Quotes About Reasoning

The nervous system consumes more glucose than most other parts of the body, and effortful mental activity appears to be especially expensive in the currency of glucose. When you are actively involved in difficult cognitive reasoning or engaged in a task that requires self-control, your blood glucose level drops. The effect is analogous to a runner who draws down glucose stored in her muscles during a sprint. The

anyone who ignores base rates and the quality of evidence in probability assessments will certainly make mistakes.

The core of his argument is that rationality should be distinguished from intelligence.

The essential keys to disciplined Bayesian reasoning can be simply summarized: Anchor your judgment of the probability of an outcome on a plausible base rate. Question the diagnosticity of your evidence.

judgment heuristics "are quite useful, but sometimes lead to severe and systematic errors.

There was no particular reason to do so, but your mind automatically assumed a temporal sequence and a causal connection between the words bananas and vomit, forming a sketchy scenario in which bananas caused the sickness.

good judgments depend on what you know, how well you think, and how you think.

Aesthetic judgments, rather than abstract reasoning, guide and shape the process by which we all come to know what we know.

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes from society.

Keep cool; anger is not an argument.

Inconsistencies of opinion, arising from changes of circumstances, are often justifiable.

Supervisors who bully employees reveal their lack of competence in reasoning.

All you get from a circular argument is dizzy.

The problem with putting two and two together is that sometimes you get four, and sometimes you get twenty-two.

We all find reasons to accept sugary fables and ignore unwelcome tidings.

Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.

Too often we seem to have the idea that submission to Scripture means that we first come to see it as reasonable and then submit to it, but submission means, in part, a willingness to bend the knee in faith to things that are not fully resolved in our mind.

Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles.

It is always important to remember that for the bulk of coffee producers, flavour is not the main reason they have selected a certain variety to grow.

The mind constructs small-scale models of reality to anticipate events, to reason, and to underlie explanation.

We must rip the foundations out from under all the bastions of human reasoning that say, "I don't need God!" We must demolish every non-God story of life. We must pulverize every God-is-not-good life narrative.

What's more, the citizens of Natal began to assess and question the reasoning behind the war. The loudest voice came from Bishop John Colenso, an outspoken critic of the invasion since Sir Henry Bartle-Frere first spoke of the supposed 'Zulu threat'.

The object of this establishment is seducing; the motive to it is laudable. But is it not safer to adhere to a right principle, and trust to its consequences, than confide in the reasoning however specious in favor of a wrong one? Look thro' the armies and navies of the world, and say whether in the appointment of their ministers of religion, the spiritual interest of the flocks or the temporal interest of the Shepherd be most in view?

In order to be a sound argument, however, two things are necessary: The argument must be valid, and its premises must be true.