Quotes About Reasoning

The utilitarian person, for whom rationality is economic rationality (i.e. the maximization of utility), does not exist. Real human beings are not, for the most part, in conscious control of, or even consciously aware of, their reasoning. Most of their reason, besides, is based on various kinds of prototypes, framings, and metaphors. People seldom engage in a form of economic reason that could maximize utility.

Once your frame is accepted into the discourse, everything you say is just common sense. Why? Because that's what common sense is: reasoning within a commonplace, accepted frame.

To reason from a thing not understood, is to walk straight into the mire.

I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY

Toujours la générosité s'oppose au mouvement de l'avarice, comme au calcul raisonné la passion.

If you can do it, why do it. ~ Gertrude Stein

Trying to understand the way nature works involves a most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen. The quantum mechanical and the relativity ideas are examples of this.

Logic works, metaphysics contemplates.

Nothing is ever resolved," Rita said, tired. "That's one of those fake concepts. How can you resolve with a man dead at thirty-four? What kind of peace can you make with that? Lately I've been thinking that the conflict is for the best. Because then we are not pretending that anything about this can ever be reasonable.

It was not my physical being, however, which was descending, but rather my mind. It was as if the thinking, reasoning part of my being was closing with the finality of a heavy, locked door.

Mastery of models improves your ability to reason, explain, design, communicate, act, predict, and explore.

Stress literally kills your brain. Studies have found that months of exposure to stress can permanently destroy neurons in your brain, which affects learning, impulse control, reasoning, and memory.

Human beings are not nearly as coolly rational as we like to think we are. Having set up comfortable planets of belief, we become resistant to altering them, and develop cognitive biases that prevent us from seeing the world with perfect clarity. We aspire to be perfect Bayesian abductors, impartially reasoning to the best explanation - but most often we take new data and squeeze it to fit with our preconceptions.

Remember this: one can be a strict logician or grammarian and at the same time full of imagination and music.

Reasonable men are not reasonable when you're in the bubbles which have characterized capitalism since the beginning of time.

If you give me enough time, enough leash, I can become pretty reasonable.

Of the demonstrably wise there are but two: those who commit suicide, & those who keep their reasoning faculties atrophied with drink.

Man is the reasoning animal. Such is the claim.

An oyster has hardly any more reasoning power than a scientist has; and so it it is reasonably certain that this one jumped to the conclusion that the nineteen million years was a preparation for him; but that would be just like an oyster, which is the most conceited animal there is, except man. And anyway, this one could not know, at that early date, that he was only an incident in a scheme, and that there was some more in the scheme yet.

In your country and mine we should have the privilege of making fun of this kind of morality, but it would be unkind to do it here.Many of these people have the reasoning faculty, but no one uses it in religious matters.

I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters concerning religion and politics a man's reasoning powers are not above the monkey's.

think you are wrong in saying we ought to follow the methods of Sherlock Holmes. We ought rather to follow Dupin, Poe's detective, the man who preceded Sherlock Holmes.

The ability to detect fallacy is one of the things that makes democratic life decent.

The rigorousness of restraint is other than the one of the "exactitude" of a loose, indifferent "reasoning" which belongs equally to everyone and whose results are compelling within the sphere of its own claims to certainty. Such results are compelling, however, only because the claim to truth is content with the correctness that comes from deduction and from insertion into a regulated and calculable order.