Quotes About Reasoning

Anecdotal thinking comes naturally; science requires training.

Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.

If you believe you are right, then you should believe that you can make the case that you're right. This requires you to deal with serious objections properly.

Researchers may like to think that, given all the facts, we make rational choices. Ask economists how that assumption works out for them. No, we are emotional creatures who use value-based reasoning in conjunction with our rationality.

Bad reasoning as well as good reasoning is possible; and this fact is the foundation of the practical side of logic.

Often people have an instant intuition that an action is immoral, and then struggle, often unsuccessfully, to come up with reasons why it is immoral.169

Resistance is like an alien or like the shark in jaws, or like the terminator. It cannot be reasoned with. It understands nothing but power. It is an engine of destruction programmed with one object only : to prevent us from doing our work.

scientific theories cannot be deduced by purely mathematical reasoning.

The willingness to change one's mind in the light of new evidence is a sign of rationality not weakness.

But when we work with numbers and abstract reasoning, the benefit to our society is infinite.

That's information, not an excuse.

Now toasted cheese is a temptation few men can resist, be they charcoal burners or kings. John Uskglass reasoned thus: all of Cumbria belonged to him – therefore this wood belonged to him – therefore this toasted cheese belonged to him.

Metaphysics may be, after all, only the art of being sure of something that is not so, and logic only the art of going wrong with confidence.

If you think about the unthinkable long enough it becomes quite reasonable.

Someone had said that if you thought about the unthinkable long enough it became quite reasonable.

Mujeres somos y hemos de defendernos en un mundo mal guisado por hombres turbulentos y menguados de raciocinio.

People argue themselves out of their pleasures

If I could sum up the message of this book in one pithy phrase, it would be that you are smarter than your data. Data do not understand causes and effects; humans do.

you are smarter than your data. Data do not understand causes and effects; humans do.

Counterfactual reasoning, which deals with what-ifs, might strike some readers as unscientific. Indeed, empirical observation can never confirm or refute the answers to such questions.

Another feature we lose in going from logic to uncertainty is incrementality.

To show what is still needed, let us examine how an ideal system might reason about the burglar alarm situation of Figure 1.2. Upon receiving the phone call from your neighbor, only the burglary hypothesis is triggered; your decision whether to drive home or stay at work is made solely on the basis of the parameter P(False alarm), which summarizes all other (unexplicated) causes for an alarm sound. After a moment's reflection, the possibility of an April Fools' Day joke may

When faced with the illogical, one must expand the sphere of logic to include rules of logic for that which is not logic. This is the only possibility in a world that works according to the rules of rationality.

What happens, the Stoics think, is that, being in an emotional state, she follows the reasons which go with that state: she seeks revenge because that is how angry people think. But there is no real division within Medea's self. She oscillates between different decisions as a whole; there is no inner battle of parts of her.