Quotes About Fallacies

For every complicated problem there is a solution that is simple, direct, understandable, and wrong." H. L. Mencken

Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its memory for vivid anecdotes rather than systematic statistics.

The reliance on the heuristic caused predictable biases (systematic errors) in their predictions.

flawed stories of the past shape our views of the world and our expectations for the future. Narrative fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world.

It's a tiresome proposition, having to take up the work of the Enlightenment all over again, but it's happened on your watch. You ought to have sent up a balloon now and then to get a read on the prevailing cognitive conditions, the Thinks watching out for the Think-Nots. Now you've gone and let the stockpiling of fallacies reach dangerous levels, and the massed weapons of illogic are threatening the survivability of the globe.

The largest cultural menace in America is the conformity of the intellectual cliques which, in education as well as the arts, are out to impose upon the nation their modish fads and fallacies, and have nearly succeeded in doing so. In this cultural issue, we are, without reservations, on the side of excellence (rather than "newness") and of honest intellectual combat (rather than conformity).

The largest cultural menace in America is the conformity of the intellectual cliques which, in education as well as the arts, are out to impose upon the nation their modish fads and fallacies, and have nearly succeeded in doing so. In this cultural issue, we are, without reservations, on the side of excellence (rather than "newness") and of honest intellectual combat (rather than conformity).

The Internet allows the small guy a global marketplace. But technology is harmful in the sense that we get too much information from it. Because of the web we get 10 times the amount of noise we ever got, which makes harmful fallacies far more likely.

Fallacies are "foul ways" to win arguments, yet they are winning arguments and manipulating people everyday. The mass media are filled with them. They are the bread and butter of mass political discourse, public relations, and advertising. We all at times fall prey to them. And many live and breathe them as if they were the vehicles of sacred truth. Your

But, after the unmasked or naked vision of Ishtar—the world experienced as infinitely more than all masks — we can never take any one mask (or any one pookah) as seriously as its Idolators. We can see many kinds of truth in many kinds of masks, and we can see the fallacies in all of them — chiefly, the fallacies of allness (the mask includes all) and Identification (the mask "is" all.)

One of the first things I learned when I began teaching courses in critical thinking in 1974 was that those of us trained in philosophy needed to supplement our philosophical training with the study of various cognitive, perceptual, and affective biases or illusions. We had a lot to learn from the social scientists if we were to teach our students to think critically. Identifying fallacies, learning to test deductive arguments for validity, and the like would not be enough.

Facts are stubborn things, but, as some one has wisely said, not half so stubborn as fallacies.

De Waal's argument is, I believe, one of the most egregious fallacies in studies of evolution. It is to claim that, simply because we are closely related genetically, we must be closely related behaviourally.

There is no point in lingering on the fallacies of the revolutionaries of unrepression; one could go on and on, but everything would come back to the same basic thing: the impossibility of living without repression.

Few fallacies are more dangerous or easier to fall into than that by which, having read a given book, we assume that we will continue to know its contents permanently, or having mastered a discipline in the past, we assume that we control it in the present. Philosophically speaking, "to learn" is a verb with not legitimate tense.

Os sofismas do fazendeiro seriam "desmascarados; suas objeções, refutadas; seus artifícios, detectados; e suas galhofas, ridicularizadas".

Intellectuals are the kind of people who demand evidence and are shocked by logical inconsistencies and fallacies. They regard oversimplification as the original sin of the mind and have not use for the slogans, the unqualified assertion and sweeping generalization which are the propagandist´s stock in the trade.

One of the most despicable religious fallacies is that suffering is ennobling, that it is a step on the path to some kind of enlightenment or salvation.

Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.

Any proposition containing the word is creates a linguistic structural confusion which will eventually give birth to serious fallacies.

Before we can study the central issues of life today, we must destroy the prejudices and fallacies born of previous centuries.

Most of the mistakes in thinking are inadequacies of perception rather than mistakes of logic.

To fix the thoughts by writing, and subject them to frequent examinations and reviews, is the best method of enabling the mind to detect its own sophisms, and keep it on guard against the fallacies which it practises on others: in conversation we naturally diffuse our thoughts, and in writing we contract them; method is the excellence of writing, and unconstraint the grace of conversation. To read, write, and converse in due proportions is, therefore, the business of a man of letters.

Keynes was scarcely a 'revolutionary' in any real sense. He possessed the tactical wit to dress up ancient statist and inflationist fallacies with modern, pseudoscientific jargon, making them appear to be the latest findings of economic science.