Best of Rationality Quotes
Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations.
— John Von Neumann
Education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don't have to go to school to learn how to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved.
Steven Pinker -- The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics.
Dean Schlicter
Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.
Bertrand Russell
If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence.
-- Bertrand Russell
In general, we are least aware of what our minds do best.
— Marvin Minsky
Thinking is skilled work. It is not true that we are naturally endowed with the ability to think clearly and logically--without learning how, or without practicing.... People with untrained minds should no more expect to think clearly and logically than people who have never learned and never practiced can expect to find themselves good carpenters, golfers, bridge-players, or pianists.
Alfred Mander -- Logic for the Millions
If you haven’t found something strange during the day, it hasn’t been much of a day.
John Archibald Wheeler
Million-to-one odds happen eight times a day in New York.
Penn Jillette
Knowing that one may be subject to bias is one thing; being able to correct it is another.
Jon Elster
There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them. With these assumptions a certain limited number of types of philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems constitutes the philosophy of the epoch.
-- Alfred North Whitehead
Reality is not optional.
Thomas Sowell
Unfortunately for the good sense of mankind, the fact of their fallibility is far from carrying the weight in their practical judgment, which is always allowed to it in theory; for while every one well knows himself to be fallible, few think it necessary to take any precautions against their own fallibility, or admit the supposition that any opinion, of which they feel very certain, may be one of the examples of the error to which they acknowledge themselves to be liable.
-- John Stuart Mill
When I became convinced that the Universe is natural — that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded with light, and all the bolts, and bars, and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide world — not even in infinite space. I was free — free to think, to express my thoughts — free to live to my own ideal — free to live for myself and those I loved — free to use all my faculties, all my senses — free to spread imagination’s wings — free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope — free to judge and determine for myself — free to reject all ignorant and cruel creeds, all the “inspired” books that savages have produced, and all the barbarous legends of the past — free from the popes and priests — free from all the “called” and “set apart” — free from sanctified mistakes and holy lies — free from the fear of eternal pain — free from the winged monsters of the night — free from devils, ghosts, and gods. For the first time I was free. There were no prohibited places in all the realms of thought — no air, no space, where fancy could not spread her painted wings — no chains for my limbs — no lashes for my back — no fires for my flesh — no master’s frown or threat — no following another’s steps — no need to bow, or cringe, or crawl, or utter lying words. I was free. I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously, faced all worlds.
And then my heart was filled with gratitude, with thankfulness, and went out in love to all the heroes, the thinkers who gave for the liberty of hand and brain — for the freedom of labor and thought — to those who fell in the fierce fields of war, to those who died in dungeons bound with chains — to those who proudly mounted scaffold’s stairs — to those whose bones were crushed, whose flesh was scarred and torn — to those by fire consumed — to all the wise, the good, the brave of every land, whose thoughts and deeds have given freedom to the sons of men. And then I vowed to grasp the torch that they had held, and hold it high, that light might conquer darkness still.
— Robert G. Ingersoll
The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work.
John Von Neumann
There’s no sense in being precise when you don’t even know what you’re talking about.
John Von Neumann
The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he's one who asks the right questions.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Mathematics is the only good metaphysics.
Lord Kelvin
Your job as a scientist is to figure out how you’re fooling yourself.
Saul Perlmutter
... by natural selection our mind has adapted itself to the conditions of the external world. It has adopted the geometry most advantageous to the species or, in other words, the most convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.
— Henri Poincaré
Memory belongs to the imagination. Human memory is not like a computer which records things; it is part of the imaginative process, on the same terms as invention.
— Alain Robbe-Grillet
Science is not ’organized common sense'; at its most exciting, it reformulates our view of the world by imposing powerful theories against the ancient, anthropocentric prejudices that we call intuition.
-- Stephen J. Gould
The whole of science consists of data that, at one time or another, were inexplicable.
— Brendan O’Regan
Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience, it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.
— Leonardo da Vinci
Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.
Alfred North Whitehead
The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.
John Maynard Keynes
The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we've connected it to all the other things we know. That's why it's almost always wrong to seek the "real meaning" of anything. A thing with just one meaning has scarcely any meaning at all.
Marvin Minsky -- The Society of Mind
Philosophers who reject God, Cartesian dualism, souls, noumenal selves, and even objective morality cannot bring themselves to do the same for the concepts of free will and moral responsibility. The question is: Why?
Tamnor Sommers — Distributed Cognition and the Will: Individual Volition and Social Context, “The Illusion of Freedom Evolves”, p. 62, MIT Press, 2007
Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions.
William James
The right answer is seldom as important as the right question.
Kip Thorne
The value of a problem is not so much coming up with the answer as in the ideas and attempted ideas it forces on the would be solver.
— Yitz Herstein
It is theory that decides what can be observed.
Albert Einstein
It really is a nice theory. The only defect I think it has is probably common to all philosophical theories. It’s wrong.
Saul Kripke
A mathematician is a person who can find analogies between theorems; a better mathematician is one who can see analogies between proofs and the best mathematician can notice analogies between theories. One can imagine that the ultimate mathematician is one who can see analogies between analogies.
Stefan Banach
It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature.
Niels Bohr
The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs. Self-conceit often regards it as a sign of weakness to admit that a belief to which we have once committed ourselves is wrong. We get so identified with an idea that it is literally a “pet” notion and we rise to its defense and stop our eyes and ears to anything different.
-- John Dewey
I reckon that for all the use it has been to science about four-fifths of my time has been wasted, and I believe this to be the common lot of people who are not merely playing follow-my-leader in research.
— Peter Medawar
The rationality of our universe is best suggested by the fact that we can discover more about it from any starting point, as if it were a fabric that will unravel from any thread.
George Zebrowski
That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
-- P. C. Hodgell
The study of mathematics cannot be replaced by any other activity that will train and develop man’s purely logical faculties to the same level of rationality.
Cletus O. Oakley
It cannot be that axioms established by argumentation should avail for the discovery of new works, since the subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of argument. But axioms duly and orderly formed from particulars easily discover the way to new particulars, and thus render sciences active.
Francis Bacon
This painting — which we call human life and experience — evolved gradually, and is indeed still in process of evolving — and should not therefore be regarded as a fixed quantity…. We have, through millennia, gazed into the world with blind inclinations, passions, and fears; with moral, religious, or aesthetic demands; and have so wallowed in the bad manners of illogical thought that the world has become amazingly variegated, fearsome, rich in spirit and meaning. It has acquired color, but we were the colorists. The human intellect has allowed the world of appearance to appear, and exported its erroneous presuppositions into reality.
— Nietzsche
Explanations come to an end somewhere.
Ludwig Wittgentstein
Trust a witness in all matters in which neither his self-interest, his passions, his prejudices, nor the love of the marvelous is strongly concerned. When they are involved, require corroborative evidence in exact proportion to the contravention of probability by the thing testified.
Thomas Henry Huxley
We define the art of conjecture, or stochastic art, as the art of evaluating as exactly as possible the probabilities of things, so that in our judgments and actions we can always base ourselves on what has been found to be the best, the most appropriate, the most certain, the best advised; this is the only object of the wisdom of the philosopher and the prudence of the statesman.
Jacob Bernoulli
In all sensation we pick and choose, interpret, seek and impose order, and devise and test hypotheses about what we witness. Sense data are taken, not merely given: we learn to perceive.… The teacher has forgotten, and the student himself will soon forget, that what he sees conveys no information until he knows beforehand the kind of thing he is expected to see.
Peter Medawar — Pluto’s Republic, “Hypothesis and Imagination”, p. 117
The intensity of a conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or false. The importance of the strength of our conviction is only to provide a proportionately strong incentive to find out if the hypothesis will stand up to critical evaluation.
— Peter Medawar
Truth will sooner come out from error than from confusion.
Francis Bacon
All advances of scientific understanding, at every level, begin with a speculative adventure, an imaginative preconception of what might be true — a preconception that always, and necessarily, goes a little way (sometimes a long way) beyond anything which we have logical or factual authority to believe in. It is the invention of a possible world, or of a tiny fraction of that world. The conjecture is then exposed to criticism to find out whether or not that imagined world is anything like the real one. Scientific reasoning is therefore at all levels an interaction between two episodes of thought — a dialogue between two voices, the one imaginative and the other critical; a dialogue, as I have put it, between the possible and the actual, between proposal and disposal, conjecture and criticism, between what might be true and what is in fact the case.
In this conception of the scientific process, imagination and criticism are integrally combined. Imagination without criticism may burst out into a comic profusion of grandiose and silly notions. Critical reasoning, considered alone, is barren. The Romantics believed that poetry, poiesis, the creative exploit, was the very opposite of analytic reasoning, something lying far above the common transactions of reason with reality. And so they missed one of the very greatest of all discoveries, of the synergism between imagination and reasoning, between the inventive and critical faculties.
Peter Medawar — Pluto’s Republic, “Science and Literature”, p. 46
More than ambition, more than ability, it is rules that limit contribution; rules are the lowest common denominator of human behavior. They are a substitute for rational thought.
Hyman G. Rickover
Science attempts to find logic and simplicity in nature. Mathematics attempts to establish order and simplicity in human thought.
— Edward Teller
Buckminster Fuller