Reasoning Flaws Quotes

Human reason can excuse any evil.

Logic is something the mind has created to conceal its timidity, a hocus-pocus designed to give formal validity to conclusions we are willing to accept if everybody else in our set will too.

Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.

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.

Man has a tendency to try to give clear reasons to be rational, but often you can see how all those reasons are not convincing and turn out to be a big nonsense.

I mean, what is an un-birthday present?" A present given when it isn't your birthday, of course." Alice considered a little. "I like birthday presents best," she said at last. You don't know what you're talking about!" cried Humpty Dumpty. "How many days are there in a year?" Three hundred and sixty-five," said Alice. And how many birthdays have you?" One.

How full of error is the judgment of mankind! They wonder at results when they are ignorant of the reasons

In every chain of reasoning, the evidence of the last conclusion can be no greater than that of the weakest link of the chain, whatever may be the strength of the rest.

You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason---if you pick the proper postulates.

This illustrates an important truth, namely, that the worse your logic, the more interesting the consequences to which it gives rise.

If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you.

Theoretically, I grant you, there is no possibility of error in necessary reasoning. But to speak thus "theoretically," is to uselanguage in a Pickwickian sense. In practice, and in fact, mathematics is not exempt from that liability to error that affects everything that man does.

It is not impossible to think that the minds of philosophers sometimes act like those of other mortals, and that, having once been determined by diverse circumstances to adopt certain views, they then look for and naturally find reasons to justify these views.

The accidental prescriptions of authority, when time has procured them veneration, are often confounded with the laws of nature, and those rules are supposed coeval with reason, of which the first rise cannot be discovered.

Life is a tightrope between two errors: generalizing the wrong particular and particularizing the wrong general.

An idle reason lessens the weight of the good ones you gave before.

I have learned to be less confident in the conclusions of human reason, and give more credit to the honesty of contrary opinions.