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An argument is valid if its conclusion is a logical consequence of its premises, regardless of the truth or falsity of the premises,
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By creating categories, by carving up the world, language supports and enhances cognition.
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Logic is but a tool of reason, and it can occasionally be reasonable to accept something that is or appears to be illogical.
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Prominent sophists included Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodicus, and Hippias, all of whom feature as characters in Plato’s dialogues.
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what constitutes intelligence can vary according to our values and priorities.
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A third form of reasoning, abduction, involves inference to the best explanation for an observation or set of observations,
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Mr Russell’s [Bertrand Russell] mot that a mathematician is a man who does not know what he is talking about or care whether what he says is true, so long as it is correctly reasoned.
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The search for meaning is deeply ingrained in human nature, so much so that, when pressed to define man, Plato replied simply, ‘a being in search of meaning.’ Memory is meaning, oblivion is death,
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trips and holidays give the impression of ‘living’, and, by extension, of having lived for longer.
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It has been said that 90 percent of scientists who ever lived are alive today,
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since there are in fact no clear or reliable criteria for distinguishing a science from a non-science.
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inductive reasoning only ever yields probabilistic ‘truths’, and yet it is the basis of everything that we know, or think we know, about the world. The only justification for induction is that it has worked in the past, which is itself an inductive proof, tantamount to saying that induction works because induction works.
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Hanlon’s razor: ‘Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by neglect, incompetence, or stupidity.’
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And whereas magic involves harnessing the world to the will, religion involves subjugating the will to the world.
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If best opinion is all that we can have or hope for, then best opinion is as good as truth, and truth is a redundant concept.
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“I am not absentminded” said the writer GK Chesterton (d. 1936), “it is presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.”
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If I could be paid to do what inspires me, and pay others to do what does not, I should be a very happy man.
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If you learn to work with and never against your nature, things will get done as if by themselves.
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human beings are much better than machines at making decisions, and people with a diminished capacity for emotion struggle to make decisions.
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To feel the right thing is to think and do the right thing, without any particular need for conscious thought or effort.
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Belief, like perception, aims at according with reality, while desire aims at altering reality so that it comes to accord with it.
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I think inconceivability may be a better guide to impossibility than conceivability to possibility.
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