Jonah Lehrer Quotes

Validity is the touchstone of inference, and truth of judgment: the fact that vichyssoise is cold ratifies the judgment that vichyssoise is, indeed, cold, and the judgment that vichyssoise is cold expresses the fact that vichyssoise is cold.

[It's] troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that's often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.

If faith is a valid tool of knowledge, then anything can be true 'by faith,' and therefore nothing is true. If the only reason you can accept a claim is by faith, then you are admitting that the claim does not stand on its own merits.

God forbid that Truth should be confined to Mathematical Demonstration!

We must never assume that which is incapable of proof.

A very great deal more truth can become known than can be proved.

Knowledge is justified belief.

The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events: its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself...

It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.

Happily I had very early learned the fallacy of building much on logic and verbal argument. Single sets of truths I knew to be as little conclusive in theology as in physics; and, in one as in the other, no theory to be worth anything, however plausibly backed up with Scripture texts or facts, which was not gathered bona fide from the analysis of all the attainable phenomena, and verified wherever possible by experiment.

In practical life we are compelled to follow what is most probable ; in speculative thought we are compelled to follow truth. A man would perish of hunger and thirst, if he refused to eat or drink, till he had obtained positive proof that food and drink would be good for him. But in philosophic reflection this is not so. On the contrary, we must take care not to admit as true anything, which is only probable. For when one falsity has been let in, infinite others follow.

There is no such thing as absolute proof. There is only evidence.

Analogy cannot serve as proof.

Arithmetic is where the content lies, and not logic; but logic prompts certainty, and not arithmetic.

Truth is that which cannot be proved false.

Philosophy means the complete liberty of the mind, and therefore independence of all social, political or religious prejudice... It loves one thing only... truth.

All reasoning ends in an appeal to self-evidence.

...I will not allow books to prove any thing." "But how shall we prove any thing?" "We never shall.

Truth has nothing to do with the conclusion, and everything to do with the methodology.

The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know.

After all, the ultimate goal of all research is not objectivity, but truth.

Reasoning draws a conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.

The truth is in nature, and I shall prove it.

All I have is the truth, and I've proven that.

Logic is the technique by which we add conviction to truth.