Ned Beauman Quotes

Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.

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

From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.

That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise.

Logic must look after itself. In a certain sense, we cannot make mistakes in logic.

Results rarely specify their causes unambiguously…. If we are forced to infer a process only from its … results, then we are usually stymied or reduced to speculation about probabilities.

It is no less a feat to keep what you have, than to increase it. In one there is chance, the other will be a work of art.

I let one thing result from another. Of course, all of it could have been just loosely connected coincidences. And whether that's true or not, I know the intention was there. Becasue when I want something to happen-or not happen- I begin to look at all events and all things as relevant, an opportunity to take or avoid.

Generalization, especially risky generalization, is one of the chief methods by which knowledge proceeds... Safe generalizations are usually rather boring. Delete that "usually rather." Safe generalizations are quite boring.

There's another way to phrase that and that is that the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. It is basically saying the same thing in a different way. Simply because you do not have evidence that something does exist does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn't exist.

If something is repeated over and over as obvious, the chances are that it is obviously false.

There is a tradition of opposition between adherents of induction and of deduction. In my view it would be just as sensible for the two ends of a worm to quarrel.

Many modern philosophers claim that probability is relation between an hypothesis and the evidence for it.

"I think you're begging the question," said Haydock, "and I can see looming ahead one of those terrible exercises in probability where six men have white hats and six men have black hats and you have to work it out by mathematics how likely it is that the hats will get mixed up and in what proportion. If you start thinking about things like that, you would go round the bend. Let me assure you of that!"

The process of induction is the process of assuming the simplest law that can be made to harmonize with our experience.

Inferences of Science and Common Sense differ from those of deductive logic and mathematics in a very important respect, namely, when the premises are true and the reasoning correct, the conclusion is only probable.

I hope you become comfortable with the use of logic without being deceived into concluding that logic will inevitably lead you to the correct conclusion.

It is natural to men to judge of things less known, by some similitude they observe, or think they observe, between them and things more familiar or better known. In many cases, we have no better way of judging. And, where the things compared have really a great similitude in their nature, when there is reason to think that they are subject to the same laws, there may be a considerable degree of probability in conclusions drawn from analogy.

no matter how many instances of white swans we may have observed, this does not justify the conclusion that all swans are white.

Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence.

The validity of all the Inductive Methods depends on the assumption that every event, or the beginning of every phenomenon, must have some cause; some antecedent, upon the existence of which it is invariably and unconditionally consequent.

The so-called law of induction cannot possibly be a law of logic, since it is obviously a proposition with a sense.--Nor, therefore, can it be an a priori law.

All knowledge resolves itself into probability. ... In every judgment, which we can form concerning probability, as well as concerning knowledge, we ought always to correct the first judgment deriv'd from the nature of the object, by another judgment, deriv'd from the nature of the understanding.

Scientists rightly resist invoking the supernatural in scientific explanations for fear of committing a god-of-the-gaps fallacy (the fallacy of using God as a stop-gap for ignorance). Yet without some restriction on the use of chance, scientists are in danger of committing a logically equivalent fallacy-one we may call the “chance-of-the-gaps fallacy.” Chance, like God, can become a stop-gap for ignorance.

The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning.