John Stuart Mill Quotes

I'm disturbed when people let superstition, magical thinking, extreme conspiracy theories and so on blur their minds.

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.

But what a weak barrier is truth when it stands in the way of an hypothesis!

Without deductive logic science would be entirely useless. It is merely a barren game to ascend from the particular to the general, unless afterwards we can reverse the process and descend from the general to the particular, ascending and descending like angels on Jacob's ladder.

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

The man of science is a poor philosopher.

The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners.

I'm a bit of a freak for evidence-based analysis. I strongly believe in data.

Science is nothing, but trained and organized common sense.

Being a skeptic just means being rational and empirical: thinking and seeing before believing.

If you're living with a scientist, you see the world differently than you do with a humanist. It's in some ways very subtle, the differences in perceiving reality.

A few observation and much reasoning lead to error; many observations and a little reasoning to truth.

Such evidence is not the only kind which produces belief; though positivism maintains that it is the only kind which ought to produce so high a degree of confidence as all minds have or can be made to have through their agreements.

There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.

What we can do is provide the tools, through our educational system, for people to be able to tell sense from nonsense. These tools include the scientific method, skeptical questioning, empirical evidence, verifying sources, etc.

Science, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense.

Disregard belief systems that aren't based on empirical studies.

My father, whose way was to force every event in nature into an hypothesis, by which means never man crucified TRUTH at the rate he did.

Physics is a good framework for thinking. ... Boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there.

If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide that proves they should value evidence. If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument would you invoke to prove they should value logic?

Because of their very nature, science and logical thinking can never decide what is possible or impossible. Their only function is to explain what has been ascertained by experience and observation.

Science is not a substitute for common sense, but an extension of it.

[Sherlock Holmes:] The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession.

If logic itself is created rather than being inborn, it follows that the first task of education is to form reasoning.

When we are in the grasp of illusion - or, for that matter, whenever we have a new idea - instead of searching for ways to prove our ideas wrong, we usually attempt to prove them correct. Psychologists call this the confirmation bias, and it presents a major impediment of our ability to break free from the misinterpretation of randomness.