Naive Realism Quotes

Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.

Intelligent people make many mistakes because they cannot believe the world is really as foolish as it is.

The person who imagined that he could not be the victim of propaganda because he could distinguish truth from falsehood, is extremely susceptible to propaganda, because when propaganda does tell the truth, he is then convinced that it is no longer propaganda: moreover, his self-confidence makes him all the more vulnerable to attacks of which he is unaware.

A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the time, about basically everything: about our political and intellectual convictions, our religious and moral beliefs, our assessments of other people, our memories, our grasp of facts. As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it, our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient.

Sense data are much more controversial than qualia, because they are associated with a controversial theory of perception - that one perceives the world by perceiving one's sense-data, or something like that.

When I went to first grade and the other children said that their fathers were farmers, I simply didn't believe them. I agreed in order to be polite, but in my heart I knew that those men were impostors, as farmers and as fathers, too. In my youthful estimation, Laurence Cook defined both categories. To really believe that others even existed in either category was to break the First Commandment.

People assign much higher probability to the truth of their opinions than is warranted.

We are often confident even when we are wrong, and an objective observer is more likely to detect our errors than we are.

The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him.

They that never peeped beyond the common belief in which their easy understandings were at first indoctrinated are strongly assured of the truth of their receptions.

False beliefs can be every bit as consoling as true ones, right up until the moment of disillusionment.

Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

Children will draw pictures with everything in them...houses and trees and people and animals...and the sun AND the moon. Grown-up says, "That's a nice picture, Honey, but you put the moon and the sun in the sky at the same time and that isn't right." But the child is right! The sun and moon are in the sky at the same time.

Everything was sensory and I never saw the structure in anything.

Most kids are smarter than most grown-ups. Kids see the world in black and white... They look through all the garbage and see a world run by fools and dullards and lazy people. And there's nothing they can do about it because they have no power.

The child often sees only what he already knows. He projects the whole of his verbal thought into things. He sees mountains as built by men, rivers as dug out with spades, the sun and moon as following us on our walks.

But you were only sixteen and not far off from the truth, as only sixteen-year-olds can be.

I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since.