reasoning errors Quotes

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

The first cause of Absurd conclusions I ascribe to the want of Method.

Reason often makes mistakes, but conscience never does.

Mistakes are made on two counts: an argument is either based on error or incorrectly developed.

It is impossible to get anywhere without sinning against reason.

People may believe correct things for the damndest and weirdest of wrong reasons.

Man has a tendency to try to give clear reasons to be rational, but often you can see how all those reasons are not convincing and turn out to be a big nonsense.

Logic invents as many fallacies as it detects; it is a good weapon, but as liable to be used in a bad as in a good cause.

I engage my subjects in conversation, patterned after psychiatric questioning, with the aim of discovering something about the reasoning underlying their right but especially their wrong answers.

The conspiracy community regularly seizes on one slip of the tongue, misunderstanding, or slight discrepancy to defeat twenty pieces of solid evidence; accepts one witness of theirs, even if he or she is a provable nut, as being far more credible than ten normal witnesses on the other side; treats rumors, even questions, as the equivalent of proof; leaps from the most minuscule of discoveries to the grandest of conclusions; and insists that the failure to explain everything perfectly negates all that is explained.

But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.

The errors which arise from the absence of facts are far more numerous and more durable than those which result from unsound reasoning respecting true data.

Since reasoning , or inference, the principal subject of logic, is an operation which usually takes place by means of words , and in complicated cases can take place in no other way: those who have not a thorough insight into both the signification and purpose of words, will be under chances, amounting almost to certainty, of reasoning or inferring incorrectly.

This illustrates an important truth, namely, that the worse your logic, the more interesting the consequences to which it gives rise.

Philosophy is an unusually ingenious attempt to think fallaciously.

An argument can be logically valid, but unsound in that it contains a false premise and, therefore, leads to a false conclusion (e.g., Scientists are smart; smart people do not make mistakes; therefore, scientists do not make mistakes).

I know too well that these arguments from probabilities are imposters, and unless great caution is observed in the use of them, they are apt to be deceptive.

It is a misfortune to pass at once from observation to conclusion, and to regard both as of equal value; but it befalls many a student.

Persons not habituated to reason often argue absurdly, because, from particular instances, they deduce general conclusions, and extend the result of their limited experience of individuals indiscriminately to whole classes.

The source of every crime, is some defect of the understanding; or some error in reasoning; or some sudden force of the passions. Defect in the understanding is ignorance; in reasoning, erroneous opinion.

Fallacious and misleading arguments are most easily detected if set out in correct syllogistic form.

There is no greater mistake in the world than the looking upon every sort of nonsense as want of sense.

Man is made for science; he reasons from effects to causes, and from causes to effects; but he does not always reason without error. In reasoning, therefore, from appearances which are particular, care must be taken how we generalize; we should be cautious not to attribute to nature, laws which may perhaps be only of our own invention.