Circular Reasoning Quotes

The possibility of circular reasoning arises-that is, using the temperature record to derive a key input to climate models that are then tested against the temperature record. ~ Theodore Wilbur Anderson

There is a moment when the dead man, too, cancels further revision of the impure.
Thus, the dead man is a postscript to closure.
The dead man is also a form of circular reasoning, the resident tautologist in an oval universe that is robin's-egg-blue to future generations.
Perhaps it's so not important that the dead man lives.
After all, the dead man deserts the future. ~ Marvin Bell

To admit one's own presuppositions and to point out the presuppositions of others is therefore to maintain that all reasoning is, in the nature of the case, circular reasoning. The starting-point, the method, and the conclusion are always involved in one another. ~ Cornelius Van Til

Pilate was required to release one of the prisoners, so he gave the mob the choice of Jesus or Barabbas, a notorious murderer and insurrectionist-in otherwords, someone who incites mobs.
Again, the mob "spoke with one voice" demanding "with loud shouts" that Jesus be crucified. ~ Ann Coulter

I went into the ministry to use the church to elicit political change according to a soft Marxist vision of wealth distribution and proletarian empowerment. Edrita [his wife] could sense that I was on a long and uncertain path. She was always more conservative than I, but she did share my basic social values and was willing at least to let me test my political follies ... Whenever I read the New Testament after 1950, I was trying to read it entirely without its crucial premises of incarnation and resurrection. That required a lot of circular reasoning for me to establish what the text said. I habitually assumed that truth in religion was finally reducible to economics (with Marx) or psychosexual motives (with Freud) or self assertive power (with Nietzsche). It was truly a self-deceptive time for me, but I had no inkling of its insidious dangers. ~ Thomas C. Oden

Here we meet a very important feature. It would seem as if this were circular reasoning; profits fell because investment fell, and investment fell because profits fell. - Jan Tinbergen,5 Jan Tinbergen, ~ Donella H. Meadows

The Mode of circular reasoning is the form used when the proof itself which ought to establish the matter of inquiry requires confirmation derived from the matter; in this case, being unable to assume either in order to establish the other, we suspend judgement about both. ~ Sextus Empiricus

Reason like a sphere? What type of reasoning does a wooden sphere do?"
"The circular type, I should think. And, by coincidence, it is my favorite type as well. Perhaps that's why I'm so good at the game. ~ Brandon Sanderson

Circular reasoning is infallible even if not exactly logical, and
this is why so many of us so often resort to it - not so much to
resolve baffling problems, but to be absolved of the obligation
to worry about them. ~ Zygmunt Bauman

There is no one who does not feel that he is imprisoned in some way. If this is the result of his own free will he must regard his will as not free, or the circular reasoning in this position would be quite apparent. Free will must lead to freedom. ~ Foundation For Inner Peace

It seemed a ruse that fear of death should be the sole motivation for living and, yet, to quell this fear made the prospect of living itself seem all the more absurd; to extend this further, the notion of living one's life for the purposes of pondering the absurdity of living was an even greater absurdity in and of itself, which thus, by reductio ad absurdum, rendered the fear of death a necessary function of life and any lack thereof, a trifling matter rooted in self-inflicted incoherence. ~ Ashim Shanker

Using less of the Earth's resources more efficiently and productively in a circular economy and making the transition from carbon-based fuels to renewable energies are defining features of the emerging economic paradigm. In the new era, we each become a node in the nervous system of the biosphere. ~ Jeremy Rifkin

As explained above, those who believe in the theory of
evolution think that a few atoms and molecules thrown into
a huge vat could produce thinking, reasoning professors
and university students; such scientists as Einstein and
Galileo; such artists as Humphrey Bogart, Frank Sinatra
and Luciano Pavarotti; as well as antelopes, lemon trees,
and carnations. Moreover, as the scientists and professors
who believe in this nonsense are educated people, it is
quite justifiable to speak of this theory as "the most potent
spell in history." Never before has any other belief or idea
so taken away peoples' powers of reason, refused to allow
them to think intelligently and logically, and hidden the
truth from them as if they had been blindfolded. This is an
even worse and unbelievable blindness than the totem
worship in some parts of Africa, the people of Saba worshipping
the Sun, the tribe of Prophet Ibrahim (as) worshipping
idols they had made with their own hands, or the
people of Prophet Musa (as) worshipping the Golden Calf.

In fact, Allah has pointed to this lack of reason in the
Qur'an. In many verses, He reveals that some peoples'
minds will be closed and that they will be powerless to see
the truth. Some of these verses are as follows:
As for those who do not believe, it makes no difference
to them whether you warn them or do not warn them,
they will not ~ Harun Yahya

The cause of the six-sided shape of a snowflake is none other than that of the ordered shapes of plants and of numerical constants; and since in them nothing occurs without supreme reason-not, to be sure, such as discursive reasoning discovers, but such as existed from the first in the Creators's design and is preserved from that origin to this day in the wonderful nature of animal faculties, I do not believe that even in a snowflake this ordered pattern exists at random. ~ Johannes Kepler

For God to be kept out of the classroom or out of America's public debate by nervous school administrators or overcautious politicians serves no one's interests. That restriction prevents people from drawing on this country's rich and diverse religious heritage for guidance, and it degrades the nation's moral discourse by placing a whole realm of theological reasoning out of bounds. The price of that sort of quarantine, at a time of moral dislocation, is - and has been - far too high. ~ Nancy Gibbs

Unfortunately, I do not find Tegmark's line of reasoning to be extremely compelling. The leap from the existence of an external reality (independent of humans) to the conclusion that, in Tegmark's words, "You must believe in what I call the mathematical universe hypothesis: that our physical reality is a mathematical structure," involves, in my opinion, a sleight of hand. When Tegmark attempts to characterize what mathematics really is, he says: "To a modern logician, a mathematical structure is precisely this: a set of abstract entities with relations between them." But this modern logician is human! In other words, Tegmark never really proves that our mathematics is not invented by humans; he simply assumes it. Furthermore, as the French neurobiologist Jean-Pierre Changeaux has pointed out in response to a similar assertion: "To claim physical reality for mathematical objects, on a level of the natural phenomena we study in biology, poses a worrisome epistemological problem it seems to me. How can a physical state, internal to our brain, represent another physical state external to it? ~ Mario Livio

One who learns to justify forgets to learn. ~ Raheel Farooq

If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability. ~ Vannevar Bush

I have just been through the process of killing a cistudo for the sake of science; but I cannot excuse myself for this murder, and see that such actions are inconsistent with the poetic perception, however they may serve science, and will affect the quality of my observations. I pray that I may walk more innocently and serenely through nature. No reasoning whatever reconciles me to this act. It affects my day injuriously. I have lost some self-respect. I have a murderer's experience to a degree. ~ Henry David Thoreau

She reached toward the chessboard, and he caught her hand in his. "Believe me," he whispered. "When I wish to be, I can be very convincing." He followed the seam of her fingers with this thumb, tracing slowly upward until he reached the soft cleft below her knuckles. He watched as her eyes widened and her lips parted. Then he stroked the spot lightly - a quick, circular caress - and she made a little sound, half gasp and half sigh. That little sound - that tiny, panting breath - was very nearly his undoing. Jeremy knew that sound. It was the tumbler of a lock falling in place, the charged crackle between lightning and thunderbolt, the hiss of a candlewick the instant before it comes alive with flame. An incomplete sound. A sound that promised - and begged for - more. ~ Tessa Dare

When a lady does consent to listen to an argument against her own opinions, she is always predetermined to withstand it - to listen only with her bodily ears, keeping the mental organs resolutely closed against the strongest reasoning. ~ Anne Bronte

The required techniques of effective reasoning are pretty formal, but as long as programming is done by people that don't master them, the software crisis will remain with us and will be considered an incurable disease. And you know what incurable diseases do: they invite the quacks and charlatans in, who in this case take the form of Software Engineering gurus. ~ Edsger Dijkstra

Once you start offering reasons for ignoring the interests of others, however, reasoning itself will usually draw you into a kind of universality. A reason is an offer of a ground for thinking or feeling or doing something. And it isn't a ground for me, unless it's a ground for you. If someone really thinks that some group of people genuinely doesn't matter at all, he will suppose they are outside the circle of those to whom justifications are due. ~ Kwame Anthony Appiah

He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer- excellent for drawing the veil from men's motives and actions. But for the trained observer to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

John Lennon imagined a world filled with peace and love. Martin Luther King dreamt of a world free from racial discrimination and oppression. The guy who invented the Frisbee, dreamt of a world where people would throw a fat, circular object at each other in order to pass the time. He succeeded. ~ Jon Lajoie

You will be right, over the course of many transactions, if your hypotheses are correct, your facts are correct, and your reasoning is correct. True conservatism is only possible through knowledge and reason. ~ Warren Buffett

My eyes narrowed. I didn't like his logical reasoning. ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

Their reliance on biblical quotations does not augur well for their for their openness to moral reasoning ... ~ Peter Singer

He said that life boils down to standing in line to get shit dropped on your head. Everyone's got a place in the queue, you can't get out of it, and just when you start to congratulate yourself on surviving your dose of shit, you discover that the line is actually circular. ~ Scott Lynch

I made a circular motion with my finger around my temple to indicate I thought this guy was crazy, forgetting that there was no one in the room to see this circular motion except him. He saw it and frowned. ~ John Swartzwelder

We probably could more successfully resolve the North Korean nuclear threat through game-theoretic reasoning. We could successfully resolve what American leaders seem to perceive as an Iranian nuclear threat through game-theoretic reasoning. ~ Bruce Bueno De Mesquita

Reasoning as a limited cognitive function, detached from the personal center, never could create courage. One cannot remove anxiety by arguing it away. ~ Paul Tillich

There is required for the composition of a great commander not only massive common sense and reasoning power, not only imagination, but also an element of legerdemain, an original and sinister touch, which leaves the enemy puzzled as well as beaten. ~ Winston Churchill

Man no longer follows instinct with the old natural fidelity. He has developed into a reasoning creature, and can intellectually cling to life or discard life just as life happens to promise great pleasure or pain. ~ Jack London

When the idea came up, (Newman's Own) I said, "Are you crazy? Stick my face on the label of salad dressing?" And then, of course, we got the whole idea of exploitation and how circular it is. Why not, really, go to the fullest length, and the silliest length, in exploiting yourself and turn the proceeds back to the community? ~ Paul Newman

I have always been interested in this man. My father had a set of Tom Paine's books on the shelf at home. I must have opened the covers about the time I was 13. And I can still remember the flash of enlightenment which shone from his pages. It was a revelation, indeed, to encounter his views on political and religious matters, so different from the views of many people around us. Of course I did not understand him very well, but his sincerity and ardor made an impression upon me that nothing has ever served to lessen.

I have heard it said that Paine borrowed from Montesquieu and Rousseau. Maybe he had read them both and learned something from each. I do not know. But I doubt that Paine ever borrowed a line from any man...

Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp. There is nothing false, little that is subtle, and an impressive lack of the negative in Paine. He literally cried to his reader for a comprehending hour, and then filled that hour with such sagacious reasoning as we find surpassed nowhere else in American letters - seldom in any school of writing.

Paine would have been the last to look upon himself as a man of letters. Liberty was the dear companion of his heart; truth in all things his object.

...we, perhaps, remember him ~ Thomas A. Edison

Deeds are done which appear so evil to us and people suffer such terrible evils that it does not seem as though any good will ever come of them; and we consider this, sorrowing and grieving over it so that we cannot find peace in the blessed contemplation of God as we should do; and this is why: our reasoning powers are so blind now, so humble and so simple, that we cannot know the high, marvelous wisdom, the might and the goodness of the Holy Trinity. And this is what he means where he says, 'You shall see for yourself that all manner of things shall be well', as if he said, 'Pay attention to this now, faithfully and confidently, and at the end of time you will truly see it in the fullness of joy. ~ Julian Of Norwich

Science in its truest form is and will always remain compatible with human rights and equality. ~ Abhijit Naskar

use our reasoning ability to drive away "all that excites or affrights us. ~ William B. Irvine

Feminist "theory," as it is grandiloquently called, is simply whatever the women in the movement come up with in post facto justification of their attitudes and emotions. A heavy focus on feminist doctrine seems to me symptomatic of the rationalist fallacy: the assumption that people are motivated primarily by beliefs. If they were, the best way to combat an armed doctrine would indeed be to demonstrate that its beliefs are false. (…) A feminist in the strict and proper sense may be defined as a woman who envies the male role.

By the male role I mean, in the first place, providing, protecting, and guiding rather than nurturing and assisting. This in turn envolves relative independence, action, and competition in the larger impersonal society outside the family, the use of language for communication and analysis (rather than expressiveness or emotional manipulation), and deliberate behavior aiming at objective achievement (rather than the attainment of pleasant subjective states) and guided by practical reasoning (rather than emotional impulse).

Both feminist and nonfeminist women sense that these characteristically male attributes have a natural primacy over their own. I prefer to speak of"primacy" rather than superiority in this context since both sets of traits are necessary to propagate the race. One sign of male primacy is that envy of the female role by men is virtually nonexistent - even, so far as I know, among homosexuals. Normal women are att ~ F. Roger Devlin

Like all Holmes' reasoning, the thing seemed simplicity itself when it was once explained. Dr. Watson, speaking of Sherlock Holmes. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment. ~ Jean Baudrillard

Scientific reasoning is a kind of dialogue between the possible and the actual, between what might be and what is in fact the case. ~ Peter Medawar

Love and hate when stretched to their extremes blind reasoning. ~ Janvier Chouteu-Chando

I learned early that you'd better know what you're talking about. You'd better realize that certain issues are going to be so hot - no matter what reason, what logic you apply to it - you're going to be met with an opposition just because their viewpoint is different, and there's no way they're going to accept your reasoning. Furthermore, they're going to attack you because you will be portrayed as not being credible: "You're an actor. What do you know?" ~ Robert Redford

Effective altruism is about asking "How can I make the biggest difference I can?" and using evidence and careful reasoning to try to find an answer. It takes a scientific approach to doing good. Just as science consists of the honest and impartial attempt to work out what's true, and a committment to believe the truth whatever that turns out to be. As the phrase suggests, effective altruism consists of the honest and impartial attempt to work out what's best for the world, and a commitment to do what's best, whatever that turns out to be. ~ William MacAskill

The inner defenses are unconscious. They consist of a kind of magic aura which the mind builds around cherished belief. Arguments which penetrate into the magic aura are not dealt with rationally but by a specific type of pseudo-reasoning. Absurdities and contradictions are made acceptable by specious rationalizations. ~ Arthur Koestler

School was more than academics; an education prepared you for the humdrum of real life: working with others, tempering one's personality to assimilate with the group but without losing your individual identity, understading the factors of logic, reasoning, and debate. For a person - vampire or human - to succeed in the world, unlocking the mysteries of the universe was insufficient. One would also need to grasp the mysteries of human nature. ~ Melissa De La Cruz

Reasoning away faith means helping people to abandon a faulty epistemology, but reasoning away religion means that people abandon their social support network. ~ Peter Boghossian

True feeling is always circular - either circular, or paradoxical - simply because its cause and its expression are tow halves of the very same thing! Love cannot be reduced to a catalogue of reasons why, and a catalogue of reasons cannot be put together into love. Any man who disagrees with me has never been in love - not truly. ~ Eleanor Catton

Most of us, in our civilized society, rely too heavily on reasoning capacity to make things happen. We've been raised to believe that logic will prevail. Logic, in and of itself, will rarely influence people. Most often logic doesn't work. ~ Herb Cohen

Umm," he moaned, as he started his rhythmic movements underneath me; raising me up and down with his hands at the speed and tempo he wanted. I leaned forward a bit so that my breasts were brushing against his chest; my hands gripped his shoulders as the heat of our lovemaking increased. He raised me up and down; up and down; my hips gyrated in a circular motion making sure the head of his beautiful cock was hitting my magic spot over and over again. My whimpers of pleasure were getting louder; his breathing was coming faster… ~ Andrea Smith

After all, the reasoning goes, at the big bang everything emerged from one place since, we believe, all places we now think of as different were the same place way back in the beginning. ~ Brian Greene

Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its train of reasoning. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

When the alchemist speaks of Mercurius, on the face of it he means quicksilver (mercury), but inwardly he means the world-creating spirit concealed or imprisoned in matter. The dragon is probably the oldest pictoral symbol in alchemy of which we have documentary evidence. It appears as the Ouroboros, the tail-eater, in the Codex Marcianus, which dates from the tenth or eleventh century, together with the legend 'the One, the All'. Time and again the alchemists reiterate that the opus proceeds from the one and leads back to the one, that it is a sort of circle like a dragon biting its own tail. For this reason the opus was often called circulare (circular) or else rota (the wheel). Mercurius stands at the beginning and end of the work: he is the prima materia, the caput corvi, the nigredo; as dragon he devours himself and as dragon he dies, to rise again in the lapis. He is the play of colours in the cauda pavonis and the division into the four elements. He is the hermaphrodite that was in the beginning, that splits into the classical brother-sister duality and is reunited in the coniunctio, to appear once again at the end in the radiant form of the lumen novum, the stone. He is metallic yet liquid, matter yet spirit, cold yet fiery, poison and yet healing draught - a symbol uniting all the opposites. ~ C.G. Jung

I deal in information," he says to the smarmy, toadying pseudojournalist who
"interviews" him. He's sitting in his office in Houston, looking slicker than
normal. "All television going out to Consumers throughout the world goes
through me. Most of the information transmitted to and from the CIC database
passes through my networks. The Metaverse -- -the entire Street -- exists by
virtue of a network that I own and control.
"But that means, if you'll just follow my reasoning for a bit, that when I have
a programmer working under me who is working with that information, he is
wielding enormous power. Information is going into his brain. And it's staying
there. It travels with him when he goes home at night. It gets all tangled up
into his dreams, for Christ's sake. He talks to his wife about it. And,
goddamn it, he doesn't have any right to that information. If I was running a
car factory, I wouldn't let workers drive the cars home or borrow tools. But
that's what I do at five o'clock each day, all over the world, when my hackers
go home from work.
"When they used to hang rustlers in the old days, the last thing they would do
is piss their pants. That was the ultimate sign, you see, that they had lost
control over their own bodies, that they were about to die. See, it's the first
function of any organization to control its own sphincters. We're not even
doing that. So we're working on ~ Neal Stephenson

It is the business of man to become acquainted with the material universe in all of its manifestations, so far as may be possible, in order to provide a foundation of knowledge on which the reasoning mind of man may increasingly build. ~ John Andreas Widtsoe

It has been argued that dinosaurs did not die out, but just evolved wings and flew away. At a certain level, this reasoning is sound ... Birds, as a group, did descend from dinosaurs and ... all 8,600 species of birds living today carry some inheritance from their reptilian ancestors. ~ David M. Raup

Apologys for self-evident Truths can never have any effect on those who have so little Sense as to deny them. They are the Foundation of all Reasoning, and the only just Bottom on which Men can proceed in convincing one another of the Truth: and by consequence whoever is capable of denying them, is not in a condition to be informed. ~ Anthony Collins