Which Intellectual Values, Convictions &
Precepts
Would Help the Cause of Liberal Education?
It is a fact of experience and common-sense that education has to be governed by some set of human values, however sharply we may disagree
about the content of these.
Christopher Derrick
Historically, almost all education systems, at all levels, had quite explicit
points of view on values.
Fred Britton
A thing cannot be true in theory and yet false in practice. Practice is the empirical check on theory, and if practice confutes theory, theory must be revised.
Arnold Lunn
The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it
can never work.
Miikka Ryökäs
All explanations come to an end somewhere.
Thomas Nagel
It is not every question that deserves an answer. For example: How do we
know that other people aren’t zombies?
All knowledge must be built up upon our instinctive beliefs, and if these are
rejected, nothing is left.
Bertrand Russell
I do not think it is possible to get anywhere if we start from scepticism. We
must start from a broad acceptance of whatever seems to be knowledge and
is not rejected for some specific reason.
Bertrand Russell
All science requires faith in the inner harmony of the world.
He who wishes to learn must believe.
Albert Einstein
Aristotle
Being fair to the philosophical opposition means conceding that honest, intelligent, well informed people can be found in the opposing camp.
The Catholic and the Communist [among others] are alike in assuming that
an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent. Each of them tacitly
claims that “the truth” has already been revealed, and that the heretic, if he
is not simply a fool, is secretly aware of “the truth” and merely resists it out
of selfish motives.
George Orwell (from The Prevention of Literature, 1946)
Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.
It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to
imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.
G. K. Chesterton
One can’t be right until one has first conceived the possibility of being
wrong.
Diana Kuhn
Every man has a right to be wrong in his opinions. But no man has a right to
be wrong in his facts.
Bernard Baruch
All who accept reason as the criterion to distinguish between true and false
beliefs are entitled to describe themselves as “rationalists” in contrast to “fideists” who consciously or unconsciously assume that they are entitled in an
argument to appeal to their personal intuitions about the nature of ultimate
reality.
Arnold Lunn
Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to
make it precise.
Bertrand Russell
PARAPHRASE: Everything is complicated and subtle to a degree you do not
realize till you have tried to make it simple and straightforward.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Carl Sagan
Facts may or may not be evidence, depending on the context—but the same
set of agreed facts can be taken as evidence in support of different interpretations or theories of the overall situation.
Fred Britton
Fundamental scepticism, where it is fully believed, is a pathological condition
and calls for intervention and help of the psychiatric kind. Christopher Derrick
The arguments of the sceptic are, says Hume, valid. But only theoretically.
Having conceded their validity as arguments he drives home the point that it
is impossible for anyone actually to live as a sceptic.
Bryan Magee
He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.
John Stuart Mill
The more knowledge we possess of the opposite point of view, the less puzzling it is to know what to do [or say].
Winston Churchill
It’s irrational to beg the question, i.e., to assume what it is one’s business to
prove.
In science, “fact” can only mean “confirmed to such a degree that it would
be perverse to withhold provisional consent.”
Stephen Jay Gould
One thing we are sure of, and that is the reality and substantiality of the luminiferous ether.
Lord Kelvin
If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. There are some premises
that can’t be reached as conclusions.
C. S. Lewis
It is notoriously impossible to prove that the external world exists.
Bryan Magee
Just because we can’t define something as a truth doesn’t mean we can’t feel
it as a fact.
G. K. Chesterton
No useful discussion is possible unless both parties to the discussion start
from the same premise.
Mediæval Maxim
No argument can establish the truth of its premises, since if it tried to do so
it would be circular; and therefore no argument can establish the truth of its
conclusions.
Bryan Magee
Not every word can be defined.
As nothing can be proved but by supposing something intuitively known,
and evident without proof, so nothing can be defined but by the use of
words too plain to admit a definition.
Samuel Johnson
Objectivity means that we can separate facts from our thoughts and feelings
about those facts.
It is important to concede everything which should be conceded because it is
not only bad policy but intellectually dishonest to defend the indefensible.
Arnold Lunn
The attempt to establish by purely intellectual processes the truth of any particular philosophy is absolutely hopeless.
Philosophical argument, strictly speaking, consists mainly of an endeavour
to cause the hearer to perceive what has been perceived by the speaker. The
argument, in short, is not of the nature of proof, but of exhortation: Look,
can’t you see what I see!
Religious (or simple) fundamentalism is the inability to see that words can’t
do what we thought they could do, namely, establish truth with authority
and without ambiguity. Philosophical (or sophisticated) fundamentalism is
the inability to see that arguments can’t do what we thought they could do,
namely, establish truth authoritatively and unambiguously.
The analogy is a particularly tricky form of rhetoric when it becomes the basis of an argument rather than merely a figure of speech.
Northrop Frye
A drop of water is not immortal; it can be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. If, therefore, a drop of water were to maintain that it had a quality of
aqueousness which would survive its dissolution we should be inclined to
be sceptical.
Bertrand Russell (arguing against immortality)
The closest we can get to impartiality is admitting we are partial.
G. K. Chesterton
Arguments that don’t satisfy us emotionally usually don’t satisfy us intellectually.
The first step in escaping fundamentalism is to distinguish between what a
sentence says and what it means.
When you say that the earth is round, do you mean it? No, you don’t mean
it. But it is true. In fact, most of the sentences we regard as true reflect facts
and opinions that are much more complicated than the explicit meaning of
the sentence.
The simple realization that there are other points of view is the beginning of
wisdom. Knowing what they are is a big step. The final achievement is understanding why they are held.
When a subject is highly controversial one cannot hope to tell the truth. One
can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One
can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as
they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker.
Virginia Woolf
There is such a thing as irrational scepticism just as there is such a thing as
irrational belief. They are just opposite sides of the same logical coin.
Any premises that are capable of being put into words are also capable of
being verbally questioned. Any argument whatsoever can thus be made into an infinite regress.
Christopher Derrick
To [John] Hick it has at once to be conceded: that it is one thing to say that a
belief is unfounded or well-founded; and quite another to say that it is irrational or rational for some particular person, in his particular time and circumstances, and with his particular experience and lack of experience, to
hold or to reject that belief.
Anthony Flew
In the Summa Theologica Thomas Aquinas poses the question of whether heretics can be endured, tolerated. And his answer is that heretics can not be
tolerated. If it was just to condemn counterfeiters to death, then surely it
was necessary to put to death those who had committed the far worse crime
of counterfeiting the faith.
True science is never philosophically partisan. It is open to any new
knowledge or understanding whatever the metaphysical implications.
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses Nature
leads, or you shall learn nothing.
T. H. Huxley
Without sympathy there can be no effective criticism.
Arnold Lunn
You cannot win a man from his belief, political or religious, unless you can
see why it attracts him and can almost imagine holding it yourself.
Frank Sheed