Cognitive Science Theory Quotes & Sayings

... for miracles to happen, God, need our cooperation. As Pastor Charles once told me, God can throw us a rope to save us, but we have to hold to it. — Stevan V. Nikolic

I was at the end of my tether when my first book was published. For eight years I didn't make a penny, I worked so hard, didn't drink, didn't enjoy life. — Orhan Pamuk

Barry Schlenker's self-identity theory (1982) asserts that self-presentation is an attempt to control information about your identity before real or imagined audiences - including yourself. People try to provide explanations of their own conduct; they try to construct an identity that is satisfying to themselves and that explains their behavior in a favorable light. One of the criteria of a good explanation is believability; that is, explanations must fit with existing knowledge. Schlenker argues that people are not motivated to attain cognitive consistency as an end in itself; rather, they need to provide a believable and self -beneficial account of their conduct, and consistency is a by-product of that. The need to provide explanations for your conduct results in the construction of an internally consistent view of reality. — James Kennedy

Blogging is to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud. — Andrew Sullivan

We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes. — Gene Roddenberry

If what you mean by the word "matter" be only the unknown support of unknown qualities, it is no matter whether there is such a thing or no, since it no way concerns us; and I do not see the advantage there is in disputing about what we know not what, and we know not why. — George Berkeley

It's sometimes easier to defend a one goal lead than a two goal lead. — Mark Lawrenson

In most sciences, there are few findings more prized than a counterintuitive result. It shows something surprising and forces us to reconsider our often tacit assumptions. In philosophy of mind, a counterintuitive "result" (e.g., a mind-boggling implication of somebody's "theory" of perception, memory, consciousness, or whatever) is typically taken as tantamount to a refutation. This affection for one's current intuitions, sometimes amounting (as we saw in the previous chapter) to a refusal even to consider alternative perspectives, installs deep conservatism in the methods of philosophers. Conservatism can be a good thing, but only if it is acknowledged. By all means, let's not abandon perfectly good and familiar intuitions without a fight, but let's recognize that the intuitions that are initially used to frame the issues may not live to settle the issues. — Daniel Dennett

Once you've recognized your own limits, you've raised yourself to a higher level of being, since you're closer to the real you ... — Banana Yoshimoto

In philosophy, metaphorical pluralism is the norm. Our most important abstract philosophical concepts, including time, causation, morality, and the mind, are all conceptualized by multiple metaphors, sometimes as many as two dozen. What each philosophical theory typically does is to choose one of those metaphors as "right," as the true literal meaning of the concept. One reason there is so much argumentation across philosophical theories is that different philosophers have chosen different metaphors as the "right" one, ignoring or taking as misleading all other commonplace metaphorical structurings of the concept. Philosophers have done this because they assume that a concept must have one and only one logic. But the cognitive reality is that our concepts have multiple metaphorical structurings. — George Lakoff

Attaching epistemic significance to metaphysical intuitions is anti-naturalist for two reasons. First, it requires ignoring the fact that science, especially physics, has shown us that the universe is very strange to our inherited conception of what it is like. Second, it requires ignoring central implications of evolutionary theory, and of the cognitive and behavioural sciences, concerning the nature of our minds. — James Ladyman