“I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed 3,000 different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently likely to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory. My chief difficulty was in constructing the carbon filament... Every quarter of the globe was ransacked by my agents, and all sorts of the queerest materials used, until finally the shred of bamboo, now utilized by us, was settled upon.” TwoDifferentLightUsedSpeakCasesMaterialsTheoryProveConnectionsDifficultyExperimentsBeing TrueAgentsChiefsReasonableQuartersElectricGlobesCarbonExaggerationElectric LightBamboo Author:Thomas A. Edison
“Being Americans, we prosecute wars to win them, not to have reasonable response, not to have appropriate levels of retaliation. Our theory is you start bombing our cities; we're going to defeat you and make it impossible.” WarWinningLevelsCitiesImpossibleTheoryResponseDefeatReasonableAppropriateBombingRetaliation Author:Newt Gingrich
“The theory behind representative government is that superior men-or at least men not inferior to the average in ability and integrity-are chosen to manage the public business, and that they carry on this work with reasonable intelligence and honest. There is little support for that theory in known facts.” MenLittlesFactsGovernmentAbilityBehindsKnownLibertySupportHonestTheoryIntegrityAverageChosenSuperiorsManageReasonableRepresentativesInferiorsSuperior ManRepresentative Government Author:H. L. Mencken
“All in all, the communally reared children of Israel are far from the emotional disasters that psychoanalytic theory predicted. Neither have they been saved from all personality problems, as the founders of the kibbutz movement had hoped when they freed children from their parents. In any reasonable environment, children seem to grow up to be themselves. There is no evidence that communal rearing with stimulating, caring adults is either the ruination or the salvation of children.” ChildrenProblemSeemsGrowsParentCommunityGrowing UpEnvironmentMovementEmotionalTheoryPersonalityEvidenceAdultsSalvationIsraelCaringSavedDisasterReasonableFoundersPsychoanalytic Author:Sandra Scarr
“Our acceptance of an ontology is, I think, similar in principle to our acceptance of a scientific theory, say a system of physics;we adopt, at least insofar as we are reasonable, the simplest conceptual scheme into which the disordered fragments of raw experience can be fitted and arranged.” ThinkingPrinciplesAcceptanceTheoryPhysicsReasonableSchemesSimplestFragmentsOntologyScientific Theory Book:Quintessence: Basic Readings from the Philosophy of W.V. Quine Source: Quintessence: Basic Readings from the Philosophy of W.V. Quine
“The test of science is not whether you are reasonable—there would not be much of physics if that was the case—the test is whether it works. And the great point about Newton’s theory of gravitation was that it worked, that you could actually say something about the motion of the moon without knowing very much about the constitution of the Earth.” IfsEarthCasesKnowingTheoryMoonTestsConstitutionPhysicsReasonableNewtonGravitation Author:Hermann Bondi
“The theory that the biosphere was created without evolution, a few thousand years ago, is ruled out by overwhelming scientific evidence. To claim that there are 'alternative (always better) Biblical explanations of the same data', which make creationism a reasonable alternative to our best theories of biology and physics, is appalling intellectual dishonesty.” YearsTheoryEvolutionThousandIntellectualEvidenceYears AgoClaimsPhysicsDataAlternativesExplanationReasonableBiologyOverwhelmingBiblicalThousand YearsDishonestyCreationismBiosphereScientific EvidenceIntellectual Dishonesty Author:David Deutsch
“To construct a scientific theory from the data and to be able to recognize that it is a reasonable theory is possible only if there are some very sharp restrictive principles that lead you to go in one direction and not in another direction. Otherwise, you wouldn't have science at all, merely randomly chosen hypotheses.” IfsAblePrinciplesTheoryChosenDataReasonableConstructsHypothesisOne DirectionScientific Theory Author:Noam Chomsky
“The masses will reject any theory, however reasonable it may be, if it lays a restriction upon the appetite.” IfsMayTheoryMassLaysReasonableRejectsAppetiteRestriction Author:Ellen G. White