No validation of our rationality - of our very sanity - can be accomplished using our rationality itself. How can a person operating within a system of beliefs, including beliefs about beliefs, get outside that system to determine whether it is rational? If your entire system becomes infected with madness, including the very rules by which you reason, then how can you ever reason your way out of your madness? . Rebecca Goldstein
About This Quote

Rationality is the fruit of experience. I have learned that I cannot trust my own beliefs, which are produced by my own experiences. I am forced to rely on others. So how do I know if their beliefs are rational? If their experience has not been my own, how can they tell me that my experience is irrational?

Source: Incompleteness: The Proof And Paradox Of Kurt GaDel

Some Similar Quotes
  1. You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams. - Dr. Seuss
  2. When someone loves you, the way they talk about you is different. You feel safe and comfortable. - Jess C. Scott
  3. I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. <span style="margin:15px;... - Neil Gaiman
  4. We have to allow ourselves to be loved by the people who really love us, the people who really matter. Too much of the time, we are blinded by our own pursuits of people to love us, people that don't even matter, while all that... - C. Joybell C.
  5. Nothing in this world was more difficult than love. - Unknown
More Quotes By Rebecca Goldstein
  1. No validation of our rationality - of our very sanity - can be accomplished using our rationality itself. How can a person operating within a system of beliefs, including beliefs about beliefs, get outside that system to determine whether it is rational? If your entire...
  2. (As Plato:) There is nothing superstitious about forcing bad consequences for the hubris of paternalistic utopianism. Humanity should never be frozen into a vision of the best. A creative society must be willing to tolerate some degree of instability because creativity is inherently unstable.
  3. Conclusions that philosophers first establish by way of torturous reasoning have a way, over time, of leaking into shared knowledge.
  4. Thinking is the soul speaking to itself.
  5. Plato worries our thinking might become too reflexive and comfortable with itself.
Related Topics