It is fairly clear that many of the arguments against proposition testing are really arguments against propositions themselves.
When confronted with two courses of action I jot down on a piece of paper all the arguments in favor of each one, then on the opposite side I write the arguments against each one. Then by weighing the arguments pro and con and cancelling them out, one against the other, I take the course indicated by what remains.
If we are not serious about facts and what's true and what's not. And particularly in an age of social media where so many people are getting their information in sound bites and snippets off their phones, if we can't discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems.
Most of this film, however, is about interpretation - are these people terrorists or freedom fighters? Are they good or bad? Is cutting timber good or bad? And I don't feel like the answers to those questions are simple, so we don't try to answer them for the audience. I wanted to elicit the strongest - and most heartfelt - arguments from the characters in the film and let those arguments bang up against the strongest arguments of their opponents.
The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.
I am well acquainted with all the arguments against freedom of thought and speech - the arguments which claim that it cannot exist, and the arguments which claim that it ought not to. I answer simply that they don't convince me and that our civilization over a period of four hundred years has been founded on the opposite notice.
There are legitimate, even powerful arguments, to be made against the Bush administration's foreign policy. But those arguments are complicated, hard to explain, and, in the end, not all that sensational.
While it is useful to rebut charges and get your arguments out in circulation, you have to understand that arguments and evidence have little impact on people as long as their feelings tilt them against you.
Forgiveness is the most effective way of dealing with arguments; altruism and forgiveness bring humanity together so that no conflict, however serious, will go beyond the bounds of what is truly human.
Traditional arguments for the existence of God and contemporary attempts to use fine-tuning and cosmology to back up the case for his existence always strike me as kinds of games, since hardly anyone believes on the basis of these arguments at all.
What monstrous absurdities and paradoxes have resisted whole batteries of serious arguments, and then crumbled swiftly into dust before the ringing death-knell of a laugh!
The hard part about writing about a guy like John Brown is that he was so serious, and his cause was so serious, that most of what's been written about him is really serious and, in my opinion, a little bit boring.
Because of mathematics precise, formal character, mathematical arguments remain sound even when they are long and complex. In contast, common sense arguments can generally be trusted only if they remain short; even moderately long nonmathematical arguments rapidly becomes farfetched an dubious.
Highly technical philosophical arguments of the sort many philosophers favor are absent here. That is because I have a prior problem to deal with. I have learned that arguments, no matter how watertight, often fall on deaf ears. I am myself the author of arguments that I consider rigorous and unanswerable but that are often not such much rebutted or even dismissed as simply ignored.
Public reason arguments can be good or bad just like other arguments.
Father sighed. “Please spare me these arguments of yours.” “Whose arguments should I use?