Topic

Evidence

Evidence is the basis on which rational belief is built — the observations, data, testimony, and argument that justify holding a view rather than merely preferring it. The quotes gathered here make the case for evidence-based thinking with the rigor it deserves. The relationship between evidence and belief is not simple: evidence is always filtered through prior assumptions, never complete, and sometimes genuinely ambiguous. But these complications strengthen rather than undermine the case for attending carefully to evidence, because they show how easily the mind can convince itself that its preferences are well-founded when they are not. Several voices here are particularly sharp on the psychology of motivated reasoning — the way people who care about an outcome tend to evaluate evidence bearing on it less critically than evidence bearing on outcomes they do not care about. The discipline of taking evidence seriously, even when it leads somewhere inconvenient, is one of the foundations of intellectual integrity.