| Dubbed “Prospero’s Precepts”, these eleven rules culled from some of history’s greatest minds can serve as a general-purpose guideline for critical thinking in all matters of doubt: | |
| 1. All beliefs in whatever realm are theories at some level. (Stephen Schneider) | |
| 2. Do not condemn the judgment of another because it differs from your own. You may both be wrong. (Dandemis) | |
| 3. Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. (Francis Bacon) | |
| 4. Never fall in love with your hypothesis. (Peter Medawar) | |
| 5. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories instead of theories to suit facts. (Arthur Conan Doyle) | |
| 6. A theory should not attempt to explain all the facts, because some of the facts are wrong. (Francis Crick) | |
| 7. The thing that doesn’t fit is the thing that is most interesting. (Richard Feynman) | |
| 8. To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact. (Charles Darwin) | |
| 9. It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. (Mark Twain) | |
| 10. Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong. (Thomas Jefferson) | |
| 11. All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second, it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident. (Arthur Schopenhauer) | |
| — Peter Surrock | |
| From his book: “AKA Shakespeare: A Scientific Approach to the Authorship Question“ | |
| [Found at a site I like to visit every now and then: http://www.brainpickings.org/ | |
| The specific post was found at: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/04/01/aka-shakespeare/ | |
| Well worth a visit… — KMAB] | |
| . | |
| On This Day In: | |
| 2014 | Friends |
| 2013 | Learning Bitter |
| 2012 | Remembrance, Minstrels & Going Off To War |
| May I Have More Happiness, Please? | |
| 2011 | There Is No God, But God |
| 2010 | Another Running Book… |
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