I'm the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal and rebut the refutation. Endlessly.
The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?
Yet again, unscientific claims were being circulated broadly, but the scientists' refutation of them was published where only fellow scientists would see it.
There is no idea that does not carry in itself a possible refutation, no word that does not imply its opposite.
An alternate explanation is not a refutation.
Sleaze is a point by point refutation of elegance.
It is clear that men accept an immediate pain rather than an immediate pleasure, but only because they expect a greater pleasure in the future. Often the pleasure is illusory, but their error in calculation is no refutation of the rule. You are puzzled because you cannot get over the idea that pleasures are only of the sense; but, child, a man who dies for his country dies because he likes it as surely as a man eats pickled cabbage because he likes it.
I'm not quite pompous enough to think of myself as an educator or a man capable of definitive refutation of falsehoods.
Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.
The economic and social theories used by those who take part in the social struggle ought to be judged not by their objective value but primarily for their effectiveness in arousing emotions. The scientific refutation of them which can be made is useless, however correct it may be objectively.
When we seek a textbook case for the proper operation of science, the correction of certain error offers far more promise than the establishment of probable truth. Confirmed hunches, of course, are more upbeat than discredited hypotheses. Since the worst traditions of "popular" writing falsely equate instruction with sweetness and light, our promotional literature abounds with insipid tales in the heroic mode, although tough stories of disappointment and loss give deeper insight into a methodology that the celebrated philosopher Karl Popper once labeled as "conjecture and refutation.
It was one thing to have guessed it, another to have had that guess confirmed beyond possibility of refutation.
