83 quotes found
“Knowledge is a social construct, a consensus among the members of a community of knowledgeable peers.”
“He who would know the world must first manufacture it.”
“Were starting to behave as if weve reached the end of human knowledge. And while that notion is undoubtedly false, the sensation of certitude it generates is paralyzing.”
“Falsity consists in the privation of knowledge, which inadequate, fragmentary, or confused ideas involve.”
“The most crucial problem with intellectual learning is that it receives the unknown on the grounds of the known.”
“One of the advantages of science is that one's work, ultimately, is either replicated or it is not.”
“But, though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience.”
“Thought and science are therefore raising problems which their terms of study can never answer, many of which are doubtless problems only for thought. The trisection of an angle is similarly an ins...”
“Scientists study only those aspects of the universe that it is within their gift to study: what is observable; what is measurable and amenable to statistical analysis; and, indeed, what they can af...”
“The objection that science is self-correcting and thus needs no outside interference overlooks, first, that every enterprise is self-correcting (look at what happened to the Catholic Church after V...”
“In the first case it emerges that the evidence that might refute a theory can often be unearthed only with the help of an incompatible alternative: the advice (which goes back to Newton and which i...”
“The idea of a method that contains firm, unchanging, and absolutely binding principles for conducting the business of science meets considerable difficulty when confronted with the results of histo...”
“Sadly, because of our tribal brains, science carries a hefty cost. Treasured ideas that are loved by the community may be left behind, unable to compete with conflicting observations. Admired heroe...”
“How does it happen that a properly endowed natural scientist comes to concern himself with epistemology? Is there no more valuable work in his specialty? I hear many of my colleagues saying, and I ...”
“Truth is, something exists, and everything exists for a reason. Regardless if the reason is known or unknown, knowable or unknowable, reason exists and can be named.”
“every feeling is the perception of a truth...”
“The mind leans on [innate] principles every moment, but it does not come so easily to distinguish them and to represent them distinctly and separately, because that demands great attention to its a...”
“The mind is not only capable of knowing [innate ideas], but further of finding them in itself; and if it had only the simple capacity to receive knowledgeit would not be the source of necessary truths”
“For the [innate] general principles enter into our thoughts, of which they form the soul and the connection. They are as necessary thereto as the muscles and sinews are for walking, although we do ...”
“A prepared mind is always made up; it knows what it thinks and why it thinks that. When it's time to change, it just makes itself up a different way. A really made-up mind--made up properly, knowin...”
