Quotes About Theory

[Knowledge is governed not by] a theory of knowledge, but by a theory of discursive practice.

Most important part of doing physics is the knowledge of approximation.

A theory must be tempered with reality.

My favorite laser disk ever was the laser disk for The Graduate, which had a commentary track that wasn't even the filmmakers, it was a professor, some film criticism guy who just happen to be this amazing commentator who went off into the whole theory of comedy.

It is not enough for theory to describe and analyse, it must itself be an event in the universe it describes. In order to do this theory must partake of and become the acceleration of this logic. It must tear itself from all referents and take pride only in the future. Theory must operate on time at the cost of a deliberate distortion of present reality.

The world has arisen in some way or another. How it originated is the great question, and Darwin's theory, like all other attempts to explain the origin of life, is thus far merely conjectural. I believe he has not even made the best conjecture possible in the present state of our knowledge.

the 2008 crisis is a textbook case for the theory of information

I don't agree with the theory that adversity and sorrow and disappointment develop moral strength. The happy people are the ones who are bubbling over with kindliness.

Scientific knowledge is a kind of discourse.

People declare as much, without, apparently, looking into the matter very closely. They seem able to dispense with the conscientious observer's scruples, when inflating their bladder of theory.

Art and theory of art, at one and the same time ; beauty and the secret of beauty ; cinema, and apologia for cinema. ' - Godard on Godard: Critical Writings

The smaller ones should always be preferred to the larger; i.e., rather than having the bass ascend or descend a sixth, we should have it descend or ascend a third, since ascending a third is the same as descending a sixth, just as ascending a sixth and descending a third, ascending a fifth and descending a fourth, or ascending a fourth and descending a

This is what Zarlino means when he says that the bass should proceed by separated intervals, for intervals cannot be consonant unless they are separated. Although Zarlino also says that the bass

I'm very manipulative towards directors. My theory is that everyone on the set is directing the film, we're all receiving art messages from the universe on how we should do the film.

Unformed, monstrous, and perhaps unidentifiable, deconstruction has moved virally through fields beyond philosophy and theory. Derrida advanced its progress in architecture, art, politics and law. And especially, in literature…

However, if one or more of the neurons are in the predictive state, our theory says, only those neurons spike and the other neurons are inhibited. Thus, when an input arrives that is unexpected, multiple neurons fire at once. If the input is predicted, then only the predictive-state neurons become active. This is a common observation about the neocortex: unexpected inputs cause a lot more activity than expected ones.

Hush," said January. "We may be old, but we're not silly. Satan is a catchall term. It gives identity to our theory of a centralized leadership. Call him what you want, a maximum leader, a caudillo. A Genghis Khan or Sitting Bull. Or a council of wise men, or warlords. The concept is sound. Logical.

A theory was forming in his head, like a musical composition he could hum from vague memories but not quite yet name or play.

The hypothetical aquatic phase of the ancestral apes during the fossil gap would have been brief, a matter of two or three million years.

That all species are related in the flow of life and death is a keystone of evolutionary theory. The grandeur displayed in this view of life is ecological in character.

a few philosophers really do important work. This applies to the so called critical philosophy and to the theory of knowledge or epistemology. This class of workers I call epistemologists to avoid the disagreeable implications of the term philosopher.

It is not paradox to say that in our most theoretical moods we may be nearest to our most practical applications

Some spent years undermining Pfeiffer's theory, and others—among them many of the most brilliant scientists of the era—took off after other alleged villains, spending untold thousands of man-hours in the crucially important but thankless task of proving themselves wrong.

I remembered how de Man had said to us in class, 'don't confuse any of this literary theory with your lives'—how we hadn't believed him, how we had wanted our criticism to tell us how to think and how to speak and how to live. De Man made literature matter more than anything in the world and then said it was only literature.