Quotes About Theory

Violence between the combatants may be called war; violence by the bystander against the combatants may be called law. The Leviathan theory, in a nutshell, is that law is better than war.

Social psychology, the science of how people behave toward one another, is often a mishmash of interesting phenomena that are "explained" by giving them fancy names. Missing is the rich deductive structure of other sciences, in which a few deep principles can generate a wealth of subtle predictions—the kind of theory that scientists praise as "beautiful" or

Optimism (in the sense that I have advocated) is the theory that all failures—all evils—are due to insufficient knowledge. . . . Problems are inevitable, because our knowledge will always be infinitely far from complete. Some problems are hard, but it is a mistake to confuse hard problems with problems unlikely to be solved. Problems are soluble, and each particular evil is a problem that can be solved.

As Francis Crick liked to say, "Any theory that can account for all the facts is wrong, because some of the facts are wrong.

Self-deception is an exotic theory, because it makes the paradoxical claim that something called "the self" can be both deceiver and deceived.

The Darwinian approach to sex is often attacked as being antifeminist, but that is just wrong. Indeed, the accusation is baffling on the face of it, especially to the many feminist women who have developed and tested the theory. The core of feminism is surely the goal of ending sexual discrimination and exploitation, an ethical and political position that is in no danger of being refuted by any foreseeable scientific theory or discovery.

Unlike the more gimmicky theories of the crime decline, massive imprisonment is almost certain to lower crime rates because the mechanism by which it operates has so few moving parts.

In this way the theory of human nature coming out of the cognitive revolution has more in common with the Judeo-Christian theory of human nature, and with the psychoanalytic theory proposed by Sigmund Freud...

To say it again: it is the greatest temptation of the rational faculty to glorify its own capacity and its own productions and to claim that in the face of its theories nothing transcendent or outside its domain need exist. This means that all important facts have been discovered. This means that nothing important remains unknown.

If society is corrupt, but not the individuals within it, then where did the corruption originate? How is it propagated? It's a one-sided, deeply ideological theory.

To hold the no excuse for physical punishment theory is also (fifth) to assume that the word no can be effectively uttered to another person in the absence of the threat of punishment.

They believe, narcissistically, underneath all that bad theory, that the world could be put right, if only they held the controls.

An ideological theory explains everything: all the past, all the present, and all the future. This means that an ideologue can consider him or herself in possession of the complete truth (something forbidden to the self-consistent fundamentalist). There is no claim more totalitarian and no situation in which the worst excesses of pride are more likely to manifest themselves (and not only pride, but then deceit, once the ideology has failed to explain the world or predict its future).

They exaggerate the importance of some events, and downplay the importance of others. They trim the facts to fit their theory.158 And they convince their clients that they were sexually abused—if they could only remember.

However, people are often willing to produce a lot of collateral damage if they can retain their theory.

Before the work of Georg Cantor in the nineteenth century, the study of the infinite was as much theology as science; now, we understand Cantor's theory of multiple infinities, each one infinitely larger than the last, well enough to teach it to first-year math majors. (To be fair, it does kind of blow their minds.)

If you do happen to find yourself partially believing a crazy theory, don't worry—probably the evidence you encounter will be inconsistent with it, driving down your degree of belief in the craziness until your beliefs come into line with everyone else's. Unless, that is, the crazy theory is designed to survive this winnowing process. That's how conspiracy theories work.

The master group theorist John Conway, upon encountering the lattice in 1968, worked out all its symmetries in a twelve-hour spree of computation on a single giant roll of paper. These symmetries ended up forming some of the final pieces of the general theory of finite symmetry groups that preoccupied algebraists for much of the twentieth century.

the crazy theory is designed to survive this winnowing process. That's how conspiracy theories work.

Theorists are a smart bunch (in theory),

if you are on a rocket moving close to the speed of light relative to Earth, then your speed through space is very high. So in order for your total speed through space-time relative to Earth to stay within the speed limit of the universe, your speed through time has to decrease—as measured by clocks on Earth.

La idea del principio en Leibniz ? la evolución de la teoría deductiva.

every hypothesis is a construction, and because of this it is an authentic theory. In so far as they merit that exigent name, ideas are never a mere reception of presumed realities, but they are constructions of possibilities; therefore they are pure bits of imagination, or fine ideas of our own...

M]an cannot be wicked without being evil, nor evil without being degraded, nor degraded without being punished, nor punished without being guilty. In short … there is nothing so intrinsically plausible as the theory of original sin.