Quotes About Empirical

Morality arose largely as an empirical defence of the individual and society. Ever since intelligent beings began to be in contact, and consequently in friction, they have felt the need to guard themselves against each other's encroachments.

Once a person has made some sort of stable, symbolic connection between two things, the connection will influence his subsequent behavior and will generate its own 'proof.' This is why it is idle and foolish to try to 'refute' religious, political, and similar beliefs with empirical arguments about referents that are symbols to the believer but not to the non-believer.

When we do science, we want to describe the world in the most objective way possible. We try to eliminate distortions and optical illusions deriving from our point of view. Science aspires to objectivity, to a shared point of view about which it is possible to be in agreement.

Our entire current technology is founded on the use of a physical thing-electromagnetic waves-that was not discovered empirically: it was predicted by Maxwell, simply by searching for the mathematical description accounting for the intuition Faraday got from bobbins and needles. This is the outstanding power of theoretical physics.

The ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment... not authority.

Empirical explorations ultimately change our understanding of which questions are important and fruitful and which are not.

You can't know what it's like to be a major league umpire unless you were a major league umpire.

I am unable to watch the Olympics due to the blustering jingoism that drenches the event. Has England ever been quite so foul with patriotism? The 'dazzling royals' have, quite naturally, hi-jacked the Olympics for their own empirical needs, and no oppositional voice is allowed in the free press.

The implications of these considerations justify the statement that all empirically verifiable knowledge even the commonsense knowledge of everyday life - involves implicitly, if not explicitly, systematic theory in this sense.

It is that of increasing knowledge of empirical fact, intimately combined with changing interpretations of this body of fact - hence changing general statements about it - and, not least, a changing a structure of the theoretical system.

The fact that the scientific investigator works 50 percent of his time by nonrational means is, it seems, quite insufficiently recognized.

But it doesn't make for good science. Science is not just about seeing, it's about measuring, preferably with something that's not your own eyes, which are inextricably conjoined with the baggage of your brain. That baggage is more often than not a satchel of preconceived ideas, post-conceived notions, and outright bias.

Science is not just about seeing, it's about measuring, preferably with something that's not your own eyes, which are inextricably conjoined with the baggage of your brain.

Lo que considera un error es que la política se piense idealizándola contra la evidencia empírica a costa de supeditarla rígidamente a las normas y valores cristianos.

Reality has a deep dimension often operating below the surface of empirical experience. To think otherwise is to commit what critical realists call the epistemic fallacy, namely, to reduce what is to what we can empirically observe. That is a debilitating move.

The rules of all intellectual activity Ã¢â'¬â€œ whether scientific or non-scientific Ã¢â'¬â€œ spin down to one golden precept: the testing of assertions on the anvils of logic and verifiable fact. For an argument to obtain, it must make sense rationally and empirically.

Empirical objects become signs (or they are looked at as signs) only from the point of view of a philosophical decision.

Science is a method to keep yourself from kidding yourself.

Linux addresses this issue by adopting an empirical rule related to the processor's cache size: the larger the processor's cache, the longer a process will wait for a piece of time on that processor.

If ordinary men never report the occurrence of these acts, for all that, according to the theory, they should be encountered vastly more frequently than headaches, or feelings of boredom; if ordinary vocabulary has no non-academic names for them; if we do not know how to settle simple questions about their frequency, duration or strength, then it is fair to conclude that their existence is not asserted on empirical grounds.

The world of empirical morality consists for the most part of nothing but ill will and envy.

Entrenched myth: Successful leaders in a turbulent world are bold, risk-seeking visionaries. Contrary finding: The best leaders we studied did not have a visionary ability to predict the future. They observed what worked, figured out why it worked, and built upon proven foundations. They were not more risk taking, more bold, more visionary, and more creative than the comparisons. They were more disciplined, more empirical, and more paranoid.

People today sometimes get uncomfortable with empirical claims that seem to clash with their political assumptions, often because they haven't given much thought to the connections.

Bottom up thinkers try to start from experience and move from experience to understanding. They don't start with certain general principles they think beforehand are likely to be true; they just hope to find out what reality is like.