Quotes About Empirical

It was mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence, wherein the mind appears to play only with itself, that turned out to be the science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe that are concealed by appearances.

Empirical evidence, however, has little effect on irrational belief.

The word strategy only came into general use at the start of the nineteenth century. Its origins predated Napoleon and reflected the Enlightenment's growing confidence in empirical science and the application of reason.

If we wish to draw philosophical conclusions about our own existence, our significance, and the significance of the universe itself, our conclusions should be based on empirical knowledge. A truly open mind means forcing our imaginations to conform to the evidence of reality, and not vice versa, whether or not we like the implications.

It's becoming clearer and clearer to me that this is materialistic philosophy masquerading as empirical science. The attitude is that life had to have developed this way because there's no other materialistic explanation.

During my sojourn in ironclad atheism, the primary arsenal leveled against Christianity had been its failure on empirical grounds. Surely, enlightened reason offered a more coherent cosmos. Surely, Occam's razor cut the faithful free from blind faith. There is no proof of God; therefore, it is unreasonable to believe in God.

To claim that ISIS is Islamic is egregiously inaccurate and empirically unsustainable, not to mention insulting to the 1.6 billion non-violent adherents of Islam across the planet.

The idea of truth as a consolation is a real one. We all face a death sentence, and we all want to believe in something that is demonstrably true. Religion in the shape of an institution, a set of dogmas and a body of doctrine, is not in this sense a help: it demands an act of faith, an acceptance that it must be true, even if, or especially because, empirical evidence is not available, and anyway, if you could see it was unarguably true, what would be the virtue of faith?

We were thinking far-out history thoughts at Harvard...believing that it was a time for visions, knowing that America had run out of philosophy, that a new empirical, tangible meta-physics was needed.

It emerged from two other disciplines, physiology and philosophy. German Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) is seen as the father of psychology because he insisted it should be a separate discipline, more empirical than philosophy and more focused on the mind than physiology. In the 1870s he created the first experimental psychology laboratory, and wrote his huge work Principles of Physiological Psychology.

Has anyone shown that reality is secular? Could you show me the person and where this was done?

But faith," Edmond declared, "by its very definition, requires placing your trust in something that is unseeable and indefinable, accepting as fact something for which there exists no empirical evidence.

But faith by its very definition, requires placing your trust in something that unseeable and indefinable, accepting something of which there exists no empirical evidence. And so, understandably, we all end up placing our faith in different things because if there is no universal truth. - Edmond Kirsch

Learning to address concerns methodically, with reference to logic and empirical evidence, is one of the most useful things an anxious person can do.

The walls of the rational, empirical world are famously porous. What come through are dreams, imaginings, inspirations, visions, revelations. There is no use in stooping over these with a magnifying lens.

A true empiricism is one that sets itself the task of getting as close as possible to the original, of sounding the depths of life, of feeling the pulse of its spirit by a sort of intellectual auscultation; we listen in on the current of life. By direct perception we feel the presence of the mind; by intellectual circumlocution we arrive at the notion that thought is a dance of molecules in the brain. Is there any doubt that intuition here beholds more truly the heart of life?

You just can't understand anything you can't get your hands on, anything you can't feel or see or, or count...

there is but a single reality out there, and science is getting increasingly better at describing it.

Science is the systematic classification of experience.

The situation in the sciences is this: A concept or an idea which cannot be measured or cannot be referred directly to experiment may or may not be useful. It need not exist in a theory.

It is always good to know which ideas cannot be checked directly, but it is not necessary to remove them all. It is not true that we can pursue science completely by using only those concepts which are directly subject to experiment.

Populists, by contrast, will persist with their representative claim no matter what; because their claim is of moral and symbolic- not an empirical- nature, it cannot be disproven.

Much of my work in this period was concerned with exploring the logic of economic models, but also with attempting to reconcile the models with everyday observation.

I'm a bit of a freak for evidence-based analysis. I strongly believe in data.