Quotes About Empirical

The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.

Don't despise empiric truth. Lots of things work in practice for which the laboratory has never found proof.

Experiment is the only means of knowledge at our disposal. Everything else is poetry, imagination.

Now the history of philosophy shows that religious belief which is primarily mystical may very well be compatible with a pronounced sense of reality in the field of empirical fact; it may even support it directly on account of the repudiation of dialectic doctrines. Furthermore, mysticism may indirectly even further the interests of rational conduct.

The fate of an epoch that has eaten of the tree of knowledge is that it must...recognize that general views of life and the universe can never be the products of increasing empirical knowledge, and that the highest ideals, which move us most forcefully, are always formed only in the struggle with other ideals which are just as sacred to others as ours are to us.

I had some of the students in my finance class actually do some empirical work on capital structures, to see if we could find any obvious patterns in the data, but we couldn't see any.

The relation of science to metaphysics and theology is not fundamentally a scientific question, nor is it fundamentally an empirical, historical, sociological, or even philosophical question, though of course it is all of these. Rather it is fundamentally a theological question, logically consequent upon the question of the relation between God and the world.

Metaphysical judgments are inherent in what counts as empirical evidence, and these judgments mediate between science and theology proper.

Science can investigate nature and inquire into the empirical world, but it cannot answer moral questions or disprove free will. That is because morality and freedom are not empirical concepts. We can't prove that they exist, but neither can we make sense of our moral lives without presupposing them.

Another way of putting this point is to say that morality is not empirical. It stands at a certain distance from the world. It passes judgment on the world. Science can't, for all its power and insight, reach moral questions, because it operates within the sensible realm.

In the modern world, as Polanyi pointed out, the concept of a 'free' market is a construct of economic theory, not an empirical observation.39 Indeed, he observed that the national capitalist market was effectively forced into existence through public policy—there was nothing 'natural' or universal about it.40

Many of today's practising theorists seem to be unconcerned that their hypotheses should eventually confront objective, real-world observations.

I argue that most of the moral development of the past several centuries has been the result of secular not religious forces, and that the most important of these that emerged from the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment are science and reason, terms that I use in the broadest sense to mean reasoning through a series of arguments and then confirming that the conclusions are true through empirical verification.

It is no longer acceptable to simply assert your moral beliefs; you have to provide reasons for them, and those reasons had better be grounded in rational arguments and empirical evidence or else they will likely be ignored or rejected.

evolution is not a religious tenet, to which one swears allegiance or belief as a matter of faith.. It is a factual reality of the empirical world. Just as one would not say 'I believe in gravity," one should not proclaim 'I believe in evolution.

The components of a philosophy must stand or fall on their own internal consistency or empirical support, regardless of the founder's or followers' personality quirks or moral inconsistencies.

I continued to wonder what exactly I had done to deserve a woman like Valerie. Nothing, probably. I observe the world as it unfurls, I thought; proceeding empirically, in good faith, I observe it; I can do no more than observe.

Logic may be conceived as ruling out what is absolutely impossible, and thus determining the field of what in the absence of empirical knowledge is abstractly possible.

All of science is largely formalized common sense.

Totalitarismus" ist die empirische Realität des "Gemeinwillens" (Volonté générale)

Der Geschichte ist nicht der Ort, wo die Antagonismen sich auflösen, sondern wo sei vergessen werden. Dir irdischen Siege sind nicht optimistische dialektische Synthesen, sondern tragisches empirisches Verschwinden eines der Elemente des vorhergehenden Antagonismus.

Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.

One anecdote should be recorded. I asked Wittgenstein whether, when he wrote the Tractatus, he had ever decided upon anything as an example of a 'simple object'. His reply was that at that time his thought had been that he was a logician; and that it was not his business, as a logician, to try to decide whether this thing or that was a simple thing or a complex thing, that being a purely empirical matter! It was clear that he regarded his former opinion as absurd.

The marketing of OxyContin relied on an empirical circularity: the company convinced doctors of the drug's safety with literature that had been produced by doctors who were paid, or funded, by the company.