Quotes About Empirical

The idea was that the brain is part of nature, nature alone is real, so consciousness can be found in an empirical study of the brain—this is a horrible reduction to monological surfaces.

Descartes himself, as one will recall, experienced great difficulty in overcoming his celebrated doubts, and was able to do so only by way of a tortuous argument which few today would find convincing. Is it not strange that tough-minded scientists should have so readily, and for so long, espoused a rationalist doctrine which calls in question the very possibility of empirical knowledge?

For a paper delivered to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, he plotted sharp up-and-down graphs of case numbers, week by week or month by month, from the empirical records of several disease outbreaks—plague in London (1665), measles in Glasgow (1808), cholera in London (1832), scarlet fever in Halifax (1880), influenza in London (1891), and others—and then matched them with smooth rollercoaster curves derived from a certain mathematical equation.

No random event has ever been empirically demonstrated. Events have been observed which have been interpreted as being based on randomness, but this is merely an inference, and rationalists can advance totally different inferences that never once refer to randomness.

The case of medicine is, at first sight, rather more intractable than that of astrology, for it is hard to disprove astrology: one would need to compare the lives of a group of people all born at the same moment.

As a rationalist, pragmatist, and a scientist I rarely involve myself in the cosmological arguments of the creation of the universe.

All knowledge that is not the real product of observation, or of consequences deduced from observation, is entirely groundless and illusory.

All good intellects have repeated, since Bacon's time, that there can be no real knowledge but which is based on observed facts.

we have little empirical knowledge about the connection between merit and success

There is no discussing theology, sociology and politics when someone is under the spell of a self-enclosed totalitarian ideology. Intentionally or out of ignorance, Ahmed, who is empirical in all matters, detests pointless and laborious philosophical imaginings, never-ending discussions, or clashes of ideas that might be respectful of non-believer opponents and sinners deserving only of complete contempt.

The fact that people have religious experiences is interesting from the psychological point of view, but it does not in any way imply that there is such a thing as religious knowledge...Unless he can formulate this 'knowledge' in propositions that are empirically verifiable, we may be sure that he is deceiving himself.

Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.

We would be in a nasty position indeed if empirical science were the only kind of science possible.

The lyrics are constructed as empirically as the music. I don't set out to say anything very important.

I think there is empirical evidence that if you look at family controlled businesses, they actually outperform in terms of results and also valuations, the broader market.

Design is a discovery process, as we implement we discover new information, often impossible to know up front. By accepting that design is an ongoing and empirical process in a forever changing world, we learn that the design process must be flexible and ongoing too. Clinging onto your original designs and trying to force them through is only going to end up with one result so you need to learn to understand that it will never look like that.

Oh yes, there are a lot of things that have been known for centuries before we had a scientific explanation for them. Medieval grimoires tell about witches using bee balm for people with heart disease and, of course, bee balm contains digitalis. It's just what modern doctors use. Somehow the witches had learned empirically over millenniums of being village herbalists what herbs really work.

My answer to that is that there is an alternative which appears more reasonable to some of us; namely to avoid the leap of faith and remain agnostic about all methods, although willing to learn from them in an open-minded way. The justification for this is entirely empirical and only probabilistic, of course. It is that those who have taken a flying leap of faith generally look rather silly within a few generations, or sometimes even within a few years.

Absolute Laws in the Platonic sense cannot be known scientifically — as Plato himself realized. They can only be known (or imagined) by intuition or by some Act of Faith. Empirically and existentially, nobody knows today, right now, if we have any Absolute Laws in our intellectual common market. All that we know is that we have some models that work a lot better, practically, than some of the older models we have discarded.

This book confronts psychopathy head-on and presents the disturbing topic for what it is—a dark mystery with staggering implications for society; a mystery that finally is beginning to reveal itself after centuries of speculation and decades of empirical psychological research.

Christianity is not a mere religion but an experimentally testable science.

The Scientific Revolution proposed a very different formula for knowledge: Knowledge = Empirical Data × Mathematics. If we want to know the answer to some question, we need to gather relevant empirical data, and then use mathematical tools to analyse the data. For

In the end, it's a simple empirical matter: if the algorithms indeed understand what's happening within you better than you understand it, authority will shift to them.

During the last five centuries, humans increasingly came to believe that they could increase their capabilities by investing in scientific research. This wasn't just blind faith – it was repeatedly proven empirically.