Quotes About Empirical

The real reason why general relativity is widely accepted is because it made predictions that were borne out by experimental observations.

What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.

We must trust to nothing but facts: these are presented to us by nature and cannot deceive. We ought, in every instance, to submit our reasoning to the test of experiment, and never to search for truth but by the natural road of experiment and observation.

My politics were pretty anarchistic until 1969 when the Montreal police went on strike. Within hours, mayhem and rioting broke out and the Mounties had to be called in to restore order. It instilled in me that one's convictions can be subjected to empirical test.

Every thing is what it is" is a famous phrase in British philosophy, and the essence of the empirical view.44*

The solution has been to shift the totem of legitimacy from premises to procedures. We know an outcome is right not because it was derived from immutable principles, but because it was reached by following the correct procedures. Science became modern when it was conceived not as an empirical confirmation of truths derived from an independent source, divine revelation, but as simply whatever followed from the pursuit of scientific methods of inquiry.

Making distinctions of this kind, however, is deeply unfashionable in intellectual circles. In my experience, people do not want to hear that Islam supports violence in a way that Jainism doesn't, or that Buddhism offers a truly sophisticated, empirical approach to understanding the human mind, whereas Christianity presents an almost perfect impediment to such understanding. In many circles, to make invidious comparisons of this kind is to stand convicted of bigotry.

He and his friends there believed in free speech. But they spoke freely about generalities. They were scientific and philosophic. They would have shrunk from the empirical freedom that results from a little beer.

Some Church leaders have come up with ingenious explanations for the complete failure to find any evidence supporting the Book of Mormon. In a March 25, 1964, address, Fletcher B.Hammond said: `:.. The Gentiles have not yet received the Book of Mormon by faith... and until they do... it appears that empirical facts will not be allowed to come forth as evidence of the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon... ."'S

I have said that the philosophy of nature is concerned with the most general features of empirical and material reality. Other expositions written from an Aristotelian-Thomistic point of view often characterize the field instead as concerned with changeable reality (though some earlier writers do characterize it the way I have, e.g. Bittle 1941, p. 13).

philosophy of nature, albeit a rival to the Aristotelian philosophy of nature. Hence to characterize the very field of the philosophy of nature as essentially concerned with change might seem to beg the question in favor of the Aristotelian approach. Better to characterize it instead in terms of what both sides agree upon, viz. the existence of the empirical and material world.

Early in my career, I was disappointed that psychoanalysis was not becoming more empirical, was not becoming more scientific. It was primarily concerned with individual patients. It wasn't trying to collect data from large groups of people who have been analyzed.

The government of Macau, of China, has been empirical and pragmatic and has brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, a feat unequaled in the history of civilization in any country.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the rise of science is not that the early scientists searched for natural laws, confident that they existed, but that they found them. It thus could be said that the proposition that the universe had an Intelligent Designer is the most fundamental of all scientific theories and that it has been successfully put to empirical tests again and again.

Knowledge has come to be defined as what can be proven by secular evidence and arguments.

Maandag stierf hij, 102 jaar oud: Ronald Coase, de man die zijn afkeer van de wiskundige modellen in de economie aldus formuleerde: 'Als je de gegevens maar lang genoeg martelt, zullen ze toegeven'.

The central components of the "institutional approach" outlined here – the adoption of a central focus on institutions, process, social control, new psychological foundations, and empirical and instrumental "scientific" investigation – serve as a reference point to identify the movement and its adherents.

This is an empirical claim: Look closely enough at your own mind in the present moment, and you will discover that the self is an illusion.

Unlike the doctrines of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the teachings of Buddhism are not considered by their adherents to be the product of infallible revelation. They are, rather, empirical instructions: If you do X, you will experience Y.

The most important scientific concept is that an assertion is often an empirical question, settled by collecting evidence. The plural of anecdote is not data, and the plural of opinion is not facts. Quality peer-reviewed scientific evidence accumulates into knowledge. People's stories are stories, and fiction keeps us going. But science should settle policy.

Karl Popper famously suggested the criterion of "falsifiability": A theory is scientific if it makes clear predictions that can be unambiguously falsified.

Since string theorists have failed to propose any way to confirm string theory experimentally, string theory should be retired

Experience presents itself as the method, and the only method, for getting at nature, penetrating its secrets, and wherein nature empirically discloses (by the use of empirical method in natural science) deepens, enriches and directs the further development of experience.

Mathematics is often cited as an example of purely normative thinking dependent upon a priori canons and supra-empirical material. But it is hard to see how the student who approaches the matter historically can avoid the conclusion that the status of mathematics is as empirical as metallurgy.