Quotes About Explanations

Mystical explanations are thought to be deep the truth is that they are not even shallow.

If a substantive chance hypothesis necessarily negates or nullifies explanations involving physical-chemical necessity and design, then the presence of a pattern necessarily negates chance.

Human beings always want explanations. They have to know everything about everything and they have to know it immediately.

All the explanations proposed seem to be only partly satisfactory. They range from massive climatic change to mammalian predation to the extinction of a plant with apparent laxative properties, in which case the dinosaurs died of constipation.

For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations, as in ancient Greece in the time of Homer , where there were gods of the sky and the Earth, the thunderstorm, the oceans and the underworld, fire and time and love and war; where every tree and meadow had its dryad and maenad.

Occam's razor: The simplest explanation that accommodates all variables is most likely the truth.

Science has not been successful by making up explanations of things that fit with the current social fabric.

This was a very parentish thing to say; parents didn't understand that teachers never listened to explanations.

Don't let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.

Even if it could be shown that all explanations can be reduced ultimately to those of science, and even if all the reductions were then to be carried out, the mystery of the world as such would be as great at the end of the process as it had been at the beginning.

The world needs only a few geniuses; civilization is maintained and extended by those lesser souls who corral the men of greatness, tie them down with explanations and footnotes and annotated editions, explain what they meant when they didn't know themselves, show their true place in the awesome progression of mankind.

From past experience, it seems that at my rate of writing it takes about a decade to produce enough new essays for assembly in a collection. I hope nevertheless that this will not be my last collection. But given actuarial realities, perhaps this would be a good time for me to add a word of thanks to readers who over many years have put up with my polemics and explanations, and have thereby given me a precious contact with the world beyond physics.

La ciencia es acumulativa; cada nueva teoría incorpora las teorías anteriores válidas como aproximaciones, e incluso explica por qué esas aproximaciones funcionan, caso de que así sea.

What is important in science (I leave philosophy to others) is not the solution of some popular scientific problems of one's own day, but understanding the world. In the course of this work, one finds out what sort of explanations are possible, and what sort of problems can lead to those explanations. The progress of science has been largely a matter of discovering what questions should be asked.

Science and technology benefit each other, but at its most fundamental level science is not undertaken for any practical reason. Though science has nothing to say one way or the other about the existence of God or an afterlife, its goal is to find explanations of natural phenomena that are purely naturalistic. Science is cumulative; each new theory incorporates successful earlier theories as approximations, and even explains why these approximations work, when they do work.

Spending too much time and effort creating excuses. Explanations do not explain. Orders do.

It's a disease we have that we think that everything is explainable. It's a merchandising idea because you can sell explanations and cures for everything, but it doesn't work like that. It's very hard to understand everything.

We humans seem to be extremely good at generating ideas, theories, and explanations that have the ring of plausibility. We may be relatively deficient, however, in evaluating and testing our ideas once they are formed

The reason so many people misunderstand so many issues is not that these issues are so complex, but that people do not want a factual or analytical explanation that leaves them emotionally unsatisfied. They want villains to hate and heroes to cheer - and they don't want explanations that fail to give them that.

Before an explanation can be too simple, it must first be wrong. But often the fact that some explanation seems too simple becomes a substitute for showing that it is wrong.

I have found therapy to be of limited usefulness, constrained in ways that religion is not, because it consistently falls short of mystery, by which I mean a profound simplicity that allows for paradox and poetry. In therapy I am likely to be searching for explanations, causes, and definitions, information that will help me change my behavior in healthful ways. But wisdom is the goal of spiritual seeking, and it is religion's true home.

No joke will work if you have to furnish a detailed explanation with it.

it was the duty of philosophy to destroy the illusions which had their origin in misconceptions, whatever darling hopes and valued expectations may be ruined by its explanations.

Some explanations of a crime are not explanations: they're part of the crime.