Quotes About Theories

Nothing is more vulnerable and ephemeral than scientific theories, which are mere tools and not everlasting truths.

If I want to understand an individual human being, I must lay aside all scientific knowledge of the average man and discard all theories in order to adopt a completely new and unprejudiced attitude.

If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.

If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.

The egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief.

One can today easily demonstrate that there can be no valid derivation of a law of nature from any finite number of facts; but we still keep reading about scientific theories being proved from facts. Why this stubborn resistance to elementary logic?

It's one thing to predict [the complete breakdown of civilization]. It's something else again to be right in the middle of it. It's a very humbling thing...for an academic like me to find his abstract theories turning into concrete reality... It was all just so many words to me, really, just a philosophical exercise, completely abstract.

The theory of universal gravitation is not cast-iron. No theory is, and there is always room for improvement. Isn't that so? Science is constructed out of approximations that gradually approach the truth. . . Well, that means all theories are subject to constant testing and modification, doesn't it? And if it eventually turns out that they're not quite close enough to the truth, they need to be replaced by something that's closer. Right?

It is odd that, though no one who has never studied chess would dream he could beat a Grand Master, so many strict amateurs with little or no scientific training are convinced they can point out the 'obvious' flaws in Einstein's theories.

This is all disillusioning, Beenay. I thought it was only us psychologists who made the data fit the theories and called the result 'science.' Seems more like something the Apostles of Flame might do!

And the continuity of our science has not been affected by all these turbulent happenings, as the older theories have always been included as limiting cases in the new ones.

I've begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world... Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theories Amor Mundi .

Logic and people who subscribed to conspiracy theories were often strangers to each other.

The way to avoid the ills of the narrative fallacy is to favor experimentation over storytelling, experience over history, and clinical knowledge over theories. Certainly

Theories are superfragile; they come and go, then come and go, then come and go again;

This is the reason I put social science theories in the left column of the Triad, as something superfragile for real-world decisions and unusable for risk analyses. The very designation "theory" is even upsetting. In social science we should call these constructs "chimeras" rather than theories.

The way to avoid the ills of the narrative fallacy is to favor experimentation over storytelling, experience over history, and clinical knowledge over theories.

We are built to be dupes for theories. But theories come and go; experience stays. Explanations

You take past instances that corroborate your theories and you treat them as evidence.

In a famous argument, the logician W. V. Quine showed that there exist families of logically consistent interpretations and theories that can match a given series of facts. Such insight should warn us that mere absence of nonsense may not be sufficient to make something true.

The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds—so those who delay developing their theories are better off. When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.

have made the claim that most of history comes from Black Swan events, while we worry about fine-tuning our understanding of the ordinary, and hence develop models, theories, or representations that cannot possibly track them or measure the possibility of these shocks.

Traders, when they make profits, have short communications; when they lose they drown you in details, theories, and charts.

In finance, for instance, people use flimsy theories to manage their risks and put wild ideas under "rational" scrutiny.