Quotes About Theories

We believe in Quine, the father of metaontology, and in his criterion of ontological commitment. Which for us ontologists and for our craft was perfectly born in On What There Is . We believe in one catholic and first-order logic. We acknowledge one method—paraphrase—for the remission of ontological sins. And when paraphrase fails, we accept without shame the entities required by our best theories. Amen.

In approaching our subject it will be best, without attempting to shorten the path by referring to famous theories of the drama, to start directly from the facts, and to collect from them gradually an idea of Shakespearean Tragedy.

there is always the chance that some experiment will show that those laws of motion and gravity are incorrect. That is the nature of scientific theories and laws: They are falsifiable but not provable.

Those who make assumptions from far away, based on universal theories, do not see the whole picture. It takes great time and effort to see the differences, to participate in a culture. And because it is much harder to percieve these differences, culture has not been given its due as one of the primary shaping forces for language and for how we experience the world.

Many of the "scientific" or scholarly ideas about Jesus paraded in the media every Christmas and Easter are increasingly obsolete, based on assumptions, theories and unproven hypotheses that are, in some cases, more than a century old and which have been superseded by more recent research.

I also hope to challenge financial thinkers to improve their theories by testing them against the impressive evidence that suggests that the price level is more than merely the sum of the available economic information, as is now generally thought to be the case.

Economists whose common sense had not been completely destroyed by their theories rejected the drastic cure of destroying the existing economy in order to rebuild it in the correct proportions.

Einstein said, So far as the theories of mathematics are about reality, they are not certain; so far as they are certain, they are not about reality." Bailey tilts her head. "Still waiting on the English there, Professor," she says. "It basically means, we don't know shit about anything," he says.

I could have just said I'm good at my job, but I didn't. Didn't want the police thinking I was holding out information when I wasn't. I've got one advantage over a normal homicide detective, I expect it to be a monster. No one ever calls me in if it's just a stabbing, or a hit-and-run. I don't spend a lot of time trying to come up with nice, normal explanations. It means I get to ignore a lot of theories.

I know historians aren't supposed to fall in love with their own theories, but I was head over heels about the notion of an entire band of female French agents, like a nineteenth-century Charlie's Angels. Only better. It made the Pink Carnation's organization look positively humdrum.

One of the endlessly alluring aspects of mathematics is that its thorniest paradoxes have a way of blooming into beautiful theories.

Much as I admired the elegance of physical theories, which at that time geology wholly lacked, I preferred a life in the woods to one in the laboratory.

Pseudoscience describes theories that sound like science but are actually just made up, like aromatherapy or biorhythms or love.

The most dangerous tendency of the modern world is the way in which bogus theories are given the force of dogma.

The progress of science, like an ancient desert trail, is strewn with the bleached skeletons of discarded theories, doctrines, and axioms which seemed to possess eternal life.

We can invent as many theories we like, and any one of them can be made to fit the facts. But that theory is always preferred which makes the fewest number of assumptions.

Theories are like a stairway; by climbing, science widens its horizon more and more, because theories embody and necessarily include proportionately more facts as they advance.

Science has so accustomed us to devising and accepting theories to account for the facts we observe, however fantastic, that our minds must begin their manufacture before we are aware of it.

The conflict of theories, leading, as it eventually must, to the survival of the fittest, is advantageous.

Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories - much of the debugging has to be done by others.

To no surprise, the theories and structures of naturalistic science affirm naturalistic assumptions.

We must keep our freedom of mind, ... and must believe that in nature what is absurd, according to our theories, is not always impossible.

Well-observed facts, though brought to light by passing theories, will never die; they are the material on which alone the house of science will at last be built.

We tend to think of science as finding equations, like E=MC2, that are simple and elegant. But maybe some theories are complicated, and we can only find the simple ones.