Tag: epistemology
27 quotes
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Science, proceeding on skepticism, not certainty, is arguably the most successful human activity of all time.
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True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing.
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What I cannot create, I do not understand
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The only way to rectify our reasonings is to make them as tangible as those of the Mathematicians, so that we can find our error at a glance, and when there are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let us calculate, without further ado, to see…
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Let us by no act deny anything to be true which is true; that is: let us act according to reason.
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Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
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Cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am)
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There is no conception without perception, and there is no perception without conception.
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All models are wrong; some models are useful.
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There is a sense in which we always move from one world to another incommensurable world. We do pass between worlds as we pass from home to office or to classroom. There are no smooth transitions between them, and we do damage by failing to notice…
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People's trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.
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What I cannot create, I do not understand.
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I know that I know nothing. This is the first step we all must take in order to learn something.
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Knowledge is the process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.
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Every solution to a problem ends with the creation of new problems, and these too can be solved. Our knowledge consists of misconceptions, which have the virtue of containing less severe errors than our previous misconceptions.
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Facts are surprisingly delible things.
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Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
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But consider, guard down, this question: what is easier than not knowing? What is easier than believing what the authority says? And why do so many read Margaret Atwood novels if somehow, somewhere, many of us don’t believe something like this has…
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Every science must devise its own instruments.
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Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
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Monocausotaxophilia : the love of single causes that explain everything
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Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best 20-20 hindsight. It’s good for seeing where you’ve been. It’s good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can’t tell you where you ought to go.
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Being a knowledgeable person, may mean knowing a lot of stuff, but it certainly means knowing who knows and who does not know.
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Absence of evidence regarding life elsewhere is not evidence of its absence
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We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
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There is a yawning gap between information and understanding unknown
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Gnothi seuton. [Know thyself.]