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A scientific observation is always a committed observation; it confirms or denies one's preconceptions; one's first ideas, one's plan of observation; it shows by demonstration; it structures the phenomena; it transcends what is close at hand; it reconstructs the real after having reconstructed its representation.
Part of the strength of science is that it has tended to attract individuals who love knowledge and the creation of it. Just as important to the integrity of science have been the unwritten rules of the game. These provide recognition and approbation for work which is imaginative and accurate, and apathy or criticism…
Common sense ... has the very curious property of being more correct retrospectively than prospectively. It seems to me that one of the principal criteria to be applied to successful science is that its results are almost always obvious retrospectively; unfortunately, they seldom are prospectively. Common sense…
Everyone engaged in practical work must investigate conditions at the lower levels. Such investigation is especially necessary for those who know theory but do not know the actual conditions, for otherwise they will not be able to link theory with practice. Although my assertion, "No investigation no right to speak"…
Where do correct ideas come from? Do they drop from the skies? No. Are they innate in the mind? No. They come from social practice, and from it alone; they come from three kinds of social practice, the struggle for production, the class struggle and scientific experiment. Where Do Correct Ideas Come from? (May 1963)…
From the evident disposition of children to imitate all the actions of grown persons, from their little scientific propensities to produce in miniature what they see in magnitude, from the delight which they feel, and the deep interest which they take in all their little works and playful amusements, it is certain…
After those few observations upon the properties of matter either organized or inert, (to which I know every Chemist in the country, whose science has conquered the bigotry of his education, will give his assent) I would call upon them all and every one to stand forward and teach mankind those important, those plain…
philosopher Paul Kurtz, in his book The Transcendental Temptation, defines three distinctly different kinds of faith, derived from the amount (or total lack) of evidence drawn upon to support it. Kurtz defines the first kind as “intransigent faith.” By this is meant faith that will not be affected by any sort of…
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…
Conway’s Game of Life is perhaps best viewed not as a single shorthand abstraction but rather as a generator of such abstractions. We get a whole bunch of useful abstractions—or at least a recipe for how to generate them—all for the price of one. And this points us to one especially useful shorthand abstraction: the…
The reason this principle is so essential to science is that it’s the beginning of understanding how we came to be here and how everything works. We look for general principles that apply to the universe as a whole first, and those explain much of the story; and then we look for the quirks and exceptions that led to…
No man's model of reality is a purely personal product. While some of his images are based on firsthand observation, an increasing proportion of them today are based on messages beamed to us by the mass media and the people around us. Thus the degree of accuracy in his model to some extent reflects the general level…
The proliferation of subcults is most evident in the world of work. Many subcults spring up around occupational specialties. Thus, as the society moves toward greater specialization, it generates more and more subcultural variety. The scientific community, for example, is splitting into finer and finer fragments. It…
It is the irreducible reality of inwardness, and its autonomy as a category of understanding, over which Pinker, in his delirium of empirical research, rides roughshod. The humanities are the study of the many expressions of that inwardness. Pinker’s condescension to the humanities is endless. He proposes for the…
To begin with, the findings of science entail that the belief systems of all the world’s traditional religions and cultures—their theories of the origins of life, humans, and societies—are factually mistaken. We know, but our ancestors did not, that humans belong to a single species of African primate that developed…
The term “scientism” is anything but clear, more of a boo-word than a label for any coherent doctrine. Sometimes it is equated with lunatic positions, such as that “science is all that matters” or that “scientists should be entrusted to solve all problems.” Sometimes it is clarified with adjectives like “simplistic,”…
The world with its quarks and chromosomes, its distant lands and spiral nebulae, is like a vast computer in a black box, forever sealed except for its input and output registers. These we directly observe, and in the light of them we speculate on the structure of the machine, the universe. Thus it is that we think up…
What are observations? Some philosophers have taken them to be sensory events: the occurrence of smells, feels, noises, color patches. This way lies frustration. What we ordinarily notice and testify to are rather the objects and events out in the world. It is to these that our very language is geared, because…
The basis of modern industry being scientific knowledge of nature's laws whereby nature's resources are made available for human use and enjoyment through the aid and agency of technical skill, "Reconstruction" becomes essentially a process of selective rejection of present inappropriate economic usages; discarding…
he nuts and bolts of artificial-intelligence research can often be more usefully interpreted without the concept of AI at all. For example, in 2011, IBM scientists unveiled a “question answering” machine that is designed to play the TV quiz show Jeopardy. Suppose IBM had dispensed with the theatrics, and declared it…