Hypothesis Quotes - Page 13

• ...it's my hypothesis that the individual is not a pre-given entity which is seized on by the exercise of power. The individual, with his identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces.

  Michel Foucault

  Exercise, Desire, Identity

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• What is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish useful ideas from the worthless ones.

  Carl Sagan

  Hands, Ideas, Two

  "The Burden of Skepticism". The Skeptical Inquirer, Volume 12, Issue 1, www.csicop.org. Fall 1987.

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• If by religion we are to understand sectarian dogmas, in which no two of them agree, then your exclamation on that hypothesis is just, "that this would be the best of worlds if there were no religion in it.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Two, Would Be, World

  Thomas Jefferson (1829). “Memoir, correspondence, and miscellanies from the papers of T. Jefferson”

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• Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.

  Will Durant

  Art, Philosophy, Achievement

  Will Durant (2012). “Story of Philosophy”, p.27, Simon and Schuster

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• Toby Tyrrell unravels the various formulations of Gaia and explains how recent scientific developments bring the hypothesis into question. His criticisms are insightful, profound, and convincing, but fair. On Gaia is wonderfully informative and a pleasure to read.

  Francisco J. Ayala

  Profound, Insightful, Criticism

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• A hypothesis is empirical or scientific only if it can be tested by experience. A hypothesis or theory which cannot be, at least in principle, falsified by empirical observations and experiments does not belong to the realm of science.

  Francisco J. Ayala

  Principles, Doe, Theory

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• Look ... first and foremost, I'm a scientist. That means it's my responsibility to make observations and gather evidence before forming a hypothesis, not vice versa.

  Allen Steele

  Mean, Responsibility, Vices

  Allen Steele (2011). “Hex”, p.138, Penguin

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• I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.

  Bertrand Russell

  Christian, Atheist, Fear

  Bertrand Russell (1993). “The Quotable Bertrand Russell”

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• All I ever aim to do is to put the Development hypothesis in the same coach as the creation one. It will only be a question of who is to ride outside & who in after all.

  Joseph Dalton Hooker

  Science, Development, Evolution

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• Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more it is a general postulate to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must henceforward bow and which they must satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow this is what evolution is.

  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

  Science, Light, Order

  "The Phenomenon of Man". Book by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, 1955.

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• We know that communism is the right hypothesis. All those who abandon this hypothesis immediately resign themselves to the market economy, to parliamentary democracy-the form of state suited to capitalism-and to the inevitable and 'natural' character of the most monstrous inequalities.

  Alain Badiou

  Character, Democracy, Communism

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• While the scientist, on the one hand, is concerned with giving a faithful description of facts, on the other, he has the equally important task of construing them in relation to some explanatory conjecture. Similarly the historian has a double duty: both of reporting the past as nearly as possible as it passed or was lived through by men at the time (without doctoring up events to fit later developments or some more "enlightened reading" of them); and second, of interpreting their import in the light of a present hypothesis.

  Marie Taylor Collins Swabey

  Reading, Science, Past

  Marie Taylor Collins Swabey (1954). “The judgment of history”

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• France is a nation devoted to the false hypothesis on which it then builds marvelously logical structures.

  Gore Vidal

  France, Logical, Structure

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• A well-understood and testable hypothesis like sexual selection surely trumps an untestable appeal to the inscrutable caprices of a creator.

  Jerry A. Coyne

  Trump, Caprice, Appeals

  Jerry A. Coyne (2010). “Why Evolution is True”, p.260, Oxford University Press

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• Today the god hypothesis has ceased to be scientifically tenable, has lost its explanatory value and is becoming an intellectual and moral burden to our thought. It no longer convinces or comforts, and its abandonment often brings a deep sense of relief.

  Julian Huxley

  Atheist, Relief, Today

  "Essays of a Humanist (The New Divinity)". Book by Julian Huxley, 1964.

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• Kant, as we all know, compared moral law to the starry heavens, and found them both sublime. On the naturalistic hypothesis we should rather compare it to the protective blotches on a beetle's back, and find them both ingenious.

  Arthur Balfour

  Law, Heaven, Sublime

  "Foundations of Belief". "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations", 1922.

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• In whatever manner God created the world, it would always have been regular and in a certain general order. God, however, has chosen the most perfect, that is to say, the one which is at the same time the simplest in hypothesis and the richest in phenomena.

  Gottfried Leibniz

  Order, Perfect, World

  Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (2008). “Discourse on Metaphysics and the Monadology”, p.11, Cosimo, Inc.

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• There never was a sounder logical maxim of scientific procedure than Ockham's razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. That is to say; before you try a complicated hypothesis, you should make quite sure that no simplification of it will explain the facts equally well.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Simplicity, Trying, Razors

  Charles Sanders Peirce, Patricia Ann Turrisi (1997). “Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking: The 1903 Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism”, p.162, SUNY Press

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• There is no other proposition in economics that has more solid empirical evidence supporting it than the Efficient Market Hypothesis... In the literature of finance, accounting, and the economics of uncertainty, the EMH is accepted as a fact of life.

  Michael Jensen

  Investing, Literature, Facts

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• Too much openness and you accept every notion, idea, and hypothesis-which is tantamount to knowing nothing. Too much skepticism-especially rejection of new ideas before they are adequately tested-and you're not only unpleasantly grumpy, but also closed to the advance of science. A judicious mix is what we need.

  Carl Sagan

  Knowledge, Acceptance, Science

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• You must not say that this cannot be, or that that is contrary to nature. You do not know what Nature is, or what she can do; and nobody knows; not even Sir Roderick Murchison, or Professor Huxley, or Mr. Darwin, or Professor Faraday, or Mr. Grove, or any other of the great men whom good boys are taught to respect. They are very wise men; and you must listen respectfully to all they say: but even if they should say, which I am sure they never would, 'That cannot exist. That is contrary to nature,' you must wait a little, and see; for perhaps even they may be wrong.

  Charles Kingsley

  Wise, Science, Boys

  Charles Kingsley (2015). “The Water-Babies”, p.38, Booklassic

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• The real question is, Did God use evolution as His plan? If it could be shown that man, instead of being made in the image of God, is a development of beasts we would have to accept it, regardless of its effort, for truth is truth and must prevail. But when there is no proof we have a right to consider the effect of the acceptance of an unsupported hypothesis.

  William Jennings Bryan

  Real, Science, Acceptance

  "God and Evolution". The New York Times, February 26, 1922.

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• To believe in something not yet proved and to underwrite it with our lives: it is the only way we can leave the future open. Man, surrounded by facts, permitting himself no surmise, no intuitive flash, no great hypothesis, no risk, is in a locked cell. Ignorance cannot seal the mind and imagination more surely.

  Lillian Smith

  Believe, Ignorance, Men

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• For the world is an ever-elusive and ever-disappointing mirage only from the standpoint of someone standing aside from it—as if it were quite other than himself—and then trying to grasp it. But a third response is possible. Not withdrawal, not stewardship on the hypothesis of a future reward, but the fullest collaboration with the world as a harmonious system of contained conflicts—based on the realization that the only real "I" is the whole endless process.

  Alan Watts

  Real, Trying, Collaboration

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• We cannot fathom the marvelous complexity of an organic being; but on the hypothesis here advanced this complexity is much increased. Each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm--a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.

  Charles Darwin

  Stars, Self, Heaven

  Charles Darwin (2015). “Darwin on Evolution: Words of Wisdom from the Father of Evolution”, p.8, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

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