Thomas Sowell Quotes

Science is defined in various ways, but today it is generally restricted to something which is experimental, which is repeatable, which can be predicted, and which is falsifiable.

Prediction is certainly a valuable goal in science, but not the only one. Explanation is also important, and there are plenty of sciences that do a lot of explaining and not much predicting.

Every explanation is after all an hypothesis.

The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability.

Science does not limit itself merely to what is currently verifiable. But it is interested in questions that are potentially verifiable (or, rather, falsifiable).

Facts are not science - as the dictionary is not literature.

I really do think that science has an internal structure, and it makes sense, and we can test it.

It is possible to interpret without observing, but not to observe without interpreting.

The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions.

You can't prove any hypothesis, you can only improve or disprove it.

It is not observation but theory that led me to this result that experience has confirmed afterwards.

I'm first and foremost a scientist.

Facts per se can neither prove nor refute anything. Everything is decided by the interpretation and explanation of the facts, by the ideas and the theories.

[One's] inability to invalidate your hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true.

Everybody has a theory.

For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.

No theory ever benefited by the application of data, Amy. Data kills theories. A theory has no better time than when it's lying there naked, pure, unsullied by facts. Let's just keep it that way for a while." "So you don't really have a theory?" "Clueless." "You lying bag of fish heads." "I can fire you, you know. Even if Clay was the one that hired you, I'm not totally superfluous to this operation yet. I'm kind of in charge. I can fire you. Then how will you live?" "I'm not getting paid." "See, right there. Perfectly good concept ruined by the application of fact.

It is that of increasing knowledge of empirical fact, intimately combined with changing interpretations of this body of fact - hence changing general statements about it - and, not least, a changing a structure of the theoretical system.

You're trying too hard to find a correlation here. You don't know these people, you don't know what they intended. You try to compile statistics and correlate them to a result that amounts to nothing more than speculation.

There can be theory but, you know, the problem is you've got to be able to test it. So theories are one thing, testing is another.

In science, nothing is ever 100% proven.

Facts are the air of scientists. Without them you can never fly.

Hypotheses should be subservient only in explaining the properties of things but not assumed in determining them, unless so far as they may furnish experiments.

My background is basically scientific math. My Dad was a physicist, so I have it in my blood somewhere. Scientific method is very important to me. I think anything that contradicts it is probably not true.

True science is never speculative; it employs hypotheses as suggesting points for inquiry, but it never adopts the hypotheses as though they were demonstrated propositions.