Nelson Goodman Quotes

The main purpose of science is simplicity and as we understand more things, everything is becoming simpler.

Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification.

But there is only one surefire method of proper pattern recognition, and that is science.

It is not his possession of knowledge, of irrefutable truth, that makes the man of science, but his persistent and recklessly critical quest for truth.

Unscientific man is beset by a deplorable desire to have been right. The scientist is distinguished by a desire to be right.

Only he who finds empiricism irksome is driven to method.

The method of science is tried and true. It is not perfect, it's just the best we have. And to abandon it, with its skeptical protocols, is the pathway to a dark age.

Scientific reasoning is a dialogue between the possible and the actual, between proposal and disposal between what might be true, and what is in fact the case.

The inexplicable happens all the time. It makes more sense to simply accept things we observe but cannot understand. It is really more scientific to keep an open mind. Until we can understand and explain the things we now label miracles, let us accept them and try to create more of them.

Reductionism is merciless.

Remember that [scientific thought] is the guide of action; that the truth which it arrives at is not that which we can ideally contemplate without error, but that which we may act upon without fear; and you cannot fail to see that scientific thought is not an accompaniment or condition of human progress, but human progress itself.

Science is only a Latin word for knowledge

At root what is needed for scientific inquiry is just receptivity to data, skill in reasoning, and yearning for truth. Admittedly, ingenuity can help too.

Science is a willingness to accept facts even when they are opposed to wishes.

Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.

GUIL: A scientific approach to the examination of phenomena is a defence against the pure emotion of fear

Hypotheses are the scaffolds which are erected in front of a building and removedd when the building is completed. They are indispensable to the worker; but the worker must not mistake the scaffolding for the building.

Science is the search for truth - it is not a game in which one tries to beat his opponent, to do harm to others.

It really comes down to parsimony, economy of explanation. It is possible that your car engine is driven by psychokinetic energy, but if it looks like a petrol engine, smells like a petrol engine and performs exactly as well as a petrol engine, the sensible working hypothesis is that it is a petrol engine.

Even today few scientists and perhaps even fewer nonscientists realize that science is a method and nothing else.

For me science is not different from art, except in the one small, crucial detail that experiments speak their own truths, not ours.

Ahimsa is a science. The word 'failure' has no place in the vocabulary of science.

If the evidence says you're wrong, you don't have the right theory. You change the theory, not the evidence.

If it turns out that we're doing proper science from time to time, it just happens to be that that's the most efficient way of doing it. We go into each of these stories with an open mind, and one of the great things about how the show works is that we're not approaching it from a doctoral point of view, we're just trying to see what happens.