Ronald Fisher Quotes

Intuition is the source of scientific knowledge.

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.

Frequently, I have been asked if an experiment I have planned is pure or applied research; to me, it is more important to know if the experiment will yield new and probably enduring knowledge about nature.

The true method of knowledge is experiment.

We must revisit the idea that science is a methodology and not an ontology.

Science is the systematic classification of experience.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

Science has fulfilled her function when she has ascertained and enunciated truth.

Science is nothing but perception.

Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.

Research is creating new knowledge.

There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination.

A good scientist can understand the current state of a field, pick interesting questions where a success will actually lead to useful new knowledge, and push that field further through their work.

Experimental observations are only experience carefully planned in advance, and designed to form a secure basis of new knowledge.

Intuition is for thinking what observation is for perception. Intuition and observation are the sources of our knowledge.

Why should there be the method of science? There is not just one way to build a house, or even to grow tomatoes. We should not expect something as motley as the growth of knowledge to be strapped to one methodology.

Science is often misrepresented as "the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory." Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliable knowledge about the world.

With no specific procedure, man arrived at sweeping conclusions about the universe that have proven to be true.

Theory is continually the precursor of truth; we must pass through the twilight and its shade, to arrive at the full and perfect day.

Nothing before had ever made me thoroughly realise, though I had read various scientific books, that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn from them.

The physicist, in his study of natural phenomena, has two methods of making progress: (1) the method of experiment and observation, and (2) the method of mathematical reasoning. The former is just the collection of selected data; the latter enables one to infer results about experiments that have not been performed. There is no logical reason why the second method should be possible at all, but one has found in practice that it does work and meets with reasonable success.

For me the problem of induction is a problem about the world: a problem of how we, as we are now (by our present scientific lights), in a world we never made, should stand better than random, or coin-tossing chances changes of coming out right when we predict by inductions. . . .

Without deductive logic science would be entirely useless. It is merely a barren game to ascend from the particular to the general, unless afterwards we can reverse the process and descend from the general to the particular, ascending and descending like angels on Jacob's ladder.

Reason, observation, and experience; the holy trinity of science.

I had learned that science is a rewarding, active process of discovery, not the passive absorption of what others had discovered.