Daniel Kahneman Quotes

Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

I don't think the scientific method and the science fictional method are really analogous. The thing about them is that neither is really practiced very much, at least not consciously. But the fact that they are methodical does relate them.

My feeling is that scientific method has the power to account for and interlink all phenomena in the universe, including its origin, using the laws of nature. But that still leaves the laws unexplained.

Not as a demonstrated natural law, but as a working hypothesis.

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

Experience by itself is not science.

The reason I spend so much of my time doing science is that the whole point of science is to help people resolve conflicting claims by saying: 'Show me the data.'

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.

Science, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense.

The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.

Experimental psychology itself has, it is true, now and again suffered relapse into a metaphysical treatment of its problems.

One of the biggest and most important tools of theoretical physics is the wastebasket.

Science has been a discipline in which testability, rather than any ecclesiastical authority or philosophical coherence, has been the measure of a scientific idea’s worth

If we are ever to discover the laws of nature, we must do so by obtaining the most accurate acquaintance with the facts of nature, and not by dressing up in philosophical language the loose opinions of men who had no knowledge of the facts

The true contrast between science and myth is more nearly touched when we say that science alone is capable of verification.

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

You must acquire something of that industrious habit of mind which the study of natural science gives,—the art of comparing, of perceiving true likenesses and true differences, and so of classifying and arranging what you see; the art of connecting facts together in your mind in cause and effect

I would rather not depend on sophisticated statistics to demonstrate behavior. I prefer to design experiments that will produce interocular effects—hit you between the eyes.

Science is a way of getting knowledge. It's a method. It's a method that really relies on making mistakes. We propose ideas, they are usually wrong, and we test them against the data. Scientists do this in a formal way. It's a way that everyone can go through life; that's how we should be teaching science from a very young age.

Sometimes I implant thoughts, sometimes I extract thoughts, but I don't like to explain it too much. It's based on science, deduction, and reasoning - it's a bit like what 'Sherlock' does, except that's a dramatised version. I look at every clue around me.

At Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, I started taking psychology courses. I was interested in the nature of the human mind, the structure itself, pathologies with which it is afflicted. I really intended to be a writer all along, but I needed to take a subject that I could make a living at, either teaching it or doing it.

It's OK to pursue speculative ideas because we don't want to be too cozy and safe and assume that we know everything about life in the universe. However, we have to be rigorous and careful and honest and logical and scientifically meticulous when we speculate.

Being a scientist/engineer by nature, I approach everything as a problem.

Galileo probably would have escaped persecution if his discoveries could have been disproved.

A scientist is no more a collector and classifier of facts than a historian is a man who complies and classifies a chronology of the dates of great battles and major discoveries.