Conceptual Change Quotes

In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favour of the facts as they are.

Philosophy is altogether less pure now. It's been impurified by science and social science and history.

In order to bring about the transition from the condition of the present to another newly resolved on, every reform should be allowed to proceed as much as possible from men’s minds and thoughts

Several classical sayings that one likes to repeat had quite a different meaning from the ones later times attributed to them.

If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor.

What Copernicus really achieved was not the discovery of a true theory but of a fertile new point of view.

Lateral thinking is concerned not with playing with the existing pieces but with seeking to change those very pieces. It is concerned with the perception part of thinking. This is where we organise the external world into the pieces we can then 'process'.

Our ideas are only intellectual instruments which we use to break into phenomena; we must change them when they have served their purpose, as we change a blunt lancet that we have used long enough.

The standard theory may survive as a part of the ultimate theory, or it may turn out to be fundamentally wrong. In either case, it will have been an important way-station, and the next theory will have to be better.

To work is to undertake to think something other than what one has thought before

I was excited about the fourth movie I guess conceptually because, what I felt we should do it, we should try to make it a conceptual jump like Terminator did to T2. It was still the Terminator franchise, but it was something kind of bigger and grander.

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.

Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.

To begin with, our knowledge grows in spots. The spots may be large or small, but the knowledge ever grows all over... What you first gain from them is probably a small amount of new information, a few new definitions, or distinctions, or points of view. But while these special ideas are being added, the rest of your knowledge stands still, and only gradually will you 'line up' your previous opinions with the novelties I am trying to instil, and modify to some slight degree their mass.

The word change, so dear to our Europe, has been given a new meaning: it no longer means a new stage of coherent development (as it was understood by Vico, Hegel or Marx), but a shift from one side to another, from front to back, from the back to the left, from the left to the front (as understood by designers dreaming up the fashion for the next season).

We must not leap to the fatalistic conclusion that we are stuck with the conceptual scheme that we grew up in. We can change it, bit by bit, plank by plank, though meanwhile there is nothing to carry us along but the evolving conceptual scheme itself. The philosopher's task was well compared by Neurath to that of a mariner who must rebuild his ship on the open sea.

Usually the first problems you solve with the new paradigm are the ones that were unsolvable with the old paradigm.

The entire history of science is a progression of exploded fallacies.

The problem with any philosophical consideration is that once you open a door in your mind, you can never close it. Once you learn something, you can never convince your mind that you didn't learn it. If you learn the world is round, you can never fit in with a world that thinks it's flat.

It was conceptually impossible before the year 1700, about, for anybody in the world to say when religion began and politics ended.

This Government intends no injury to honest business. The processes we follow in seeking social justice do not, in adding to general prosperity, take from one and give to another. In this modern world, the spreading out of opportunity ought not to consist of robbing Peter to pay Paul. In other words, we are concerned with more than mere subtraction and addition. We are concerned with multiplication also -- multiplication of wealth through cooperative action, wealth in which all can share.

The reason why new concepts in any branch of science are hard to grasp is always the same; contemporary scientists try to picture the new concept in terms of ideas which existed before.

One thing I do not see happening is women of certain age being represented correctly. We have to evolve conceptually.

My main professional interest during the 1970s has been in the dramatic change of concepts and ideas that has occurred in physics during the first three decades of the century, and that is still being elaborated in our current theories of matter. The new concepts in physics have brought about a profound change in our world view; from the mechanistic conception of Descartes and Newton to a holistic and ecological view, a view which I have found to be similar to the views of mystics of all ages and traditions.

If you follow the process of a thought - any thought, not just about art - the thought changes. It has to do with what you can hold in your memory and what you lose. That's an interesting thing to try to paint.