Empirical Observation Quotes

The best and safest method of philosophizing seems to be first to inquire diligently into the properties of things, and establishing those properties by experiments, and then to proceed more slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them.

In so far as such a theory is empirically correct it will also tell us what empirical facts it should be possible to observe in a given set of circumstances.

A discovery is generally an unforeseen relation not included in theory.

We must not be content to memorize the beautiful formulas of our illustrious predecessors. Let us go out and study beautiful nature.

The proper method for inquiring after the properties of things is to deduce them from experiments.

I feign no hypotheses.

A law of nature is not a formula drawn up by a legislator, but a mere summary of the observed facts - a "bundle of facts." Things do not act in a particular way because there is a law, but we state the "law" because they act in that way.

They who depend upon manifest observations will philosophize better than those who persist in opinions repugnant to the senses.

A theoretical system does not merely state facts which have been observed and that logically deducible relations to other facts which have also been observed.

Much of my work in this period was concerned with exploring the logic of economic models, but also with attempting to reconcile the models with every day observation.

Let us suppose that an ichthyologist is exploring the life of the ocean. He casts a net into the water and brings up a fishy assortment. Surveying his catch, he proceeds in the usual manner of a scientist to systematise what it reveals. He arrives at two generalisations: No sea-creature is less than two inches long. (2) All sea-creatures have gills. These are both true of his catch, and he assumes tentatively that they will remain true however often he repeats it.

It is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.

The inquiries of the jurist are in truth prosecuted much as inquiry in physic and physiology was prosecuted before observation had taken the place of assumption.

I understand that you take the Bible, as written in English, translated many many times over the last three millennia as to be a more accurate, more reasonable assessment of the natural laws we see around us than what I and everybody in here can observe. That, to me, is unsettling.

Those qualities of bodies that cannot be intended and remitted [i.e., qualities that cannot be increased and diminished] and that belong to all bodies on which experiments can be made should be taken as qualities of all bodies universally.

Historical methodology, as I see it, is a product of common sense applied to circumstances.

I always thought that life is full of stories and characters that feel like literary stories and characters. So when I started making documentaries, they weren't humble empirical things, just following people around. I was always trying to impose a story.

Most students of nature sooner or later pass through a process of writing off a large percentage of their supposed capital of knowledge as a merely illusory asset. As we trace more accurately certain familiar sequences of phenomena we begin to realize how closely these sequences, or laws , as we call them, are hemmed round by still other laws of which we can form no notion. With myself this writing off of illusory assets has gone rather far and the cobweb of supposed knowledge has been pinched (as some one has phrased) into a particularly small pill.

Some beliefs may be subject to such instant, brutal and unambiguous rejection. For example: no left-coiling periwinkle has ever been found among millions of snails examined. If I happen to find one during my walk on Nobska beach tomorrow morning, a century of well nurtured negative evidence will collapse in an instant.