Quotes Tagged "epistemology"

Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. . . If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication ... and there is the real illness.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.

The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are things which never change... and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that everything changes. If you superimpose their two views, you get this result: Nothing is real.

And although I have seen nothing but black crows in my life, it doesn't mean that there's no such thing as a white crow. Both for a philosopher and for a scientist it can be important not to reject the possibility of finding a white crow. You might almost say that hunting for 'the white crow' is science's principal task.

فكرة الحداثة والعلمانية والتنوير فكرة متأخرة عن الثورة العلمية بقرنيين على الأقل وهي نتيجة الثورة العلمية ومعلولهاوليست شرطها وعلتها

أسمع من المحيط إلى الخليج أن من لا يقدر على إفهامنا لم تحل معادلات الدرجة الثانية بالطريقة التي تحل بها يخرف حول ابستمولوجية السقوط الحر ونسبية اينشتاين خلطا بين التعليقات الإيديولوجية والنفسية على مايزعم جاريا في وعي العلماء وتصوراتهم وبين فهم آليات الإبداع العلمي وقوانينه

I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theater, it is known as vaudeville.

Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration.

Why is it so difficult for us to think in relative terms? Well, for the good reason that human nature loves absoluteness, and erroneously considers it as a state of higher knowledge.

The best ship, the best culture, the best knowledge, is the one which allows us to go farther, explore more territories or oceans of reality, and have the least damaging leaks possible.

The command of our language is crucial to focusing our thoughts and communicating them with precision to others.

Subjectivity is strange to Science, while Relativity is an objective part of it.

To believe in nothing is as ridiculous as to believe in everything. Reason and factual evidence may convert a belief into knowledge.

Comprehending and knowing better and deeper are the best guarantees we can have to attain ideas and criteria of our own; i.e. to stop depending on what other people say. In summary, to be freer to choose our own path in life.

Truth is not as pompous and romantic as myth ... but it has the immeasurable value of being the Truth.

Besides our eyes, skin and the other senses through which we receive the shadows of the exterior reality, we have a 'mental eye' (intelligence) with which we can perceive reality as it is.

Foreknowledge cannot be gotten from ghosts and spirits, cannot be had by analogy, cannot be found out by calculation. It must be obtained from people, people who know the conditions of the enemy.

If Relativity Theory kills our deepest convictions, why not start by finding out why we believed in them for millennia?

After some cogitation, it is difficult not to agree with Herman Bondi (1919 - 2005), who in his book 'Relativity and Common Sense' says: ... The surprising thing, surely, is that molecules in a gas behave so much as billiard balls, not that electrons behave so little like billiard balls.

Without causality in the world, there is no point in educating people, or making any moral or political appeal.