Knowledge Quotes

"The boundaries between disciplines are fictions we have agreed to believe."

"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design."

"The growth of knowledge can be plotted as an asymptotic curve approaching, but never reaching, a limite of perfect knowledge."

"The growth of our knowledge is the result of a process closely resembling what Darwin called 'natural selection' - that is, the natural selection of hypotheses."

"Experience is not simply observation; it is observation directed by theory."

"What we see depends upon what we look for and upon what we have learned to look for."

"In the long run, the market always corrects itself."

"Knowledge without experience is incomplete."

"Knowledge pursued for its own sake enriches the soul."

"The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges."

"The appeal to the world is there when we begin by questioning the ground of our knowledge."

"What makes sense in one linguistic community might be nonsense in another."

"Epistemology is not immune from the problems it investigates."

"What we call knowledge is really just a system of mutually supporting beliefs."

"We cannot step outside language to compare our words with things in themselves."

"Our beliefs about the physical world are underdetermined by experience."

"Every assertion we make is made against the background of a system of accepted propositions."

"We are not passive receivers of sensory data but active constructors of experience."

"We must distinguish between the justification of a belief and its causal origin."

"What we call experience is already shaped by our linguistic and conceptual practices."

"The notion of absolute truth makes no sense; truth is always relative to a conceptual scheme."

"What we believe depends partly on our evidence and partly on the structure we impose."

"The given is not our starting point; theory goes all the way down."

"The notion of synthetic a priori knowledge is confused."

"We construct our understanding of reality through language and thought."

"Discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly."

"The textbook of a past and obsolete scientific achievement, no longer alive as research."

"Scientists do not see what is there, they see what they expect to see."

"What appears to be a logical deduction may actually be a paradigm-dependent interpretation."

"Intellect is to emotion as our clothes are to our bodies; we could not very well have civilized life without them."