Hypothesis Quotes - Page 17

• What doubts, what hypotheses, what labyrinths of amusement, what fields of disputation, what an ocean of false learning, may be avoided by that single notion of immaterialism!

  George Berkeley

  Ocean, Doubt, Labyrinth

  George Berkeley (1871). “The Works of George Berkeley”, p.356

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• To invent without scruple a new principle to every new phenomenon, instead of adapting it to the old; to overload our hypothesis with a variety of this kind, are certain proofs that none of these principles is the just one, and that we only desire, by a number of falsehoods, to cover our ignorance of the truth.

  David Hume

  Truth, Ignorance, Numbers

  David Hume (2003). “A Treatise of Human Nature”, p.201, Courier Corporation

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• Given a conjecture, the best thing is to prove it. The second best thing is to disprove it. The third best thing is to prove that it is not possible to disprove it, since it will tell you not to waste your time trying to disprove it. That's what Gödel did for the Continuum Hypothesis.

  Saharon Shelah

  Science, Trying, Waste

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• We avoid the gravest difficulties when, giving up the attempt to frame hypotheses concerning the constitution of matter, we pursue statistical inquiries as a branch of rational mechanics.

  J. Willard Gibbs

  Giving Up, Inquiry, Branches

  "Elementary Principles in Statististical Mechanics". Book by J. Willard Gibbs (Preface, p. 9), 1902.

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• Mr Hall's hypothesis has its cause for subsidence, but none for the lifting of the thickened sunken crust into mountains. It is a theory for the origin of mountains, with the origin of mountains left out.

  James Dwight Dana

  Mountain, Causes, Theory

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• The wheels and springs of man are all set to the hypothesis of the permanence of nature. We are not built like a ship to be tossed, but like a house to stand.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Change, Nature, Spring

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.1084, Delphi Classics

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• If there should chance to be any mathematicians who, ignorant in mathematics yet pretending to skill in that science, should dare, upon the authority of some passage of Scripture wrested to their purpose, to condemn and censure my hypothesis, I value them not, and scorn their inconsiderate judgement.
  De Revolutionibus Coelestibus

  Nicolaus Copernicus

  Skills, Judgement, Ignorant

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• This hypothesis (Parallel hypothesis) would not destroy itself at all easily.

  Johann Heinrich Lambert

  Parallels

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• The hypothesis I wish to advance is thatthe language of morality is ingrave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have--very largely if not entirely--lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.

  Alasdair MacIntyre

  Keys, Expression, Wish

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• A perfect historian must possess an imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and picturesque; yet he must control it so absolutely as to content himself with the materials which he finds, and to refrain from supplying deficiencies by additions of his own. He must be a profound and ingenious reasoner; yet he must possess sufficient self-command to abstain from casting his facts in the mould of his hypothesis.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Powerful, Self, Profound

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• If the hypothesis of evolution is true, living matter must have arisen from non-living matter; for by the hypothesis the condition of the globe was at one time such, that living matter could not have existed in it, life being entirely incompatible with the gaseous state.

  Thomas Huxley

  Matter, Evolution, States

  "Biology, with Preludes on Current Events". Book by Joseph Cook, p. 39, 1878.

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• We shall do better to abandon the whole attempt to learn the truthunless we can trust to the human mind's having such a powerof guessing right that before very many hypotheses shall have been tried, intelligent guessing may be expected to lead us to one which will support all tests, leaving the vast majority of possible hypotheses unexamined.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Science, Intelligent, Support

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• It is clear that the building of models is not a purely mechanical process but requires skill of a high order - not merely mathematical skill but a sensitivity to the relative importance of different factors and a critical, almost an artistic, faculty in the selection of behaviour equations which are reasonable, tentative hypotheses in explaining the behaviour of actual economies.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Order, Skills, Different

  "The Skills of the Economist". Book by Kenneth Ewart Boulding, pp. 16-17, 1958.

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• There is no other proposition in economics that has more solid empirical evidence supporting it than the Efficient Market Hypothesis... In the literature of finance, accounting, and the economics of uncertainty, the EMH is accepted as a fact of life.

  Michael Jensen

  Investing, Literature, Facts

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• There never was a sounder logical maxim of scientific procedure than Ockham's razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. That is to say; before you try a complicated hypothesis, you should make quite sure that no simplification of it will explain the facts equally well.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Simplicity, Trying, Razors

  Charles Sanders Peirce, Patricia Ann Turrisi (1997). “Pragmatism as a Principle and Method of Right Thinking: The 1903 Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism”, p.162, SUNY Press

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• In whatever manner God created the world, it would always have been regular and in a certain general order. God, however, has chosen the most perfect, that is to say, the one which is at the same time the simplest in hypothesis and the richest in phenomena.

  Gottfried Leibniz

  Order, Perfect, World

  Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (2008). “Discourse on Metaphysics and the Monadology”, p.11, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Kant, as we all know, compared moral law to the starry heavens, and found them both sublime. On the naturalistic hypothesis we should rather compare it to the protective blotches on a beetle's back, and find them both ingenious.

  Arthur Balfour

  Law, Heaven, Sublime

  "Foundations of Belief". "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations", 1922.

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• A well-understood and testable hypothesis like sexual selection surely trumps an untestable appeal to the inscrutable caprices of a creator.

  Jerry A. Coyne

  Trump, Caprice, Appeals

  Jerry A. Coyne (2010). “Why Evolution is True”, p.260, Oxford University Press

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• France is a nation devoted to the false hypothesis on which it then builds marvelously logical structures.

  Gore Vidal

  France, Logical, Structure

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• While the scientist, on the one hand, is concerned with giving a faithful description of facts, on the other, he has the equally important task of construing them in relation to some explanatory conjecture. Similarly the historian has a double duty: both of reporting the past as nearly as possible as it passed or was lived through by men at the time (without doctoring up events to fit later developments or some more "enlightened reading" of them); and second, of interpreting their import in the light of a present hypothesis.

  Marie Taylor Collins Swabey

  Reading, Science, Past

  Marie Taylor Collins Swabey (1954). “The judgment of history”

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• We know that communism is the right hypothesis. All those who abandon this hypothesis immediately resign themselves to the market economy, to parliamentary democracy-the form of state suited to capitalism-and to the inevitable and 'natural' character of the most monstrous inequalities.

  Alain Badiou

  Character, Democracy, Communism

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• Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more it is a general postulate to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must henceforward bow and which they must satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow this is what evolution is.

  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

  Science, Light, Order

  "The Phenomenon of Man". Book by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, 1955.

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• To believe in something not yet proved and to underwrite it with our lives: it is the only way we can leave the future open. Man, surrounded by facts, permitting himself no surmise, no intuitive flash, no great hypothesis, no risk, is in a locked cell. Ignorance cannot seal the mind and imagination more surely.

  Lillian Smith

  Believe, Ignorance, Men

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• Anarchism is grounded in a rather definite social-psychological hypothesis: that forceful, graceful and intelligent behaviour occurs only when there is an uncoerced and direct response to the physical and social environment; that in most human affairs, more harm than good results from compulsion, top-down direction, bureaucratic planning, pre-ordained curricula, jails, conscription, states.

  Paul Goodman

  Intelligent, Jail, Top Down

  Paul Goodman (1967). “Like a conquered province: the moral ambiguity of America”

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• My anguish came from my hypothesis that other people's hypothetical hypotheses about me mattered. Ridiculous!

  Martha Beck

  People, Ridiculous, Opinion

  "10 Life Lessons You Should Unlearn" by Martha Beck, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 14, 2013.

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