Sublime

In building a mathematical model of scientific thinking, where a reasonable person could develop a hypothesis and then evaluate it relentlessly in light of new knowledge, he became the first modern Bayesian. His system was enormously sensitive to new information.

Science, it struck me then, is a guide to thinking, not a thought: an endless process of becoming.

My idea of science diverges with that of the people around me walking around calling themselves scientists. Science is mere speculation, mere formulation of conjecture.

These three classes of problems—determination of significant fact, matching of facts with theory, and articulation of theory—exhaust, I think, the literature of normal science, both empirical and theoretical. They do not, of course, quite exhaust the entire literature of science.

philosophers who worry about this ‘problem of induction’ are not inductivists in the old-fashioned sense. They do not try to obtain or justify any theories inductively. They do not expect the sky to fall in, but they do not know how to justify that expectation.

Mathematics is a practice rather than knowledge. Mathematicians understand better than anyone the objects they’re working on, but their mathematical intuition can never become omnipotent. Objects they aren’t familiar with still raise difficulties. You can be an exceptional

To be accepted as a paradigm, a theory must seem better than its competitors, but it need not, and in fact never does, explain all the facts with which it can be confronted.

In general, the dynamics of possibility should not be thought of as confined to a particular period of life