Sublime

What happens in systems with noisy data and underdeveloped theory—like earthquake prediction and parts of economics and political science—is a two-step process. First, people start to mistake the noise for a signal. Second, this noise pollutes journals, blogs, and news accounts with false alarms, undermining good science and setting back our abilit

More clearly than most other episodes in the history of at least the physical sciences, these display what all scientific revolutions are about. Each of them necessitated the community’s rejection of one time-honored scientific theory in favor of another incompatible with it. Each produced a consequent shift in the problems available for scientific

The central insight of Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, is that science is not a collection of verifiable propositions; rather, it is a set of theories that, at best, can be wholly falsified.

Kuhn cannot take seriously that “there is some one full, objective, true account of nature.” Does this mean that he does not take truth seriously? Not at all. As he observed, he said nothing about truth in the book, except when quoting Bacon (169). Wise lovers of facts, who try to determine the truth about something, do not state a “theory of truth

The notion of “particularity” is born only at the moment we begin to see the universe in a blurred and approximate way.

The world conventionally assumes that the processing of problems requires starting from the known (the question or conditions) and moving on to the unknown (the so-called answer) in a time sequence following definite steps and logical progression. Nonlinear dynamics moves in the opposite direction: from the unknown (the nondeterministic data of the

He had a gift for aphorism; and his names have acquired an unusual status, for although they were once arcane, some of them are now part of colloquial English. Here is the sequence: (1) normal science (§§II–IV—he called these sections, not chapters, for he thought of Structure as more of a book outline than a book); (2) puzzle-solving (§IV); (3) pa

Thus, in searching for and judging explanations, we need more than just a refutation of solipsism. We need to develop reasons for accepting or rejecting the existence of entities that may appear in contending theories; in other words, we need a criterion for reality.

But within such communities, there are smaller and smaller groups, so that in the end the analysis should apply to “communities of perhaps a hundred members, sometimes significantly fewer.”31 Each will have its own group of commitments, its own models of how to proceed. Moreover, the achievements are not just anything notable. They are 1. “sufficie