Empirical Quotes & Sayings

There is no discussing theology, sociology and politics when someone is under the spell of a self-enclosed totalitarian ideology. Intentionally or out of ignorance, Ahmed, who is empirical in all matters, detests pointless and laborious philosophical imaginings, never-ending discussions, or clashes of ideas that might be respectful of non-believer opponents and sinners deserving only of complete contempt. — Elie Wiesel

I had made an empirical discovery and it carried all the weight of a mathematical proof. — Paul Auster

Biochemists assume that the three cellular kingdoms evolved from a single common ancestor, because the alternative of supposing an independent origin of life two or more times presents still greater difficulties. The common ancestor is merely hypothetical, as are the numerous transitional intermediate forms that would have to connect such enormously different groups to the ancestor. From a Darwinist viewpoint all these hypothetical creatures are a logical necessity, but there is no empirical confirmation that they existed. — Phillip E. Johnson

Moreover, an archetype exists in the nation's consciousness that connects student loan debt with irresponsibility. This is a result of well-publicized accounts of loan defaults in decades past in which students took out loans with no intention of ever paying them back and simply filed for bankruptcy after graduation. This perception was sufficiently strong that in the 1970s, Congress was convinced to remove bankruptcy protections from student loans. However, according to a March 2007 paper by John A. E. Pottow of the University of Michigan, this perception had a fatal flaw: "The fatal problem is that there are no empirical data to buttress the myth that students defraud creditors any more than other debtors."1 In fact, it was shown that when student loans were dischargeable in bankruptcy, there was a less than 1 percent bankruptcy rate among student debtors.2 Nevertheless, this misconception has been so often repeated that it is now indelibly etched in the public's mind. — Alan Collinge

Intellectually secure people do not need to show anyone how smart they are. They are empirical and seek truth. Intellectually insecure people need to show everyone how smart they are. They are egotistical and seek triumph. — Kevin Ashton

In India there was a sense of time that does not tick with modern clocks, just as there is a knowledge that is not gained through science and empirical experiments. In the modern West knowledge is of objective, finite particulars in historical time. India recognizes that kind of useful information: it calls it "lower knowledge." Higher knowledge (paravidya) proceeds differently, or rather it doesn't proceed at all but enters history full-blown on the morning of a new creation. — Huston Smith

The most distinctive characteristic which differentiates mathematics from the various branches of empirical science, and which accounts for its fame as the queen of the sciences, is no doubt the peculiar certainty and necessity of its results. — Carl Gustav Hempel

Of course, there remains the question of why we should find mind-brain identities so persistently counter-intuitive, if they are true. But this is a simple psychological question, and there are a number of plausible explanations. Indeed this is a topic that is quite extensively discussed outside philosophy, by developmental psychologists and theorists of religion among others, under the heading of 'intuitive dualism'. It is rather shocking that so few of the many philosophers working on 'the explanatory gap' are familiar with this empirical literature. — David Papineau

[Modern scientific] theories can necessarily never be more than hypothetical, since their starting-point is wholly empirical, for facts in themselves are always susceptible of diverse explanations and so never have been and never will be able to guarantee the truth of any theory. — Rene Guenon

Philosophy ... is a science, and as such has no articles of faith; accordingly, in it nothing can be assumed as existing except what is either positively given empirically, or demonstrated through indubitable conclusions. — Arthur Schopenhauer

It is that of increasing knowledge of empirical fact, intimately combined with changing interpretations of this body of fact - hence changing general statements about it - and, not least, a changing a structure of the theoretical system. — Talcott Parsons

There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the world's present warming trend. — Alexander Cockburn

Empirical explorations ultimately change our understanding of which questions are important and fruitful and which are not. — Lawrence M. Krauss

Realism is not a matter of any fidelity to an empirical reality, but of the discursive conventions by which and for which a sense of reality is constructed. — John Fiske

Darwin based his theory on generalizations that were strictly empirical. You can go out and see that organisms do vary, that variations are inherited, and that every organism is capable of increasing its numbers in sufficiently favorable circumstances. — George C. Williams

This is an empirical claim: Look closely enough at your own mind in the present moment, and you will discover that the self is an illusion. — Sam Harris

[T]he whole undertaking of philosophical inquiry requires a prior understanding of the conceptual system in which the undertaking is set. That is an empirical job for cognitive science and cognitive semantics ... Unless this job is done, we will not know whether the answers philosophers give to their questions are a function of the conceptualization built into the questions themselves. — George Lakoff

Inside accounts of Presidential advisory groups make it clear that the failure to express dissent can have direct, immediate, and severe consequences ... Because so much disagreement remains hidden, our beliefs are not properly shaped by healthy scrutiny and debate. The absence of such argument also leads us to exaggerate the extent to which other people believe the way we do. Bolstered by such a false sense of social support, our beliefs strike us as more resistant to subsequent logical and empirical challenge. — Thomas Gilovich

The child who has no need to feign empirical knowledge about life can wonder and fantasise with great ease. The world is his oyster, or any other thing he wants it to be. — Michael Leunig

We must remember that science is a way of using empirical evidence to better understand our world. We are all scientists, just many of us are not very good ones. However, we are all capable of exercising our intellects in a purposeful, linear pursuit of knowledge. — Chris Matakas

Thomas Nagel, professor of philosophy at New York University. This is how he explains his deep-seated antipathy toward religion: In speaking of the fear of religion, I don't mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions ... in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper - namely the fear of religion itself ... I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and naturally, hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.1 That — Ravi Zacharias

I have a standing offer of $250,000 to anyone who can give any empirical evidence (scientific proof) for evolution. My $250,000 offer demonstrates that the hypothesis of evolution is nothing more than a religious belief. — Kent Hovind

The richer people, when they get another $100,000, or another million, or 10 million, don't tend to spend it as much as the poorer people would if they got another $100 or $1,000 or $5,000. All the empirical evidence suggests that the rich tend to consume a lower proportion of income than middle and lower-income people. — Adair Turner

Yet the paradox is that scientific methodology is the product of human hands and thus cannot reach some permanent truth. We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena into manageable units. Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue. Between — Paul Kalanithi

On the philosophical level, both Buddhism and modern science share a deep suspicion of any notion of absolutes, whether conceptualize as a transcendent being, as an eternal, unchanging principle such as soul, or as a fundamental substratum of reality. ... In the Buddhist investigation of reality, at least in principle, empirical evidence should triumph over scriptural authority, no matter how deeply venerated a scripture may be. ~ 14th Dalai Lama in his talk to the Society for Neuroscience in 2005 in Washington. — Dalai Lama XIV

But Friedman seemed to share Friedrich Hayek's extreme and inaccurate view that socialism of the sort that Britain embraced under the old Labour Party was incompatible with democracy, and I don't think that there is a good theoretical or empirical basis for that view. The Road to Serfdom flunks the test of accuracy of prediction! — Richard Posner

Niebuhr [Oden's Doctoral adviser at Yale and leading 20th century Christian theological ethicist] wanted all of his graduate students to have some serious interdisciplinary competence beyond theology, so I chose to be responsible for the area of psychology of religion. I hoped to correlate aspects of contemporary psychotherapies with a philosophy of universal history. The psychology that prevailed in my college years was predominately Freudian psychoanalysis, but my clinical beginning point in the late 1950's had turned to Rogerian client-centered therapy. The psychology that prevailed in my Yale years was predominantly the empirical social psychologists like Kurt Lewin and Musafer Sherif. I gradually assimilated those views in order to work on a critique of therapies and assess them all in relation to my major interest in the meaning of history. — Thomas C. Oden

[The aim of science is] to explain what so far has taken to be an explicans, such as a law of nature. The task of empirical science constantly renews itself. We may go on forever, proceeding to explanations of a higher and higher universality ... — Karl Popper

The empirical fact is that self-actualizing people, our best experiencers, are also our most compassionate, our great improvers and reformers of society, our most effective fighters against injustice, inequality, slavery, cruelty, exploitation (and also are best fighters for excellence, effectiveness, competence). And it also becomes clearer and clearer that our best 'helpers' are the most fully human persons. What I may call the bodhisattvic path is an integration of self-improvement and social zeal, i.e., the best way to become a better 'helper' is to become a better person. But one necessary aspect of becoming a better person is via helping other people. So one must and can do both simultaneously. — Abraham H. Maslow

Empirical knowledge itself is of little benefit unless it awakens the inner perception of man as to his own situation, his potentialities, his risks, and his destiny — Fazlur Rahman

I'm pretty sure Mom and Dad didn't see me coming, either: the kid with the black moods, the kid whose mind was always elsewhere, flinching from real life as from a bruise. Who wanted to lay a fiction-filter on top of everything and pretend it was something else just to keep the sheer disappointment of it all bearable: this limited, empirical experience of ours, trapped inside a decaying shell of meat, mainly able to perceive that nothing lasts, even in our most pleasurable moments. — Gemma Files

While the romantics rejected the Enlightenment's exaltation of reason, many theologians accepted it and sought to frame the Bible as a set of empirical data. — Joseph Laycock

I honestly can't remember much else about those years except a certain mood that permeated most of them, a melancholy feeling that I associate with watching 'The Wonderful World of Disney' on Sunday nights. Sunday was a sad day - early to bed, school the next morning, I was constantly worried my homework was wrong - but as I watched the fireworks go off in the night sky, over the floodlit castles of Disneyland, I was consumed by a more general sense of dread, of imprisonment within the dreary round of school and home: circumstances which, to me at least, presented sound empirical argument for gloom. — Donna Tartt

I am a lay historian by nature. I seek out an empirical reflection of what truth is. I sort of want dates and motivations and I want the whole story. But I've always felt, unconsciously, that all human history is that connection from person to person to person, event to event to event, and from idea to idea. — Tom Hanks

Even in recent times, the empirical evidence does not support the claim that trade liberalization or incentive neutrality leads to faster growth. It is true that higher manufacturing growth rates have been typically associated with higher export growth rates (mostly in countries where export and import shares to GDP grew), but there is no statistical relation between either of these growth rates or degree of trade restrictions. Rather, almost all of successful export-oriented growth has come with selective trade and industrialization policies. In this regard, stable exchange rates and national price levels seem to be considerably more important than import policy in producing successful export-oriented growth — Anwar Shaikh

If and when all the laws governing physical phenomena are finally discovered, and all the empirical constants occurring in these laws are finally expressed through the four independent basic constants, we will be able to say that physical science has reached its end, that no excitement is left in further explorations, and that all that remains to a physicist is either tedious work on minor details or the self-educational study and adoration of the magnificence of the completed system. At that stage physical science will enter from the epoch of Columbus and Magellan into the epoch of the National Geographic Magazine! — George Gamow

The experimentalists think that we can only get at our concepts by way of empirical investigation, while the armchair philosophers think that we can skip the experiments and figure things out from our armchairs. What they have in common, however, is regarding our concepts as the targets of philosophical theorising, and I just don't think that, in the vast majority of cases, the subject matter of philosophy has our concepts as its target. — Hilary Kornblith

We must frankly confess, then, using our empirical common sense and ordinary practical prejudices, that in the world that actually is, the virtues of sympathy, charity, and non-resistance may be, and often have been, manifested in excess ... You will agree to this in general, for in spite of the Gospel, in spite of Quakerism, in spite of Tolstoi, you believe in fighting fire with fire, in shooting down usurpers, locking up thieves, and freezing out vagabonds and swindlers. — William James

I'm wary of artistic directors who say, 'Here is my vision', because it's empirical. Basically it's about who you work with and what plays you put on; the vision comes out of that. — Richard Eyre

First, there is a large body of empirical evidence on the predictive accuracy of speculative markets, on everything from horse-racing to elections to invasions. "Put your money where your mouth is" turns out to be a great way to get the well informed to reveal what they know, and the poorly informed to quiet down. No system is perfect, but betting markets outperform other methods of prediction in a wide variety of circumstances. The PAM was inspired not by ivory tower theorizing, but by the proven success of betting markets in other areas. — Bryan Caplan

Making distinctions of this kind, however, is deeply unfashionable in intellectual circles. In my experience, people do not want to hear that Islam supports violence in a way that Jainism doesn't, or that Buddhism offers a truly sophisticated, empirical approach to understanding the human mind, whereas Christianity presents an almost perfect impediment to such understanding. In many circles, to make invidious comparisons of this kind is to stand convicted of bigotry. — Sam Harris

Although signs may be found in everything that comes to us, as though a river at our doorstep carried these messages on its surface, the Quran (like other sacred books) speaks in terms of empirical experience, since it is intended to endure through the ages and cannot bind itself to the 'scientific' theories of any particular time. Its images are the phenomena of nature as they appear to us in our experience - the rising and setting of the sun, the domed sky above and the mountains, which are like weights set upon the earth. Scientific observations change according to the preconceptions of the observer and the instruments at his disposal, and the speculations which blinkered human minds construct on the basis of these observations change no less swiftly. But man's experience of the visual universe does not change. The sun 'rises' for me today as it 'rose' for the man of ten thousand years ago. — Charles Le Gai Eaton

Our empirical criterion for a series of theories is that it should produce new facts. The idea of growth and the concept of empirical character are soldered into one. — Imre Lakatos

Empirical laws [ ... ] have only slight or even no value beyond the limits within which they have been observed to be true. — Vilfredo Pareto

Edison was by far the most successful and, probably, the last exponent of the purely empirical method of investigation. Everything he achieved was the result of persistent trials and experiments often performed at random but always attesting extraordinary vigor and resource. Starting from a few known elements, he would make their combinations and permutations, tabulate them and run through the whole list, completing test after test with incredible rapidity until he obtained a clue. His mind was dominated by one idea, to leave no stone unturned, to exhaust every possibility. — Nikola Tesla

As soon as science has emerged from its initial stages, theoretical advances are no longer achieved merely by a process of arrangement. Guided by empirical data, the investigator rather develops a system of thought which, in general, is built up logically from a small number of fundamental assumptions, the so-called axioms. We call such a system of thought a theory. The theory finds the justification for its existence in the fact that it correlates a large number of single observations, and it is just here that the 'truth' of the theory lies. — Albert Einstein

The widely documented failure of late starters to achieve native-like proficiency, even when motivation, cognitive abilities, and opportunities are optimal and plentiful, all agree, is one of the most salient facts about SLA. It is a weighty empirical problem, in Laudan's sense, crying out for a solution. — Michael H. Long

Thinking in art and morals and even mathematics is neither the reflection in consciousness of a mechanical order in the brain nor the tracing with the mind's eye of some empirical order in its object, but an endeavour to realize in thought an ideal order which would satisfy an inner demand. The nearer thought comes to its goal, the more it finds itself under constraint by that goal, and dominated in its creative effort by aesthetic or moral or logical relevance. These relations of relevance are not physical or psychological relations. They are normative relations that can enter into the mental current because that current is ... teleological. Their operation marks the presence of a different type of law, which supervenes upon physical and psychological laws when purpose takes control. — Brand Blanshard

A second variety concentrated on presumed major transformations of the capitalist system as of some recent point in time, in which the whole earlier point of time served as a mythologized foil against which to treat the empirical reality of the present. — Immanuel Wallerstein

Yes, I know liberals are more empirical because Jonathan Chait says they are, but my empirical studies of liberal empiricism keep spitting out contradictory findings. — Jonah Goldberg

Poetry is related to philosophy as experience is related to empirical science. Experience makes us acquainted with the phenomenon in the particular and by means of examples, science embraces the whole of phenomena by means of general conceptions. So poetry seeks to make us acquainted with the Platonic Ideas through the particular and by means of examples. Philosophy aims at teaching, as a whole and in general, the inner nature of things which expresses itself in these. One sees even here that poetry bears more the character of youth, philosophy that of old age. — Arthur Schopenhauer

No one has the right to destroy another person's belief by demanding empirical evidence. — Ann Landers

Three days ago, I was fired from my job teaching at a college because one of my students
bet me that you don't cum when you get a prostate exam and it took me seven minutes
to prove that dumb fucking kid wrong. It was hard to touch my own prostate, but
ultimately, I was correct. I came onto the floor and onto the person in the desk up front.
I said, "Kids, that is what is known as 'empirical evidence'. — Sam Pink

It would be easy, but misleading, to see the rise of terrorism expertise as simply a response to an increase in political violence. This simplistic empirical approach neglects the reflexive relationship between experts and their objects of knowledge. Others have suggested that we view terrorism expertise as a product of political propaganda by governments seeking to demonize their enemies and draw attention away from their own use of violence. But this "critical" approach (see, for example, Chomsky 2001; Herman and O'Sullivan 1989), which argues that terrorism experts constitute an "industry," funded and organized by the state and other elite interests, neglects the agency and interests of the experts themselves, and the ways in which these interests may either harmonize or clash with those of the state, the media, and the "terrorists" themselves. — Lisa Stampnitzky

In the long run, the map was a triumph of marketing as much as empirical science. It helped a good idea find a wide audience. — Steven Johnson

The ocean is the last frontier of human empirical knowledge; even the contours on that eighth-grader's globe are the product of a mix of scientific measurement, inference and conjecture. — Alan Huffman

An adult female orang-utan cannot defeat an adult male spotted hyena. That is the plain empirical truth. Let it become known among zoologists. Had Orange Juice been a male, had she loomed as large on the scales as she did in my heart, it might have been another matter. But portly and overfed though she was from living in the comfort of a zoo, even so she tipped the scales at barely 110 pounds. Female orang-utans are half the size of males. But it is not simply a question of weight and brute strength. Orange Juice was far from defenseless. What it comes down to is attitude and knowledge. What does a fruit eater know about killing? Where would it learn where to bite, how hard, for how long? An orang-utan may be taller, may have very strong and agile arms and long canines, but if it does not know how to use these as weapons, they are of little use. The hyena, with only its jaws, will overcome the ape because it knows what it wants and how to get it. — Yann Martel

Disclaimer: While Pastafarianism is the only religion based on empirical evidence, it should also be noted that this is a faith-based book. Attentive readers will note numerous holes and contradictions throughout the text; they will even find blatant lies and exaggerations. These have been placed there to test the reader's faith. — Bobby Henderson

In philosophical terms, the opposite of rationalism is not irrationalism but empiricism, that is, a willingness to form beliefs on the basis of experience rather than from a priori deduction. Empirical evidence never yields the dogmatic certainty that accompanies logical deduction. — John Quiggin

In my view, philosophers have shown a great deal more respect for the first-person point of view than it deserves. There's a lot of empirical work on the various psychological mechanisms by way of which the first-person point of view is produced, and, when we understand this, I believe, we can stop romanticising and mythologising the first-person perspective. — Hilary Kornblith

It's a truism in policing that witnesses and statements are fine, but nothing beats empirical physical evidence. Actually it isn't a truism because most policemen think the word 'empirical' is something to do with Darth Vader, but it damn well should be. — Ben Aaronovitch

If we truly knew all the answers in advance as to the meaning of life and the nature of God and the destiny of our souls, our belief in all that would not be a leap of faith and it would not a courageous act of humanity; it would just be ... a prudent insurance policy. I'm not interested in the insurance industry. I am tired of being a skeptic, I'm irritated by spiritual prudence and I feel bored and parched by empirical debate. I don't want to hear it anymore. I couldn't care less about evidence and proof and assurances. I just want God. I want God inside me. I want God to play in my bloodstream the way light amuses itself on water. — Elizabeth Gilbert

I'm all for empowerment and education, but the empirical evidence is that it doesn't work. That's why I say make it easy. — Richard Thaler

The enlightened rational man is not unlike the title character in Mozart's opera "Don Giovanni": a likeable rake, intelligent and enterprising, free to do as he pleases, outmaneuvering his honorable, tradition-bound adversaries at every step. One cannot begrudge him his liberty and pursuit of happiness, but looming large above him is his fatal flaw: his mind's maturity does not match his freedom. His pursuits are frivolous, tawdry and destructive. And this, we maintain, is the historical moment of our techno-scientific world: like some allegorical alien race in a science fiction story, we have placed broad freedoms and enormous power in the hands of a flawed creature: ourselves. Empirical reason has brought us here, and by its light we will have to find a way forward. — Danko Antolovic

I have made some headway in addressing these questions, however, and succeeded in explaining how it is that the category of knowledge might play an important role in empirical theories. To the extent that talk of knowledge can be shown to play an explanatory role in such theories, the analogy I wish to make with paradigm natural kinds such as acids and aluminum starts to make a good deal of sense. This is, of course, connected with the issue of the role of intuitions in philosophy. — Hilary Kornblith

But it must not be forgotten that ... glass and porcelain were manufactured, stuffs dyed and metals separated from their ores by mere empirical processes of art, and without the guidance of correct scientific principles. — Justus Von Liebig

The Bible is the empirical evidence that proves God doesn't exist. — Joey Lawsin

It is true that the grasping of truth is not possible without empirical basis. However, the deeper we penetrate and the more extensive and embracing our theories become the less empirical knowledge is needed to determine those theories. — Albert Einstein

Science is empirical, all about physical senses that tell us about the world. But physical senses are not the only senses we have. Nobody has ever seen a thought. Nobody has ever seen a feeling. And yet thoughts and feelings are where we live our lives most immediately, and science cannot connect with that. — Huston Smith

My thesis, then, is as follows: In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. — C. G. Jung

As to the efficacy of the policy recommended by Rostow, it speaks for itself: no country, once underdeveloped, ever managed to develop By Rostow's stages. Is that why Rostow is now trying to help the people of Vietnam, the Congo, the Dominican Republic, and other underdeveloped countries to overcome the empirical, theoretical, and policy shortcomings of his manifestly non-communist intellectual aid to economic development and cultural change by bombs, napalm, chemical and biological weapons, and military occupation? — Andre Gunder Frank

Bealer argues that the kind of naturalistic view which Quine holds will rob him of the ability to make the normative claims which (many) naturalists wish to make in epistemology. I don't think this is right about Quine, but I'm certain it's not right about my own view. To the extent that I can show that talk of knowledge is firmly rooted within empirical theories where it plays an important explanatory role, I thereby demonstrate its naturalistic credentials. — Hilary Kornblith

Bohr's standpoint, that a space-time description is impossible, I reject a limine. Physics does not consist only of atomic research, science does not consist only of physics, and life does not consist only of science. The aim of atomic research is to fit our empirical knowledge concerning it into our other thinking. All of this other thinking, so far as it concerns the outer world, is active in space and time. If it cannot be fitted into space and time, then it fails in its whole aim and one does not know what purpose it really serves. — Erwin Schrodinger

It is generally believed that our science is empirical and that we draw our concepts and our mathematical constructs from the empirical data. If this were the whole truth, we should, when entering into a new field, introduce only such quantities as can directly be observed, and formulate natural laws only by means of these quantities. — Werner Heisenberg

I don't believe in empirical science. I only believe in a priori truth. — Kurt Godel

My politics were pretty anarchistic until 1969 when the Montreal police went on strike. Within hours, mayhem and rioting broke out and the Mounties had to be called in to restore order. It instilled in me that one's convictions can be subjected to empirical test. — Steven Pinker

The whole intention of empirical economics is to force theory down to Earth. — George Akerlof

A second possible approach to general systems theory is through the arrangement of theoretical systems and constructs in a hierarchy of complexity, roughly corresponding to the complexity of the "individuals" of the various empirical fields ... leading towards a "system of systems." ... I suggest below a possible arrangement of "levels" of theoretical discourse ... (vi) ... the "animal" level, characterized by increased mobility, teleological behavior and self-awareness ... — Kenneth E. Boulding

Scientific research is compounded of ... empirical procedures, general speculative ideas, and mathematical or abstract reasoning. — James Bryant Conant

As words are not the things we speak about, and structure is the only link between them, structure becomes the only content of knowledge. If we gamble on verbal structures that have no observable empirical structures, such gambling can never give us any structural information about the world. Therefore such verbal structures are structurally obsolete, and if we believe in them, they induce delusions or other semantic disturbances. — Alfred Korzybski

A healthy economics has got to have both conceptual, theoretical research and applied, empirical research. — Edmund Phelps

We need science. We need empirical evidence. We can't just use mathematical reasoning to deduce the nature of the world. — Rebecca Goldstein

CAPM pioneer Bill Sharpe remarked, "I have concluded that I may never see an empirical result that will convince me that it disconfirms any theory," which reiterated Fischer Black's (1993) feeling, "I find theory to be far more powerful than data. — Eric G. Falkenstein

"science" as defined in our culture has a philosophical bias that needs to be exposed. On the one hand, science is empirical. This means that scientists rely on experiments, observations and calculations to develop theories and test them. On the other hand, contemporary science is naturalistic and materialistic in philosophy. What this means is that materialist explanations for all phenomena are assumed to exist. And what that means is that the NABT's definition of evolution as an unsupervised process is simply true by definition
regardless of the evidence! It is a waste of time to argue about the evidence if one side has already won the argument by defining the terms. — Phillip E. Johnson

Above all, I am anxious to grant no credence whatsoever to the special mythology of "the Enlightenment." Nothing strikes me as more tiresomely vapid than the notion that there is some sort of inherent opposition - or impermeable partition - between faith and reason, or that the modern period is marked by its unique devotion to the latter. One can believe that faith is mere credulous assent to unfounded premises, while reason consists in a pure obedience to empirical fact, only if one is largely ignorant of both. — David Bentley Hart

When you are young in this world, you believe that the class of deductive truths about social matters is larger than it turns out to be. [ ... ] I have discovered, to my infinite regret, that most of the serious debates over the basic principles of any political order have an irreducible empirical content. — Richard Allen Epstein

If a lack of empirical foundations is a defect of the theory of logical probability, it is also a defect of deductive logic. — David Stove

My experiments with single traits all lead to the same result: that from the seeds of hybrids, plants are obtained half of which in turn carry the hybrid trait (Aa), the other half, however, receive the parental traits A and a in equal amounts. Thus, on the average, among four plants two have the hybrid trait Aa, one the parental trait A, and the other the parental trait a. Therefore, 2Aa+ A +a or A + 2Aa + a is the empirical simple series for two differing traits. — Gregor Mendel

The simple, brief experience of imagining oneself as another transformed both self-perception and, through this transformation, behavior. The maxim "fake it till you make it" gains empirical support. — Cordelia Fine

I urge you to engrave this on the template of your memories: there are thousands of diseases in this world, but Medical Science only has an empirical cure for twenty-six of them. The rest is ... guesswork. — Erich Segal

Empirical sciences prosecuted purely for their own sake, and without philosophic tendency are like a face without eyes. — Arthur Schopenhauer

For human reason, without any instigations imputable to the mere vanity of great knowledge, unceasingly progresses, urged on by its own feeling of need, towards such questions as cannot be answered by any empirical application of reason, or principles derived therefrom; and so there has ever really existed in every man some system of metaphysics. — Immanuel Kant

Different 'philosophies' represent nothing but methods of evaluation, which may lead to empirical mis-evaluation if science and empirical facts are disregarded. — Alfred Korzybski

Empirical description involves enslavement to the object by decreeing passivity on the part of the subject. — Gaston Bachelard

Although this was not a comforting point of view, he did not reject it, because it coincided with one of his basic beliefs: that a man must at all costs keep some part of himself outside and beyond life. If he should ever for an instant cease doubting, accept wholly the truth of what his senses conveyed to him, he would be dislodged from the solid ground to which he clung and swept along with the current, having lost all objective sense, totally involved with existence. — Paul Bowles

The highest truths cannot be forced into the type of empirical evidence that only applies to material reality. — Pope Benedict XVI

In which of these respects the public is more stubborn is an empirical question to be judged from the factual evidence, not something that can be determined by reason alone. — Milton Friedman

It cannot be maintained that empirical science provides a complete explanation of life, the interplay of all creatures and the whole of reality. — Pope Francis

As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones. — Steven Pinker

difference in kind between empirical questions characteristic of science and philosophical questions about the fact of existence itself (a distinction lost on those who think that the universe as a whole, or matter-energy, or anything else that exists, might adequately explain its own being).135 — Brad S. Gregory