Indeterminism Quotes & Sayings

I do not ... reject the use of statistics in medicine, but I condemn not trying to get beyond them and believing in statistics as the foundation of medical science ... Statistics ... apply only to cases in which the cause of the facts observed is still [uncertain or] indeterminate ... There will always be some indeterminism ... in all the sciences, and more in medicine than in any other. But man's intellectual conquest consists in lessening and driving back indeterminism in proportion as he gains ground for determinism by the help of the experimental method.. — Claude Bernard

The belief in causality is metaphysical. It is nothing but a typical metaphysical hypostatization of a well-justified methodological rule- the scientist's decision never to abandon his search for laws. The metaphysical belief in causality seems thus more fertile in its various manifestations than any indeterminist physics metaphysics of the kind advocated by Heisenberg. Indeed, we can see that Heisenberg's comments have had a crippling effect on research. Connections which are not far to seek may easily be overlooked if its continually repeated that the search for any such connections is 'meaningless'. — Karl Popper

Open text is one of a pair of terms popularized by Eco to refer to kinds of interpretative interactions between text and reader. An open text, unlike a closed one such as a work of popular fiction, is not aimed at a specific reader in a specific social context. It is also open in that its theme, structure and language are more complex, less explicit, more "open-ended": what other critics as Barthes in reception theory would call "Indeterminate". The open text constructs the model of its own reader as part of its structural strategy. — Katie Wales

Indeterminism does not confer freedom on us: I would feel that my freedom was impaired if I thought that a quantum mechanical trigger in my brain might cause me to leap into the garden and eat a slug — J.J.C. Smart