William James Quotes

The criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.

To say that prediction is the purpose of a scientific theory is to confuse means with ends. It is like saying that the purpose of a spaceship is to burn fuel. ... Passing experimental tests is only one of many things a theory has to do to achieve the real purpose of science, which is to explain the world.

Science is prediction, not explanation.

Hypotheses should be subservient only in explaining the properties of things but not assumed in determining them, unless so far as they may furnish experiments.

To me, what makes physics physics is that experiment is intimately connected to theory. It's one whole.

The scientific discovery appears first as the hypothesis of an analogy; and science tends to become independent of the hypothesis.

The hypotheses we accept ought to explain phenomena which we have observed. But they ought to do more than this: our hypotheses ought to foretell phenomena which have not yet been observed.

A theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements: it must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations.

The strength of a theory is not what it allows, but what it prohibits; if you can invent an equally persuasive explanation for any outcome, you have zero knowledge.

Think of a hypothesis as a card. A theory is a house made of hypotheses.

A valid scientific theory is predictive, verifiable, and replicable. To me, that's beautiful.

We don't regard any scientific theory as the absolute truth.

When the basic status of a theory is clear, and all that needs to be cleared are details, you can collaborate. But if the main structure of a hypothesis isn't established, and you want to change the paradigm - like it was the case in the 1960s - it's better to work alone.

That said, ID does not qualify as science because it gives us nothing to test or measure. Science requires replicable tests involving measurable variables.

If the experiments which I urge be defective, it cannot be difficult to show the defects; but if valid, then by proving the theory, they must render all objections invalid.

It is also a good rule not to put overmuch confidence in the observational results that are put forward until they are confirmed by theory.

Not as a demonstrated natural law, but as a working hypothesis.

True science is never speculative; it employs hypotheses as suggesting points for inquiry, but it never adopts the hypotheses as though they were demonstrated propositions.

Hypotheses are what we lack the least.

There is no justifiable prediction about how the hypothesis will hold up in the future; its degree of corroboration simply is a historical statement describing how severely the hypothesis has been tested in the past.

Scientific theory is a contrived foothold in the chaos of living phenomena.

In order to displace a prevailing theory or paradigm in science, it is not enough to merely point out what it cannot explain; you have to offer a new theory that explains more data, and do so in a testable way.

Falsifiability for a theory is great, but a theory can still be respectable even if it is not falsifiable, as long as it is verifiable.

The fundamental laws of physics do not describe true facts about reality. Rendered as descriptions of facts, they are false; amended to be true, they lose their explanatory force.

It is not observation but theory that led me to this result that experience has confirmed afterwards.