Philip Kitcher Quotes

Universities ought to be aware of the degree they would want to accept funding from governments like China to work on, say, face recognition technology.

I'm reverent toward my sources. History is a team sport, and references are how you support your teammates.

Further, in writing, I feel corrupt and unethical if I have to look up a subject in a library as part of the writing itself. This acts as a filter--it is the only filter. If the subject is not interesting enough for me to look it up independently, for my own curiosity or purposes, and I have not done so before, then I should not be writing about it at all, period. It does not mean that libraries (physical and virtual) are not acceptable; it means that they should not be the source of any idea.

I make no pretensions to 'objectivity,' a fraudulent concept in an era of industrialized and politicized science in which intellectual mercenaries too often serve power and greed, the ambitions of competing nation-states, or the requirements of commerce.

In one word he told me the secret of success in mathematics: plagiarize; only be sure always to call it . . . research.

A learned historian declared to me of a contemporary, that the latter had appropriated his researches; he might, indeed, and he had a right to refer to the same originals; but if his predecessor had opened the sources for him, gratitude is not a silent virtue.

Trimming consists of clipping off little bits here and there from those observations which differ most in excess from the mean, and in sticking them onto those which are too small; a species of 'equitable adjustment,' as a radical would term it, which cannot be admitted in science.

I mean, like the rest of America, I wasn't really into politics until Obama went into office, so it's all kind of new to me, but I'm excited about it. I've been watching a lot of campaign ads, doing a lot of research for it. It's so different, it'll be interesting.

It's a very bad idea for scientific conclusions to be accepted because they fit with the political values of a group of researchers.

As we all know, blinking lights means science.

Even painless research is fascism, supremacism, because the act of confinement is traumatizing in itself.

We do an epically bad job of acknowledging one another's work and checking our sources.

It has become more important than ever that we teach students how to do research, and how to evaluate different sources of information. (Jimmy Wales, IB World, 68, Sept. 2013, p.10. )

I thought, we can’t keep destroying embryos for our research. There must be another way.

Researchers find it very necessary to keep blinkers on. They don't want to admit that the animals they are working with have feelings. They don't want to admit that they might have minds and personalities because that would make it quite difficult for them to do what they do; so we find that within the lab communities there is a very strong resistance among the researchers to admitting that animals have minds, personalities and feelings.

These days, more than any other time, we are worried about our personal life, our private life. When we talk about our private life, it means our home, our body even. It seems that when we want to have calmness in this world, we make a wall around us. This gives us a very calm environment, and when we feel that somebody is intruding into that, it makes us very angry and we feel we have to do something about it.

One must stop conducting research before one has finished. Otherwise, one will never stop and never finish.

You can't really do a lot of research for being a mass manipulating, murdering super-villain.

Research, research, research. It means everything.

Learning to exist in a world quite different from that which formed you is the condition, these days, of pursuing research you can on balance believe in and write sentences you can more or less live with.

Finding truth involves some kind of activity. As I like to point out, truth isn't handed to you on a platter. It's not something that you get at a cafeteria, where they just put it on your plate. It's a search, a quest, an investigation, a continual process of looking at and looking for evidence, trying to figure out what the evidence means.

Do your homework and keep good files. Know the background and biases of your sources.

All the followers of science are fully persuaded that the processes of investigation, if only pushed far enough, will give one certain solution to each question to which they can be applied.... This great law is embodied in the conception of truth and reality. The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real.

My own view is simply that there are some very basic rules; very simple rules that apply to all writing in a way, which is: don't lie; if you're wrong, correct; do not misrepresent; and try and keep oneself intellectually honest - which means, as a writer, the very difficult task in public of admitting you were wrong.

To me, the research is a way of exploring what it means to be alive.