Claude Levi-Strauss Quotes

Truth in science can be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the next better one.

One of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that... they know there is a reality.

So far as hypotheses are concerned, let no one expect anything certain from astronomy, which cannot furnish it, lest he accept as the truth ideas conceived for another purpose, and depart from this study a greater fool than when he entered it.

But if science may be said to be blind without philosophy, it is true also that philosophy is virtually empty without science.

Belief has no place as far as science reaches, and may be first permitted to take root where science stops.

Epistemology without contact with science becomes an empty scheme. Science without epistemology is-insofar as it is thinkable at all-primitive and muddled.

Life's scientific, but we don't know, do we? Not certainly, I mean.

I find science so much more fascinating than science fiction. It also has the advantage of being true.

A lot of my theories were not applicable as a closer

Science is the most reliable guide in life.

Science preceded the theory of science, and is independent of it. Science preceded naturalism, and will survive it.

Science does not give us absolute and final certainty. It only gives us assurance within the limits of our mental abilities and the prevailing state of scientific thought.

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

In science, nothing is ever 100% proven.

Science makes no pretension to eternal truth or absolute truth.

Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.

We should remember that there was once a discipline called natural philosophy. Unfortunately, this discipline seems not to exist today. It has been renamed science, but science of today is in danger of losing much of the natural philosophy aspect.

Science is the ultimate tool to reveal the laws of nature, and the one word written on its banner is Truth.

Every result of science is provisional and subject to future revision

The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.

Science has promised us truth...It has never promised us either peace or happiness.

There is no debate here, just scientists and non-scientists. And since the subject is science, the non-scientists don't get a vote.

[It's] troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that's often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.

Except in pure mathematics, nothing is known for certain (although much is certainly false).

Philosophy is empty if it isn't based on science. Science discovers, philosophy interprets.