Chauncey Wright Quotes

Once you reject evidence as a source of knowledge, you don't gotta believe nothin' you don't like.

There is a tradition of opposition between adherents of induction and of deduction. In my view it would be just as sensible for the two ends of a worm to quarrel.

POSITIVISM- A philosophy that denies our knowledge of the Real and affirms our ignorance of the Apparent. Its longest exponent is Comte, its broadest Mill and its thickest Spencer.

But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.

Einstein's results again turned the tables and now very few philosophers or scientists still think that scientific knowledge is, or can be, proven knowledge.

There is nothing which an untrained mind shows itself more hopelessly incapable, than in drawing the proper general conclusions from its own experience. And even trained minds, when all their training is on a special subject, and does not extend to the general principles of induction, are only kept right when there are ready opportunities of verifying their inferences by facts.

The greatest empiricists among us are only empiricists on reflection: when left to their instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes.

Deductivism in mathematical literature and inductivism in scientific papers are simply the postures we choose to be seen in when the curtain goes up and the public sees us. The theatrical illusion is shattered if we ask what goes on behind the scenes. In real life discovery and justification are almost always different processes.

Almost all the other fellows do not look from the facts to the theory but from the theory to the facts; they cannot get out of the network of already accepted concepts; instead, comically, they only wriggle about inside.

Through logic and inference we can prove anything. Therefore, logic and inference, in contrast to ordinary daily living experience, are secondary instruments of knowledge. Probably tertiary.

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.

Positivism stands or falls with the principle of scientism, that is that the meaning of knowledge is defined by what the sciences do and can thus be adequately explicated through the methodological analysis of scientific procedures.

My father, whose way was to force every event in nature into an hypothesis, by which means never man crucified TRUTH at the rate he did.

There's another way to phrase that and that is that the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. It is basically saying the same thing in a different way. Simply because you do not have evidence that something does exist does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn't exist.

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

The separation of Science from Knowledge was effected step by step as the Subjective Method was replaced by the Objective Method: i.e., when in each inquiry the phenomena of external nature ceased to be interpreted on premisses suggested by the analogies of human nature.

Science, in its ultimate ideal, consists of a set of propositions arranged in a hierarchy, the lowest level of the hierarchy being concerned with particular facts, and the highest with some general law, governing everything in the universe. The various levels in the hierarchy have a two-fold logical connection, travelling one up, one down; the upward connection proceeds by induction, the downward by deduction.

If someone doesn’t value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide that proves they should value evidence. If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument would you invoke to prove they should value logic?

I must begin with a good body of facts and not from a principle (in which I always suspect some fallacy) and then as much deduction as you please.

Intuition is the source of scientific knowledge.

The facts of life do not penetrate to the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished; they did not engender those beliefs, and they are powerless to destroy them.

[Sherlock Holmes:] The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession.

The scientist believes in proof without certainty.

However logical our induction, the end of the thread is fastened upon the assurance of faith.