Howard Gardner Quotes

Science is nothing but perception.

I would proclaim that the vast majority of what [say, Scientific American] is true-yet my ability to defend such a claim is weaker than I would like. And most likely the readers, authors, and editors of that magazine would be equally hard pressed to come up with cogent, non-technical arguments convincing a skeptic of this point, especially if pitted against a clever lawyer arguing the contrary. How come Truth is such a slippery beast?

Science is not wisdom.

Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not.

Both art and science are bent on the understanding of the forces that shape existence, and both call for a dedication to what is. Neither of them can tolerate capricious subjectivity because both are subject to their criteria of truth. Both require precision, order, and discipline because no comprehensible statement can be made without these. Both accept the sensory world as what the Middle Ages called signatura regrum, the signature of things, but in quite different ways.

Theory is continually the precursor of truth; we must pass through the twilight and its shade, to arrive at the full and perfect day.

Epistemology is the study of knowledge. By what conduit do we know what we know?

We must revisit the idea that science is a methodology and not an ontology.

It is not his possession of knowledge, of irrefutable truth, that makes the man of science, but his persistent and recklessly critical quest for truth.

While it is true that science cannot decide questions of value, that is because they cannot be intellectually decided at all, and lie outside the realm of truth and falsehood. Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.

What is the truth? Is it what you experience? Is it what I experience? Or is there some objective truth in between?

Let not men think there is no truth, but in the sciences that they study, or the books that they read.

Human thought by its nature is capable of giving, and does give, absolute truth, which is compounded of a sum-total of relative truths.

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

I see men ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out whether the things are so.

Maybe scientists are fundamentalist when it comes to defining in some abstract way what is meant by 'truth'. But so is everybody else. I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than when I say it is true that New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere. We believe in evolution because the evidence supports it, and we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it.

Hope is easy; knowledge is hard. Science is the one domain in which we human beings make a truly heroic effort to counter our innate biases and wishful thinking. Science is the one endeavor in which we have developed a refined methodology for separating what a person hopes is true from what he has good reason to believe.

The crude real will not by itself yield truth.

Science is the search for truth - it is not a game in which one tries to beat his opponent, to do harm to others.

God forbid that Truth should be confined to Mathematical Demonstration!

After all, the ultimate goal of all research is not objectivity, but truth.

I don't know if there's such a thing as objectivity.

Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.

Not so the scientist. The very essence of his life is the service of truth.

Science has fulfilled her function when she has ascertained and enunciated truth.