William James Quotes

The scientific method is the ultimate elegant explanation. It is the ultimate foundation for anything worthy of the name "explanation". It makes no sense to talk about explanations without having a process for deciding which are right and which are wrong, and in a broad sense that is what the scientific method is about. All of the other wonderful explanations celebrated here owe their origin and credibility to the process by which they are verified-the scientific method.

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

It is an acknowledged truth in philosophy that a just theory will always be confirmed by experiment.

There's no such thing as 'facts of life'. Only standing theories that haven't been disproved as of yet.

Truth as such is not a particularly important concept in naturalistic philosophy.

Revelation and the nature of truth must be viewed in reference to the structure of language.

Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.

Since Plato, we have been considering the nature of knowledge, the meaning of meaning and the status of the physical world.

It's so hard for me to wrap my head around the concept of truth, I don't even know what people mean by it.

Happily I had very early learned the fallacy of building much on logic and verbal argument. Single sets of truths I knew to be as little conclusive in theology as in physics; and, in one as in the other, no theory to be worth anything, however plausibly backed up with Scripture texts or facts, which was not gathered bona fide from the analysis of all the attainable phenomena, and verified wherever possible by experiment.

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.

Truth is a standard both of itself and of falsity.

Validity is the touchstone of inference, and truth of judgment: the fact that vichyssoise is cold ratifies the judgment that vichyssoise is, indeed, cold, and the judgment that vichyssoise is cold expresses the fact that vichyssoise is cold.

The crude real will not by itself yield truth.

Philosophy's position with regard to science, which at one time could be designated with the name "theory of knowledge," has been undermined by the movement of philosophical thought itself. Philosophy was dislodged from this position by philosophy.

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

Now this principle of induction cannot be a purely logical truth like a tautology or an analytic statement. . . .

It is difficult even to attach a precise meaning to the term "scientific truth." So different is the meaning of the word "truth" according to whether we are dealing with a fact of experience, a mathematical proposition or a scientific theory. "Religious truth" conveys nothing clear to me at all.

Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their agreement, as falsity means their disagreement, with reality.

God's existence is either true or not. But calling it a scientific question implies that the tools of science can provide the answer.

I think truth as an idea should be left to the philosophers and perhaps religious leaders and politicians, and professional people who deal with that idea.

Truth is that which cannot be proved false.

Truth happens to an idea

Mathematics is the only good metaphysics.