Clayton Christensen Quotes

Theory is needed to tell you where to look.

There is no knowledge without theory.

It is the theory which decides what we can observe

No single theory ever agrees with all the facts in its domain

Think of a hypothesis as a card. A theory is a house made of hypotheses.

Science does not limit itself merely to what is currently verifiable. But it is interested in questions that are potentially verifiable (or, rather, falsifiable).

When the basic status of a theory is clear, and all that needs to be cleared are details, you can collaborate. But if the main structure of a hypothesis isn't established, and you want to change the paradigm - like it was the case in the 1960s - it's better to work alone.

Thus, in general, in the first instance, the direction of interest in empirical fact will be canalised by the logical structure of the theoretical system.

Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.

Hypotheses are what we lack the least.

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

The criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.

There really is not a new law of nature. It was all in the theory to begin with but nobody worked it out.

To say that prediction is the purpose of a scientific theory is to confuse means with ends. It is like saying that the purpose of a spaceship is to burn fuel. ... Passing experimental tests is only one of many things a theory has to do to achieve the real purpose of science, which is to explain the world.

I venture to define science as a series of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiment and observation and fruitful of further experiments and observations. The test of a scientific theory is, I suggest, its fruitfulness.

Without a theory the facts are silent.

Science walks forward on two feet, namely theory and experiment.

If you claim to have a theory that deduces unexpected consequences from nontrivial principles, let's see it.

It is not enough for theory to describe and analyze, it must itself be an event in the universe it describes.

Data don't generate theory - only researchers do that.

But while I accept specialization in the practice, I reject it utterly in the theory of science.

A theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements: it must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations.

Whether or not you can observe a thing depends upon the theory you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed.

... on principle, it is quite wrong to try founding a theory on observable magnitudes alone. In reality the very opposite happens. It is the theory which decides what we can observe.

It is impossible to devise an experiment without a preconceived idea; devising an experiment, we said, is putting a question; we never conceive a question without an idea which invites an answer. I consider it, therefore, an absolute principle that experiments must always be devised in view of a preconceived idea, no matter if the idea be not very clear nor very well defined.