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Theory Quotes

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Theory Quotes

“When scientists need to explain difficult points of theory, illustration by hypothetical example - rather than by total abstraction - works well (perhaps indispensably) as a rhetorical device. Such cases do not function as speculations in the pejorative sense - as silly stories that provide insight into complex mechanisms - but rather as idealized illustrations to exemplify a difficult point of theory. (Other fields, like philosophy and the law, use such conjectural cases as a standard device.”

Source: Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

“The theory of punctuated equilibrium, proposed by Niles Eldredge and myself, is not, as so often misunderstood, a radical claim for truly sudden change, but a recognition that ordinary processes of speciation, properly conceived as glacially slow by the standard of our own life-span, do not resolve into geological time as long sequences of insensibly graded intermediates (the traditional, or gradualistic, view), but as geologically "sudden" origins at single bedding planes.”

“When I arrived at Harvard, I wanted to design a course in political theory that would have interested me, back when I was started out, in a way that the standard things didn't.”

Way Wanted Political Courses Design Theory Standards Harvard Back When Political Theory

Author:Michael Sandel

“The only way to have real success in science, the field I'm familiar with, is to describe the evidence very carefully without regard to the way you feel it should be. If you have a theory , you must try to explain what's good and what's bad about it equally. In science, you learn a kind of standard integrity and honesty .”

Ifs Way Feels Should Trying Kind Real Honesty Fields Theory Integrity Standards Evidence Regard Familiar Honesty And Integrity Real Success

Book:The Quotable Feynman

Source: The Quotable Feynman

“The error in positivism is that it takes as its standard of truth the contingently given division of labor, that between the science and social praxis as well as that within science itself, and allows no theory that could reveal the division of labor to be itself derivative and mediated and thus strip it of its false authority.”

Wells Given Social Theory Authority Standards Labor Errors Division Derivatives Division Of Labor Positivism Praxis

Book:Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords

Source: Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords

“there is that wish, in the name of democracy, to level down, because high cultural standards are despised and rejected, and even feared, in our Western Democracies. Don't let anyone else have what I've not got, or can't enjoy! - is the secret theory. A very large number of writers in the British and American popular press profess to be preaching democracy when in fact they are only trying to make envy respectable!”

Trying Facts Names Wish Enjoy Levels Numbers Secret Democracy Theory Standards Presses Western British Envy Preaching Rejected Respectable Despised Large Numbers

Author:Ann Bridge

“The credit which the apparent conformity with recognized scientific standards can gain for seemingly simple but false theories may, as the present instance shows, have grave consequences.”

May Shows Simple Economy Theory Standards Consequence Gains Credit Graves Instance Conformity

Author:Friedrich August von Hayek

“Because my graduate academic training at law school was not one that included most of the intellectual traditions I find useful for understanding the conditions and problems that most concern me - anti-colonial theories, Foucault, critical disability studies, prison studies and the like are rarely seen in standard US Law School curricula, where students are still fighting on many campuses to get a single class on race or poverty offered - I developed most of my thinking about these topics through activist reading groups and collaborative writing projects with other activist scholars.”

“Knowing is different from doing and therefore theory must never be used as norms for a standard, but merely as aids to judgment.”

Different Used Knowing Theory Judgment Standards Aids Norm

Author:Carl von Clausewitz

“In human rights theory it is very important that governments still have the primary responsibility for the standards and provision of such services even if they no longer deliver them. They must insist that the private sector delivers without discrimination. So governments still have responsibility, including the need to influence business.”

Ifs Needs Humans Stills Important Government Responsibility Rights Influence Theory Standards Including Human Rights Discrimination Primaries Provision Private Sector

Author:Mary Robinson