The proper concepts are needed to formulate a good theory, but we need a good theory to arrive at the proper concepts.
ABRAHAM KAPLANExperience is of particulars only.
More Abraham Kaplan Quotes
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We are caught up in a paradox, one which might be called the paradox of conceptualization.
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Every discipline develops standards of professional competence to which its workers are subject… Every scientific community is a society in the small, so to speak, with its own agencies of social control.
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Mathematics is not yet capable of coping with the naïveté of the mathematician himself.
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A philosophy which speaks, even indirectly, only to philosophers is no philosophy at all; and I think the same is true if it speaks only to scientists, or only to jurists, or priests, or any other special class.
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The operationist asks, “What would we have to do to come to believe it?” For the pragmatist the question is, “What would we do if did believe it?”
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The price of training is always a certain trained incapacity: the more we know how to do something, the harder it is to learn to do it differently.
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We are forever asking Nature whether it has stopped beating its wife.
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In addition to the social pressures from the scientific community there is also at work a very human trait of individual scientist.
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I call it the law of the instrument , and it may be formulated as follows: Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.
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Give a small boy a hammer and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.
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Experience is of particulars only.
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It comes as no particular surprise to discover that a scientist formulates problems in a way which requires for their solution just those techniques in which he himself is especially skilled.
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There is nothing more inspiring than having a mind unfold before you. Let people teach who have a calling. It is never just a job.
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A problem is something you can do something about. If you can’t do something about it, then it’s not a problem, it’s a predicament. That means it’s something that must be coped with, endured.
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To get at the meaning of a statement the logical positivist asks, “What would the world be like if it were true?”
ABRAHAM KAPLAN