“To develop an empiricist account of science is to depict it as involving a search for truth only about the empirical world, aboutwhat is actual and observable….”

Certain issues in philosophy of science (having to do with observation and the definition of a theory’s empirical import) had beenmisconstrued as issues in philosophy of logic and of language. With respect to modality.

Ask “If that turned out to be true, would you still say they were good scientists?” The answer would reveal something about how they themselves understood what it is to be a scientist.

It must involve throughout a resolute rejection of the demand for an explanation of the regularities in the observable course of nature,

I hold the exact opposite: important philosophical problems concerning language have been misconstrued as relating to the content of science and the nature of the world. This is not at all new, but is the traditional nominalist line.

By means of truths concerning a reality beyond what is actual and observable, as a demand which plays no role in the scientific enterprise.

Philosophers often think all scientists must be scientific realists. If you ask a simple question like “Are electrons real?” the answer will be “Yes”. But if your questions are less superficial, for example whether some well-known scientist was a good scientist.

Then, they had insisted that only empirical criteria matter and that they actually did not believe in the reality of sub-atomic entities.

Life’s scientific, but we don’t know, do we? Not certainly, I mean.

I don’t think they [contemporary writers] read me either. I mean, if we’re concerned genuinely with writing, I think we probably get on with our work.

No matter who you are, black, white, green, there’s going to be things in your way, you know what I mean?

You can’t allow the forces of political correction to shut you up. I mean, why are people afraid to say, ‘Merry Christmas?’ Give me a break. If people don’t like it, yeah, they can go do something else.

What anxiety means is it’s as though the world is knocking at your door, and you need to create, you need to make something, you need to do something. I think anxiety, for people who have found their own heart and their own souls, for them it is a stimulus toward creativity, toward courage. It’s what makes us human beings.

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

Belief in oneself and knowing who you are, I mean, that’s the foundation for everything great.

Science appears to us with a very different aspect after we have found out that it is not in lecture rooms only, and by means of the electric light projected on a screen, that we may witness physical phenomena.