The method of learning by trial and error – of learning from our mistakes – seems to be fundamentally the same whether it is practised by lower or by higher animals, by chimpanzees or by men of science.
Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability; but there are degrees of testabilty: some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation, than others; they take, as it were, greater risks.
We must regard all laws or theories as hypothetical or conjectural; that is, as guesses.
What we call nowadays totalitarianism belongs to a tradition which is just as old or just as young as our civilization itself.
It is not the consciousness of man that determines his existence – rather, it is his social existence that determines his consciousness.
The essential feature of dualist-interactionism is that the mind and brain are independent entities... and that they interact by quantum physics.
Theories are nets cast to catch what we call ‘the world’: to rationalize, to explain, and to master it. We endeavor to make the mesh ever finer and finer.
Science is most significant as one of the greatest spiritual adventures that man has yet known.
The true Enlightenment thinker, the true rationalist, never wants to talk anyone into anything. No, he does not even want to convince; all the time he is aware that he may be wrong. Above all, he values the intellectual independence of others too highly to want to convince them in important matters. He would much rather invite contradiction, preferably in the form of rational and disciplined criticism. He seeks not to convince but to arouse – to challenge others to form free opinions.
Every ‘good’ scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.
There is no law of progress, and everything will depend on ourselves. But the actual situation is briefly and fairly summed up by Parkes36 in one sentence: ‘Low wages, long hours, and child labour have been characteristic of capitalism not, as Marx predicted, in its old age, but in its infancy.
Is it within the power of any social science to make sweeping historical prophecies? Can we expect to get more than the irresponsible reply of the soothsayer if we ask a man what the future has in store for mankind?
The way of science is paved with discarded theories which were once declared self-evident;.
The simple truth is that truth is hard to come by, and that once found may easily be lost again.
Science can be viewed from various standpoints, not only from that of epistemology; for example, we can look at it as a biological or as a sociological phenomenon. As such it might be described as a tool, or an instrument, comparable perhaps to some of our industrial machinery. Science may be described as a means of production – as the last word in ’roundabout production.
The point is that, whenever we propose a solution to a problem, we ought to try as hard as we can to overthrow out solution, rather than defend it. Few of us, unfortunately, praise this precept; but other people, fortunately, will supply the criticism for us if we fail to supply it ourselves. Yet criticism will be fruitful only if we state our problem as clearly as we can and put our solution in a sufficiently definite form – a form in which it can be critically discussed.
Denying realism amounts to megalomania.
The ‘conspiracy theory of society’ is a typical result of a secularization of a religious superstition. The belief in the Homeric gods whose conspiracies explain the history of the Trojan War is gone. The gods are abandoned. But their place is filled by powerful men or groups – sinister pressure groups whose wickedness is responsible for all the evils we suffer from – such as the Learned Elders of Zion, or the monopolists, or the capitalists, or the imperialists.
I wish to apologize to the Kantians for mentioning them in the same breath as the Hegelians.
The question of the acceptance of theories should, I propose, be demoted to the status of a minor problem. For science may be regarded as a growing system of problems, rather than as a system of beliefs. And for a system of problems, the tentative acceptance of a theory or a conjecture means hardly more than that it is considered worthy of further criticism.
Marxism is only an episode – one of the many mistakes we have made in the perennial and dangerous struggle for building a better and freer world.