28 January 2021

Peter B Medawar - Collected Quotes

"The formulation of a hypothesis carries with it an obligation to test it as rigorously as we can command skills to do so." (Peter Medawar, "Hypothesis and Imagination", 1963)

"Scientific discovery, or the formulation of scientific theory, starts in with the unvarnished and unembroidered evidence of the senses. It starts with simple observation - simple, unbiased, unprejudiced, naive, or innocent observation - and out of this sensory evidence, embodied in the form of simple propositions or declarations of fact, generalizations will grow up and take shape, almost as if some process of crystallization or condensation were taking place. Out of a disorderly array of facts, an orderly theory, an orderly general statement, will somehow emerge." (Sir Peter B Medawar, "Is the Scientific Paper Fraudulent?", The Saturday Review, 1964)

"Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth." (Sir Peter B Medawar, "Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought", 1969)

"Every discovery, every enlargement of the understanding, begins as an imaginative preconception of what the truth might be. The imaginative preconception - a ‘hypothesis’ - arises by a process as easy or as difficult to understand as any other creative act of mind; it is a brainwave, an inspired guess, a product of a blaze of insight. It comes anyway from within and cannot be achieved by the exercise of any known calculus of discovery." (Sir Peter B Medawar, "Advice to a Young Scientist", 1979)

"I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of a conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing over whether it is true or not. The importance of the strength of our conviction is only to provide a proportionately strong incentive to find out if the hypothesis will stand up to critical evaluation." (Sir Peter B Medawar, "Advice to a Young Scientist", 1979)

"The intensity of a conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or false." (Peter Medawar, "Advice to a Young Scientist", 1979)

"All advances of scientific understanding, at every level, begin with a speculative adventure, an imaginative preconception of what might be true - a preconception that always, and necessarily, goes a little way (sometimes a long way) beyond anything which we have logical or factual authority to believe in. It is the invention of a possible world, or of a tiny fraction of that world. The conjecture is then exposed to criticism to find out whether or not that imagined world is anything like the real one. Scientific reasoning is therefore at all levels an interaction between two episodes of thought - a dialogue between two voices, the one imaginative and the other critical; a dialogue, as I have put it, between the possible and the actual, between proposal and disposal, conjecture and criticism, between what might be true and what is in fact the case." (Sir Peter B Medawar, "Pluto’s Republic: Incorporating the Art of the Soluble and Induction Intuition in Scientific Thought", 1982)

"If the purpose of scientific methodology is to prescribe or expound a system of enquiry or even a code of practice for scientific behavior, then scientists seem able to get on very well without it." (Sir Peter B Medawar, "Pluto’s Republic: Incorporating the Art of the Soluble and Induction Intuition in Scientific Thought", 1982)

"In a modern professional vocabulary a hypothesis is an imaginative preconception of what might be true in the form of a declaration with verifiable deductive consequences. It no longer tows ‘gratuitous’, ‘mere’, or ‘wild’ behind it, and the pejorative usage (‘Evolution is a mere hypothesis’, ‘It is only a hypothesis that smoking causes lung cancer’) is one of the outward signs of little learning." (Sir Peter B Medawar, "Pluto’s Republic: Incorporating the Art of the Soluble and Induction Intuition in Scientific Thought", 1982)

"In all sensation we pick and choose, interpret, seek and impose order, and devise and test hypotheses about what we witness. Sense data are taken, not merely given: we learn to perceive. […] The teacher has forgotten, and the student himself will soon forget, that what he sees conveys no information until he knows beforehand the kind of thing he is expected to see."  (Sir Peter B Medawar, "Pluto’s Republic: Incorporating the Art of the Soluble and Induction Intuition in Scientific Thought", 1982)

"Intuition takes many different forms in science and mathematics, though all forms of it have certain properties in common: the suddenness of their origin, the wholeness of the conception they embody, and the absence of conscious premeditation." (Sir Peter B Medawar, "Pluto’s Republic: Incorporating the Art of the Soluble and Induction Intuition in Scientific Thought", 1982)

"Observation is the generative act in scientific discovery. For all its aberrations, the evidence of the senses is essentially to be relied upon - provided we observe nature as a child does, without prejudices and preconceptions, but with that clear and candid vision which adults lose and scientists must strive to regain." (Sir Peter B Medawar, "Pluto’s Republic: Incorporating the Art of the Soluble and Induction Intuition in Scientific Thought", 1982)

"Scientific theories (I have said) begin as imaginative constructions. The begin, if you like, as stories, and the purpose of the critical or rectifying episode in scientific reasoning is precisely to find out whether or not these stories are stories about real life. Literal or empiric truthfulness is not therefore the starting-point of scientific enquiry, but rather the direction in which scientific reasoning moves. If this is a fair statement, it follows that scientific and poetic or imaginative accounts of the world are not distinguishable in their origins. They start in parallel, but diverge from one another at some later stge. We all tell stories, but the stories differ in the purposes we expect them to fulfil and in the kinds of evaluations to which they are exposed." (Sir Peter B Medawar, "Pluto’s Republic: Incorporating the Art of the Soluble and Induction Intuition in Scientific Thought", 1982)

"Scientific discovery is a private event, and the delight that accompanies it, or the despair of finding it illusory, does not travel. One scientist may get great satisfaction from another’s work and admire it deeply; it may give him great intellectual pleasure; but it gives him no sense of participation in the discovery, it does not carry him away, and his appreciation of it does not depend on his being carried away. If it were otherwise the inspirational origin of scientific discovery would never have been in doubt." (Sir Peter B Medawar, "Pluto’s Republic: Incorporating the Art of the Soluble and Induction Intuition in Scientific Thought", 1982)

"Simultaneous discovery is utterly commonplace, and it was only the rarity of scientists, not the inherent improbability of the phenomenon, that made it remarkable in in the past." (Sir Peter B Medawar, "Pluto’s Republic: Incorporating the Art of the Soluble and Induction Intuition in Scientific Thought", 1982)

"The ballast of factual information, so far from being just about to sink us, is growing daily less. The factual burden of a science varies inversely with its degree of maturity. As a science advances, particular facts are comprehended within, and therefore in a sense annihilated by, general statements of steadily increasing explanatory power and compass - whereupon the facts need no longer be known explicitly, that is, spelled out and kept in mind. In all sciences we are being progressively relieved of the burden of singular instances, the tyranny of the particular. We need no longer record the fall of every apple." (Sir Peter B Medawar, "Pluto’s Republic: Incorporating the Art of the Soluble and Induction Intuition in Scientific Thought", 1982)

"The critical task of science is not complete and never will be, for it is the merest truism that we do not abandon mythologies and superstitions, but merely substitute new variants for old." (Sir Peter B Medawar, "Pluto’s Republic: Incorporating the Art of the Soluble and Induction Intuition in Scientific Thought", 1982)

"The formulation of a natural ‘law’ always begins as an imaginative exploit, and without imagination scientific thought is barren." (Sir Peter B Medawar, "Pluto’s Republic: Incorporating the Art of the Soluble and Induction Intuition in Scientific Thought", 1982)

"The purpose of scientific enquiry is not to compile an inventory of factual information, nor to build up a totalitarian world picture of Natural Laws in which every event that is not compulsory is forbidden. We should think of it rather as a logically articulated structure of justifiable beliefs about nature. It begins as a story about a Possible World - a story which we invent and criticize and modify as we go along, so that it winds by being, as nearly as we can make it, a story about real life." (Sir Peter B Medawar, "Pluto’s Republic: Incorporating the Art of the Soluble and Induction Intuition in Scientific Thought", 1982)

"The scientific method is a potentiation of common sense, exercised with a specially firm determination not to persist in error if any exertion of hand or mind can deliver us from it. Like other exploratory processes, it can be resolved into a dialogue between fact and fancy, the actual and the possible; between what could be true and what is in fact the case. The purpose of scientific enquiry is not to compile an inventory of factual information, nor to build up a totalitarian world picture of Natural Laws in which every event that is not compulsory is forbidden. We should think of it rather as a logically articulated structure of justifiable beliefs about nature. It begins as a story about a Possible World - a story which we invent and criticise and modify as we go along, so that it ends by being, as nearly as we can make it, a story about real life." (Sir Peter B Medawar, "Pluto’s Republic: Incorporating the Art of the Soluble and Induction Intuition in Scientific Thought", 1982)

"There is no such thing as a Scientific Mind. Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics. What sort of mind or temperament can all these people be supposed to have in common? Obligative scientists must be very rare, and most people who are in fact scientists could easily have been something else instead." (Sir Peter B Medawar, "Pluto’s Republic: Incorporating the Art of the Soluble and Induction Intuition in Scientific Thought", 1982)

"What shows a theory to be inadequate or mistaken is not, as a rule, the discovery of a mistake in the information that led us to propound it; more often it is the contradictory evidence of a new observation which we were led to make because we held that theory." (Sir Peter B Medawar, "Pluto’s Republic: Incorporating the Art of the Soluble and Induction Intuition in Scientific Thought", 1982)

"A scientist is no more a collector and classifier of facts than a historian is a man who complies and classifies a chronology of the dates of great battles and major discoveries." (Sir Peter B Medawar, "Aristotle to Zoos: A Philosophical Dictionary of Biology", 1983)

"The attempt to discover and promulgate the truth is nevertheless an obligation upon all scientists, one that must be persevered in no matter what the rebuffs - for otherwise what is the point in being a scientist?" (Sir Peter B Medawar, "Aristotle to Zoos: A Philosophical Dictionary of Biology", 1983)

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