On Knowledge (1950-1959)

"Every bit of knowledge we gain and every conclusion we draw about the universe or about any part or feature of it depends finally upon some observation or measurement. Mankind has had again and again the humiliating experience of trusting to intuitive, apparently logical conclusions without observations, and has seen Nature sail by in her radiant chariot of gold in an entirely different direction." (Oliver J Lee, "Measuring Our Universe: From the Inner Atom to Outer Space", 1950)

"The essence of knowledge is generalization. That fire can be produced by rubbing wood in a certain way is a knowledge derived by generalization from individual experiences; the statement means that rubbing wood in this way will always produce fire. The art of discovery is therefore the art of correct generalization." (Hans Reichenbach, "The Rise of Scientific Philosophy", 1951)

"[The information of a message can] be defined as the 'minimum number of binary decisions which enable the receiver to construct the message, on the basis of the data already available to him.' These data comprise both the convention regarding the symbols and the language used, and the knowledge available at the moment when the message started." (Dennis Gabor, "Optical transmission" in Information Theory : Papers Read at a Symposium on Information Theory, 1952)

"The world is not made up of empirical facts with the addition of the laws of nature: what we call the laws of nature are conceptual devices by which we organize our empirical knowledge and predict the future." (Richard B Braithwaite, "Scientific Explanation", 1953)

"Knowledge rests on knowledge; what is new is meaningful because it departs slightly from what was known before; this is a world of frontiers, where even the liveliest of actors or observers will be absent most of the time from most of them." (J Robert Oppenheimer, "Science and the Common Understanding", 1954)

"Science, then, is the attentive consideration of common experience; it is common knowledge extended and refined. Its validity is of the same order as that of ordinary perception; memory, and understanding. Its test is found, like theirs, in actual intuition, which sometimes consists in perception and sometimes in intent." (George Santayana, "The Life of Reason, or the Phases of Human Progress", 1954)

"Scientific metaphors are called models. They are made with the full knowledge that the connection between the metaphor and the real thing is primarily in the mind of the scientist. And they are made with a clearly definable purpose - as starting points of a deductive process. […] Like every other aspect of scientific procedure, the scientific metaphor is a pragmatic device, to be used freely as long as it serves its purpose, to be discarded without regrets when it fails to do so." (Anatol Rapoport, "Operational Philosophy", 1954)

"The laws of science are the permanent contribution to knowledge - the individual pieces which are fitted together attempt to form a picture of the physical universe in action." (Edwin P Hubble, "The Nature of Science and Other Lectures", 1954)

"Science cannot be based on dogma or authority of any kind, nor on any institution or revelation, unless indeed it be of the Book of Nature that lies open before our eyes. We need not dwell on the processes of acquiring knowledge by observation, experiment, and inductive and deductive reasoning. The study of scientific method both in theory and practice is of great importance. It is inherent in the philosophy that the record may be imperfect and the conceptions erroneous; the potential fallibility of our science is not only acknowledged but also insisted upon." (Sir Robert Robinson, "Science and the Scientist", Nature Vol. 176 (4479), 1955)

"There comes a point where the mind takes a leap - call it intuition or what you will - and comes out upon a higher plane of knowledge, but can never prove how it got there. All great discoveries have involved such a leap." (Albert Einstein, [interview in Life, "Death of a Genius"] 1955)

"There is no correlation between the cause and the effect. The events reveal only an aleatory determination, connected not so much with the imperfection of our knowledge as with the structure of the human world." (Raymond Aron, "The Opium of the Intellectuals", 1955)

"General Systems Theory is a name which has come into use to describe a level of theoretical model-building which lies somewhere between the highly generalized constructions of pure mathematics and the specific theories of the specialized disciplines. Mathematics attempts to organize highly general relationships into a coherent system, a system however which does not have any necessary connections with the 'real' world around us. It studies all thinkable relationships abstracted from any concrete situation or body of empirical knowledge." (Kenneth E Boulding, "General Systems Theory - The Skeleton of Science", Management Science Vol. 2 (3), 1956)

"In no subject is there a rule, compliance with which will lead to new knowledge or better understanding. Skillful observations, ingenious ideas, cunning tricks, daring suggestions, laborious calculations, all these may be required to advance a subject. Occasionally the conventional approach in a subject has to be studiously followed; on other occasions it has to be ruthlessly disregarded. Which of these methods, or in what order they should be employed is generally unpredictable. Analogies drawn from the history of science are frequently claimed to be a guide; but, as with forecasting the next game of roulette, the existence of the best analogy to the present is no guide whatever to the future. The most valuable lesson to be learnt from the history of scientific progress is how misleading and strangling such analogies have been, and how success has come to those who ignored them." (Thomas Gold, "Cosmology", 1956) 

"Knowledge is not something which exists and grows in the abstract. It is a function of human organisms and of social organization. Knowledge, that is to say, is always what somebody knows: the most perfect transcript of knowledge in writing is not knowledge if nobody knows it. Knowledge however grows by the receipt of meaningful information - that is, by the intake of messages by a knower which are capable of reorganising his knowledge." (Kenneth E Boulding, "General Systems Theory - The Skeleton of Science", Management Science Vol. 2 (3), 1956)

"The mathematical formulas indeed no longer portray nature, but rather our knowledge of nature." (Werner K Heisenberg, "The Representation of Nature in Contemporary Physics", Daedalus Vol. 87 (3), 1958)

"Science does not mean an idle resting upon a body of certain knowledge; it means unresting endeavor and continually progressing development toward an end which the poetic intuition may apprehend, but which the intellect can never fully grasp." (Max Planck, "The New Science", 1959)