"The aim of every science is foresight. For the laws of established observation of phenomena are generally employed to foresee their succession. All men, however little advanced make true predictions, which are always based on the same principle, the knowledge of the future from the past." (Auguste Compte, "Plan des travaux scientifiques nécessaires pour réorganiser la société", 1822)
"The aim of natural science is to obtain connections among phenomena. Theories, however, are like withered leaves, which drop off after having enabled the organism of science to breathe for a time." (Ernst Mach, "Die Geschichte und die Wurzel des Satzes von der Erhaltung der Arbeit", 1871)
"The aim of ‘science’ is to attain conceptions so adequate and exact that we shall never need to change them." (William James, "The Principles of Psychology", 1890)
"The aim of science is always to reduce complexity to simplicity." (William James, "The Principles of Psychology", 1890)
"The aim of science is not things themselves, as the dogmatists in their simplicity imagine, but the relation between things. (Henri Poincaré, "Science and Hypothesis", 1905)
"The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts." (Alfred N Whitehead, "The Concept of Nature", 1919)
"Science does not aim at establishing immutable truths and eternal dogmas; its aim is to approach the truth by successive approximations, without claiming that at any stage final and complete accuracy has been achieved." (Bertrand Russell, "The ABC of Relativity", 1925)
"Science aims at constructing a world which shall be symbolic of the world of commonplace experience." (Sir Arthur S Eddington, "The Nature of the Physical World", 1928)
"[…] the grand aim of all science […] is to cover the greatest possible number of empirical facts by logical deductions from the smallest possible number of hypotheses or axioms." (Albert Einstein, 1954)
"The true aim of science is to discover a simple theory which is necessary and sufficient to cover the facts, when they have been purified of traditional prejudices." (Lancelot L Whyte, "Accent on Form", 1954)
"Science aims at the discovery, verification, and organization of fact and information [...] engineering is fundamentally committed to the translation of scientific facts and information to concrete machines, structures, materials, processes, and the like that can be used by men." (Eric A Walker, "Engineers and/or Scientists", Journal of Engineering Education Vol. 51, 1961)
"For Science in its totality, the ultimate goal is the creation of a monistic system in which - on the symbolic level and in terms of the inferred components of invisibility and intangibly fine structure - the world’s enormous multiplicity is reduced to something like unity, and the endless successions of unique events of a great many different kinds get tidied and simplified into a single rational order. Whether this goal will ever be reached remains to be seen. Meanwhile we have the various sciences, each with its own system coordinating concepts, its own criterion of explanation." (Aldous Huxley, "Literature and Science", 1963)
"The aim of science is to apprehend this purely intelligible world as a thing in itself, an object which is what it is independently of all thinking, and thus antithetical to the sensible world." (Robin G Collingwood, "Essays in the Philosophy of Art", 1964)
"The goal of science is to make sense of the diversity of Nature." (John D Barrow, "Theories of Everything: The Quest for Ultimate Explanation", 1991)
"It [science] has as its highest principle and most coveted aim the solution of the problem to condense all natural phenomena which have been observed and are still to be observed into one simple principle, that allows the computation of past and more especially of future processes from present ones." (Max Planck)
"The aim of every science is foresight (prevoyance). For the laws of established observation of phenomena are generally employed to foresee their succession. All men, however little advanced make true predictions, which are always based on the same principle, the knowledge of the future from the past." (Auguste Compte)
"The sole aim of science is the honor of the human mind, and from this point of view a question about numbers is as important as a question about the system of the world." (Carl Gustav Jacobi)
No comments:
Post a Comment