"Discovery follows discovery, each both raising and answering questions, each ending a long search, and each providing the new instruments for a new search." (J Robert Oppenheimer, "Prospects in the Arts and Sciences", 1964)
"There are as many types of questions as components in the information." (Jacques Bertin, Semiology of graphics [Semiologie Graphique], 1967)
"Questions are the engines of intellect, the cerebral machines which convert energy to motion, and curiosity to controlled inquiry." (David H Fischer, "Historians’ Fallacies", 1970)
"Definitions, like questions and metaphors, are instruments for thinking. Their authority rests entirely on their usefulness, not their correctness. We use definitions in order to delineate problems we wish to investigate, or to further interests we wish to promote. In other words, we invent definitions and discard them as suits our purposes." (Neil Postman, "Language Education in a Knowledge Context", 1980)
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." (Carl Sagan, "Cosmos", 1980)
"The purpose of models is not to fit the data but to sharpen the questions." (Samuel Karlin, 1983)
"Each of us carries within us a worldview, a set of assumptions about how the world works - what some call a paradigm - that forms the very questions we allow ourselves to ask, and determines our view of future possibilities." (Frances M Lappé, "Rediscovering America's Values", 1991)
"Patterns experienced again and again become intuitions. […] Intuitive judgments are made by our use of imagery; intuition is the result of mental model building. […] The mental model used and the form of the intuition is dependent upon the question being answered." (Roger Frantz, "Two Minds", 2005)
"It is also a good idea to not apply any given technique or method blindly, but to think ahead and see where one could hope such a technique to take one; this can allow one to save enormous amounts of time by eliminating unprofitable directions of inquiry before sinking lots of effort into them, and conversely to give the most promising directions priority."
"[...] we also distinguish knowledge from information, because some pieces of information, such as questions, orders, and absurdities do not constitute knowledge. And also because computers process information but, since they lack minds, they cannot be said to know anything." (Mario Bunge, "Matter and Mind: A Philosophical Inquiry", 2010)
"Meta-analytic thinking is the consideration of any result in relation to previous results on the same or similar questions, and awareness that combination with future results is likely to be valuable. Meta-analytic thinking is the application of estimation thinking to more than a single study. It prompts us to seek meta-analysis of previous related studies at the planning stage of research, then to report our results in a way that makes it easy to include them in future meta-analyses. Meta-analytic thinking is a type of estimation thinking, because it, too, focuses on estimates and uncertainty." (Geoff Cumming, "Understanding the New Statistics", 2012)
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