On Beliefs (1925-1949)

"Rule 2. Any summary of a distribution of numbers in terms of symmetric functions should not give an objective degree of belief in any one of the inferences or predictions to be made therefrom that would cause human action significantly different from what this action would be if the original distributions had been taken as evidence." (Walter A Shewhart, "Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product", 1931)

"There is scarcely a scientific axiom that is not nowadays denied by somebody. And at the same time almost any nonsensical theory that may be put forward in the name of science would be almost sure to find believers and disciples." (Max Planck, "Where is Science Going?", 1932)

"A scientist commonly professes to base his beliefs on observations, not theories [...] have never come across anyone who carries this profession into practice. [...] Observation is not sufficient [...]  theory has an important share in determining belief." (Arthur S Eddington, "The Expanding Universe", 1933)

"As words are not the things we speak about, and structure is the only link between them, structure becomes the only content of knowledge. If we gamble on verbal structures that have no observable empirical structures, such gambling can never give us any structural information about the world. Therefore such verbal structures are structurally obsolete, and if we believe in them, they induce delusions or other semantic disturbances." (Alfred Korzybski, "Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics", 1933)

"The most important application of the theory of probability is to what we may call 'chance-like' or 'random' events, or occurrences. These seem to be characterized by a peculiar kind of incalculability which makes one disposed to believe - after many unsuccessful attempts - that all known rational methods of prediction must fail in their case. We have, as it were, the feeling that not a scientist but only a prophet could predict them. And yet, it is just this incalculability that makes us conclude that the calculus of probability can be applied to these events." (Karl R Popper, "The Logic of Scientific Discovery", 1934)

"Every new theory as it arises believes in the flush of youth that it has the long sought goal; it sees no limits to its applicability, and believes that at last it is the fortunate theory to achieve the 'right' answer." (Percy W Bridgman, "The Nature of Physical Theory", 1936)

"Both religion and natural science require a belief in God for their activities, to the former He is the starting point, and to the latter the goal of every thought process. To the former He is the foundation, to the latter, the crown of the edifice of every generalized world view." (Max Planck, "Religion and Natural Science", 1937)

"It happens at times that a person believes that he has a world-view, but that there is yet one particular phenomenon that is of such a nature that it baffles the understanding, and that he explains differently and attempts to ignore in order not to harbor the thought that this phenomenon might overthrow the whole view, or that his reflection does not possess enough courage and resolution to penetrate the phenomenon with his world-view." (Søren Kierkegaard, 1938)

"In every writer on philosophy there is a concealed metaphysic, usually unconscious; even if his subject is metaphysics, he is almost certain to have an uncritically believed system which underlies his specific arguments." (Bertrand Russell, "Dewey’s New Logic" [in"The Philosophy of John Dewey", ed. by Paul A Schilpp & Lewis E Hahn, 1939])

"Classes and concepts may, however, also be conceived as real objects, namely classes as 'pluralities of things' or as structures consisting of a plurality of things and concepts as the properties and relations of things existing independently of our definitions and constructions. It seems to me that the assumption of such objects is quite as legitimate as the assumption of physical bodies and there is quite as much reason to believe in their existence. They are in the same sense necessary to obtain a satisfactory system of mathematics as physical bodies are necessary for a satisfactory theory of our sense perceptions." (Kurt Gödel, "The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell", 1944)

"To a scientist a theory is something to be tested. He seeks not to defend his beliefs, but to improve them. He is, above everything else, an expert at ‘changing his mind’." (Wendell Johnson, 1946)

"But, despite their remoteness from sense experience, we do have something like a perception of the objects of set theory, as is seen from the fact that the axioms force themselves upon us as being true. I don't see any reason why we should have less confidence in this kind of perception, i.e., in mathematical intuition, than in sense perception, which induces us to build up physical theories and to expect that future sense perception will agree with them and, moreover, to believe that a question not decidable now has meaning and may be decided in future." (Kurt Gödel, "What is Cantor’s Continuum problem?", American Mathematical Monthly 54, 1947)

"Belief has its structures, and its symbols change. Its tradition changes. All the relationships within these forms are inter-dependent. We look at the symbols, we hope to read them, we hope for sharing and communication." (Muriel Rukeyser, "The Life of Poetry", 1949)