On Images (1950-1959)

"Speaking roughly, a homology theory assigns groups to topological spaces and homomorphisms to continuous maps of one space into another. To each array of spaces and maps is assigned an array of groups and homomorphisms. In this way, a homology theory is an algebraic image of topology. The domain of a homology theory is the topologist’s field of study. Its range is the field of study of the algebraist. Topological problems are converted into algebraic problems." (Samuel Eilenberg &Norman E Steenrod, "Foundations of Algebraic Topology", 1952)

"The process of understanding in nature, together with the joy that man feels in understanding, i.e., in becoming acquainted with new knowledge, seems therefore to rest upon a correspondence, a coming into congruence of preexistent internal images of the human psyche with external objects and their behavior. […] the place of clear concepts is taken by images of strongly emotional content, which are not thought but are seen pictorially, as it were, before the minds eye." (Wolfgang Pauli, "Der Einfluss archetypischer Vorstellungen auf die Bildung naturwissenschaftlicher Theorien bei Kepler", 1952)

"Despite all the richness of what men have learned about the world of nature, of matter and of space, of change and of life, we carry with us today an image of the giant machine as a sign of what the objective world is really like." (J Robert Oppenheimer, "Science and the Common Understanding", 1954)

"A symbol, therefore, may have no effect and indeed ordinarily will have no effect on the image of the immediate future around one. It does produce an effect, however, of what might be called the image of the image, on the image of the future, on the image of the past, on the image of the potential or even of the image of the possible." (Kenneth E Boulding, "The Image: Knowledge in life and society", 1956)

"Because of the extended time image and the extended relationship images, man is capable of ‘rational behavior,’ that is to say, his response is not to an immediate stimulus but to an image of the future filtered through an elaborate value system. His image contains not only what is, but what might be." (Kenneth E Boulding, "The Image: Knowledge in life and society", 1956)

"I have suggested that one of the basic theorems of the theory of the image is that it is the image which in fact determines what might be called the current behavior of any organism […] The image acts as a field. The behavior consists in gravitating toward the most highly valued part of the field." (Kenneth E Boulding, "The Image: Knowledge in life and society", 1956)

"Out of our image we predict the messages which will return to us as a result of our acts. If this prediction is fulfilled the image is confirmed, if it is not fulfilled the image must be changed. This is the essence of the logical-positivist view that definitions must be operational and hypotheses must be testable as an open system of a very different and much more complex character than that of the biological organism." (Kenneth E Boulding, "The Image: Knowledge in life and society", 1956)

"The correct analogy to the image of the organization in the organism is what might be called the genetic image. As far as the genetics of organisms is concerned, it is the image of the cell that is important, not the image of the organization as a whole. Because of this fact, an organization, although it is an open system, is an open system of a very different and much more complex character than that of the biological organism." (Kenneth E Boulding, "The Image: Knowledge in life and society", 1956)

"The problem of the transformation of images is of great importance in the theory of economic development. […] The problem here is that of the initiation and imitation of superior processes. Both these phenomena require transformation of the image; a new process always starts as a new image, as a new idea. The process itself is merely a form of transcription of the new image." (Kenneth E Boulding, "The Image: Knowledge in life and society", 1956)

"Within the confines of my abstraction, for instance, it is clear that the problem of truth and validity cannot be solved completely, if what we mean by the truth of an image is its correspondence with some reality in the world outside it. The difficulty with any correspondence theory of truth is that images can only be compared with images. They can never be compared with any outside reality. The difficulty with the coherence theory of truth, on the other hand, is that the coherence or consistency of the image is simply not what we mean by its truth." (Kenneth E Boulding, "The Image: Knowledge in life and society", 1956)

"The unconscious [...] is always empty - or, more accurately, it is as alien to mental images as is the stomach to the foods which pass through it." (Claude Levi-Strauss, "Structural Anthropology", 1958)

"The implication of game theory, which is also the implication of the third image, is, however, that the freedom of choice of any one state is limited by the actions of the others." (Kenneth Waltz, "Man, the State, and War", 1959)