{"quotes":[{"text":"[At the beginning of modern science], a light dawned on all those who study nature. They comprehended that reason has insight only into what it itself produces according to its own design; that it must take the lead with principles for its judgments according to constant laws and compel nature to answer its questions, rather than letting nature guide its movements by keeping reason, as it were, in leading-strings; for otherwise accidental observations, made according to no previously designed plan, can never connect up into a necessary law, which is yet what reason seeks and requires. Reason, in order to be taught by nature, must approach nature with its principles in one hand, according to which alone the agreement among appearances can count as laws, and, in the other hand, the experiments thought in accordance with these principles - yet in order to be instructed by nature not like a pupil, who has recited to him whatever the teacher wants to say, but like an appointed judge who compels witnesses to answer the questions he puts to them. Thus even physics owes the advantageous revolution in its way of thinking to the inspiration that what reason would not be able to know of itself and has to learn from nature, it has to seek in the latter (though not merely ascribe to it) in accordance with what reason itself puts into nature. This is how natural science was first brought to the secure course of a science after groping about for so many centuries.","author":"Immanuel Kant","tags":["constructivism","critical-turn","empiricism","experiment","laws","modern-science","nature","necessity","philosophy","physics","rational-principles","reason","science","system","understanding"],"id":6179,"author_id":"Immanuel+Kant"},{"text":"All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.","author":"Immanuel Kant","tags":["empiricism","knowledge","rationalism","reason","senses","understanding"],"id":13381,"author_id":"Immanuel+Kant"},{"text":"The theories of the social sciences do not consist of “laws” in the sense of empirical rules about the behavior of objects definable in physical terms. All that the theory of the social sciences attempts is to provide a technique of reasoning which assists us in connecting individual facts, but which, like logic or mathematics, is not about the facts. It can, therefore, and this is the second point, never be verified or falsified by reference to facts.","author":"Friedrich A. Hayek","tags":["economics","empiricism","falsification","libertarianism","pseudoscience","reality","science"],"id":20507,"author_id":"Friedrich+A.+Hayek"},{"text":"The empiricist assumes without any evidence or proof that his experiences somehow give him a magical access to reality. So completely does he identify experience and reality that he cannot liberate himself from thinking of the two as one and the same. In equating experience and reality, he is making a huge and unwarranted leap. But this breakdown of reason is not easy for him or us to recognize because our human minds have a built-in disposition toward illusion – the illusion that reality must be exactly the way we experience it. The irony is that many of the people who proceed in this irrational way think of themselves as following strictly along the pathways of reason.","author":"Dinesh D'Souza","tags":["empiricism","faith","reason"],"id":31734,"author_id":"Dinesh+D%27Souza"},{"text":"Four Characters in Consciousness—How does it go on? We notice immediately four important characters in the process, of which it shall be the duty of the present chapter to treat in a general way:1) Every 'state' tends to be part of a personal consciousness. 2) Within each personal consciousness states are always changing. 3) Each personal consciousness is sensibly continuous.4) It is interested in some parts of its object to the exclusion of others, and welcomes or rejects—chooses from among them, in a word—all the while.","author":"William James","tags":["consciousness","empiricism"],"id":47503,"author_id":"William+James"},{"text":"Human intellectual progress, such as it has been, results from our long struggle to see things 'as they are,' or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions. Thunder is not a tantrum in the sky, disease is not a divine punishment, and not every death or accident results from witchcraft. What we call the Enlightenment and hold on to only tenuously, by our fingernails, is the slow-dawning understanding that the world is unfolding according to its own inner algorithms of cause and effect, probability and chance, without any regard for human feelings.","author":"Barbara Ehrenreich","tags":["empiricism","enlightenment"],"id":94364,"author_id":"Barbara+Ehrenreich"},{"text":"Reasonableness is a matter of degree. Beliefs can be very reasonable (Japan exists), fairly reasonable (quarks exist), not unreasonable (there's intelligent life on other planets) or downright unreasonable (fairies exist).There's a scale of reasonableness, if you like, with very reasonable beliefs near the top and deeply unreasonable ones towards the bottom. Notice a belief can be very high up the scale, yet still be open to some doubt. And even when a belief is low down, we can still acknowledge the remote possibility it might be true.How reasonable is the belief that God exists? Atheists typically think it very unreasonable. Very low on the scale. But most religious people say it is at least not unreasonable (have you ever met a Christian who said 'Hey, belief in God is no more reasonable than belief in fairies, but I believe it anyway!'?) They think their belief is at least halfway up the scale of reasonableness.Now, that their belief is downright unreasonable might, in fact, be established empirically. If it turned out that not only is there no good evidence of an all-powerful, all-good God, there's also overwhelming evidence against (from millions of years of unimaginable and pointless animal suffering, including several mass extinctions - to thousands of children being crushed to death or buried alive in Pakistan earthquake, etc. Etc. Etc.) then it could be empirically confirmed that there's no God.Would this constitute a 'proof' that there's no God? Depends what you mean by 'proof'. Personally I think these sorts of consideration do establish beyond any reasonable doubt that there is no all-powerful all-good God. So we can, in this sense, prove there's no God.Yet all the people quoted in my last blog say you cannot 'scientifically' prove or disprove God's existence. If they mean prove beyond any doubt they are right. But then hardly anything is provable in that sense, not even the non-existence of fairies.","author":"Stephen Law","tags":["atheism","atheist","atheist-argument","beliefs","doubt","empirical","empiricism","evidence","existence","fairies","japan","omnibenevolence","omnipotence","problem-of-evil","proof","quarks","rationality","reason","science","suffering","unreasonable"],"id":164821,"author_id":"Stephen+Law"},{"text":"Praxeology is a theoretical and systematic, not a historical, science. Its scope is human action as such, irrespective of all environmental, accidental, and individual circumstances of the concrete acts. Its cognition is purely formal and general without reference to the material content and the particular features of the actual case. It aims at knowledge valid for all instances in which the conditions exactly correspond to those implied in its assumptions and inferences. Its statements and propositions are not derived from experience. They are, like those of logic and mathematics, a priori. They are not subject to verification or falsification on the ground of experience and facts.","author":"Ludwig von Mises","tags":["economics","empiricism","falsification","libertarianism","pseudoscience","reality","science"],"id":177197,"author_id":"Ludwig+von+Mises"},{"text":"What sets science and the law apart from religion is that nothing is expected to be taken on faith. We're encouraged to ask whether the evidence actually supports what we're being told - or what we grew up believing - and we're allowed to ask whether we're hearing all the evidence or just some small prejudicial part of it. If our beliefs aren't supported by the evidence, then we're encouraged to alter our beliefs.","author":"Gary Taubes","tags":["belief","beliefs","confirmation-bias","empiricism","faith","law","obesity","pitfalls-of-bad-thinking","religion","science"],"id":190807,"author_id":"Gary+Taubes"},{"text":"The rationalist imagines an imbecile-free society; the empiricist and imbecile-proof one, or even better, a rationalist-proof one.","author":"Nassim Nicholas Taleb","tags":["4chan","atheism","empiricism","nerd","nerdiness","nerds","pitfalls-of-bad-thinking","rationalism","rationalists","reddit","white-male-privilege","white-privilege","wisdom","wisdom-vs-nerds"],"id":201904,"author_id":"Nassim+Nicholas+Taleb"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":26,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}