Empirical Quotes

Empirical explorations ultimately change our understanding of which questions are important and fruitful and which are not.

Illegitimacy is important for the socialisation of little girls and especially little boys. If you have large numbers of young men growing up who never see an adult male doing the ordinary things men do, then you get chaos. This is not a moral statement, it’s an empirical statement.

That is, a system starts with a group of interrelated propositions which involve reference to empirical observations within the logical framework of the propositions in question.

The fact remains that many of the most creative and innovative hypotheses that are eventually verified by empirical research are born in the consulting room out of practitioners’ work with individual patients.

There is clear empirical evidence that the response of EME financial markets to different shocks, including changes in U.S. interest rates, depends importantly on the state of economic fundamentals in the EMEs themselves.

Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.

I’m English enough to feel something of a gut-reaction to modernism, to continental philosophising and anything that smacks of a refusal to pay attention to the forensics: the empirical facts on the ground.

We would be in a nasty position indeed if empirical science were the only kind of science possible.

It should simply be an empirical matter whether the climate is changing or not and whether we’re responsible. But the various sides of the debate have now become so tribal that it’s no longer a matter of changing our views as more information comes in.

Thus, in general, in the first instance, the direction of interest in empirical fact will be canalised by the logical structure of the theoretical system.

When we make decisions based on factors other than the available empirical evidence, we are less than objective, which means we are no longer acting as scientists.

Empirical debunking cannot reach the deepest fear of the reactionary mind, which is that the state – that devouring leviathan – will soon swallow up all traces of human volition and dignity. The conclusion is based on conservative moral convictions that reason can’t shake.

Becoming an artist is not empirical; it’s not about hard work. You have to put the work in, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to make it.

Science is based on the possibility of objectivity, on the possibility of different people checking out for themselves the observations made by others. Without that possibility, there is no empirical principle capable of deciding between different arguments and theories.

Being a skeptic just means being rational and empirical: thinking and seeing before believing.

It is that of increasing knowledge of empirical fact, intimately combined with changing interpretations of this body of fact – hence changing general statements about it – and, not least, a changing a structure of the theoretical system.

Philip Kitcher thinks that mathematics is surprisingly like empirical science. Few mathematicians would agree; philosophers too, from Socrates on, have held the opposite opinion.

Early in my career, I was disappointed that psychoanalysis was not becoming more empirical, was not becoming more scientific. It was primarily concerned with individual patients. It wasn’t trying to collect data from large groups of people who have been analyzed.

Science is empirical, all about physical senses that tell us about the world. But physical senses are not the only senses we have. Nobody has ever seen a thought. Nobody has ever seen a feeling. And yet thoughts and feelings are where we live our lives most immediately, and science cannot connect with that.

I think philosophers can do things akin to theoretical scientists, in that, having read about empirical data, they too can think of what hypotheses and theories might account for that data. So there’s a continuity between philosophy and science in that way.

In so far as such a theory is empirically correct it will also tell us what empirical facts it should be possible to observe in a given set of circumstances.

The government of Macau, of China, has been empirical and pragmatic and has brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, a feat unequaled in the history of civilization in any country.

Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage?

Men act like brutes in so far as the sequences of their perceptions arise through the principle of memory only, like those empirical physicians who have mere practice without theory.

Visit a typical science classroom and you will discover far more than empirical facts being taught. The dominant worldview among scientific intellectuals is evolutionary naturalism, which holds that humans are essentially biochemical machines.

I think there is empirical evidence that if you look at family controlled businesses, they actually outperform in terms of results and also valuations, the broader market.

While I have no empirical evidence to back this up, I bet that the number of homosexual people per thousand has not fluctuated all that much over the centuries. I do not believe the dented wisdom my father used to extol, that homosexuality was a sure sign of a civilization in decline.

I am unable to watch the Olympics due to the blustering jingoism that drenches the event. Has England ever been quite so foul with patriotism? The ‘dazzling royals’ have, quite naturally, hi-jacked the Olympics for their own empirical needs, and no oppositional voice is allowed in the free press.

The t-shirts that declare ‘Girls Rule the World’ offer an empirical falsehood, but at least the aspiration is there.

My politics were pretty anarchistic until 1969 when the Montreal police went on strike. Within hours, mayhem and rioting broke out and the Mounties had to be called in to restore order. It instilled in me that one’s convictions can be subjected to empirical test.

Our empirical criterion for a series of theories is that it should produce new facts. The idea of growth and the concept of empirical character are soldered into one.

What’s nice about experiments is that they are much more closely tied to what theorists think about the world than normal empirical research. You can design your experiment to exactly ask the question you want to ask. This is not true about normal empirical research.

I’m wary of artistic directors who say, ‘Here is my vision’, because it’s empirical. Basically it’s about who you work with and what plays you put on; the vision comes out of that.

Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.

Empirical interest will be in the facts so far as they are relevant to the solution of these problems.

Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology.

Now obviously the propositions of the system have reference to matters of empirical fact; if they did not, they could have no claim to be called scientific.

Morality arose largely as an empirical defence of the individual and society. Ever since intelligent beings began to be in contact, and consequently in friction, they have felt the need to guard themselves against each other’s encroachments.

No one has the right to destroy another person’s belief by demanding empirical evidence.

Economic science concerns itself primarily with theoretical and empirical generalizations about the behavior of individuals, institutions, markets, and national economies. Most academic research falls in this category.