Edwin Boring: Quotes about science

Edwin Boring was American psychologist. Explore interesting quotes on science.
Edwin Boring: 40   quotes 0   likes

“The gift of professional maturity comes only to the psychologist who knows the history of his science.”

Edwin Boring

Cited in: David Ballin Klein (1977) The Unconscious: Invention Or Discovery? p. iii;
A History of Experimental Psychology, 1929

History , Science

“The historical approach to understanding of scientific fact is what differentiates the scholar in science from the mere experimenter.”

Edwin Boring

Source: Psychologist at large, 1961, p. 3

Understanding , Science

“Broca’s famous observation was in itself very simple. There had in 1831 been admitted at the Bicêtre, an insane hospital near Paris, a man whose sole defect seemed to be that he could not talk. He communicated intelligently by signs and was otherwise mentally normal. He remained at the Bicêtre for thirty years with this defect and on April 12, 1861, was put under the care of Broca, the surgeon, because of a gangrenous infection. Broca for five days subjected him to a careful examination, in which he satisfied himself that the musculature of the larynx and articulatory organs was not hindered in normal movements, that there was no other paralysis that could interfere with speech, and that the man was intelligent enough to speak. On April 17 the patient— fortunately, it must have seemed, for science—died; and within a day Broca had performed an autopsy, discovering a lesion in the third frontal convolution of the left cerebral hemisphere, and had presented the brain in alcohol to the Société d’Anthropologie.”

Edwin Boring

Source: A History of Experimental Psychology, 1929, p. 71: As cited in: Hergenhahn (2008;248)

Alcohol , Intelligence , Communication , Science

“Scientific truth, like puristic truth, must come about by controversy. Personally this view is abhorrent to me. It seems to mean that scientific truth must transcend the individual, that the best hope of science lies in its greatest minds being often brilliantly and determinedly wrong, but in opposition, with some third, eclectically minded, middle-of-the-road nonentity seizing the prize while the great fight for it, running off with it, and sticking it into a textbook for sophomores written from no point of view and in defense of nothing whatsoever. I hate this view, for it is not dramatic and it is not fair; and yet I believe that it is the verdict of the history of science.”

Edwin Boring

Source: History, psychology, and science. 1963, p. 68; Paper "The Psychology of Coutroversy", (1929)

Hate , Truth , Hope , History