“The generalist, is like the fox, who knows many things. Just as anthropologists learn to live in many cultures, without rifles, so do certain scientists manage to adapt comfortably to the paradigms of several disciplines. How do they do it? When questioned, these generalists always express an inner faith in the unity of science. They, too, carry a single paradigm, but it is one taken from a much higher vantage point, one from which the paradigms of the different disciplines are seen to be very much alike, though often obscured by special language.”

Source: Introduction to General Systems Thinking, 1975, p. 34; Quote in: Franz Pichler, Roberto Moreno Diaz (1993. Computer Aided Systems Theory. p. 134

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The generalist, is like the fox, who knows many things. Just as anthropologists learn to live in many cultures, without…" by Gerald M. Weinberg?
Gerald M. Weinberg photo
Gerald M. Weinberg 22
American computer scientist 1933–2018

Related quotes

“A mature science is governed by a single paradigm.”

Source: What Is This Thing Called Science? (Third Edition; 1999), Chapter 8, Theories as structures I: Kuhn's paradigms, p. 109.

Thomas Kuhn photo
Tsitsi Dangarembga photo

“I realize that creative women often do not fit easily into certain paradigms. I think to myself, Then where do they go? Where do they go? Because I feel that these women have so much to contribute, that they just see things in a different way. Every society has people like that and marginalizes them in some way. So it’s a very difficult situation.”

Tsitsi Dangarembga (1959) Zimbabwean author and filmmaker

On the difficulties of being a creative woman in “An Interview with Tsitsi Dangarembga: An excerpt” https://brickmag.com/an-interview-with-tsitsi-dangarembga/ in Brick Magazine (December 2012)

“Not only because you can't understand quantum physics without this new metaphysics but also because the new paradigm resolves many other paradoxes of the old paradigm and explains much anomalous data.”

Amit Goswami (1936) American physicist

Interview with Suzie Daggett at Insight: Healthy Living (July 2006).
Context: Mystics, contrary to religionists, are always saying that reality is not two things — God and the world — but one thing, consciousness. It is a monistic view of reality based on consciousness that mystics claim to directly intuit. The problem with science has always been that most scientists believe that science must be done within a different monistic framework, one based on the primacy of matter. And then, quantum physics showed us that we must change that myopic prejudice of scientists, otherwise we cannot comprehend quantum physics. So now we have science within consciousness, a new paradigm of science based on the primacy of consciousness that is gradually replacing the old materialist science. Why? Not only because you can't understand quantum physics without this new metaphysics but also because the new paradigm resolves many other paradoxes of the old paradigm and explains much anomalous data.

Sheldon Pollock photo

“How, concretely, does one do Indology beyond the Raj and Auschwitz in a world of pretty well tattered scholarly paradigms?”

Sheldon Pollock (1948) American linguist

(Pollock 1993:114), quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2018). Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins.

Thomas Kuhn photo

Related topics