“The extensive literature addressed to the definition or characterization of science is filled with inconsistent points of view and demonstrates that an adequate definition is not easy to attain. Part of the difficulty arises from the fact that the meaning of science is not fixed, but is dynamic. As science has evolved, so has its meaning. It takes on a new meaning and significance with successive ages.”

— Russell L. Ackoff

Source: 1960s, Scientific method: optimizing applied research decisions, 1962, p. 1.

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 extensive literature addressed to the definition or characterization of science is filled with inconsistent points …" by Russell L. Ackoff?

Russell L. Ackoff 70

Scientist 1919–2009

George Gaylord Simpson (1902–1984) American paleontologist

Simpson in: Elie Alexis Shneour (1966) Extraterrestrial Life: An Anthology and Bibliography. p. 269

“Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

Moralités (1932)

“Among the various paradigmatic changes in science and mathematics in this century, one such change concerns the concept of uncertainty. In science, this change has been manifested by a gradual transition from the traditional view, which insists that uncertainty is undesirable in science and should be avoided by all possible means, to an alternative view, which is tolerant of uncertainty and insists that science cannot avoid it. According to the traditional view, science should strive for certainty in all its manifestations (precision, specificity, sharpness, consistency, etc.); hence, uncertainty (imprecision, nonspecificity, vagueness, inconsistency, etc.) is regarded as unscientific. According to the alternative (or modem) view, uncertainty is considered essential to science; it is not only an unavoidable plague, but it has, in fact, a great utility.”

George Klir (1932–2016) American computer scientist

Source: Fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic (1995), p. 1.

“Science contributes moral as well as material blessings to the world. Its great moral contribution is objectivity, or the scientific point of view. This means doubting everything except facts; it means hewing to the facts, let the chips fall where they may.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "Chihuahua and Sonora: The Green Lagoons", p. 153-154.

“Science has sometimes been said to be opposed to faith, and inconsistent with it. But all science, in fact, rests on a basis of faith, for it assumes the permanence and uniformity of natural laws – a thing which can never be demonstrated.”

Tryon Edwards (1809–1894) American theologian

Source: A Dictionary of Thoughts, 1891, p. 165.

“One cannot ignore half of life for the purposes of science, and then claim that the results of science give a full and adequate picture of the meaning of life.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Religion and the Rebel (1957), p. 309
Context: One cannot ignore half of life for the purposes of science, and then claim that the results of science give a full and adequate picture of the meaning of life. All discussions of 'life' which begin with a description of man's place on a speck of matter in space, in an endless evolutionary scale, are bound to be half-measures, because they leave out most of the experiences which are important to use as human beings.

“"Science worships skepticism," I wrote, "unless skepticism is applied to science, its hypotheses, procedures, or methods. What we need are more skeptics who are not afraid to judge the claims of science with the same fine discrimination used to examine other alternate disciplines and fields of endeavor. Like The New York Times, science publishes 'all the news that's fit to print,' meaning all of the news that fits into the officially accepted view of reality. That news is already censored, and yet we're supposed to live our lives in accordance with that official definition of experience.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto (1981), p. 129

“It has been said that to appreciate what virtue and morals mean, men must live virtuous and moral lives. It is equally true, that a knowledge of the objects of science is not to be attained by any scheme of definitions, however carefully contrived. He who would know what geometry is, must venture boldly into its depths and learn to think and feel as a geometer.”

James Joseph Sylvester (1814–1897) English mathematician

J. J. Sylvester. "A Probationary Lecture on Geometry", Collected Mathematical Papers, Vol. 2 (1908), p. 9 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=miun.aas8085.0002.001;view=1up;seq=25

“The potential conflict inherent in every word, and finding expression in the fact that the use of every word is an individual embodiment of a general concept, is the focal point of semantics understood as a part of linguistics — that is as a science of the meanings of words and the history of such meanings”

Witold Doroszewski (1899–1976) Lexicographer and linguist

Witold Doroszewski, Z zagadiiien leksykografii polskiej [Selected Problems of Polish Lexicography], Warszawa 1954, p. 93; as cited in Schaff (1962;6).

“There's a reason for poetry… Poetry is a very nonlinear use of language, where the meaning is more than just the sum of the parts. And science requires that it be nothing more than the sum of the parts. And just the fact that there's stuff to explain out there that's more than the sum of the parts means that the traditional approach, just characterizing the parts and the relations, is not going to be adequate for capturing the essence of many systems that you would like to be able to do. That's not to say that there isn't a way to do it in a more scientific way than poetry, but I just like the feeling that culturally there's going to be more of something like poetry in the future of science.”

Christopher Langton (1949) American computer scientist

Christopher Langton, as quoted by John Horgan, The End of Science (1996) p. 201.

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Russell L. Ackoff 70

Related quotes

Related topics