“The illiterate expression ‘given data’ constantly recurs in Lange. It appears to have an irresistable attraction to mathematical economists because it doubly assures them that they know what they do not know. It seems to bewitch them into making assertions about the real world for which they have no empirical justification whatever.”

1980s and later, "Two Pages of Fiction" (1982)

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Friedrich Hayek79

Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economic… 1899–1992

Paul Ormerod book The Death of Economics

Part I, Chapter 3, The Roots of Economic Orthodoxy, p. 43
The Death of Economics (1994)

“A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself personally, both in mind and body, as irresistibly attractive to men and women. An Englishman is self-assured, as being a citizen of the best-organized state in the world, and therefore as an Englishman always knows what he should do and knows that all he does as an Englishman is undoubtedly correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets himself and other people. A Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe that anything can be known. The German's self-assurance is worst of all, stronger and more repulsive than any other, because he imagines that he knows the truth — science — which he himself has invented but which is for him the absolute truth.”

Leo Tolstoy book War and Peace

Bk. IX, ch. 10
War and Peace (1865–1867; 1869)

“If appearances are deceitful, then they do not deserve any confidence when they assert what appears to them to be true.”

Diogenes Laërtius (180–240) biographer of ancient Greek philosophers

Pyrrho, 11.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 9: Uncategorized philosophers and Skeptics

“You have questions—urgent questions—I know that. And what makes them urgent is that you have in your mind the answers you want to hear. You will be more and more angry if you do not get those answers, but some can’t be given as you would hear them, because they would not be true.”

Theodore Sturgeon book Venus Plus X

Source: Venus Plus X (1960), Section 13 (p. 40)

“But with royalty you never know. They think differently than real people. The real world never quite seems to reach them.”

Glen Cook book Soldiers Live

Source: Soldiers Live (2000), Chapter 126, “Taglios: Royal Return” (p. 720)

“The English, I now know, eat mashed fish and deviled sheep’s hearts to guarantee a bad digestion (and consequent irritability). It is their abominable cooking which has given them half the world as their Empire.”

Michael Moorcock book The City in the Autumn Stars

Source: The City in the Autumn Stars (1986), Chapter 5 (p. 245)

“Economists have uncovered the conditions necessary if Adam Smith’s results are to be achieved and where, in the real world, such conditions do not appear to be found, they have proposed changes which are designed to bring them about. It is what one finds in the textbooks. Harold Demsetz has said rightly that what this theory analyses is a system of extreme decentralisation. It has been a great intellectual achievement and it throws light on many aspects of the economic system. But it has not been by any means all gain.”

Ronald H. Coase (1910–2013) British economist and author

1990s and later, "The Institutional Structure of Production" (1992)

“With the development of the human race (and perhaps a little earlier), a new structure emerges, which we can call know-what. This consists of the structures in the nervous system which presumably map into some kind of images in the of the 'mind', which also map into structure in the 'real world', whatever that is. Know-what is very different from know-how. The fertilized egg certainly has the know-how to make whatever organism it knows how to make, but it is very doubtful that it knows what it is doing. The remarkable thing about know-what is that it creates know-how, as we see with the fantastic burgeoning of human artifacts under the influence of a science-based technology. Science, fundamentally, deals with know-what and this enormously increases know-how.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Kenneth Boulding (1984) In: Meheroo Jussawalla, Helene Ebenfield eds. Communication and information economics: new perspectives. p. vii as cited in: John Laurent (2003) Evolutionary Economics and Human Nature. p. 177
1980s

“Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

An Outline of Philosophy Ch.15 The Nature of our Knowledge of Physics (1927)
1920s
Context: Physics is mathematical not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little: it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover.

“If somebody asks them, Why, what evil does he practice or teach? they do not know, and cannot tell; but in order that they do not appear to be at a loss, they repeat the ready-made charges which are used against all philosophers about teaching things up in the clouds and under the earth, and having no gods, and making the worse appear the better cause; for they do not like to confess that their pretense of knowledge has been detected — which is the truth…”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

23d
Plato, Apology

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