Context: There is no reason why an extraphysical general principle is necessarily to be avoided, since such principles could conceivably serve as useful working hypotheses. For the history of scientific research is full of examples in which it was very fruitful indeed to assume that certain objects or elements might be real, long before any procedures were known which would permit them to be observed directly.
“The principles of the theory of probabilities [cannot] serve to guide us in the election of… [scientific] hypotheses.”
Source: 1850s, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854), p. 375, as cited in: Lev D. Beklemishev (2000) Provability, Computability and Reflection, p. 432
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George Boole 39
English mathematician, philosopher and logician 1815–1864Related quotes
1970s-1980s, "Rationality of Self and Others in an Economic System", 1986
Arthur Beer (ed.), Vistas in Astronomy (1955) Introduction to Vol.1 https://ia600304.us.archive.org/35/items/VistasInAstronomy-Volume1/Beer-VistasInAstronomyVolume1.pdf
Source: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), Ch. XXXII : Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret, p. 841
Context: All hypotheses scientifically probable are the last gleams of the twilight of knowledge, or its last shadows. Faith begins where Reason sinks exhausted. Beyond the human Reason is the Divine Reason, to our feebleness the great Absurdity, the Infinite Absurd, which confounds us and which we believe. For the Master, the Compass of Faith is above the Square of Reason; but both rest upon the Holy Scriptures and combine to form the Blazing Star of Truth.
All eyes do not see alike. Even the visible creation is not, for all who look upon it, of one form and one color. Our brain is a book printed within and without, and the two writings are, with all men, more or less confused.
Time and Individuality (1940)
As quoted in Free Verse. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics 2nd ed (1975)
General sources
“Think of a hypothesis as a card. A theory is a house made of hypotheses.”
Attributed in Proceedings of the Twenty-fifth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (1991)
Instructions populaires sur le calcul des probability (1825) English translation by R. Beamish (1839)
Part of an unsigned foreword to Copernicus' De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, actually written by Andreas Osiander.
Misattributed