“All things in nature become identical with the phenomena they present when submitted to the practices of our laboratories, whose problems no less than their apparatus express in turn the problems and interests of society as it is. This view may be compared with that of a criminologist maintaining that trustworthy knowledge of a human being can be obtained only by the well-tested and streamlined examining methods applied to a suspect in the hands of the metropolitan police.”

— Max Horkheimer, book Eclipse of Reason

describing the pragmatist view, p. 49.
Eclipse of Reason (1947)

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Max Horkheimer61

German philosopher and sociologist 1895–1973

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“At present, when the prevailing forms of society have become hindrances to the free expression of human powers, it is precisely the abstract branches of science, mathematics and theoretical physics, which … offer a less distorted form of knowledge than other branches of science which are interwoven with the pattern of daily life, and the practicality of which seemingly testifies to their realistic character.”

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“At present, a nonspecialist might well regard the Wiener-Kolmogorov theory of filtering and prediction [1, 2] as "classical' — in short, a field where the techniques are well established and only minor improvements and generalizations can be expected.
That this is not really so can be seen convincingly from recent results of Shinbrot [3], Stceg [4], Pugachev [5, 6], and Parzen [7]. Using a variety of methods, these investigators have solved some long-stauding problems in nonstationary filtering and prediction theory. We present here a unified account of our own independent researches during the past two years (which overlap with much of the work [3-71 just mentioned), as well as numerous new results. We, too, use time-domain methods, and obtain major improvements and generalizations of the conventional Wiener theory. In particular, our methods apply without modification to multivariate problems.”

Rudolf E. Kálmán (1930–2016) Hungarian-born American electrical engineer

Source: New results in linear filtering and prediction theory (1961), p. 95 Opening paragraphs

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