Lecture to the Royal Aeronautical Society (1913)
“Prentice: It's a fascinating theory, sir, and cleverly put together. Does it tie in with known facts?
Rance: That need not cause us undue anxiety. Civilizations have been founded and maintained on theories which refused to obey facts.”
What the Butler Saw (1969), Act I
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Joe Orton 50
English playwright and author 1933–1967Related quotes
Source: The structure of social action (1937), p. 8
“As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.”
"The Will to Believe" p. 10 http://books.google.com/books?id=Moqh7ktHaJEC&pg=PA10
1890s, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)
“As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.”
William James, in The Will to Believe (1897)
Misattributed
New York Times interview (1911)
Source: What Is This Thing Called Science? (Third Edition; 1999), Chapter 4, Deriving theories from facts: induction, p. 41.
Ch. 1 : Experience as evidence http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/laing.htm
The Politics of Experience (1967)
Context: Even facts become fictions without adequate ways of seeing "the facts". We do not need theories so much as the experience that is the source of the theory. We are not satisfied with faith, in the sense of an implausible hypothesis irrationally held: we demand to experience the "evidence".
We can see other people's behaviour, but not their experience. This has led some people to insist that psychology has nothing to do with the other person's experience, but only with his behaviour.
The other person's behaviour is an experience of mine. My behaviour is an experience of the other. The task of social phenomenology is to relate my experience of the other's behaviour to the other's experience of my behaviour. Its study is the relation between experience and experience: its true field is inter-experience.
Youtube, Other, Reason Rally Ra Rant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isrST6wOUJA (March 28, 2012)