Arnold Toynbee quote: “The right method in any particular case must be largely determined by the nature of the problem.”

“The true Genius is a mind of large general powers, accidentally determined to some particular direction.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

The Life of Cowley http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/lvwal10h.htm
Lives of the English Poets (1779–81)

“In war there are none but particular cases; everything has there an individual nature; nothing ever repeats itself.
In the first place, the data of a military problem are but seldom certain; they are never final.”

Ferdinand Foch (1851–1929) French soldier and military theorist

Everything is in a constant state of change and reshaping.
Source: Precepts and Judgments (1919), p. 152

“The idea that a country's economic fortunes are largely determined by its success on world markets is a hypothesis, not a necessary truth; and as a practical, empirical matter, that hypothesis is flatly wrong. That is, it is simply not the case that the world's leading nations are to any important degree in economic competition with each other, or that any of their major economic problems can be attributed to failures to compete on world markets.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

Pop Internationalism (1996), Competitiveness: A Dangerous Obsession (1994)

“I don't see any particular problem with that.”

Jimmy Wales (1966) Wikipedia co-founder and American Internet entrepreneur

Responding to http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/2007-March/066648.html the deletion of a Wikipedia article from non-administrator view, while the article's deletion was being reviewed by the community. (27 March 2007)

“In war there are none but particular cases; everything has there an individual nature; nothing ever repeats itself.
In the first place, the data of a military problem are but seldom certain; they are never final. Everything is in a constant state of change and reshaping.”

Ferdinand Foch (1851–1929) French soldier and military theorist

Source: Precepts and Judgments (1919), p. 152

“If we are to use effectively these abstract models and this descriptive material, we must have a comparable exploration of the criteria for determining what abstract model it is best to use for particular kinds of problems, what entities in the abstract model are to be identified with what observable entities, and what features of the problem or of the circumstances have the greatest effect on the accuracy of the predictions yielded by a particular model or theory.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

"The Methodology of Positive Economics" (1953)

“A development method may be regarded as a path or a procedure by which the developer proceeds from a problem of a certain class to a solution of a certain class. In trivial cases, the method may be fully algorithmic; for example, there is an algorithmic procedure for obtaining the square root of a nonnegative number to any desired degree of accuracy.”

Michael A. Jackson (1936) British computer scientist

Michael A. Jackson. "A system development method," in: Tools and notions for program construction: An advanced course, Cambridge University Press, 1982. p. 1

“Suppose that the organism is given the problem of determining the analysis of a stimulus at a certain level of representation- e. g., the problem of determining which sequence of words a given utterance encodes. Since, in the general case, transducer outputs underdetermine perceptual analyses, we can think of the solution of such problems as involving processes of non-demonstrative inference. In particular, we can think of each input system as a computational mechanism which projects and confirms a certain class of hypotheses on the basis of a certain body of data.”

Jerry Fodor (1935–2017) American philosopher

Source: Modularity of Mind (1983), p. 126, partly cited in: Meredith Williams (2002) Wittgenstein, Mind, and Meaning: Toward a Social Conception of Mind. p. 104. Quote about the direction of information flow in perceptual and observer analysis.

“To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

“The oppressors develop a series of methods precluding any presentation of the world as a problem and showing it rather as a fixed entity, as something given--something to which people, as mere spectators, must adapt.”

Paulo Freire (1921–1997) educator and philosopher

Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970)

“The right method in any particular case must be largely determined by the nature of the problem.”

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Arnold Toynbee 20

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