“[…]the simple-minded positivism that believes it has found a firm ground of certainty if it only excludes all mental phenomena from consideration and holds fast to observable facts.”

— Hannah Arendt , book The Life of the Mind

Source: The Life of the Mind (1971/1978), p. 39.

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Hannah Arendt 85

Jewish-American political theorist 1906–1975

Alan Chalmers book What Is This Thing Called Science?

Source: What Is This Thing Called Science? (Third Edition; 1999), Chapter 1, Science as knowledge derived form the facts of experience, p. 3.

“Seeing our common-sense conceptual framework for mental phenomena as a theory brings a simple and unifying organization to most of the major topics in the philosophy of mind.”

Paul Churchland (1942) Canadian philosopher

Source: "Eliminative materialism and the propositional attitudes," 1981, p. 68: About "Why folk Psychology is a theory."

“I pass with relief from the tossing sea of Cause and Theory to the firm ground of Result and Fact.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Story of the Malakand Field Force

Early career years (1898–1929)
Source: The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War (1898), Chapter III.

“Mind is the very element in and through which we live, yet it is what is most elusive and mysterious. Bare Attention, however, by first attending patiently to the basic facts of the mental processes, is capable of shedding light on mind’s mysterious darkness, and of obtaining a firm hold on its elusive flow.”

Nyanaponika Thera (1901–1994) German Buddhist monk

Source: The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1965), p. 34

“A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent, unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty, until found effective.”

Edward Teller (1908–2003) Hungarian-American nuclear physicist

Conversations on the Dark Secrets of Physics (1991) by Edward Teller, Wendy Teller and Wilson Talley, Ch. 5, p. 69 footnote

“Each metaphysician has his own system, which to a large extent excludes that of his predecessors and colleagues. Hence... metaphysics are built either on air or on quicksands—either they start from no foundation in facts at all, or the superstructure has been raised before a basis has been found in the accurate classification facts.”

Karl Pearson book The Grammar of Science

Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)

“From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.”

Tom Stoppard (1937) British playwright

From principles is derived probability, but truth is obtained only from facts. - Jesse Olney (1798 - 1872), The National Preceptor (Goodwin, 1830), Lesson LXXXV: "Select Sentences," rule # 19 (p. 171).
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