“Experience by itself teaches nothing…Without theory, experience has no meaning. Without theory, one has no questions to ask. Hence without theory there is no learning.”

The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education (1993)

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W. Edwards Deming photo
W. Edwards Deming 33
American professor, author, and consultant 1900–1993

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“Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

This is declared to be "an old Kantian maxim" in General Systems Vol. 7-8 (1962)‎, p. 11, by the Society for the Advancement of General Systems Theory, but may simply be a paraphrase or summation of Kantian ideas.
Kant's treatment of the transcendental logic in the First Critique contains a portion, of which this quote may be an ambiguously worded paraphrase. Kant, claiming that both reason and the senses are essential to the formation of our understanding of the world, writes: "Without sensibility no object would be given to us, and without understanding none would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind (A51/B75)".
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“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.”

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".
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“Mainstream economics scholarship produces theory without facts ("pure theory") and facts without theory”

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“Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.”

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Augustin-Jean Fresnel (1788–1827) French engineer and physicist

Ce n'est point l'observation mais la théorie qui m'a conduit à ce résultat que l'expérience a ensuite confirmé.
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Luis A. Ferré quote: “My theory was that a city without a newspaper is a city without a soul.”
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