“Once data are ruled out as arbiters among theories, those theories become pointless, just another clever intellectual game.”

— Massimo Pigliucci

On The Problem of Consciousness, Panpsychism & More https://letter.wiki/conversation/277 February 11, 2020

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Massimo Pigliucci 2

chair of the Department of Philosophy at CUNY-Lehman College 1964

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“In 1965, I was invited to a game theory workshop at Jerusalem which lasted for three weeks and had only 17 participants, but among them all the important researchers in game theory, with few exceptions. Game theory was still a small field. We had heated discussions about Harsanyi's new theory of games with incomplete information. This was the beginning of my long cooperation with John C. Harsanyi.”

Reinhard Selten (1930–2016) German economist

"Reinhard Selten - Biographical," 1994

“If enough data points trouble the theory, the theory may be wrong. If the theory is basic, the paradigm may have to change.”

Kim Stanley Robinson book Green Mars

Source: Green Mars (1993), Chapter 8, “Social Engineering” (p. 410)

“Data always overruled theory.”

Gregory Benford (1941) Science fiction author and astrophysicist

Part 2, Chapter 10 (p. 111)
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“Science books go out of date. We throw the old one away when a newer one comes out, when we have new theories. But we don't throw away our old data; we merely interpret them differently. New theories try to account for old data (and new data) in new ways.”

Guy Consolmagno (1952) American Jesuit, Catholic Priest, research astronomer and planetary scientist at the Vatican Observatory.

[Consolmagno, Guy, Mueller, Paul, https://www.google.com/books?id=lf5vDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA16, 9780804136952, Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?: And Other Questions from the Astronomers' In-Box at the Vatican Observatory, 16, 2014, Image]

“Data don't generate theory – only researchers do that.”

Henry Mintzberg (1939) Canadian busines theorist

Source: The structuring of organizations (1979), p. 584

“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)".
Disputed

“Those creatures, therefore, which receive part of that intellectual influence, will become subject to the action of Providence in the same proportion as they are acted upon by the intellect. This theory is in accordance with reason and with the teaching of the Scripture, whilst the other theories previously mentioned either exaggerate Divine Providence of detract from it.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.17
Context: I do not ascribe to God ignorance of anything or any kind of weakness; I hold that Divine Providence is related and closely connected with the intellect, because Providence can only proceed from an intelligent being, from a being that is itself the most perfect Intellect. Those creatures, therefore, which receive part of that intellectual influence, will become subject to the action of Providence in the same proportion as they are acted upon by the intellect. This theory is in accordance with reason and with the teaching of the Scripture, whilst the other theories previously mentioned either exaggerate Divine Providence of detract from it.

“When the theory performs well you also think, “Are there parallel results in naturally occurring field data?” You look for coherence across different data sets because theories are not specific to particular data sources. Such extensions are important because theories often make specific assumptions about information and institutions which can be controlled in the laboratory, but which may not accurately represent field data generating situations. Testing theories on the domain of their assumptions is sterile unless it is part of a research program concerned with extending the domain of applications of theory to field environments”

Vernon L. Smith (1927) American economist

Source: "Theory, experiment and economics," 1989, p. 151.

“Blind commitment to a theory is not an intellectual virtue: it is an intellectual crime.
:”

Imre Lakatos (1921–1974) Hungarian mathematician, philosopher

“A theory is only as good as its assumptions. If the premises are false, the theory has no real scientific value. The only scientific criterion for judging the validity of a scientific theory is a confrontation with the data of experience.”

Maurice Allais (1911–2010) French economist; 1988 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics

L'anisotropie de l'espace. La nécessaire révision de certains postulats des théories contemporaines. Les données de l'expérience (1997), p. 591

“Once data are ruled out as arbiters among theories, those theories become pointless, just another clever intellectual game.”

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Massimo Pigliucci 2

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