“It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data.”
Source: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”
Source: Sherlock Holmes
Last update June 3, 2021.
History
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Do you have more details about the quote "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead…" by Arthur Conan Doyle?
Arthur Conan Doyle 166
Scottish physician and author 1859–1930Related quotes
Edward Witten
(1951) American theoretical physicist
as quoted by John Horgan, The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (1996)
Michel Chossudovsky
(1946) Canadian economist
"applied economics"
Source: The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order - Second Edition - (2003), Chapter 2, Global Falsehoods, p. 27
“Theories without facts may be barren, but facts without theories are meaningless.”
Kenneth E. Boulding
(1910–1993) British-American economist
Attributed to Kenneth Boulding in: Association of American Colleges (1955) Liberal education. Vol. 41, p. 430
1950s
"One of the Family", p. 369
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)
Willis Lamb
(1913–2008) American Physicist
relating his experimental confirmation of the fine structure spectrum of hydrogen, as reported by [Jagdish Mehra, The historical development of quantum theory, Springer, 2001, 0387950869, 1037]
David Gross
(1941) American particle physicist and string theorist
"Einstein and the Search for Unification", p. 10 https://books.google.com/books?id=rEaUIxukvy4C&pg=PA10, in The legacy of Albert Einstein: a collection of essays in celebration of the year of physics (2007)
Source: What Is This Thing Called Science? (Third Edition; 1999), Chapter 4, Deriving theories from facts: induction, p. 41.
“If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts.”
Albert Einstein
(1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity
The earliest published attribution of this quote to Einstein found on Google Books is the 1991 book The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis by Raj Jain (p. 507), but no source to Einstein's original writings is given and the quote itself is older; for example New Guard: Volume 5, Issue 3 from 1961 says on p. 312 http://books.google.com/books?id=5BbZAAAAMAAJ&q=%22fit+the+theory%22#search_anchor "Someone once said that if the facts do not fit the theory, then the facts must be changed", while Product engineering: Volume 29, Issues 9-12 from 1958 gives the slight variant on p. 9 "There is an age-old adage, 'If the facts don't fit the theory, change the theory.' But too often it's easier to keep the theory and change the facts." These quotes are themselves probably variants of an even earlier saying which used the phrasing "so much the worse for the facts", many examples of which can be seen in this search http://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=bks&q=facts+fit+%22so+much+the+worse+for+the+facts%22&tbs=,cdr:1,cd_max:Dec%2031_2%201950&num=10; for example, the 1851 American Whig Review, Volumes 13-14 says on p. 488 http://books.google.com/books?id=910CAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA488#v=onepage&q&f=false "However, Mr. Newhall may possibly have been of that casuist's opinion, who, when told that the facts of the matter did not bear out his hypothesis, said 'So much the worse for the facts.'" The German idealist philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte circa 1800 did say "If theory conflicts with the facts, so much the worse for the facts." The Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs in his "Tactics and Ethics" (1923) echoed the same quotation.
Misattributed
