A Quote by Kenneth E. Boulding

The concept of a value-free science is absurd.

Kenneth E. Boulding

Quote Topics

Absurd Concept Free Science Value

Quote Author

Kenneth E. Boulding
American - Economist
January 18, 1910 - March 18, 1993

Reliable scientific knowledge is value free and has no moral or ethical value. Science tells us how the world is. ... Dangers and ethical issue arise only when science is applied as technology.

Lewis Wolpert

Theory-free science makes about as much sense as value-free politics.

Stephen Jay Gould

The problem is that censors create the concept of obscenity. By supposedly trying to protect us they form an absurd concept of what is obscene.

Catherine Breillat

I would teach the world that science is the best way to understand the world and that for any set of observations, there is only one correct explanation. Also, science is value-free, as it explains the world as it is. Ethical issues arise only when science is applied to technology - from medicine to industry.

Lewis Wolpert

To my knowledge significant progress has never been born of competition. ... In science, being 'better' than others is of little practical value. Examples of how absurd the idea of scientific competition is are abundant.

Heinrich Rohrer

Free software' is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of 'free' as in 'free speech,' not as in 'free beer'.

Richard Stallman

The belief that established science and scholarship--which have so relentlessly excluded women from their making--are "objective"and "value-free" and that feminist studies are "unscholarly," "biased," and "ideological" dies hard. Yet the fact is that all science, and all scholarship, and all art are ideological; there is no neutrality in culture!

Adrienne Rich

The concept of 'green jobs' or a 'green economy' is often attacked as the work of the Grimm Brothers by those wedded to the grim science of free-market economics.

Sharan Burrow

Value is a relative concept: the value of each action is determined by comparing it with other possible actions.

Garrett Hardin

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

Albert Camus

I know nothing of the science of astrology and I consider it to be a science, if it is a science, of doubtful value, to be severely left alone by those who have any faith in Providence.

Mahatma Gandhi

But the science of operations, as derived from mathematics more especially, is a science of itself, and has its own abstract truth and value; just as logic has its own peculiar truth and value, independently of the subjects to which we may apply its reasonings and processes.

Ada Lovelace

We must show that liberty is not merely one particular value but that it is the source and condition of most moral values. What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free. We can therefore not fully appreciate the value of freedom until we know how a society of free men as a whole differs from one in which unfreedom prevails.

Friedrich August von Hayek

I've always been literally a lover of the absurd. I think the absurd gives a new dimension to reality and even to common sense. And life, you know, on an everyday basis, is absurd, or may turn out to be absurd. There's no reality without absurdity.

Tomi Ungerer

The concept of individual rights is so prodigious a feat of political thinking that few men grasp it fully - and two hundred years have not been enough for other countries to understand it. But this is the concept to which we owe our lives - the concept which made it possible for us to bring into reality everything of value that any of us did or will achieve or experience.