A Quote by Stephen Jay Gould

Facts do not 'speak for themselves'; they are read in the light of theory.

Stephen Jay Gould

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Facts Light Read Speak Themselves Theory

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Stephen Jay Gould
American - Scientist
September 10, 1941 - May 20, 2002

The facts will speak for themselves. Credit them or not, but read!

Ralph Chaplin

Facts do not speak for themselves. They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.

Thomas Sowell

Theory is worth but little, unless it can explain its own phenomena, and it must effect this without contradicting itself; therefore, the facts are sometimes assimilated to the theory, rather than the theory to the facts.

Charles Caleb Colton

Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome.

Stephen Jay Gould

Letting the facts speak for themselves is an immoral principle when we all know that facts and figures can be selected to prove anything.

Patrick Kavanagh

Such abstraction which refuses to accept the given universe of facts as the final context of validation, such "transcending" analysis of the facts in the light of their arrested and denied possibilities, pertains to the very structure of social theory.

Herbert Marcuse

No theory ever agrees with all the facts in its domain, yet it is not always the theory that is to blame. Facts are constituted by older ideologies, and a clash between facts and theories may be proof of progress. It is also a first step in our attempt to find the principles implicit in familiar observational notions.

Paul Feyerabend

Almost all the other fellows do not look from the facts to the theory but from the theory to the facts; they cannot get out of the network of already accepted concepts; instead, comically, they only wriggle about inside.

Albert Einstein

If facts conflict with a theory, either the theory must be changed or the facts.

Baruch Spinoza

I have this theory that people in Hollywood don't read. They read 'Vanity Fair' and then consider themselves terribly well read. I think I can basically write about anybody without getting caught.

Jackie Collins

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

Michel Chossudovsky

Those who cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution, as not adequately supported by facts, seem quite to forget that their own theory it supported by no facts at all.

Herbert Spencer

The facts, if they are there, speak for themselves.

David Seabury

Theory and fact are equally strong and utterly interdependent; one has no meaning without the other. We need theory to organize and interpret facts, even to know what we can or might observe. And we need facts to validate theories and give them substance.

Stephen Jay Gould

Facts may speak for themselves.

George Washington

Dialectical thought understands the critical tension between "is" and "ought" first as an ontological condition, pertaining to the structure of Being itself. However, the recognition of this state of Being its theory intends from the beginning a concrete practice. Seen in the light of a truth which appears in them falsified or denied, the given facts themselves appear false and negative.

Herbert Marcuse

A Quote by Stephen Jay Gould

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