Stephen Jay Gould, "Brief Amici Curiae of Physicians, Scientists, and Historians of Science in Support of Petitioners", Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993).
Judgments based on scientific evidence, whether made in a laboratory or a courtroom, are undermined by a categorical refusal even to consider research or views that contradict someone’s notion of the prevailing ‘consensus’ of scientific opinion. … Automatically rejecting dissenting views that challenge the conventional wisdom is a dangerous fallacy, for almost every generally accepted view was once deemed eccentric or heretical. Perpetuating the reign of a supposed scientific orthodoxy in this way, whether in a research laboratory or in a courtroom, is profoundly inimical to the search for truth. … The quality of a scientific approach or opinion depends on the strength of its factual premises and on the depth and consistency of its reasoning, not on its appearance in a particular journal or on its popularity among other scientists.”
You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that you have got to re-learn, Winston. It needs an act of self-destruction, an effort of the will. You must humble yourself before you can become sane. … Do you remember … writing in your diary, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four”? … How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?
Whitaker Chambers, "Big Sister is Watching You", National Review (1957).
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The book's dictatorial tone is its most striking feature. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal ... resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final can only be willingly wicked. There are ways dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. from almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: "To a gas chamber-go!" The same inflexibly self-righteous stance results, too, in odd extravagances of inflection and gesture ... At first we try to tell ourselves that these are just lapses, that this mind has, somehow, mislaid the discriminating knack that most of us pray will warn us in time of the difference between what is effective and firm, and what is wildly grotesque and excessive. Soon we suspect something worse. We suspect that this mind finds, precisely in extravagance, some exalting merit; feels a surging release of power and passion precisely in smashing up the house.
The important point is that since the origin of life belongs to the category of at-least-once phenomena, time is on its side. However improbable we regard this event, or any of the steps it involves, given enough time, it will almost certainly happen at least once. And for life as we know it, with its capability for growth and reproduction, once may be enough. Time is the hero of the plot … Given so much time, the impossible becomes possible, the possible becomes probable, the probable becomes virtually certain. One only has to wait; time itself performs miracles.
It is often said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Sound advice though this may be, it does not get one very far in practice. The reason is that there is no agent called “history” which teaches unambiguous moral lessons. Study World War II and you may come away believing that nation-building works. Study Iraq and you may come away believing the opposite. In the end, the historical episodes we choose to study — and to ignore — say less about the wisdom offered by “history” and more about the lessons that we consider relevant today.
George Gilder, Microcosm (Simon & Schuster: August 1, 1989), pp. 21-2.
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It is understandable that humans resist the microcosm and even rebel against it. Quantum theory is an abstruse and difficult set of ideas. It baffles many of its leading exponents and it perplexed Albert Einstein to his grave. Defying the testimony of the human senses, the new physics is contrary to all human intuition and metaphor. In the quantum domain, all conventional analogies of physics — such as tops, springs, and billiard balls — are radically misleading. Therefore, we cannot "understand" quantum theory in the way we can comprehend classical physics. Quantum theory simply does not make sense.
All possible knowledge, then, depends on the validity of reasoning. If the feeling of certainty which we express by words like must be and therefore and since is a real perception of how things outside our own minds really ‘must’ be, well and good. But if this certainty is merely a feeling in our own minds and not a genuine insight into realities beyond them — if it merely represents the way our minds happen to work — then we can have no knowledge. Unless human reasoning is valid no science can be true.
It follows that no account of the universe can be true unless that account leaves it possible for our thinking to be a real insight. A theory which explained everything else in the whole universe but which made it impossible to believe that our thinking was valid, would be utterly out of court. For that theory would itself have been reached by thinking, and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course, be itself demolished. It would have destroyed its own credentials. It would be an argument which proved that no argument was sound — a proof that there are no such things as proofs — which is nonsense.
A worldview is meant to give a systematic explanation of those inescapable, unavoidable facts of experience accessible to all people, in all cultures, across all periods of history. In biblical terms, those facts constitute general revelation. Philosophers sometimes refer to them collectively as the life-world, or lived experience, or pre-theoretical experience. The whole point of building theoretical systems is to explain what humans know by pre-theoretical experience. That is the starting point for any philosophy. That is the data it seeks to explain. If it fails to explain the data of experience, then it has failed the test. It has been falsified.
Charles Darwin in a letter to Henry Fawcett (Darwin & Seward, 1903), cited in Plant Microevolution and Conservation in Human-influenced Ecosystems (Cambridge University Press : Nov 26, 2009), p. 12.
About 30 years ago there was much talk that geologists ought to observe and not to theorize; and I well remember someone saying that at that rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours. How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!
If you were looking for a place to assign blame for nosism — the use of the first-person plural to refer to oneself — you might start with God (“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness,” etc.) or with papal practice, or with Henry II, who is credited with having introduced the practice of English monarchs referring to themselves in the majestic plural in the 12th century; in the end, none of this is convincing. Without getting into the intricacies of theology and Hebrew grammar, for instance, it’s quite possible that God is a trinitarian, or using an intensifier to boast about His greatness in a way that seems more understandable coming from the creator of space and time than from a middle-tier magazine columnist, while popes and monarchs are not using the plural to refer to themselves alone but to themselves and God and/or the polities for which they speak, which may be arrogant, but displays a different sort of presumptuousness than that of a writer claiming to have divined the thoughts of everyone reading them. Even then, all of this is archaic: God hasn’t said anything in a long time, popes have generally passed over the “we” business since John Paul II, and even British monarchs aren’t all that likely to abuse the royal we.