Abraham Kaplan Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

The price of training is always a certain "trained incapacity": the more we know how to do something, the harder it is to learn to do it differently.

Abraham Kaplan
To get at the meaning of a statement the logical positivist asks, "What would the world be like if it were true?" The operationist asks, "What would we have to do to come to believe it?" For the pragmatist the question is, "What would we do if did believe it?"

Abraham Kaplan
In addition to the social pressures from the scientific community there is also at work a very human trait of individual scientist. I call it the law of the instrument, and it may be formulated as follows: Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding. It comes as no particular surprise to discover that a scientist formulates problems in a way which requires for their solution just those techniques in which he himself is especially skilled.

Abraham Kaplan
We are caught up in a paradox, one which might be called the paradox of conceptualization. The proper concepts are needed to formulate a good theory, but we need a good theory to arrive at the proper concepts.

Abraham Kaplan
Every discipline develops standards of professional competence to which its workers are subject... Every scientific community is a society in the small, so to speak, with its own agencies of social control.

Abraham Kaplan
"Some fool has put the head of this nail on the wrong end." "You idiot, it's for the opposite wall!" To be sure, if the space of physical objects allowed motions of translation only, and not also rotations. That space has such geometry is a fantasy; experience shows otherwise. It is only experience that makes this complaint and the rejoinder a dialogue of madmen.

Abraham Kaplan
Mathematics is not yet capable of coping with the naivete of the mathematician himself.

Abraham Kaplan
If we can predict successfully on the basis of a certain explanation, we have good reason, and perhaps the best of reason, for accepting the explanation.

Abraham Kaplan
Proleptically [anticipatively], I would say that whether we can measure something depends, not on that thing, but on how we have conceptualized it, on our knowledge of it, above all on the skill and ingenuity which we can bring to bear on the process of measurement which our inquiry can put to use.

Abraham Kaplan
The words "model" and "mode" have, indeed, the same root; today, model building is science a la mode.

Abraham Kaplan
Laws serve to explain events and theories to explain laws; a good law allows us to predict new facts and a good theory new laws. At any rate, the success of prediction... adds credibility to the beliefs which led to it, and a corresponding force to the explanations they provide.

Abraham Kaplan
Statistical techniques are tools of thought, and not substitutes for thought.

Abraham Kaplan