Henry H. Bauer Quotes

9 Sourced Quotes

Science progresses not because scientists as a whole are passionately open-minded but because different scientists are passionately closed-minded about different things.

Henry H. Bauer
Science is uniquely distinguished from other human practices: it is the only activity in which the constraints of reality have brought to the quest for deep answers an effective consensus across all the variations that in other respects divide the human species.

Henry H. Bauer
Science may be better served when some scientists generate novel ideas while others carp at everything new than if all scientists could somehow become disinterestedly skeptical.

Henry H. Bauer
There is no good reason to discard the scientific method as an ideal; rather, there is good reason to keep it so. Myths, after all, even if not literally true, are stories that embody moral truths.

Henry H. Bauer
Studying science is excellent training for the mind, much better than the classically prescribed study of Latin. When you study science in the right way, you learn about reality therapy; and that is worth applying to other things than science.

Henry H. Bauer
Quite in general, it is not the case that, because science has changed its mind in the past, therefore it might change its mind again in any direction and by any amount.

Henry H. Bauer
That science is inescapably a human activity does not mean that it is only or just a human activity, essentially similar to all other human activities.

Henry H. Bauer
The point is that no amount of knowledge of or about science in itself causes individuals or groups to make good decisions about the many quandaries of life: humans readily subjugate their knowledge to their wishes, believing and doing what they want, all scientific facts and knowledge notwithstanding.

Henry H. Bauer
One of the things wrong with the popular, classical definition of the scientific method is the implication that solitary people can successfully do good science, for example frame hypotheses and test them. In practice, however, the people who put forward the hypotheses are not usually the same people who apply the best test to them.

Henry H. Bauer