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"From all this it follows what the general character of the problem of the development of a body of scientific knowledge is, in so far as it depends on elements internal to science itself."
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"You squeeze the eyedropper, and a drop of pond water drips out onto the microscope stage. You look at the projected image. The drop is full of life - strange beings swimming, crawling, tumbling; high dramas of pursuit and escape, triumph and tragedy. This is a world populated by beings far more exotic than in any science fiction movie..."

"What is salvation for humans? The answer is simple: Salvation is to perpetuate our existence via science!"

"Statistics, likelihoods, and probabilities mean everything to men, nothing to God."
Explore more quotes by Talcott Parsons


"Among those who are satisfactory in this respect it is desirable to have represented as great a diversity of intellectual tradition, social milieu and personal character as possible."


"Of course there may well be particular reasons why Spencer rather than others is dead, as there were also particular reasons why he rather than others made such a stir."


"That is, a system starts with a group of interrelated propositions which involve reference to empirical observations within the logical framework of the propositions in question."


"The implications of these considerations justify the statement that all empirically verifiable knowledge even the commonsense knowledge of everyday life - involves implicitly, if not explicitly, systematic theory in this sense."


"A theoretical system does not merely state facts which have been observed and that logically deducible relations to other facts which have also been observed."


"But the fact a person denies that he is theorising is no reason for taking him at his word and failing to investigate what implicit theory is involved in his statements."


"The importance of certain problems concerning the facts will be inherent in the structure of the system."


"It is that of increasing knowledge of empirical fact, intimately combined with changing interpretations of this body of fact - hence changing general statements about it - and, not least, a changing a structure of the theoretical system."


"It is probably safe to say that all the changes of factual knowledge which have led to the relativity theory, resulting in a very great theoretical development, are completely trivial from any point of view except their relevance to the structure of a theoretical system."
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