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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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"Human psychology is the most mysterious thing in the world."
"Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not."
"In our world," said Eustace, "a star is a huge ball of flaming gas."Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of."
"We in science are spoiled by the success of mathematics. Mathematics is the study of problems so simple that they have good solutions."
"Psychology is more concerned with identifying the degree of mental disorder and less with its cure!"
"A drop of water is not immortal; it can be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. If, therefore, a drop of water were to maintain that it had a quality of aqueousness which would survive its dissolution we should be inclined to be skeptical. In like manner we know that the brain is not immortal..."
Explore more quotes by Talcott Parsons
"The hypothesis may be put forward, to be tested by the s subsequent investigation, that this development has been in large part a matter of the reciprocal interaction of new factual insights and knowledge on the one hand with changes in the theoretical system on the other."
"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."
"Thus, in general, in the first instance, the direction of interest in empirical fact will be canalised by the logical 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."
"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."
"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."
"Empirical interest will be in the facts so far as they are relevant to the solution of these problems."
"In so far as such a theory is empirically correct it will also tell us what empirical facts it should be possible to observe in a given set of circumstances."
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