Abraham Kaplan Quotes

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.

The goal of moksha, of emancipation, though individual in form (like the Western quest for personal salvation), is thoroughly social in content. In a way, it goes beyond even the prevailing Western conception of moving from egoism to altruism. For the goal is not unselfishness but selflessness—a movement not from self to other, but from self to Self, in which there is no other.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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?"

Experience is of particulars only.