The results of Socrates' martyrdom and Plato's unexcelled prose that followed are nothing less than the whole world of Western man as we know it. If … - Robert M. Pirsig

"At first he found it amusing. He coined a law intended to have the humor of a Parkinson’s law that "The number of rational hypotheses
that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite." It pleased him never to run out of hypotheses. Even when his experimental work
seemed dead-end in every conceivable way, he knew that if he just sat down and muddled about it long enough, sure enough, another
hypothesis would come along. And it always did. It was only months after he had coined the law that he began to have some doubts
about the humor or benefits of it.
If true, that law is not a minor flaw in scientific reasoning. The law is completely nihilistic. It is a catastrophic logical disproof of the
general validity of all scientific method!
If the purpose of scientific method is to select from among a multitude of hypotheses, and if the number of hypotheses grows faster
than experimental method can handle, then it is clear that all hypotheses can never be tested. If all hypotheses cannot be tested, then the
results of any experiment are inconclusive and the entire scientific method falls short of its goal of establishing proven knowledge"

You can’t really think hard about what you’re doing and listen to the radio at the same time. Maybe they didn’t see their job as having anything to do with hard thought, just wrench twiddling.

Dialectic generally means "of the nature of the dialogue," which is a conversation between two persons. Nowadays it means logical argumentation. It involves a technique of cross-examination, by which truth is arrived at.