Ernest Nagel Quotes on Knowledge
Ernest Nagel’s The Structure of Science (1961) gave mid-twentieth-century American philosophy of science its most systematic statement of logical empiricist epistemology. The central project is the rigorous analysis of the logical structure of scientific explanation, theory reduction, and the methodology of the social and historical sciences — with the deductive-nomological model of explanation, the conditions for the successful inter-theoretic reduction (the famous discussion of the reduction of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics), and the analysis of teleology in biology supplying its central technical contributions. The framework, developed across Nagel’s long Columbia career and his role in the broader Vienna Circle in exile, shaped the entire postwar American philosophy-of-science curriculum and supplied the principal philosophical target of the subsequent Kuhnian, Lakatosian, and historicist critiques.
Quotes
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Attributed to Ernest Nagel:
“Science is the systematic refinement of common knowledge.”
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Attributed to Ernest Nagel:
“To explain is to deduce a phenomenon from general laws and initial conditions.”
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Attributed to Ernest Nagel:
“Reduction unites the sciences without dissolving their distinctions.”
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Attributed to Ernest Nagel:
“Probabilistic reasoning is essential to all empirical inquiry.”
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Attributed to Ernest Nagel:
“Naturalism, properly understood, is the philosophy of the scientific intelligence.”
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“The way forward does not lie in amateur and comically timeless linguistic sociology which takes ‘forms of life ’ for granted (and this is what philosophy has been recently), but in the systematic study of forms of life which does not take them for granted at all. It hardly matters whether such an inquiry is called philosophy or sociology.”
The crisis in the humanities and in the mainstream of philosophy (1964), reprinted in The Devil in Modern Philosophy (1974) -
“(J. L. Austin's) admirers claim that his supreme preoccupation was truth. His work, with its sad conjunction of extraordinary cunning in presentation with very thin content, leaves rather the impression of a man who had little sense of real problems but who liked winning arguments and dominating people in the course of them, and who was well equipped to gratify his taste. He was the supreme dialec”
Poker Player (1969), reprinted in The Devil in Modern Philosophy (1974) -
“The Coming of Nationalism and Its Interpretation: The Myths of Nation and Class in Mapping the Nation”
Just as every girl should have a husband, preferably her own, so every culture must have its state, preferably its own. -
“Dr J. O. Wisdom once observed to me that he knew people who thought there was no philosophy after Hegel , and others who thought there was none before Wittgenstein ; and he saw no reason for excluding the possibility that both were right.”
Spectacles & Predicaments (1979) -
“Spectacles & Predicaments (1979)”
Dr J. O. Wisdom once observed to me that he knew people who thought there was no philosophy after Hegel , and others who thought there was none before Wittgenstein ; and he saw no reason for excluding the possibility that both were right. -
“Concepts and Community , in Relativism and the Social Sciences (1985)”
Wittgenstein 's appeal lies in the fact that he provides a strange kind of vindication of romanticism, of conceptual Gemeinschaft , of custom-based concepts rather than statute-seeking Reform, and that he does so through a very general theory of meaning, rather than from the premisses habitually used for this purpose. Because there is no unique formal notation valid for all speech, each and every -
“When knowledge is the slave of social considerations, it defines a special class; when it serves its own ends only, it no longer does so. There is of course a profound logic in this paradox : genuine knowledge is egalitarian in that it allows no privileged source, testers, messengers of Truth . It tolerates no privileged and circumscribed data. The autonomy of knowledge is a leveller.”
Plough, Sword, and Book : The Structure of Human History (1988), Ch. 5 : Codification, p. 123