Ernest Nagel Quotes on Truth
Ernest Nagel’s “The Logic of Reduction in the Sciences” (1935), the systematic chapters of The Structure of Science (1961), and the late papers on the foundations of probability give mid-twentieth-century logical empiricist philosophy of science one of its most rigorous treatments of scientific truth. The central commitments — the deductive-nomological model of explanation, the conditions for the successful inter-theoretic reduction, and the parallel analysis of the conditions under which a scientific theory is to be regarded as approximately true rather than merely empirically adequate — articulate a moderately realist alternative to the more deflationary positivist accounts of theoretical truth. The framework, drawing on the broader Vienna Circle tradition and the long Columbia analytic tradition Nagel anchored, shaped the postwar American philosophy of science and the broader debate over scientific realism, theory reduction, and the truth-conditions of theoretical assertions.
Quotes
-
Attributed to Ernest Nagel:
“Science is the systematic refinement of common knowledge.”
-
Attributed to Ernest Nagel:
“To explain is to deduce a phenomenon from general laws and initial conditions.”
-
Attributed to Ernest Nagel:
“Reduction unites the sciences without dissolving their distinctions.”
-
Attributed to Ernest Nagel:
“Probabilistic reasoning is essential to all empirical inquiry.”
-
Attributed to Ernest Nagel:
“Naturalism, properly understood, is the philosophy of the scientific intelligence.”
-
“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) -
“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