Ernst Mach Quotes on Knowledge
Ernst Mach (1838–1916) developed the most rigorous version of late-nineteenth-century scientific positivism, treating the basic objects of physical knowledge as economical functional summaries of the elements of immediate experience — sensations, colours, tones, pressures — rather than as inferences to a hidden substantial reality behind them. The Analysis of Sensations (1886) and Knowledge and Error (1905) frame the epistemological doctrine of the economy of thought that the Vienna Circle would inherit, and the parallel critique of Newtonian absolute space and time supplied one of the philosophical sources of Einstein's special relativity.
Quotes
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Attributed to Ernst Mach:
“Physics is experience, arranged in economic order.”
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Attributed to Ernst Mach:
“All knowledge is for the sake of action.”
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Attributed to Ernst Mach:
“We hold a theory to be the most economical method of expressing the largest variety of facts in the simplest formulae.”
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Attributed to Ernst Mach:
“It is the goal of science to make the strangeness of the world disappear.”
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“I know of nothing more terrible than the poor creatures who have learned too much. Instead of the sound powerful judgement which would probably have grown up if they had learned nothing, their thoughts creep timidly and hypnotically after words, principles and formulae, constantly by the same paths. What they have acquired is a spider's web of thoughts too weak to furnish sure supports, but complicated enough to provide confusion.”
On the Relative Educational Value of the Classics and the Mathematico-Physical Sciences in Colleges and High Schools", an address in (16 April 1886), published in Popular Scientific Lectures (1898), as translated by Thomas J. McCormack, p. 367 -
“Personally, people know themselves very poorly.”
Contributions to the analysis of the sensations (1897), translated by Cora May Williams, published by Open Court Publishing Company, p. 4 -
“p. 197; On mathematics and counting.”
There is no problem in all mathematics that cannot be solved by direct counting. But with the present implements of mathematics many operations can be performed in a few minutes which without mathematical methods would take a lifetime. -
“Mach (1910) "Die Leitgedanken meiner naturwissenschaftlichcn Erkennenislehre und ihr Aufnahme durch die Zeitgenossen", Physikalische Zeitschrift . 1, 1910, 599-606 Eng. trans. as "The Guiding Principles of my Scientific Theory of Knowledge and its Reception by my Contemporaries", in S. Toulmin ed., Physical Reality , New York : Harper, 1970. pp.28-43. Cited in: K. Mulligan & B. Smith (1988) " Mach and Ehrenfels: Foundations of Gestalt Theory”
I see the expression of... economy clearly in the gradual reduction of the statical laws of machines to a single one, viz. , the principle of virtual work: in the replacement of Kepler 's laws by Newton 's single law... and in the [subsequent] reduction, simplification and clarification of the laws of dynamics. I see clearly the biological-economical adaptation of ideas, which takes place by the p -
“Not bodies produce sensations, but element-complexes (sensation-complexes) constitute the bodies. When the physicist considers the bodies as the permanent reality, the `elements' as the transient appearance, he does not realise that all `bodies' are only mental symbols for element-complexes (sensation-complexes)”
p. 23, as quoted in Lenin as Philosopher: A Critical Examination of the Philosophical Basis of Leninism (1948) by Anton Pannekoek, p. 33