Mary Hesse Quotes on Knowledge
Mary Hesse (1924–2016) was a leading British philosopher of science whose Models and Analogies in Science (1963) gave the most rigorous mid-century defence of the indispensable role of analogical reasoning in scientific theorizing. The "network model" of theories developed in The Structure of Scientific Inference (1974) treats scientific knowledge as a system of laws related by similarity and connection rather than as a strict deductive hierarchy, and the framework engages directly with Quinean holism, Kuhnian incommensurability, and the post-empiricist debates of the period.
Quotes
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Attributed to Mary Hesse:
“Models are essential to scientific theorizing.”
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Attributed to Mary Hesse:
“All scientific knowledge is metaphorical at the deepest level.”
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Attributed to Mary Hesse:
“Theories are not mere instruments; they are claims about the world.”
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Attributed to Mary Hesse:
“Analogy is the engine of theoretical progress.”
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Attributed to Mary Hesse:
“Inference in science is always defeasible, always open to revision.”
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“A theory in its scientific context is not a static museum piece, but is always being extended and modified to account for new phenomena.”
Mary Hesse, Models and Analogies in Science, 1966. p. 4 ; Mary Hesse is quoting here Norman Robert Campbell ' s Physics from 1920. -
“Mary Hesse, Models and Analogies in Science, 1966. p. 4 ; Mary Hesse is quoting here Norman Robert Campbell ' s Physics from 1920.”
A theory in its scientific context is not a static museum piece, but is always being extended and modified to account for new phenomena. -
“Mary B. Hesse. Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science, 1980. p. VII”
These three assumptions between them constitute a picture of science and the world somewhat as follows : there is an external world which can in principle be exhaustively described in scientific language. The scientist, as both observer and language-user, can capture the external facts of the world in prepositions that are true if they correspond to the facts and false if they do not. Science is i -
“It could plausibly be argued that far from Christian theology having hampered the study of nature for fifteen hundred years , it was Greek corruptions of biblical Christianity which had hampered it , and the attitude to nature.”
p. 40 -
“This of course has always been the method of empirical science , which has been suspicious of deductive argumentation unchecked by reference to experiment; but in a more general sense, and outside the practice of science itself, scientists have sometimes been the greatest offenders in adhering to dogmatic ideas against all the evidence , especially when they have tended to limit 'experience' to laboratory experiment.”
p 89.