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Abraham Kaplan Quotes
1918–1993 United States
Abraham Kaplan (June 11, 1918 – June 19, 1993) was a U.S. philosopher, known best for being the first philosopher to systematically examine the behavioral sciences in his book "The Conduct of Inquiry" (1964).
United States Philosophers Random Abraham Kaplan quote
8 quotes
Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.
The price of training is always a certain "trained incapacity": the more we know how to do something, the harder it is to learn to do it differently.
Experience is of particulars only.
Every discipline develops standards of professional competence to which its workers are subject... Every scientific community is a society in the small, so to speak, with its own agencies of social control.
We are caught up in a paradox, one which might be called the paradox of conceptualization. The proper concepts are needed to formulate a good theory, but we need a good theory to arrive at the proper concepts.
To get at the meaning of a statement the logical positivist asks, "What would the world be like if it were true?" The operationist asks, "What would we have to do to come to believe it?" For the pragmatist the question is, "What would we do if did believe it?"
The goal of moksha, of emancipation, though individual in form (like the Western quest for personal salvation), is thoroughly social in content. In a way, it goes beyond even the prevailing Western conception of moving from egoism to altruism. For the goal is not unselfishness but selflessness—a movement not from self to other, but from self to Self, in which there is no other.
"Some fool has put the head of this nail on the wrong end." "You idiot, it's for the opposite wall!" To be sure, if the space of physical objects allowed motions of translation only, and not also rotations. That space has such geometry is a fantasy; experience shows otherwise. It is only experience that makes this complaint and the rejoinder a dialogue of madmen.