Every theory presented as a scientific concept is just that; it’s a theory that tries to explain more about the world than previous theories have done. It is open to being challenged and to being proven incorrect.
Gerald Jonas’s book about stuttering is called ‘The Disorder of Many Theories.’ Back theory seems to suffer from the same ‘Rashomon’ effect: as with almost every human problem, there is no dearth of answers and no answer.
The wise man regulates his conduct by the theories both of religion and science. But he regards these theories not as statements of ultimate fact but as art-forms.
Theories of evolution must provide for the creative acts which brought such theories into existence.
One of my theories is that men love with their eyes; women love with their ears.
The menstruation taboo is ancient, and there are so many theories about it. For some, it is fear of blood, and for some, period blood is toxic. If you read the theories about menstruation, you might even laugh.
I began my career as an economics professor but became frustrated because the economic theories I taught in the classroom didn’t have any meaning in the lives of poor people I saw all around me. I decided to turn away from the textbooks and discover the real-life economics of a poor person’s existence.
‘Orphan Black’ allows for people to have debates and theories and allegiances to different characters – to trust characters and hate other characters – but it doesn’t tell you who is good or bad or right or wrong. That’s the most exciting storytelling, in my book.
Many studies or theories by political scientists fit some subset of cases that a court decides, but literally no theory can account for all of them, particularly when it comes to studying a complex institution like the Supreme Court.
Free market economists frequently see minimum wage legislation as mere political intervention. However, there are decent economic theories which show that, under certain circumstances, minimum wages can be beneficial, as it makes workers more productive.
Conspiracy theories are good to look at and you can find yourself Googling things until 3 A.M.!
During the many centuries that magic, here on this planet, was presumed to have worked, there were at least as many theories as to how magic worked as there were cultures and religions.
Theories, for me, are just about freeing your mind. It doesn’t mean the theory is going to work like a scientific theory works. It’s about freeing your mind and making you think a different way.
I’m very interested in theories in how we exist: how people exist and how souls exist separate from their bodies or their brains.
The left has promoted some wild conspiracy theories – namely that Trump had been groomed for decades by the Russians, and then, even spent two-and-a-half years and $32 million of taxpayer dollars investigating it.
We do not talk – we bludgeon one another with facts and theories gleaned from cursory readings of newspapers, magazines and digests.
The caricature of science is that we hold tight to the theories we have, and shun challenges to them. That’s just not true. In fact, we hold our highest rewards for those scientists who can prove others wrong. And by the way, they are famous in their own lifetimes. We don’t wait until they’re dead.
The planet Mars – crimson and bright, filling our telescopes with vague intimations of almost-familiar landforms – has long formed a celestial tabula rasa on which we have inscribed our planetological theories, utopian fantasies, and fears of alien invasion or ecological ruin.
In other words, unlike some people with new theories, we will go out, we’ll go into a school and we get products and the products are evaluated, whether it’s by teachers or others. The scores are quantified and then we compare performances.
One problem with the focus on speculation is that it tends to promote the growth of the great intellectual cancer of our times: conspiracy theories.
I began my work in the ’70s, teaching at a university in Bangladesh, and these economic theories that I had learned stopped ringing true for me, as I saw the misery of people living all around me.
Any normal candidate who mocked the disabled or made crude reference to a woman’s menstrual cycle or dabbled in 9/11 conspiracy theories would be out of the race. Trump’s fans remain. And wait for more.
There’s no such thing as ‘facts of life’. Only standing theories that haven’t been disproved as of yet.
We have to challenge lies. We have to challenge falsehoods and conspiracy theories. If you don’t, they fester – unchecked and unchallenged.
Humans are pattern-seeking animals, consciously and subconsciously imposing designs and theories on to past events. We do this in both our private lives and when looking at history.
Physics has a history of synthesizing many phenomena into a few theories.
As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.
From whichever angle one looks at it, the application of racial theories remains a striking proof of the lowered demands of public opinion upon the purity of critical judgment.
How thoroughly it is ingrained in mathematical science that every real advance goes hand in hand with the invention of sharper tools and simpler methods which, at the same time, assist in understanding earlier theories and in casting aside some more complicated developments.
Goals and objectives are based on theories and foundations.
You have to be careful when you use beauty as a guide. There are many theories people didn’t think were beautiful at the time but did find beautiful later – and vice versa.
I really can’t abide conspiracy theories, because I believe that everything in the world stems from idiocy and incompetence. That’s certainly true of most of what’s happened in Russia under Putin.
Having served as California’s top elections official, I’ve been fighting back against Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ and conspiracy theories about the integrity of our elections for years.
I think philosophers can do things akin to theoretical scientists, in that, having read about empirical data, they too can think of what hypotheses and theories might account for that data. So there’s a continuity between philosophy and science in that way.
When you have a regime that would be happier in the afterlife than in this life, this is not a regime that is subject to classic theories of deterrence.
When I am talking about politics, it is not about reading a book, theories on policies, but awareness on what is our right as a citizen of a democratic country.
Today’s preoccupation with physical theories of everything takes a wrong turn from the purpose of science – to question all things relentlessly. Modern physics has become like Swift’s kingdom of Laputa, flying absurdly on an island above the earth and indifferent to what is beneath.
Evolution is among the most well-established theories in the scientific community. To doubt it sounds to biologists as absurd as denying relativity does to physicists.
Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children, and no theories.
Other psychological theories say a good deal about compensation.
The only time I commit to conspiracy theories is when something way retarded happens. Like Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone.
Theories pass. The frog remains.
Theories of history used to be supernatural: the divine ruled time; the hand of God, a special providence, lay behind the fall of each sparrow. If the present differed from the past, it was usually worse: supernatural theories of history tend to involve decline, a fall from grace, the loss of God’s favor, corruption.
Conspiracy theories feed on opacity, and that’s a longtime problem with short selling. Large long positions must be reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission in public filings, but not large short positions.
I think it’s normal that for a part of your life you have a lot of questions, and you’re interested in all possible theories.
The truly privileged theories are not the ones referring to any particular scale of size or complexity, nor the ones situated at any particular level of the predictive hierarchy, but the ones that contain the deepest explanations.
People are always asking for the latest developments in the unification of this theory with that theory, and they don’t give us a chance to tell them anything about one of the theories that we know pretty well. They always want to know things that we don’t know.
The primary difference that I have found between the system of education in India and other countries, particularly the U.S., is that they focus on problem solving and relating theories to reality around them. These two things are lacking in the education system in India.
No religious position is loyally served by refusing to consider annoying theories which may well turn out to be facts.
There’s so much to learn about acting and performance in general… I mean, acting is a very complex art, and there are a lot more theories and methods and techniques to it than I think anybody would think.
It’s getting hard to keep up with all of the news from Washington – witch hunts, conspiracy theories and Republicans tearing each other apart over who is ideologically pure and who is apostate. It’s a real set of carnival sideshows.
