Top 40 Empirical Quotes

Realism is not a matter of any fidelity to an empirical reality, but of the discursive conventions by which and for which a sense of reality is constructed.

Economic science concerns itself primarily with theoretical and empirical generalizations about the behavior of individuals, institutions, markets, and national economies. Most academic research falls in this category.

I am unable to watch the Olympics due to the blustering jingoism that drenches the event. Has England ever been quite so foul with patriotism? The ‘dazzling royals’ have, quite naturally, hi-jacked the Olympics for their own empirical needs, and no oppositional voice is allowed in the free press.

What we can do is provide the tools, through our educational system, for people to be able to tell sense from nonsense. These tools include the scientific method, skeptical questioning, empirical evidence, verifying sources, etc.

The fact remains that many of the most creative and innovative hypotheses that are eventually verified by empirical research are born in the consulting room out of practitioners’ work with individual patients.

Being a skeptic just means being rational and empirical: thinking and seeing before believing.

It’s wrong to try and convert tribal societies. What should the empirical evidence for religion be? It should produce peaceful, strong, secure people who are right with God and right with the world. I don’t see that evidence very often.

We would be in a nasty position indeed if empirical science were the only kind of science possible.

There’s zero evidence, empirical or anecdotal, that more guns leads to less gun crime.

Illegitimacy is important for the socialisation of little girls and especially little boys. If you have large numbers of young men growing up who never see an adult male doing the ordinary things men do, then you get chaos. This is not a moral statement, it’s an empirical statement.

Empirical evidence collected and analyzed by political scientists demonstrates that judicial pensions are the most important factor in a Justice’s decision to retire, far more important than the party of the President or which political party has control of the Senate.

My politics were pretty anarchistic until 1969 when the Montreal police went on strike. Within hours, mayhem and rioting broke out and the Mounties had to be called in to restore order. It instilled in me that one’s convictions can be subjected to empirical test.

Our empirical criterion for a series of theories is that it should produce new facts. The idea of growth and the concept of empirical character are soldered into one.

As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.

While I have no empirical evidence to back this up, I bet that the number of homosexual people per thousand has not fluctuated all that much over the centuries. I do not believe the dented wisdom my father used to extol, that homosexuality was a sure sign of a civilization in decline.

There is clear empirical evidence that the response of EME financial markets to different shocks, including changes in U.S. interest rates, depends importantly on the state of economic fundamentals in the EMEs themselves.

Men act like brutes in so far as the sequences of their perceptions arise through the principle of memory only, like those empirical physicians who have mere practice without theory.

I said Donald Trump could never be elected, confidently fueled by the empirical data of professional polling, a certainty in the vital necessity of field operations, and the knowledge his own campaign team (even on the night of the election) was ratting out the shambolic train wreck his campaign had been. I was wrong.

The grand aim of all science is to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest number of hypotheses or axioms.

A healthy economics has got to have both conceptual, theoretical research and applied, empirical research.

When we make decisions based on factors other than the available empirical evidence, we are less than objective, which means we are no longer acting as scientists.

Empirical and observational data along with a healthy dash of intuition often have to be combined as business owners begin to look outward, not inward, at what solutions they can provide to their customers.

Economics make homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.

The t-shirts that declare ‘Girls Rule the World’ offer an empirical falsehood, but at least the aspiration is there.

Science is based on the possibility of objectivity, on the possibility of different people checking out for themselves the observations made by others. Without that possibility, there is no empirical principle capable of deciding between different arguments and theories.

The government of Macau, of China, has been empirical and pragmatic and has brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, a feat unequaled in the history of civilization in any country.

Historians will tell you that they deal with fact and empirical evidence. But that doesn’t really help me understand a person.

No one has the right to destroy another person’s belief by demanding empirical evidence.

In so far as such a theory is empirically correct it will also tell us what empirical facts it should be possible to observe in a given set of circumstances.

Empirical explorations ultimately change our understanding of which questions are important and fruitful and which are not.

Now obviously the propositions of the system have reference to matters of empirical fact; if they did not, they could have no claim to be called scientific.

Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.

There is no empirical evidence to suggest that ageing in humans has been modified by any means, nor is there evidence that it is even possible to measure biological age. And nothing has been demonstrated to be true when it comes to anti-ageing medicines.

Darwin based his theory on generalizations that were strictly empirical. You can go out and see that organisms do vary, that variations are inherited, and that every organism is capable of increasing its numbers in sufficiently favorable circumstances.

I think there is empirical evidence that if you look at family controlled businesses, they actually outperform in terms of results and also valuations, the broader market.

The ocean is the last frontier of human empirical knowledge; even the contours on that eighth-grader’s globe are the product of a mix of scientific measurement, inference and conjecture.

What’s nice about experiments is that they are much more closely tied to what theorists think about the world than normal empirical research. You can design your experiment to exactly ask the question you want to ask. This is not true about normal empirical research.

I always thought that life is full of stories and characters that feel like literary stories and characters. So when I started making documentaries, they weren’t humble empirical things, just following people around. I was always trying to impose a story.

Becoming an artist is not empirical; it’s not about hard work. You have to put the work in, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to make it.

I’m English enough to feel something of a gut-reaction to modernism, to continental philosophising and anything that smacks of a refusal to pay attention to the forensics: the empirical facts on the ground.