And even in our time, when such giants and fathers are dead, scientific debate is a contest for the language to announce what will count as public knowledge. […] Science is our myth.

— Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, p. 108

"A wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism"

— Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. xxxv

It is not surprising, then, that they have nothing good to say to or about each other, and that when they do communicate, it is only to castigate each other’s work and point of view. (2/2)

— Thomas Szasz, The myth of mental illness, p. 144

In short, we may conclude that the psychologically minded psychiatrist and his organicist colleague, though often members of the same professional organizations, do not speak the same language and do not have the same interests. (1/2)

— Thomas Szasz, The myth of mental illness, p. 144

This is what constitutes scientific objectivity. Everyone who has learned the technique of understanding and testing scientific theories can repeat the experiment and judge for himself. (9/9)

— Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, p. 570

In order to avoid speaking at cross-purposes, scientists try to express their theories in such a form that they can be tested, i.e. refuted (or else corroborated) by such experience. (8/9)

When speaking of 'experience' I have in mind experience of a 'public' character, like observations, and experiments, as opposed to experience in the sense of more 'private' æsthetic or religious experience; and an experience is 'public' if everybody who takes the trouble can repeat it. (7/9)

They try very seriously to speak one and the same language, even if they use different mother tongues. In the natural sciences this is achieved by recognizing experience as the impartial arbiter of their controversies. (6/9)

Secondly, scientists try to avoid talking at cross-purposes. (I may remind the reader that I am speaking of the natural sciences, but a part of modern economics may be included.) (5/9)

But this will not impress his fellow-scientists and competitors; rather it challenges them: they know that the scientific attitude means criticizing everything, and they are little deterred even by authorities. (4/9)

Together they constitute what I may term the 'public character of scientific method'. First, there is something approaching free criticism. A scientist may offer his theory with the full conviction that it is unassailable. (3/9)

...'objective', but from the friendly-hostile co-operation of many scientists. Scientific objectivity can be described as the inter-subjectivity of scientific method. [...] Two aspects of the method of the natural sciences are of importance in this connection. (2/9)

ironically enough, objectivity is closely bound up with the social aspect of scientific method, with the fact that science and scientific objectivity do not (and cannot) result from the attempts of an individual scientist to be... (1/9)

— Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, p. 570

Out of these we create a world: not the real world, but our own nets in which we try to catch the real world. (7/7)

— Karl Popper, Unended Quest, p. 70

He was right to believe that knowledge was genetically or psychologically a priori, but quite wrong to suppose that any knowledge could be a priori valid.62 Our theories are our inventions; but they may be merely ill-reasoned guesses, bold conjectures, hypotheses. (6/7)

Kant, I felt, had been right when he said that it was impossible that knowledge was, as it were, a copy or impression of reality. (5/7)

We can try to replace them by something better if we have learned, with their help, where they let us down. Thus there may arise a scientific or critical phase of thinking, which is necessarily preceded by an uncritical phase. (4/7)

...at first we have to stick to our theories—without theories we cannot even begin, for we have nothing else to go by—we can, in the course of time, adopt a more critical attitude towards them. (3/7)

We do try to impose them on the world, and we can always stick to them dogmatically if we so wish, even if they are false (as are not only most religious myths, it seems, but also Newton’s theory, which is the one Kant had in mind).61 But although... (2/7)

Our theories, beginning with primitive myths and evolving into the theories of science, are indeed man-made, as Kant said. (1/7)

— Karl Popper, Unended Quest, p. 70

No science, however, can be better than its linguistic apparatus allows it to be. And the language of psychiatry (and psychoanalysis) is fundamentally unfaithful to its own subject: in it, imitating medicine comes before telling the truth.

— Thomas Szasz, The myth of mental illness, p. 31

By offering us "openness to Being" to replace "philosophical argument," Heidegger helps preserve all that was worst in the tradition which he hoped to overcome. (6/6)

— Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 55

[…] One may say of Heidegger what he himself says of Nietzsche: misled by a superficial understanding of the Platonic ideas, he tried to replace them, but instead only translated Platonism into a newer jargon. (5/6)

...Heidegger's weakness was that he could not escape the notion that philosophers' difficulties are more than just philosophers' difficulties- the notion that if philosophy goes down, so will the West. (4/6)

Which of these attitudes one adopts depends on how devoted one is to the notion of "philosophy. "... (3/6)

...developed. Heidegger hoped that a new path would open. But he thought we shall only see it open if we detach ourselves from the problems of men and are still; in that silence we may perhaps hear the word of Being. (2/6)

Dewey found what he wanted in turning away from philosophy as a distinctive activity altogether, and towards the ordinary world -the problems of men, freshly seen by discarding the distinctions which the philosophical tradition had... (1/6)

— Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 55

The notion of "intertextuality" would have no deliciously naughty thrill. (7/7)

— Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 135

In a culture in which the notion of "hard fact" -the Parmenidean notion of compulsion to truth by reality-had less of a place, the whole genre of "modernist" writing would make no sense. (6/7)

But this would, I think, be a great mistake. It would be better to see these people as using the Parmenidean tradition as a dialectical foil, in whose absence they would have nothing to say. (5/7)