Abraham Kaplan famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

Give a small boy a hammer and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.
-- Abraham Kaplan

#Children #Humorous #Parenting
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.
-- Abraham Kaplan

#Agency #Discipline #Community
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.
-- Abraham Kaplan

#Training #Incapacity #Certain
Experience is of particulars only.
-- Abraham Kaplan
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?
-- Abraham Kaplan

#Believe #World #Logical
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.
-- Abraham Kaplan

#Needs #Might #Paradox
Mathematics is not yet capable of coping with the naÃ¯vetÃ© of the mathematician himself.
-- Abraham Kaplan

#Vets #Coping #Mathematics
A problem is something you can do something about. If you can't do something about it, then it's not a problem, it's a predicament. That means it's something that must be coped with, endured.
-- Abraham Kaplan

#Mean #Problem #Predicaments
In addition to the social pressures from the scientific community there is also at work a very human trait of individual scientist. I call it the law of the instrument , and it may be formulated as follows: Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding. It comes as no particular surprise to discover that a scientist formulates problems in a way which requires for their solution just those techniques in which he himself is especially skilled.
-- Abraham Kaplan

#Boys #Law #Giving
There is nothing more inspiring than having a mind unfold before you. Let people teach who have a calling. It is never just a job.
-- Abraham Kaplan

#Jobs #People #Mind
A philosophy which speaks, even indirectly, only to philosophers is no philosophy at all; and I think the same is true if it speaks only to scientists, or only to jurists, or priests, or any other special class.
-- Abraham Kaplan

#Philosophy #Thinking #Class
We are forever asking Nature whether it has stopped beating its wife.
-- Abraham Kaplan

#Wife #Forever #Asking

You may also like:

Aaron Wildavsky
Political Scientist
C. Wright Mills
Sociologist
Charles Edward Merriam
Political Scientist
Charles Taylor
Philosopher
David Easton
Political Scientist
Edward Bernays
Public Relations Consultant
Ernest Nagel
Philosopher
Hans Reichenbach
Philosopher
Harold Lasswell
Political Scientist
Irving Copi
Philosopher
John Rawls
Philosopher
Morris Raphael Cohen
Philosopher
Robert A. Dahl
Political scientist
Robert K. Merton
Sociologist of Science
Robert Nozick
Philosopher
Rudolf Carnap
Philosopher
Sidney Hook
Philosopher
Theodore Bikel
Actor
Walter Lippmann
Writer
Warren Weaver
Scientist