The Conduct of Inquiry Quotes

“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, The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioural Science

“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, The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioural Science

“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 we did believe it?”
― Abraham Kaplan, The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioural Science