It Started With Copernicus Quotes

“If so, then we must conclude that scientists do not understand the meaning of their own theories and must wait for historians like Kuhn to enlighten them! Such a claim appears arrogant, to say the least, and imposes a burden of proof on Kuhn and other defenders of incommensurability that they have not met. So,”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“The story of the Copernican Revolution never has been and probably never will be better told than in Thomas Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (New York: MJF Books, 1985)”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“Much of the chapter looks at and evaluates the recent book The Atheist's Guide to Reality by philosopher Alex Rosenberg (2011)”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“Although it is not as famous as Kuhn's SSR, Bas van Fraassen's book The Scientific Image (1980) has certainly had a profound effect on the philosophy of science”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“The implied premise of this passage is that life must be everlasting to be meaningful, but there is no obvious reason for thinking that. Why not draw the opposite conclusion—that the fact that life is short is our motivation for filling it with meaning? If we are keenly aware of “time's wingéd chariot,”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“Let me be explicit: It seems to me that the “is” in the above sentence should be taken as the “is” of identity. The mental event and the physical event are identical in exactly the same way that hitting a particular musical note and moving one's vocal cords in a particular way are the same event. Here I go farther than Melnyk, who tells me by private communication that he remains agnostic as to the identity of mental events and their physical realizers. For me, “realization” is best construed as an identity relation between mental-act tokens and physical-act tokens. I think that we need to see that the essentialist Cartesian concepts of “mental” and “physical” as mutually exclusive categories is an obscurantist, religiously based holdover from the seventeenth century, one that should no longer have any place in our discussions of mind”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“The “four ‘F's’” of animal behavior—fleeing, fighting, feeding, and…reproducing—all depend on acquiring information and”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“Science is objective not because scientists are just naturally more objective thinkers—or due to any other quirk of the scientific brain (including intelligence)—but because scientists acknowledge their biases, and construct methods to counteract them”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“A rational man proportions his belief to the evidence,” Hume said. The brain study cited by Shermer indicates that we too often do the opposite. We proportion our beliefs to our emotions and process the evidence as our feelings demand”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“Yet the replacement thesis faces an obvious, glaring problem. As Hilary Kornblith notes, psychology can tell us how we do arrive at our beliefs, but we can still ask, “Are the processes by which we do arrive at our beliefs the ones by which we ought to arrive at our beliefs?”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“Foundationalism sounds too good to be true, and it is. For one thing, the distinction between “basic” and “nonbasic” beliefs appears simplistic and naïve”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“I suspect that the real reason that we are not more bothered by this argument is that nobody—nobody—really takes its conclusion seriously. If you did seriously consider that we can make no reasonable predictions about the future, and so we can make no rational decision about any action, you would soon be insane and probably would be involuntarily frozen into total catatonic immobility. As for Popper's recommendations, then, I think we have to say that if this be methodology, there is madness in it.”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“Surely, only a lunatic would walk off a cliff, drink cyanide, fire a loaded gun at his head, or walk into a Texas country & western bar with a T-shirt reading “Willie Nelson Sucks”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“Aristotle and Bacon can therefore be seen respectively as the grandfather and the father of the modern branch of the philosophy of science called “confirmation theory,” that is, the study of how scientific hypotheses and theories are confirmed by evidence. Evidence clearly has a very significant bearing on the decisions of scientific communities to accept or reject certain theories, but spelling out the precise nature of that relationship is difficult”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“Whether we actually see through a microscope is a question philosopher Ian Hacking raises in one of the most acute criticisms of van Fraassen's skepticism about the reliability of instruments designed to see what the human senses cannot detect. Hacking's essay “Do We See through a Microscope”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“Susan Haack make a similar point with her crossword-puzzle analogy. She develops the analogy and offers many other insights in a book I recommend to the reader with no reservations, Defending Science—Within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“but his delightful essay “The Relativity of Wrong” is an exception. It is printed in one of the many collections of Asimov's essays, The Relativity of Wrong (New York: Kensington Books, 1988). Asimov makes the simple point—one that seems to”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“This quote is from pages 9–10 of Butterfield's The Origins of Modern Science 1300–1800, revised edition (New York: Free Press, 1957). A good discussion of the problems with Whig history is in chapter 9 of An Introduction to the Historiography of Science by Helge Kragh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“For full details on the search of scientific literature that turned up one hundred thousand articles with evolution as a key work, see J. R. Staver, “Evolution and Intelligent Design,” Science Teacher 70, no. 8 (2003): 32–35.”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“One very good introduction to the topic of scientific explanation is the chapter “Scientific Explanation” by Wesley C. Salmon in Salmon et al., Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1992).”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“Those of us who pursue science studies are the Darwins of science, showing how the exquisite beauty of facts, theories, instruments and machines can be accounted for without ever resorting to teleological principles or arguments by design”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“Sokal gave his piece a suitably portentous title: “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” The text was a farrago of ludicrous claims about the”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“Another, more recent, progenitor of postmodernism was philosopher Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998). Lyotard argues that we should reject all “metanarratives.” A “metanarrative” is any attempt to establish an absolute standard for any value or ideal—truth, rationality, goodness, or justice, for instance. Instead, we must recognize that there is an irreducible plurality of incommensurable narratives, each encompassing its own criteria for goodness, truth, and so on. Lyotard expressed these views most influentially in his work The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979).”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“To avoid confusion, let me make an important distinction: Practically all philosophers these days are fallibilists. That is, they recognize that even our best-supported theories and factual claims are fallible and may turn out to be wrong—as, indeed, they so often have in the past. But fallibilism does not entail relativism”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“The “postmodernist” label has been attached to a wide variety of writers, including the philosopher Gilles Deleuze; his frequent collaborator the psychoanalyst Felix Guattari; sociologist Jean Baudrillard; psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan; and Luce Irigaray, whose writings deal with topics in many fields. So multifarious are these various manifestations of the postmodernist spirit that I can give only a very broad and impressionistic characterization of the attitudes and outlooks that tie them together.”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“And that night of July 6, 1885, they made the first injection of the weakened microbes of hydrophobia into a human being. Then, day after day, the boy Meister went without a hitch through his fourteen injections—which were only slight pricks of the hypodermic needle into his skin…. And the boy went home to Alsace and never had a sign of that dreadful disease. (179–80)”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“Richard Dawkins explains how natural selection “designs” organisms in The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987)”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“The essay “Commensurability, Comparability, Communicability” (abbreviated here as CCC) is found in the collection of Kuhn's writings The Road since Structure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“Icon Books has a fine series called “Revolutions in Science.” These works are succinct, highly readable, and authoritative. The series includes John Henry's Moving Heaven and Earth: Copernicus and the Solar System (Duxford, Cambridge: Icon Books, 2001). Henry's book can be read in an afternoon, and, while not as detailed as Kuhn's classic, it tells the story with verve and lucidity.”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution

“then had to decide which two-to-three-hour (with luck) block of time I could spend at the DMV. Waits at the DMV are shorter in the morning, and I hate standing in long lines or sitting in uncomfortable chairs next to people with screaming babies, so I opted to go some morning. I couldn't do it Monday morning because I had papers to grade. Tuesday I had to be teaching off campus all day. Wednesday there were faculty meetings and committee meetings”
― Howard Margolis, It Started With Copernicus: How Turning the World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution