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The best and safest way of philosophising seems to be, first to enquire diligently into the properties of things, and to establish those properties by experiences [experiments] and then to proceed slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them. for hypotheses should be employed only in explaining the properties of things, but not assumed in determining them; unless so far as they may furnish experiments.
-Isaac Newton
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The Best And Safest Way Of Philosophising

Isaac Newton
The best and safest way of philosophising seems to be, first to enquire diligently into the properties of things, and to establish those properties by experiences [experiments] and then to proceed slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them. for hypotheses should be employed only in explaining the properties of things, but not assumed in determining them; unless so far as they may furnish experiments.
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Philosophy Science Experience

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Given any rule, however "fundamental" or "necessary" for science, there are always circumstances when it is advisable not only to ignore the rule, but to adopt its opposite. for example, there are circumstances when it is advisable to introduce, elaborate and defend ad hoc hypotheses, or hypotheses which contradict well-established and generally accepted experimental results, or hypotheses whose content is smaller than the content of the existing and empirically adequate alternative, or self-inconsistent hypotheses, and so on.
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The growth of our knowledge is the result of a process closely resembling what darwin called 'natural selection'; that is, the natural selection of hypotheses: our knowledge consists, at every moment, of those hypotheses which have shown their (comparative) fitness by surviving so far in their struggle for existence, a competitive struggle which eliminates those hypotheses which are unfit.
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Almost everyone... seems to be quite sure that the differences between the methodologies of history and of the natural sciences are vast. for, we are assured, it is well known that in the natural sciences we start from observation and proceed by induction to theory. and is it not obvious that in history we proceed very differently? yes, i agree that we proceed very differently. but we do so in the natural sciences as well.
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I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and i frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called a hypothesis, and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy.
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One of the ways of stopping science would be only to do experiments in the region where you know the law. but experimenters search most diligently, and with the greatest effort, in exactly those places where it seems most likely that we can prove our theories wrong. in other words, we are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.
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America is so special, everybody wants to go there. and there's not a thought given to how it got special. it's just assumed it was made that way, i guess. it's just assumed that it's just there. and it's also assumed that it's always going to be there. call it the golden goose or whatever you want but everybody saying that we have no right to keep anybody out because nobody kept us out, we all had to get here. nobody here now actually started here. of course, that's no longer true.
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