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Sir Percy Nunn
(28 Dec 1870 - 12 Dec 1944)
English educationalist who developed new methods for teaching mathematics.
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Science Quotes by Sir Percy Nunn (5 quotes)
“Science” and “Philosophy” undoubtedly refer to different provinces on the map of intellectual effort, however difficult it may be to delimitate their frontiers.
— Sir Percy Nunn
In The Aim and Achievements of Scientific Method: An Epistemological Essay (1907), 3.
Science is here conceived as a definite secular conative process which may be distinguished in and traced through the conscious life of civilisation.
— Sir Percy Nunn
Nunn rejects a merely static view of science as a stockpile of truths, and instead defines it as an active human pursuit. From The Aim and Achievements of Scientific Method: An Epistemological Essay (1907), 4.
The aim of the scientific process as it occurs in the individual is to render the Objective in its actual determinations intelligible.
— Sir Percy Nunn
Percy’s view is that Science seeks intelligibility, not mere accumulation. He uses “the Objective” as his key technical term for the experienced world, as encountered, treated as independent of the observer. From The Aim and Achievements of Scientific Method: An Epistemological Essay (1907), 142.
The words “Science” and “Philosophy” seem not unhappy examples of a distinct class of terms—terms that are recognised everywhere as indispensable and yet can find few who will accept the responsibility of giving them precise and exhaustive definitions.
— Sir Percy Nunn
Opening sentence of The Aim and Achievements of Scientific Method: An Epistemological Essay (1907), 1.
We may usefully … replace the current static conception of Science as a body of truths by a dynamic conception of it as a definite pursuit.
— Sir Percy Nunn
In The Aim and Achievements of Scientific Method: An Epistemological Essay (1907), 4.
See also:
- 28 Dec - short biography, births, deaths and events on date of Nunn's birth.
- The Aim and Achievements of Scientific Method: An Epistemological Essay, by T. Percy Nunn. - book suggestion.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
