Judgement Quotes (8 quotes)
[Decoding the human genome sequence] is the most significant undertaking that we have mounted so far in an organized way in all of science. I believe that reading our blueprints, cataloguing our own instruction book, will be judged by history as more significant than even splitting the atom or going to the moon.
Interview (23 May 1998), 'Cracking the Code to Life', Academy of Achievement web site.
[In addition to classical, literary and philosophical studies,] I devoured without much appetite the Elements of Algebra and Geometry…. From these serious and scientific pursuits I derived a maturity of judgement, a philosophic spirit, of more value than the sciences themselves…. I could extract and digest the nutritive particles of every species of litterary food.
In The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon (1896), 235. [“litterary” is sic.]
In all matters of opinion and science ... the difference between men is ... oftener found to lie in
generals than in particulars; and to be less in reality than in appearance. An explication of the
terms commonly ends the controversy, and the disputants are surprised to find that they had been
quarrelling, while at bottom they agreed in their judgement.
Dissertation IV, 'Of the Standard of Taste', Four Dissertations (1757), 204.
In practical talk, a man’s common sense means his good judgement, his freedom from eccentricity, his gumption.
In Lecture (1907/1908), 'Pragmatism and Common Sense', collected in 'Lecture 5: Pragmatism and Common Sense', Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907, 1910), 171.
Is there a due regard to be had, … for the golden tongue of wisdom, that relisheth all not by imagination but true judgement.
In 'To the Reader', The Optick Glass of Humors (1607), 10.
Prolonged commitment to mathematical exercises in economics can be damaging. It leads to the atrophy of judgement and intuition which are indispensable for real solutions and, on occasion, leads also to a habit of mind which simply excludes the mathematically inconvenient factors from consideration.
In Economics, Peace, and Laughter (1981), 41, footnote.
To be placed on the title-page of my collected works: Here it will be perceived from innumerable examples what is the use of mathematics for judgement in the natural sciences and how impossible it is to philosophise correctly without the guidance of Geometry, as the wise maxim of Plato has it.
Epigraph before title page, T. W. Körner, The Pleasures of Counting (1996).
When Galileo caused balls, the weights of which he had himself previously determined, to roll down an inclined plane; when Torricelli made the air carry a weight which he had calculated beforehand to be equal to that of a definite volume of water; or in more recent times, when Stahl changed metal into lime, and lime back into metal, by withdrawing something and then restoring it, a light broke upon all students of nature. They learned that reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own, and that it must not allow itself to be kept, as it were, in nature's leading-strings, but must itself show the way with principles of judgement based upon fixed laws, constraining nature to give answer to questions of reason's own determining. Accidental observations, made in obedience to no previously thought-out plan, can never be made to yield a necessary law, which alone reason is concerned to discover.
Critique of Pure Reason (1781), trans. Norman Kemp Smith (1929), 20.
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) -- 
