Só mesmo naquela de chatear o pessoal e tentar causar alguma discussão

Estes pensamentos não são meus, mas concordo com eles quase na íntegra. No futuro irei citar todo o texto e fazer alguns comentários, mas por agora ficam com isto:

"In fact, if you look at the history of science seriously, in the seventeenth century there was a major challenge to the existing scientific approach. I mean, it was assumed by Galileo and Descartes and classical scientists that the world would be intelligible to us, that all we had to do was think about it and it would be intelligible. Newton disproved them. He showed that the world is not intelligible to us. Newton demonstrated that there are no machines, that there’s nothing mechanical in the sense in which it was assumed that the world was mechanical. He didn’t believe it — in fact he felt his work was an absurdity — but he proved it, and he spent the rest of his life trying to disprove it. And other scientists did later on. I mean, it’s often said that Newton got rid of the ghost in the machine, but it’s quite the opposite. Newton exorcised the machine. He left the ghost.
And by the time that sank in, which was quite some time, it just changed the conception of science. Instead of trying to show that the world is intelligible to us, we recognized that it’s not intelligible to us. But we just say, ‘Well, you know, unfortunately that’s the way it works. I can’t understand it but that’s the way it works.’ And then the aim of science is reduced from trying to show that the world is intelligible to us, which it is not, to trying to show that there are theories of the world which are intelligible to us. That’s what science is: It’s the study of intelligible theories which give an explanation of some aspect of reality."

"When people talk about what science tells you about human affairs, it’s mostly a joke. Incidentally, I don’t think religion tells you very much either. So it’s not that science is displacing religion, there’s nothing to displace."

"People have a right to believe whatever they like, including irrational beliefs. In fact, we all have irrational beliefs, in a certain sense. We have to. If I walk out the door, I have an irrational belief that the floor is there. Can I prove it? You know if I’m paying attention to it I see that it’s there, but I can’t prove it. In fact, if you’re a scientist, you don’t prove anything. The sciences don’t have proofs, what they have is surmises. There’s a lot of nonsense these days about evolution being just a theory. Everything’s just a theory, including classical physics! If you want proofs you go to arithmetic; in arithmetic you can prove things. But you stipulate the axioms. But in the sciences you’re trying to discover things, and the notion of proof doesn’t exist."


"...we must recognize how very limited in both scope and precision a paradigm can be at the time of its first appearance. Paradigms gain their status because they are more successful than  their  competitors in  solving a few problems that the group of practitioners has come to recognize as acute. To be more successful  is not, however, to be either completely successful with a single problem or notably successful with any large number. The success of a paradigm-whether Aristotle's analysis of motion, Ptolemy's computations of planetary position, Lavoisiert application of  the balance, or  Maxwell's mathematization of  the electromagnetic field - is  at the start largely a promise of success discoverable in selected and still incomplete examples. Normal science consists  in the actualization of that promise, an actualization achieved by extending the knowledge of  those facts that  the paradigm displays as particularly revealing, by increasing the extent of the match between those facts and the paradigm's predictions, and by further articulation of the paradigm itself.

Few people who are not  actually practitioners of  a mature science realize how much mop-up work of this sort a paradigm leaves to be done or quite how fascinating such work can provein the execution."

"Nor do scientists normally aim to invent new theories, and they are often intolerant of those invented by others. Instead, normal-scientific  research is directed to  the articulation  of  those phenomena and theories that  the paradigm already supplies."

Umas frases são de uma entrevista conjunta a um grupo de três cientistas e outras são do clássico "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions".