Percy Williams Bridgman Quotes

#1. The operational approach demands that we make our reports and do our thinking in the freshest terms of which we are capable, in which we strip off the sophistications of millenia of culture and report as directly as we can on what happens.

Percy Williams Bridgman

#2. The true meaning of a term is to be found by observing what a man does with it, not by what he says about it.

Percy Williams Bridgman

#3. There is no adequate defense, except stupidity, against the impact of a new idea.

Percy Williams Bridgman

#4. It is the merest truism, evident at once to unsophisticated observation, that mathematics is a human invention.

Percy Williams Bridgman

#5. In general, we mean by any concept nothing more than a set of operations; the concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations.

Percy Williams Bridgman

#6. Coincidence is what you have left over when you apply a bad theory.

Percy Williams Bridgman

#7. I can see no justification whatever for the attitude which refuses on purely a priori grounds to accept action at a distance ... Such an attitude bespeaks an unimaginativeness, a mental obtuseness and obstinacy.

Percy Williams Bridgman

#8. The scientist would maintain that knowledge in of itself is wholly good, and that there should be and are methods of dealing with misuses of knowledge by the ruffian or the bully other than by suppressing the knowledge.

Percy Williams Bridgman

#9. My point of view is that science is essentially private, whereas the almost universal counter point of view, explicitly stated in many of the articles in the Encyclopaedia, is that it must be public.

Percy Williams Bridgman

#10. Science is what scientists do, and there are as many scientific methods as there are individual scientists.

Percy Williams Bridgman

#11. Nature does not count nor do integers occur in nature. Man made them all, integers and all the rest, Kronecker to the contrary notwithstanding.

Percy Williams Bridgman

#12. If a specific question has meaning, it must be possible to find operations by which an answer may be given to it ... I believe that many of the questions asked about social and philosophical subjects will be found to be meaningless when examined from the point of view of operations.

Percy Williams Bridgman

#13. The first business of a man of science is to proclaim the truth as he finds it, and let the world adjust itself as best it can to the new knowledge.

Percy Williams Bridgman