🦋Science: On Myths (Quotes)

"Science, in one aspect, is ordered technique; in another, it is rationalized mythology." (John D Bernal, "Science in History", 1957)

"Myth is more individual and expresses life more precisely than does science. Science works with concepts of averages which are far too general to do justice to the subjective variety of an individual life." (Carl G Jung, "Memories, Dreams, Reflections", 1963)

"The mathematicians and physics men have their mythology; they work alongside the truth, never touching it; their equations are false But the things work. Or, when gross error appears, they invent new ones; they drop the theory of waves In universal ether and imagine curved space." (Robinson Jeffers, "The Beginning and the End and Other Poems, The Great Wound", 1963) 

"Thus science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths; neither with the collection of observations, nor with the invention of experiments, but with the critical discussion of myths, and of magical techniques and practices." (Karl Popper, "Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge", 1963)

"For what are myths if not the imposing of order on phenomena that do not possess order in themselves? And all myths, however they differ from philosophical systems and scientific theories, share this with them, that they negate the principle of randomness in the world." (Stanisław Lem, "Highcastle: A Remembrance", 1965)

"A scientist can not be measured quantitatively by the number of degrees or the accumulation of information. A true scientist should have a measure of courage to correct error and seek truth - no matter how painful. The alternative is more painful. To build error upon error is to drift into dogmas, metaphysics, science fiction, and mythology." (Alexander Wilf, "Origin and Destiny of the Moral Species", 1969)

"Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth." (Sir Peter B Medawar, "Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought", 1969)

"Both the myths of religion and the laws of science, it is now becoming apparent, are not so much descriptions of facts as symbolic expressions of cosmic truths." (René J Dubos, "A God Within", 1972)

"Science never starts from scratch; it can never be described as free from assumptions; for at every instant it presupposes a horizon of expectations - yesterday’s horizon of expectations, as it were. Today’s science is built upon yesterday's science (and so it is the result of yesterday’s searchlight); and yesterday’s science, in turn, is based on the science of the day before. And the oldest scientific theories are built on pre-scientific myths, and these, in their turn, on still older expectations." (Karl R Popper, "Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach", 1972)

"[…] science is not sacrosanct. The restrictions it imposes (and there are many such restrictions though it is not easy to spell them out) are not necessary in order to have general coherent and successful views about the world. There are myths, there are the dogmas of theology, there is metaphysics, and there are many other ways of constructing a worldview. It is clear that a fruitful exchange between science and such ‘nonscientific’ world-views will be in even greater need of anarchism than is science itself. Thus, anarchism is not only possible, it is necessary both for the internal progress of science and for the development of our culture as a whole." (Paul Feyerabend, "Against Method", 1975)

"In the ultimate analysis science is born of myth and religion, all three being expressions of the ordering spirit of the human mind." (Lancelot L Whyte, "The Unconscious Before Freud", 1978)

"To try to write a grand cosmical drama leads necessarily to myth. To try to let knowledge substitute ignorance in increasingly larger regions of space and time is science." (Hannes Alfven, 1978)

"The mythology of science asserts that with many different scientists all asking their own questions and evaluating the answers independently, whatever personal bias creeps into their individual answers is canceled out when the large picture is put together." (Ruth Hubbard, "Women Look at Biology Looking at Women", 1979)

"However, for most of us, science functions like myth in that we have no personal experience in the matter. We put our trust in the scientific view given us by our culture and enshrined in its myths. If asked why leaves are green, most of us would probably mutter something about 'chlorophyll'. But unless we were specialists, we would simply be repeating the story of someone else’s experience." (Wallace B Clift, "Jung and Christianity", 1982)

"Myths and science fulfil a similar function: they both provide human beings with a representation of the world and of the forces that are supposed to govern it. They both fix the limits of what is considered as possible." (François Jacob, "The Possible and the Actual", 1982)

"The critical task of science is not complete and never will be, for it is the merest truism that we do not abandon mythologies and superstitions, but merely substitute new variants for old." (Sir Peter B Medawar, "Pluto’s Republic: Incorporating the Art of the Soluble and Induction Intuition in Scientific Thought", 1982)

"It is important that we, as working scientists, combat these myths of our profession as something superior and apart. The myths may serve us well in the short and narrow as rationale for a lobbying strategy - give us the funding and leave us alone, for we know what we’re doing and you don’t understand anyway. But science can only be harmed in the long run by its self-proclaimed separation as a priesthood guarding a sacred rite called the scientific method." (Stephen J Gould, "Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time", 1987)

"Myths are errors that result [both from] scientists bringing societal preconceptions into science and […] scientists feeding society ideas that masquerade as science." (MN Mahadeva, "From Misinterpretations to Myths", Science Teacher Vol. 56 (4), 1989)

"Today’s quarks and leptons can be viewed as metaphors of the underlying reality of nature, though metaphors that are objectively and rationally defied and are components of theories that have great predictive power. And that’s the difference between the metaphors of science and those of myth: scientific metaphors work." (Victor J Stenger, "Physics and Psychics: The Search for a World Beyond the Senses", 1990)

"The ability of a scientific theory to be refuted is the key criterion that distinguishes science from metaphysics. If a theory cannot be refuted, if there is no observation that will disprove it, then nothing can prove it - it cannot predict anything, it is a worthless myth." (Eric Lerner, "The Big Bang Never Happened", 1991)

"There is no good reason to discard the scientific method as an ideal; rather, there is good reason to keep it so. Myths, after all, even if not literally true, are stories that embody moral truths." (Henry H Bauer, "Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method", 1992)

"But our ways of learning about the world are strongly influenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking that each scientist must apply to any problem. The stereotype of a fully rational and objective ‘scientific method’, with individual scientists as logical (and interchangeable) robots, is self-serving mythology." (Stephen J Gould, "This View of Life: In the Mind of the Beholder", "Natural History", Vol. 103, No. 2, 1994)

"Mythology and science both extend the scope of human beings. Like science and technology, mythology, as we shall see, is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensely within it." (Karen Armstrong, "A Short History Of Myth", 2004)

"The truth is more magical - in the best and most exciting sense of the word - than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic: the magic of reality." (Richard Dawkins, "The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True", 2011)

"Intellectual inquiry begins with myth, religion and philosophy. Originally, philosophy (or perhaps theology or metaphysics) is the queen of the sciences, other intellectual disciplines having only a highly subservient, specialized role to play within philosophy. [...] Instead of being the queen of the sciences, overarching all other sciences, philosophy has been transformed into a highly specialized, technical, somewhat meagre enterprise, concerned not with improving our knowledge and understanding of the world - for that is the business of the empirical sciences - but rather with clarifying concepts and solving conceptual problems." (Nicholas Maxwell, "Karl Popper, Science and Enlightenment", 2017)

🏷️Knowledge Representation: On Myths (Quotes)

"One may call the world a myth, in which bodies and things are visible, but souls and minds hidden. Besides, to wish to teach the whole truth about the Gods to all produces contempt in the foolish, because they cannot understand, and lack of zeal in the good, whereas to conceal the truth by myths prevents the contempt of the foolish, and compels the good to practice philosophy." (Sallustius, "On the Gods and the Cosmos", cca. 4^th century)

"Theological myths suit philosophers, physical and psychic suit poets, mixed suit religious initiations, since every initiation aims at uniting us with the world and the Gods." (Sallustius, "On the Gods and the Cosmos", cca. 4^th century)

"Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder." (St. Thomas Aquinas)

"The myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious." (Thomas Mann, "Freud and the Future", 1937)

"A myth is, of course, not a fairy story. It is the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them." (Gilbert Ryle, "The Concept of Mind", 1949)

"Dream is personalized myth, myth is depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamics of the psyche. But in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problem and solutions shown are directly valid for all mankind." (Joseph Campbell, "The Hero with a Thousand Faces", 1949)

"Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth." (Joseph Campbell, "The Hero with a Thousand Faces", 1949) 

"Everyone has some kind of philosophy, some general worldview, which to men of other views will seem mythological." (H Richard Niebuhr, “Christ and Culture”, 1951)

"The hearer of myth, regardless of his level of culture, when he is listening to a myth, forgets, as it were, his particular situation and is projected into another world, into another universe which is no longer his poor little universe of every day […] The myths are true because they are sacred, because they tell him about sacred beings and events. Consequently, in reciting or listening to a myth, one resumes contact with the sacred and with reality, and in so doing one transcends the profane condition, the 'historical situation'. In other words one goes beyond the temporal condition and the dull self-sufficiency which is the lot of every human being simply because every human being is 'ignorant' - in the sense that he is identifying himself, and Reality, with his own particular situation. And ignorance is, first of all, this false identification of Reality with what each one of us appears to be or to possess." (Mircea Eliade, "Images and Symbols", 1952) 

"The purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction (an impossible achievement if, as it happens, the contradiction is real)." (Claude Lévi-Strauss, "Structural Anthropology", 1958)

"Myths grow like crystals, according to their own, recurrent pattern; but there must be a suitable core to start their growth." (Arthur Koestler, "The Sleep Walkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe", 1959)

"All our language is composed of brief little dreams; and the wonderful thing is that we sometimes make of them strangely accurate and marvelously reasonable thoughts. […] What should we be without the help of that which does not exist? Very little. And our unoccupied minds would languish if fables, mistaken notions, abstractions, beliefs, and monsters, hypotheses, and the so-called problems of metaphysics did not people with beings and objectless images our natural depths and darkness. Myths are the souls of our actions and our loves. We cannot act without moving towards a phantom. We can love only what we create." (Paul Valéry, "The Outlook for Intelligence", 1962)

"The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie - deliberate, contrived and dishonest - but the myth - persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." (John F Kennedy, [Commencement address] 1962)

"This whole illusion has its history in ways of thinking - in the images, models, myths, and language systems which we have used for thousands of years to make sense of the world. […] Idolatry is not the use of images, but confusing them with what they represent, and in this respect mental images and lofty abstractions can be more insidious than bronze idols." (Alan W. Watts," The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are", 1966)

"Our technology forces us to live mythically, but we continue to think fragmentarily, and on single, separate planes." (Marshall McLuhan, "The Medium is the Massage: An inventory of effects", 1967)

"A fact which is not denied but whose truths are rationalized loses its objective base. It ceases to be concrete and becomes a myth created in defense of the class of the perceiver." (Paulo Freire, "Pedagogia do oprimido" ["Pedagogy of the Oppressed"], 1968)

"Myth expresses in terms of the world - that is, of the other world or the second world - the understanding that man has of himself in relation to the foundation and the limit of his existence." (Paul Ricœur, "The Conflict of Interpretations", 1969)

"Knowledge is not a series of self-consistent theories that converges toward an ideal view; it is rather an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible (and perhaps even incommensurable) alternatives, each single theory, each fairy tale, each myth that is part of the collection forcing the others into greater articulation and all of them contributing, via this process of competition, to the development of our consciousness." (Paul K Feyerabend, "Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge", 1975)

"Symbol and myth do bring into awareness infantile, archaic dreads and similar primitive psychic content. This is their regressive aspect. But they also bring out new meaning, new forms, and disclose a reality that was literally not present before, a reality that is not merely subjective but has a second pole which is outside ourselves. This is the progressive side of symbol and myth." (Rollo May, "The Courage to Create", 1975)

"A myth is first of all a multistoreyed structure, each story being built according to an identical plan but at a different level of abstraction." (Michel Tournier, "The Wind Spirit: An Autobiography", 1977)

"Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there. Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words." (Italo Calvino, "The Literature Machine: Essays", 1980)

"Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns." (Northrop Frye, "The Great Code: The Bible and Literature", 1982)

"Myths and science fulfil a similar function: they both provide human beings with a representation of the world and of the forces that are supposed to govern it. They both fix the limits of what is considered as possible." (François Jacob, "The Possible and the Actual", 1982)

"The critical task of science is not complete and never will be, for it is the merest truism that we do not abandon mythologies and superstitions, but merely substitute new variants for old." (Sir Peter B Medawar, "Pluto’s Republic: Incorporating the Art of the Soluble and Induction Intuition in Scientific Thought", 1982)

"Myth is the system of basic metaphors, images, and stories that in-forms the perceptions, memories, and aspirations of a people; provides the rationale for its institutions, rituals and power structure; and gives a map of the purpose and stages of life." (Sam Keen, "The Passionate Life", 1983)

"Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implication outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have the explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that, they say this is." (Robert Hass, "Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on poetry", 1984)

"Artistic symbols and myths speak out of the primordial, preconscious realm of the mind which is powerful and chaotic. Both symbol and myth are ways of bringing order and form into this chaos." (Rollo May, "My Quest for Beauty", 1985)

"Myths hook and bind the mind because at the same time they set the mind free: they explain the universe while allowing the universe to go on being unexplained; and we seem to need this even now, in our twentieth-century grandeur." (Jeanette Winterson, "Boating for Beginners", 1985)

"Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth - penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told." (Joseph Campbell, "The Power of Myth", 1988)

"But our ways of learning about the world are strongly influenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking that each scientist must apply to any problem. The stereotype of a fully rational and objective ‘scientific method’, with individual scientists as logical (and interchangeable) robots, is self-serving mythology." (Stephen J Gould, "This View of Life: In the Mind of the Beholder", "Natural History", Vol. 103, No. 2, 1994)

“Cultural archetypes are the unconscious models that help us make sense of the world: they are the myths, narratives, images, symbols, and files into which we organize the data of our life experience” (Clotaire Rapaille, “Cultural Imprints”, Executive Excellence Vol. 16 (10), 1999)

"What is becoming more interesting than the myths themselves has been the study of how the myths were constructed from sparse or unpromising facts - indeed, sometimes from no facts - in a kind of mute conspiracy of longing, very rarely under anybody's conscious control." (Arthur C Clarke, "The Light of Other Days", 2000)

"The value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity." (Clive S Lewis, "Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings", The Chesterton Review 28 (1/2), 2002)

"If it is written and read with serious attention, a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another. A novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest." (Karen Armstrong, "A Short History of Myth", 2004)

"Once a myth becomes established, it forms part of our mental model of the world and alters our perception, the way our brains interpret the fleeting patterns our eyes pick up." (Jeremy Wade, "River Monsters: True Stories of the Ones that Didn't Get Away", 2011)

"The truth is more magical - in the best and most exciting sense of the word - than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic: the magic of reality." (Richard Dawkins, "The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True", 2011)

"A myth is a fantasy, a preferred lie, a foundational story, a hypnotic trance, an identity game, a virtual reality, one that can be either inspirational or despairing. It is a story in which I cast myself; it is my inner cinema, the motion picture of my inner reality - one that moves all the time. No diagnosis can fix the myth, no cure can settle it, because our inner life is precisely what, in us, will not lie still." (Ginette Paris, "Wisdom of the Psyche: Depth Psychology After Neuroscience", 2013)

Communication: On Myths (Quotes)

"All our language is composed of brief little dreams; and the wonderful thing is that we sometimes make of them strangely accurate and marvelously reasonable thoughts. […] What should we be without the help of that which does not exist? Very little. And our unoccupied minds would languish if fables, mistaken notions, abstractions, beliefs, and monsters, hypotheses, and the so-called problems of metaphysics did not people with beings and objectless images our natural depths and darkness. Myths are the souls of our actions and our loves. We cannot act without moving towards a phantom. We can love only what we create." (Paul Valéry, "The Outlook for Intelligence", 1962)

"Myth is more individual and expresses life more precisely than does science. Science works with concepts of averages which are far too general to do justice to the subjective variety of an individual life." (Carl G Jung, "Memories, Dreams, Reflections", 1963)

"Our technology forces us to live mythically, but we continue to think fragmentarily, and on single, separate planes." (Marshall McLuhan, "The Medium is the Massage: An inventory of effects", 1967)

"Knowledge is not a series of self-consistent theories that converges toward an ideal view; it is rather an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible (and perhaps even incommensurable) alternatives, each single theory, each fairy tale, each myth that is part of the collection forcing the others into greater articulation and all of them contributing, via this process of competition, to the development of our consciousness." (Paul K Feyerabend, "Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge", 1975)

"[…] science is not sacrosanct. The restrictions it imposes (and there are many such restrictions though it is not easy to spell them out) are not necessary in order to have general coherent and successful views about the world. There are myths, there are the dogmas of theology, there is metaphysics, and there are many other ways of constructing a worldview. It is clear that a fruitful exchange between science and such ‘nonscientific’ world-views will be in even greater need of anarchism than is science itself. Thus, anarchism is not only possible, it is necessary both for the internal progress of science and for the development of our culture as a whole." (Paul Feyerabend, "Against Method", 1975)

"Myths and science fulfill a similar function: they both provide human beings with a representation of the world and of the forces that are supposed to govern it. They both fix the limits of what is considered as possible." (François Jacob, "The Possible and the Actual", 1982)

"Myth is the system of basic metaphors, images, and stories that in-forms the perceptions, memories, and aspirations of a people; provides the rationale for its institutions, rituals and power structure; and gives a map of the purpose and stages of life." (Sam Keen, "The Passionate Life", 1983) 

"Today’s quarks and leptons can be viewed as metaphors of the underlying reality of nature, though metaphors that are objectively and rationally defied and are components of theories that have great predictive power. And that’s the difference between the metaphors of science and those of myth: scientific metaphors work." (Victor J Stenger, "Physics and Psychics: The Search for a World Beyond the Senses", 1990)

"The ability of a scientific theory to be refuted is the key criterion that distinguishes science from metaphysics. If a theory cannot be refuted, if there is no observation that will disprove it, then nothing can prove it - it cannot predict anything, it is a worthless myth." (Eric Lerner, "The Big Bang Never Happened", 1991)

"Cultural archetypes are the unconscious models that help us make sense of the world: they are the myths, narratives, images, symbols, and files into which we organize the data of our life experience." (Clotaire Rapaille, "Cultural Imprints", Executive Excellence Vol. 16 (10), 1999)

"Once a myth becomes established, it forms part of our mental model of the world and alters our perception, the way our brains interpret the fleeting patterns our eyes pick up." (Jeremy Wade, "River Monsters: True Stories of the Ones that Didn't Get Away", 2011) 

"The truth is more magical - in the best and most exciting sense of the word - than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic: the magic of reality." (Richard Dawkins, "The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True", 2011)