Much of current academic teaching and research has been criticized for its lack of relevance, that is, of immediate practical impact... The trouble is caused, however, not by an inadequate selection of targets, but rather by our inability to hit squarely any one of them... The weak and all too slowly growing empirical foundations clearly cannot support the proliferating superstructure of pure, or should I say, speculative economic theory.
Wassily LeontiefRelated topics
academic growing hit inability lack pure relevance research selection should superstructure support teaching troubleRelated quotes
We speak of concrete and not 'abstract painting', because we have finished with the period of research and speculative experience. In their search for purity artists were obliged to abstract from 'natural forms' in which the plastic elements were hidden, in order to eliminate natural forms and to replace them with 'artistic forms'. To-day the idea of 'artistic form' is as obsolete as the idea of 'natural form'. We establish the period of pure painting by constructing 'spiritual form.
Theo van Doesburg
The greatest danger to good computer science research today may be excessive relevance. Evidence for the worldwide fascination with computers is everywhere, from the articles on the financial, and even the front pages of the newspapers, to the difficulties that even the most prestigious universities experience in finding and keeping faculty in computer science. The best professors, instead of teaching bright students, join start-up companies.
Dennis Ritchie
The man in the street, and also the philosopher K. Marbe, believe that after a run of seventeen heads tail becomes more probable. This argument has nothing to do with imperfections of physical coins; it endows nature with memory, or, in our terminology, it denies the stochastic independence of successive trials. Marbe's theory cannot be refuted by logic but is rejected because of empirical support.
William Feller
The idea that a country's economic fortunes are largely determined by its success on world markets is a hypothesis, not a necessary truth; and as a practical, empirical matter, that hypothesis is flatly wrong. That is, it is simply not the case that the world's leading nations are to any important degree in economic competition with each other, or that any of their major economic problems can be attributed to failures to compete on world markets.
Paul Krugman
I then arrived at the certainty that it was necessary to posit that mathematics writes that which, of being itself, is pronounceable in the field of a pure theory of the Multiple. The entire history of rational thought appeared to me to be illuminated once one assumed the hypothesis that mathematics, far from being a game without object, draws the exceptional severity of its law from being bound to support the discourse of ontology.
Alain Badiou