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Quotation of the Day…

… is from page 135 of Morris Cohen’s wise 1944 book, A Preface to Logic:

There can be no doubt that statistics deals with actuality, and that knowledge of actualities is always empirical, i.e., that we cannot obtain knowledge by purely a priori methods.  There is, however, no genuine progress in scientific insight through the Baconian method of accumulating empirical facts without hypotheses or anticipation of nature.  Without some guiding idea we do not know what facts to gather.  Without something to prove, we cannot determine what is relevant and what is irrelevant.

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