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… is from the late Stephen Jay Gould’s 1981 book, The Mismeasure of Man, as quoted on page 247 of the 2016 Mercatus Center re-issue of my late colleague Don Lavoie’s penetrating 1985 volume National Economic Planning: What Is Left? [2] (ellipses original to Lavoie):
I believe that science must be understood as a social phenomenon, a gutsy, human enterprise, not the work of robots programmed to collect pure information. I also present this view as an upbeat for science, not as a gloomy epitaph or a noble hope sacrificed on the alter of human limitations. Science, since people must do it, is a socially embedded activity. It progresses by hunch, vision, and intuition…. Facts are not pure unsullied bits of information; culture also influences what we see and how we see it. Theories, moreover, are not inexorable inductions from facts. The most creative theories are often imaginative visions imposed upon facts; the source of imagination is also strongly cultural.
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