Wiener on scientific cooperation

“[Cybernetics is a] boundary regions of science which offer the richest opportunities to the qualified investigator. They are at the same time the most refractory to the accepted techniques of mass attack and the division of labor [...] a proper exploration of these blank spaces on the map of science could only be made by a team of scientists, each a specialist in his own field but each possessing a thoroughly sound and trained acquaintance with the fields of his neighbors; all in the habit of working together, of knowing one another’s intellectual customs, and of recognizing the significance of a colleague’s new suggestion before it has taken on a full formal expression. The mathematician need not have the skill to conduct a physiological experiment, but he must have the skill to understand one, to criticize one, and to suggest one. The physiologist need not be able to prove a certain mathematical theorem, but he must be able to grasp its physiological significance and to tell the mathematician for what he should look.”

Norbert Wiener. Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, second edition, 1948. p.2

Cited from arXiv:1107.2984v1 

On the link between epistemology and tolerance

“It was this doctrine of an essential human fallibility which Nicolas of Cusa and Erasmus of Rotterdam (who refers to Socrates) revived; and it was the ‘humanist’ doctrine (in contradistinction to the optimistic doctrine of which Milton relied, the doctrine that truth will prevail) which Nicolas and Erasmus, Montaigne and Locke and Voltaire, followed by John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell, made the basis of the doctrine of tolerance. ‘What is tolerance?’ asks Voltaire in his Philosophical Dictionary; and he answers: ‘It is a necessary consequence of our humanity. We are all fallible, and prone to error; let us then pardon each other's follies. This is the first principle of natural right.’”

Quoted from: K. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, Routledge (2008) p. 22

K. Popper on theories that are not (yet?) scientific

“I thus felt that if a theory is found to be non-scientific, or ‘metaphysical’ (as we might say), it is not thereby found to be unimportant, or insignificant, or ‘meaningless’, or ‘nonsensical’. But it cannot claim to be backed by empirical evidence in the scientific sense—although it may easily be, in some genetic sense, ‘the result of observation’.”

Quoted from: K. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, Routledge (2008) p.50-51