Conjecture Quotes
-What did you do today?
-Went to the grocery store and Xeroxed a box of English muffins, two pounds of ground veal and an apple. In flagrant violation of the Copyright Act.
-You had your nap, I remember that-
-I had my nap.
-Lunch, I remember that, there was lunch, slept with Susie after lunch, then your nap, woke up, right?, went Xeroxing, right?, read a book not a whole book but part of a book-
-Talked to Happy on the telephone saw the seven o'clock news did not wash dishes want to clean up some of this mess?
-If one does nothing but listen to the new music, everything else drifts, frays. Did Odysseus feel this way when he and Diomedes decided to steal Athene's statue from the Trojans, so that they would become dejected and lose the war? I don't think so, but who is to know what effect the new music of that remote time had on its hearers?
-Or how it compares to the new music of this time?
-One can only conjecture.
Donald Barthelme
In France at least, the history of science and thought gives pride of place sciences, sciences of the necessary, all close to philosophy: one can observe in their history the almost uninterrupted emergence of truth and pure reason. The other disciplines, however - those, for example, that concern living beings, languages, or economic facts - are considered too tinged with empirical thought, too exposed to the vagaries of chance or imagery to age old traditions and external events, for it to be supposed that their history could be anything other irregular. At most, they are expected to provide evidence of a state of mind, an intellectual fashion, a mixture of archaism and bold conjecture, of intuition and blindness. But what if empirical knowledge, at a given time and in a given culture, did possess a well defined regularity.
Michel Foucault