"Every discipline develops standards of professional competence to which its workers are subject. [...] Every scientific community is a society in the small, so to speak, with its own agencies of social control." (Abraham Kaplan, "The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science", 1964)
"Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding. It comes as no particular surprise to discover that a scientist formulates problems in a way which requires for their solution just those techniques in which he himself is especially skilled." (Abraham Kaplan, "The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science", 1964)
"Measurement, we have seen, always has an element of error in it. The most exact description or prediction that a scientist can make is still only approximate." (Abraham Kaplan, "The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science", 1964)
"The price of training is always a certain "trained incapacity": the more we know how to do something, the harder it is to learn to do it differently." (Abraham Kaplan, "The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science", 1964)
"[…] statistical techniques are tools of thought, and not substitutes for thought." (Abraham Kaplan, "The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science", 1964)
"We are caught up in a paradox, one which might be called the paradox of conceptualization. The proper concepts are needed to formulate a good theory, but we need a good theory to arrive at the proper concepts." (Abraham Kaplan, "The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science", 1964)
