Stephen Jay Gould on Theory

“Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them.”

“[T]wo aspects of this older positivist view... lack validity and impede understanding: ...the notion of a timeless scientific method based on rigorously objective observation and logic, and ...that earlier systems were either theory-free or theory-poor because explanation can only follow accurate description. Theory-free science makes about as much sense as value-free politics. Both... are oxymoronic. All thinking about the natural world must be informed by theory... The old... theories may have been wrong, but they were as persuasive (and restrictive) in the structuring of knowledge as any more accurate and later system... [W]e cannot collect information without a theory to organize our searches and observations. ...[T]heory is always, and must be, colored by social and psychological biases of surrounding culture; we have no access to utterly objective observation or universally unambiguous logic.”