Prospero’s Precepts

1. All beliefs in whatever realm are theories at some level. -Stephen Schneider
2. Do not condemn the judgment of another because it differs from your own. You may both be wrong. -Dandemis
3. Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. -Francis Bacon
4. Never fall in love with your hypothesis. -Peter Medawar
5. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories instead of theories to suit facts. -Arthur Conan Doyle
6. A theory should not attempt to explain all the facts, because some of the facts are wrong. -Francis Crick
7. The thing that doesn’t fit is the thing that is most interesting. -Richard Feynman
8. To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact. -Charles Darwin
9. It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. -Mark Twain
10. Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong. -Thomas Jefferson
11. All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second, it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident. -Arthur Schopenhauer

Peter Surrock,  AKA Shakespeare: A Scientific Approach to the Authorship Question