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Many persons entertain a prejudice against mathematical language, arising out of a confusion between the ideas of a mathematical science and an exact science. ...in reality, there is no such thing as an exact science.

William Stanley Jevons

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William Stanley Jevons
Age: 46 †
Born: 1835
Born: September 1
Died: 1882
Died: August 13
Economist
Philosopher
Photographer
Statistician
City of Liverpool
Jevons
William Stanley
Thing
Prejudice
Arising
Logic
Entertain
Language
Exact
Science
Reasoning
Reality
Uncertainty
Persons
Mathematical
Ideas
Confusion
Many
Certainty
Ontology

More quotes by William Stanley Jevons

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The whole result of continued labour is not often consumed and enjoyed in a moment the result generally lasts for a certain length of time. We must then conceive the capital as being progressively uninvested.
William Stanley Jevons
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It isrequisite from time to time to remind one generation of the experience which led a former generation to important legislative actions.
William Stanley Jevons
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One of the most important axioms is, that as the quantity of any commodity, for instance, plain food, which a man has to consume, increases, so the utility or benefit derived from the last portion used decreases in degree. The decrease in enjoyment between the beginning and the end of a meal may be taken as an example.
William Stanley Jevons
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I consider that interest is determined by the increment of produce which it enables a labourer to obtain, and is altogether independent of the total return which he receives for this labour.
William Stanley Jevons
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There are a multitude of allied branches of knowledge connected with mans condition the relation of these to political economy is analogous to the connexion of mechanics, astronomy, optics, sound, heat, and every other branch more or less of physical science, with pure mathematics.
William Stanley Jevons
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I protest against deference to any man, whether John Stuart Mill, or Adam Smith, or Aristotle, being allowed to check inquiry. Our science has become far too much a stagnant one, in which opinions rather than experience and reason are appealed to.
William Stanley Jevons
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There are many portions of economical doctrine which appear to me as scientific in form as they are consonant with facts.
William Stanley Jevons
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In any case I hold that there must arise a science of the development of economic forms and relations.
William Stanley Jevons
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Value is the most invincible and impalpable of ghosts, and comes and goes unthought of, while the visible and dense matter remains as it was.
William Stanley Jevons
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You will perceive that economy, scientifically speaking, is a very contracted science it is in fact a sort of vague mathematics which calculates the causes and effects of man's industry, and shows how it may be best applied.
William Stanley Jevons
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There is no such thing as absolute cost of labour it is all a matter of comparison. Every one gets the most which he can for his exertions some can get little or nothing, because they have not sufficient strength, knowledge or ingenuity others get much, because they have, comparatively speaking, a monopoly of certain powers.
William Stanley Jevons
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Repeated reflection and inquiry have led me to the somewhat novel opinion, that value depends entirely upon utility.
William Stanley Jevons
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The calculus of utility aims at supplying the ordinary wants of man at the least cost of labour.
William Stanley Jevons
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Property is only another name for monopoly.
William Stanley Jevons
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In short, I do not write for mathematicians, nor as a mathematician, but as an economist wishing to convince other economists that their science can only be satisfactorily treated on an explicitly mathematical basis.
William Stanley Jevons
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The point of equilibrium will be known by the criterion that an infinitely small amount of commodity exchanged in addition, at the same rate, will bring neither gain nor loss of utility.
William Stanley Jevons
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I feel quite unable to adopt the opinion that the moment goods pass into the possession of the consumer they cease altogether to have the attributes of capital.
William Stanley Jevons
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By a commodity we shall understand any object, substance, action or service, which can afford pleasure or ward off pain.
William Stanley Jevons
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PLEASURE and pain are undoubtedly the ultimate objects of the calculus of economics. To satisfy our wants to the utmost with the least effort - to procure the greatest amount of what is desirable at the expense of the least that is undesirable - in other words, to maximize pleasure, is the problem of economics.
William Stanley Jevons
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It is clear that economics, if it is to be a science at all, must be a mathematical science.
William Stanley Jevons