“Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.”
Quelle: "The Conduct of Inquiry", p. 28.
Kontext: In addition to the social pressures from the scientific community there is also at work a very human trait of individual scientist. I call it the law of the instrument, and it may be formulated as follows: 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.
