On Sat, 7 Aug 2004, Jonathan Nitzan wrote:
> There is a common quote, attributed in various versions to Arthur
> Schopenhauer, Arthur C. Clarke and Leo Szilard, which goes something
> like this: "Every new truth passes through three stages. In the
> beginning the experts ridicule it as 'nonsense.' Then they dismiss it as
> 'trivial.' And in the end we learn that they 'said it all along.'"
Fwiw, it's actually William James, from his 1907 book _Pragmatism: A New Name For Some Old Ways of Thinking_. It's from Lecture 6, paragraph 2:
URL: http://www.dal.ca/~dhevans/5562/PragConc.html
I fully expect to see the pragmatist view of truth run through the
classic stages of a theory's career. First, you know, a new
theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but
obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that
its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it. Our doctrine
of truth is at present in the first of these three stages, with
symptoms of the second stage having begun in certain quarters. I wish
that this lecture might help it beyond the first stage in the
eyes of many of you.
<end quote>
Michael