Science Quote by Claude Levi-Strauss

Levi-Strauss is quietly demoting the culture’s favorite myth about science: that it’s a glittering factory of correct answers. In his hands, the “scientific mind” isn’t a credential or a lab coat; it’s a stance toward the world, defined less by certainty than by disciplined curiosity. The line works because it shifts the prestige from conclusions to inquiry, from “being right” to knowing what to doubt, what to isolate, and what to compare.

The subtext is methodological and moral at once. Methodological, because good questions determine the shape of the evidence you’ll even notice. Ask the wrong thing and you get clean data that proves nothing interesting. Moral, because the habit of questioning is a guardrail against dogma - political, religious, even academic. Levi-Strauss spent his career showing how “common sense” categories (civilized/primitive, rational/mythic) are themselves artifacts. His structuralism treated kinship rules, myths, and rituals as systems with internal logic, not as exotic mistakes waiting to be corrected by Western reason. That project required better questions than anthropology had been asking: not “Why are they like this?” but “What patterns make this intelligible, and what does that reveal about us?”

Context matters: writing in the mid-20th century, amid both the triumph of technoscience and the wreckage of ideological certainties, Levi-Strauss insists that science’s real power is epistemic humility. The line also contains a gentle warning for our age of hot takes and instant expertise: answers travel fast; questions take work.