A quotes list created by Lee Sonogan
Known as the father of pragmatism, he made many contributions to logic beyond being a chemist and an employed scientist for over 30 years. Described as an unusual character, he was also honoured with such words as the most original or versatile American philosopher to ever live. Predicting digital computers carried out by electrical switching boards of his ideas, this guy is a highly underrated dude from history worthy of knowing.
- “Let it be considered that what is more wholesome than any particular belief is integrity of belief; and that to avoid looking into the support of any belief from a fear that it may turn out rotten is quite as immoral as it is disadvantageous.”
- “I hear you say: ‘All that is not /fact/ : it is poetry’. Nonsense! Bad poetry is false, I grant; but nothing is truer than true poetry. And let me tell the scientific men that the artists are much finer and more accurate observers than they are, except of the special minutiae that the scientific man is looking for.”
- The entire universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs.
- We do not really think, we are barely conscious, until something goes wrong.
- Every new concept first comes to the mind in a judgment.
- The essence of belief is the establishment of a habit.
- “What the pragmatist has his pragmatism for is to be able to say, Here is a definition and it does not differ at all from your confusedly apprehended conception because there is no practical difference.”
- “Abduction is the process of forming an explanatory hypothesis. It is the only logical operation which introduces any new idea; for induction does nothing but determine a value and deduction merely evolves the necessary consequences of a pure hypothesis.”
- It is… easy to be certain. One has only to be sufficiently vague.
- Three elements go to make up an idea. The first is its intrinsic quality as a feeling. The second is the energy with which it affects other ideas, an energy which is infinite in the here-and-nowness of immediate sensation, finite and relative in the recency of the past. The third element is the tendency of an idea to bring along other ideas with it.
- The pragmatist knows that doubt is an art which hs to be acquired with difficulty.
- It is a common observation that those who dwell continually upon their expectations are apt to become oblivious to the requirements of their actual situation.
- The idea does not belong to the soul; it is the soul that belongs to the idea.
- All the greatest achievements of mind have been beyond the power of unaided individuals.
- In all the works on pedagogy that ever I read — and they have been many, big, and heavy — I don’t remember that any one has advocated a system of teaching by practical jokes, mostly cruel. That, however, describes the method of our great teacher, Experience.
- “We start, then, with nothing, pure zero. But this is not the nothing of negation. For not means other than, and other is merely a synonym of the ordinal numeral second. As such it implies a first; while the present pure zero is prior to every first. The nothing of negation is the nothing of death, which comes second to, or after, everything. But this pure zero is the nothing of not having been born. There is no individual thing, no compulsion, outward nor inward, no law. It is the germinal nothing, in which the whole universe is involved or foreshadowed. As such, it is absolutely undefined and unlimited possibility — boundless possibility. There is no compulsion and no law. It is boundless freedom.”
- Upon this first, and in one sense this sole, rule of reason, that in order to learn you must desire to learn, and in so desiring not be satisfied with what you already incline to think, there follows one corollary which itself deserves to be inscribed upon every wall of the city of philosophy: Do not block the way of inquiry.
- There never was a sounder logical maxim of scientific procedure than Ockham’s razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. That is to say; before you try a complicated hypothesis, you should make quite sure that no simplification of it will explain the facts equally well.
- There is a kink in my damned brain that prevents me from thinking as other people think.
There is plenty more to his work than this two-digit amount of quotes list as equally good for so many reasons. Defining the highest forms of linguistics as much as its foundations, his stuff might become fitting for one of my next tik tok videos. As exploring its metadata, this guy needs to be with many other hashtags still within modern-day relevant topics/subjects.
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