The strain of civilization was beginning to be felt. This strain, this uneasiness, is a consequence of the breakdown of the closed society. It is still felt even in our day, especially in times of social change. (1/4) — Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, p. 245

To appreciate the patchy unpredictability associated with our current condition, we need to reopen our imaginations. The point of this book is to help that process along—with mushrooms. (1/3) — Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, p. 250

The scientists will probably think that these exchanges of properties among rivers, forces, neurotransmitters, marshals, and engineers are not metamorphoses but simple metaphors. (1/5) — Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia, p. 76

It is conceivable, of course, that significant physicochemical disturbances will be found in some “mental patients” and in some “conditions” now labeled “mental illnesses.” But this does not mean that all so-called mental diseases... (1/2) — Thomas Szasz, The myth of mental illness, p. 141

Soon, physicians and psychiatrists were joined by philosophers and journalists, lawyers and laymen, in labeling as “mental illness” any and every kind of human experience or behavior in which they could detect, or to which they could... (1/3) — Thomas Szasz, The myth of mental illness, p. 77

The ultimate aim of a xenofeminist politics of technology should be to transform political systems and disciplinary structures themselves, so that autonomy does not always have to be craftily, covertly, and repeatedly seized [...]. (1/3) — Helen Hester, Xenofeminism, p. 124

The difference between mental representations and linguistic representations has not changed the motive of an inquiry into representation; whereas once we had theories about privileged "ideas" or Vorstellungen (simple ideas of... (1/6) — Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 128

But still the objection must be met: doesn't the social world present us with mere trends and tendencies and not the genuine law-like regularity of the natural world? (1/3) — David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, p. 20

Contaminated diversity is everywhere. If such stories are so widespread and so well known, the question becomes: Why don’t we use these stories in how we know the world? (1/6) — Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, p. 633

Unless we adopt a scientific approach to the nature of knowledge, then our grasp of that nature will be no more than a projection of our ideological concerns … Epistemology will be merely implicit propaganda. (1/5) — David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, p. 80

Science can describe general types of landscape, for example, or of man, but it can never exhaust one single individual landscape, or one single individual man. (1/7) — Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, p. 603

gender abolitionism is ‘shorthand for the ambition to construct a society where traits currently assembled under the rubric of gender no longer furnish a grid for the asymmetric operation of power’.44 The struggle must continue until currently... (1/3) — Helen Hester, Xenofeminism, p. 23

What constitutes the very existence of science is its status as an ongoing activity. It is ultimately a pattern of thought and behaviour, a style of going about things which has its characteristic norms and values. (1/3) — David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, p. 159

One may say that all this is obvious: most of us know that it is a difficult task to formulate our problems clearly, and that we often fail in this task. (1/4) — Karl Popper, Unended Quest, p. 162

“[there is a] fear that if there is nothing quasi-scientific for philosophy as an academic discipline to do, if there is no properly professional Fach which distinguishes the philosophy professor from the historian or the... (1/4) — Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. xxxvii-b

TO LISTEN TO AND TELL A RUSH OF STORIES IS A method. And why not make the strong claim and call it a science, an addition to knowledge? (1/5) — Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, p. 663

It is on this step that depends the fact that one can call upon the subject to re-enter himself in the unconscious—for, after all, it is important to know who one is calling. (1/7) — Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 47

Here is one way to look at physics : there are some invisible things which are parts of everything else and whose behavior determines the way everything else works. (1/8) — Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 91

Freud did not discover that hysteria was a mental illness. He merely asserted and advocated that so-called hysterics be declared ill. (1/4) — Thomas Szasz, The myth of mental illness, p. 74

The relaxed attitude I am recommending suggests that we should not worry about whether analytic philosophy has retained the "scientific" we worry about whether what we, or somebody else, is doing is "really philosophy." (1/5) — Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 219

if one thinks of ‘meaning’ in terms of the discovery of the speech dispositions of foreigners rather than in terms of mental essences (ideas, concepts, chunks of the crystalline structure of thought), then one will not be able to draw... (1/2) — Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 6

By the end of the nineteenth century, the medical conquest of the soul is secure. […] Today, the role of the physician as curer of the soul is uncontested. There are no more bad people in the world; there are only mentally ill people. — Thomas Szasz, The myth of mental illness, p. 9

The adoption of rationalism implies, moreover, that there is a common medium of communication, a common language of reason; it establishes something like a moral obligation towards that language, the obligation to keep up its... (1/5) — Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, p. 596

Philosophy is an autonomous academic discipline with pretensions to be architectonic for culture as a whole not because we can justify either the autonomy or the pretension, but because the German idealists told us that such a... (1/3) — Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 149

Consider again the snippets of Oregon history with which I began this chapter. The first, about railroads, tells of progress. It led to the future: railroads reshaped our destiny. (1/3) — Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, p. 449

"[One must respect] the laws of nature [which] impose themselves on everyone [whatever one may do and whatever one may think]." (1/6) — Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia, p. 32

Certain conditions have to obtain before a computation has any meaning. These conditions are social in the sense that they reside in the collectively held system of classifications and meanings of a culture. (1/2) — David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, p. 124

How are we to understand the almost religious maintenance of the terms proposed by Freud to structure the analytic experience? (1/3) — Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 10

I will now make use of my list (1) to (4) of Plato’s theories in order to derive the modern theory of art as expression (a theory which I reject). (1/3) — Karl Popper, Unended Quest, p. 78

The idea that logical authority is moral authority may be in danger of neglecting these more dynamic elements in logical thought: competing definitions; opposing pressures; contested patterns of inference; problematic cases. (1/2) — David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, p. 134

Everybody who has done some translating, and who has thought about it, knows that there is no such thing as a grammatically correct and also almost literal translation of any interesting text. (1/2) — Karl Popper, Unended Quest, p. 26

...linguistics, whose model is the combinatory operation, functioning spontaneously, of itself, in a presubjective way – it is this linguistic structure that gives its status to the unconscious. (1/2) — Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 21

The first sort of textualist-the weak textualist-thinks that each work has its own vocabulary, its own secret code, which may not be commensurable with that of any other. (1/9) — Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 152

Let us examine the consequences of irrationalism first. The irrationalist insists that emotions and passions rather than reason are the mainsprings of human action. (1/6) — Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, p. 589

Why should the sacred character of scientific knowledge be threatened by a sociological scrutiny? … Religion is essentially a source of strength. When people communicate with their gods they are fortified, elevated and protected. (1/8) — David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, p. 48

There are great dangers in being aware of the shortcomings of empiricism without seeing its virtues. — David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, p. 24

The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher... (1/3) — Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, p. 201

Some differences are playful; some are poles of world historical systems of domination. 'Epistemology' is about knowing the difference. — Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, p. 215

Within positions founded upon a claim of being ‘born this way’, one finds supposedly in-built characteristics leveraged as a kind of transcendental guarantee: ‘we are told to seek solace in unfreedom [. . .] (1/7) — Helen Hester, Xenofeminism, p. 21

ther than seeing only the expansion-and-conquest strategies of relentless individuals, we must look for histories that develop through contamination. — Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, p. 550

Heidegger's hope is just what was worst in the tradition -the quest for the holy which turns us away from the relations between beings and beings (the relations, for example, between the ghastly apparatus of modern technology and the... (1/5) — Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 53

The tone and style of Popper's philosophy is an important part of its overall message. This tone is in part provided by the key metaphors which are used. The image of Darwinian struggle is prominent. (1/7) — David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, p. 56

Thus we can say that we owe our reason, like our language, to intercourse with other men. The fact that the rationalist attitude considers the argument rather than the person arguing is of far-reaching importance. (1/3) — Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, p. 579

Our "irreverence" or "lack of respect" for science is not intended as an attack on scientific activity. It is simply that we maintain an agnostic position. (1/4) — Bruno Latour & Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life, p. 36

It would be generally admitted that territorial boundaries have the status of social conventions, though this does not mean that they are 'mere' or 'arbitrary' conventions. (1/5) — David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, p. 97

Freud's unconscious is not at all the romantic unconscious of imaginative creation. It is not the locus of the divinities of night. — Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, p. 24

… our thinking about mathematics is poised on a knife-edge. By adopting a formal, either/or attitude, it can be made to look as if there are no significant sources of variation within mathematics which require explanation. (1/5) — David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery, p. 120

The smell of matsutake transformed me in a physical way. The first time I cooked them, they ruined an otherwise lovely stir-fry. The smell was overwhelming. (1/9) — Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, p. 808

The imagined 'they' constitute a kind of invisible conspiracy of masculinist scientists and philosophers replete with grants and laboratories; and the imagined 'we' are the embodied others, who are not allowed not to have a body, a finite... (1/2) — Donna Haraway, Situated Knowledges, p. 244

Circumstances (that which stands around) have generally been considered irrelevant to the practice of science. Our argument could be summarised as an attempt to demonstrate their relevance. (1/3) — Bruno Latour & Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life, p. 276