Nevertheless, there is an infinite number of different possible values, of which precisely 180 degrees is only one; so that the probability is as 1 to ∞ or 0 to 1, that the value is just 180 degrees. In other words, it seems for the present impossible to suppose the postulates of geometry /1

At any rate, it is now agreed that there is no reason whatever to think the sum of the three angles of a triangle precisely equal to 180 degrees. It is generally admitted that the evidence is that the departure from 180 degrees ( if there is any) will be greater the larger the triangle, /1

Besides, the four tastes are altogether special and throw no light on the problems which, on account of their extreme generality, will naturally be examined by a class of researchers of entirely different aptitudes from those which adapt men to the discovery of recondite facts.

Thus, everybody has remarked that there are four prominent qualities of the sense of taste, sweet, sour, salt, and bitter. But there may be other tastes, not so readily made out without special study; and in any case tastes are conveniently studied /1

It’s the birthday of the man who coined the term “stream of consciousness” and who said that “the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook” (1842)… www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/twa-th...

What we call common sense—the body of widely accepted truths—is, just as Heidegger and Nabokov thought, a collection of dead metaphors. CIS p.152 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Metaphor

Such novel way of reasoning might, perhaps, be considered as a new observational means, since it draws attention to relations between facts which would previously have been passed by unperceived.

But this is not the way in which science mainly progresses. It advances by leaps; and the impulse for each leap is either some new observational resource, or some novel way of reasoning about the observations.

Lamarckian evolution might, for example, take the form of perpetually modifying our opinion in the effort to make that opinion represent the known facts as more and more observations came to be collected. /1

The evolutionary theory in general throws great light upon history and especially upon the history of science -- both its public history and the account of its development in an individual intellect. As great a light is thrown upon the theory of evolution in general by the evolution of history, /1

If you want to be remembered by future generations, go in for poetry rather than for mathematics. CIS p.151 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Poetry

Thoughts? #philosophy

The medical men, too, who deserve special mention for the reason that they have had since Galen a logical tradition of their own, recognize this rule, however dimly, in their working against reasoning "post hoc, ergo propter hoc.".

This rule is recognized in the requirement of physicists that a theory shall furnish predictions which shall be verified before any particular weight is accorded to it.

The reason is that any sample will be peculiar and unlike the average of the lot sampled in innumerable respects. At the same time it will be approximately like the average of the whole lot in the great majority of respects.

Thirty throws of a die constitute an approximately random sample of all the throws of that die; and that the randomness should be approximate is all that is required.

The humanists were weak thinkers.

This is a question of logic rather than of metaphysics -- and as soon as this is answered the reply to the other question immediately follows after.

But as a first step toward its solution, it is proper to ask whether, granting that our common-sense beliefs are true, the analysis of the meaning of those beliefs shows that, according to those beliefs, laws and types are objective or subjective.

You know what the question was. It was whether laws and general types are figments of the mind or are real. If this be understood to mean whether there really are any laws and types, it is strictly speaking a question of metaphysics and not of logic.

In the days of which I am speaking, the age of Robert of Lincoln, Roger Bacon, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Duns Scotus, the question of nominalism and realism was regarded as definitively and conclusively settled in favor of realism.

Then we must have an immediate consciousness of the past.

My book is meant for people who want to find out; and people who want philosophy ladled out to them can go elsewhere. There are philosophical soup shops at every corner, thank God!

Thoughts? #philosophy

I shall support my propositions by such arguments as I can. Demonstrative proof is not to be thought of.

Thus, in brief, my philosophy may be described as the attempt of a physicist to make such conjecture as to the constitution of the universe as the methods of science may permit, with the aid of all that has been done by previous philosophers.

The first strictly philosophical books that I read were of the classical German schools; and I became so deeply imbued with many of their ways of thinking that I have never been able to disabuse myself of them.

Thirty throws of a die constitute an approximately random sample of all the throws of that die; and that the randomness should be approximate is all that is required.

That this does justify induction is a mathematical proposition beyond dispute. It has been objected that the sampling cannot be random in this sense. But this is an idea which flies far away from the plain facts.

The cause of their success has been that the motive which has carried them to the laboratory and the field has been a craving to know how things really were, and an interest in finding out whether or not general propositions actually held good -- which has overbalanced all prejudice, all vanity, /1

I should express it in this way:modern students of science have been successful because they have spent their lives not in their libraries and museums but in their laboratories and in the field;and while in their laboratories and in the field they have been not gazing on nature with a vacant eye, /1

Mr. George Henry Lewes in his work on Aristotle seems to me to have come pretty near to stating the true cause of the success of modern science when he has said that it was verification.

This same scientific spirit has been equally misunderstood as it is found in the schoolmen. They have been above all things found fault with because they do not write a literary style and do not "study in a literary spirit." The men who make this objection /1

Thoughts? #philosophy

The more original a book or a kind of writing is, the more unprecedented, the less likely we are to have criteria in hand, and the less point there is in trying to assign it to a genre. CIS p.135 #Pragmatism #Rorty #Metaphysics

They cannot understand that it is not the sublimity of Darwin's theories which makes him admired by men of science, but that it is rather his minute, systematic, extensive, strict, scientific researches which have given his theories a more favorable reception -- /1

The followers of Herbert Spencer, for example, cannot comprehend why scientific men place Darwin so infinitely above Spencer, since the theories of the latter are so much grander and more comprehensive.

I think it may be said then that the schoolmen did not attach too much weight to authority, although they attached much more to it than we ought to do or than ought or could be attached to it in any age in which science is pursuing a successful and onward course -- /1

In our own day, the writings of Whewell, Mill, and Herschel afford some of the finest accounts of the methods of thought in science.

At the first dawn of the age [of] science, Francis Bacon wrote that professedly and really logical treatise, the Novum Organum, a work the celebrity of which perhaps exceeds its real merits.

The most striking characteristic of British thinkers is their nominalistic tendency. This has always been and is now very marked. So much so that in England and in England alone are there many thinkers more distinguished at this day as being nominalistic than as holding any other doctrines.

British logic is a subject of some particular interest inasmuch as some peculiar lines of thought have always been predominant in those islands, giving their logicians a certain family resemblance, which already begins to appear in very early times.

The most striking characteristic of medieval thought is the importance attributed to authority.

My view is that there are three modes of being. I hold that we can directly observe them in elements of whatever is at any time before the mind in any way. They are the being of positive qualitative possibility, the being of actual fact, and the being of law that will govern facts in the future.

The heart of the dispute lies in this. The modern philosophers -- one and all, unless Schelling be an exception -- recognize but one mode of being, the being of an individual thing or fact, the being which consists in the object's crowding out a place for itself in the universe, so to speak, /1

But so far as words are of use and signification, so far is there a constant connexion between the sound and the idea, and a designation that the one stands for the other; without which application of them, they are nothing but so much insignificant noise. /1

Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.

About that time -- say the date of Mansel's Prolegomena Logica -- Logic touched bottom. There was no room for it to become more degraded.

Very early in my studies of logic, before I had really been devoting myself to it more than four or five years, it became quite manifest to me that this science was in a bad condition, entirely unworthy of the general state of intellectual development of our age; /1

…Because men would not be thought to talk barely of their own imagination, but of things as really they are; therefore they often suppose the words to stand also for the reality of things.