5 ideas
| 23123 | Basic to human culture are binary oppositions, such as eating raw or cooked [Levi-Strauss, by Green,TH] |
| Full Idea: Lévi-Strauss made canonic to French structuralism the idea that human culture could be understood through a series of binary oppositionsn - the difference between what could be eaten raw and what cooked being one of the most fundamental. | |
| From: report of Claude Lévi-Strauss (works [1950]) by T.H. Green - Prolegomena to Ethics 1 | |
| A reaction: My guess is that such oppositions can often be illuminating, but will always be eventually judged as too simplistic. |
| 15335 | Peirce's theory offers anti-realist verificationism, but surely how things are is independent of us? [Horsten on Peirce] |
| Full Idea: Peirce's anti-realist theory of a truth is a verificationist theory. Truth is judged to be an epistemic notion. But the way things are is independent of the evidence we may be able to obtain for or against a judgement. | |
| From: comment on Charles Sanders Peirce (Pragmatism in Retrospect [1906]) by Leon Horsten - The Tarskian Turn 02.1 | |
| A reaction: This criticism doesn't quite capture the point that Peirce's theory is that truth is an ideal, not the set of opinions that miserable little humans eventually settle for when they get bored. Truth is an aspect of rationality, perhaps. |
| 14796 | Independent truth (if there is any) is the ultimate result of sufficient enquiry [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: I hold that truth's independence of individual opinions is due (so far as there is any 'truth') to its being the predestined result to which sufficient enquiry would ultimately lead. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (Pragmatism in Retrospect [1906], p.288) |
| 14795 | Pragmatism is a way of establishing meanings, not a theory of metaphysics or a set of truths [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: Pragmatism is no doctrine of metaphysics, no attempt to determine the truth of things. It is merely a method of ascertaining the meanings of hard words and of abstract concepts. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (Pragmatism in Retrospect [1906], p.271) | |
| A reaction: Suddenly I recognise a prominent strand of modern philosophy of language (especially in America) for what it is. |
| 7517 | I could take a healthy infant and train it up to be any type of specialist I choose [Watson,JB] |
| Full Idea: Give me a dozen healthy infants, and my own specified world to bring them up in, and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select - doctor, artist, beggar, thief - regardless of his ancestry. | |
| From: J.B. Watson (Behaviorism [1924], Ch.2), quoted by Steven Pinker - The Blank Slate | |
| A reaction: This was a famous pronouncement rejecting the concept of human nature as in any way fixed - a total assertion of nurture over nature. Modern research seems to be suggesting that Watson is (alas?) wrong. |