9 ideas
| 14779 | I reason in order to avoid disappointment and surprise [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: I do not reason for the sake of my delight in reasoning, but solely to avoid disappointment and surprise. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (Criterion of Validity in Reasoning [1903], I) | |
| A reaction: Hence Peirce places more emphasis on inductive and abductive reasoning than on deductive reasoning. I have to agree with him. Anyone account of why we reason must have an evolutionary framework. What advantage does reason bestow? It concerns the future. |
| 14777 | That a judgement is true and that we judge it true are quite different things [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: Either J and the judgment 'I say that J is true' are the same for all judgments or for none. But if identical, their denials are identical. These are 'J is not true' and 'I do not say that J is true', which are different. No judgment judges itself true. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (Criterion of Validity in Reasoning [1903], I) | |
| A reaction: If you are going to espouse the Ramseyan redundancy view of truth, you had better make sure you are not guilty of the error which Peirce identifies here. |
| 14780 | Only study logic if you think your own reasoning is deficient [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: It is foolish to study logic unless one is persuaded that one's own reasonings are more or less bad. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (Criterion of Validity in Reasoning [1903], II) |
| 14778 | Facts are hard unmoved things, unaffected by what people may think of them [Peirce] |
| Full Idea: Facts are hard things which do not consist in my thinking so and so, but stand unmoved by whatever you or I or any man or generations of men may opine about them. | |
| From: Charles Sanders Peirce (Criterion of Validity in Reasoning [1903], I) | |
| A reaction: This is my view of facts, with which I am perfectly happy, for all the difficulties involved in individuating facts, and in disentangling them from our own modes of thought and expression. Let us try to establish the facts. |
| 20508 | How people vote should be on public record, so they can be held accountable [Mill, by Wolff,J] |
| Full Idea: Mill believed in an open vote. People should be held accountable for how they vote, and therefore it should be a matter of public record. | |
| From: report of John Stuart Mill (Representative Government [1861]) by Jonathan Wolff - An Introduction to Political Philosophy (Rev) 3 'Representative' | |
| A reaction: Nowadays it is a mantra that voting should be secret, because coercion is an obvious problem, but MPs vote publicly, and are held accountable for their voting records. People like the mafia seem to make open public voting impossible. |
| 20507 | Voting is a strict duty, like jury service, and must only be aimed at the public good [Mill] |
| Full Idea: The citizen's vote is not a thing in which he has an option; it has no more to do with his personal wishes than the verdict of a juryman. ...he is bound to give it according to his best and most conscientious opinion of the public good. | |
| From: John Stuart Mill (Representative Government [1861], p.299), quoted by Jonathan Wolff - An Introduction to Political Philosophy (Rev) 3 'Representative' | |
| A reaction: Mill was also concerned that voters might pursue 'class interest' (which they currently do, big time). |
| 20505 | Direct democracy is inexperience judging experience, and ignorance judging knowledge [Mill] |
| Full Idea: At its best [direct democracy] is inexperience sitting in judgement on experience, ignorance on knowledge. | |
| From: John Stuart Mill (Representative Government [1861], p.232), quoted by Jonathan Wolff - An Introduction to Political Philosophy (Rev) 4 'Representative' | |
| A reaction: Recent experiments have suggested that inexperienced people can become very good at making large decisions, if they are allowed to consult experts when they want to. See Van Reybrouck's 'Against Elections'. |
| 20504 | People can only participate in decisions in small communities, so representatives are needed [Mill] |
| Full Idea: Since all cannot, in a community exceeding a single small town, participate personally in any but some very minor portions of the public business, it follows that the ideal type of a perfect government must be representative. | |
| From: John Stuart Mill (Representative Government [1861], p.217-8), quoted by Jonathan Wolff - An Introduction to Political Philosophy (Rev) 4 'Representative' | |
| A reaction: Wolff offers Mill as the principal spokesman for representative democracy. It is not only the difficulty of achieving participation, but also the slowness of decision-making. Modern technology may be changing all of this. |
| 7825 | The politics of Leibniz was the reunification of Christianity [Stewart,M] |
| Full Idea: The politics of Leibniz may be summed up in one word: theocracy. The specific agenda motivating much of his work was to reunite the Protestant and Catholic churches | |
| From: Matthew Stewart (The Courtier and the Heretic [2007], Ch. 5) | |
| A reaction: This would be a typical project for a rationalist philosopher, who thinks that good reasoning will gradually converge on the one truth. |