Cambridge Pragmatism Quotes

“theory falls into the realm of the inexpressible.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“There is no answering a question about axioms from outside the system (WVC: 128–9). A contradiction, for instance, ‘can only occur among the rules of a game’ (WVC: 124). Wittgenstein employs a metaphor that he was frequently to use. Just as the rules of chess delimit certain moves in that game, the idea of a logical contradiction only makes sense in ‘the true–false game, that is, only where we make statements”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“nor is it the set of feelings Beethoven had while composing it, nor is it our own state of mind: I would reply that whatever I was told, I would reject, and that not because the explanation was false but because it was an explanation. If I were told anything that was a theory, I would say, No, no! That does not interest me … What is ethical cannot be taught. If I could explain the essence of the ethical only by means of a theory, then what is ethical would be of no value whatsoever … For me a theory is without value. A theory gives me nothing.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“Our ‘astonishment that anything at all exists’ is the ethical. It is just that ‘Every attempt to express it leads to nonsense’ (WVC: 93). In a subsequent meeting he expands on this point: Everything I describe is within the world. An ethical proposition never occurs in the complete description of the world, not even when I am describing a murderer. What is ethical is not a state of affairs.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“[Carnap’s Aufbau] reminded me strongly of William James’s pragmatic requirement, that the meaning of any statement is given by its ‘cash value,’ that is, by what it means as a direction for human behavior. I wrote immediately to Carnap, ‘What you advocate is pragmatism.’ This was as astonishing to him as it had been to me.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“work for us. Russell considers, for example, the belief in the existence of other minds:”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“something critical on pragmatism every year from 1908 to 1912. He”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“My dying words to you are “Say good-by to mathematical logic if you wish to preserve your relations with concrete realities!” ’ (CWJ 12: 103, 1908). Russell made his reply in a letter to the logician Philip Jourdain: ‘I would much rather, of the two, preserve my relations with symbolic logic.’14”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“There is the question: “How is the word ‘truth’ properly used?” This is a question for the dictionary, not for philosophy’ (CP 6: 116, 1910). In a letter to Ottoline Morrell he puts his need for truth of a more transcendent sort thus: ‘the worship of my life … is Truth. That is the something greater than Man that seems to me most capable of giving greatness to Man. That is why I hate pragmatism’ (CP 6: liii, 1911). And that is why James hated logical atomism.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“The minutes for 24 November 1916, for instance, show the group worrying that a false judgement ‘has nothing as its object’.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“particulars that exhibit qualities and stand in relations. These entities come together to form a layer of atomic facts, which consist either of a particular exhibiting a quality, or of multiple particulars standing in a relation. These atomic facts are combined into complex molecular facts describing complex objects, dependent on those atomic facts and simple, basic entities. A logically ideal language would describe all such combinations using, besides logical connectives, only words representing the constituents of atomic facts. This simple language would mirror the world as it really is.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“consequences, perhaps surprising, of the beliefs we find so obvious. Russell”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“quandary”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“Complex entities like physical objects or other minds are logical constructions from the immediately given entities of sensation, so that the data yielded by acquaintance in a given case are simply ‘defined as constituting’ the complex object in question (PLA:”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“As he was to put it later, in the 1918 course of lectures in London that became The Philosophy of Logical Atomism: ‘you can get down in theory, if not in practice, to ultimate simples, out of which the world is built, and … those simples have a kind of reality not belonging to anything else’ (PLA: 234).”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“Russell and Moore (like James) were educated by Hegelians.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“empiricist question of how we could possibly achieve awareness of something beyond our circle of mental impressions. For to have a sensation just is to take us out of the circle. The idealist, on this view, fails to see that whenever I have a sensation, I know something that is not wholly dependent upon my experience.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“organic unity’, makes no sense. And they all agreed that idealism holds an unattractive view of relations. The idealists argued that relations were ‘internal’—”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“As Rorty, James’s successor in twentieth-century philosophy, said, Russell had a theory of truth, a natural corollary of his foundationalism and his demand for certainty, against which pragmatism recoiled. But, as is his wont, Rorty goes further than he should: ‘Neither William nor Henry James would have had anything to say in a world without Russells’ (1982: 136). This is rather strained, to say the least, since William and Henry were putting their ideas forward before Russell came on the scene. But Rorty is using Russell as an archetype for ‘straight men’ who defend ‘common-sense realism’.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“terms like ‘good’ and ‘bad’ into non-ethical ones like ‘pleasing’ and ‘displeasing’ commits what Moore called the ‘naturalistic fallacy’. The good is intrinsically valuable and cannot be analysed in more fundamental terms. It is ‘one of those innumerable objects of thought which are themselves incapable of definition, because they are the ultimate terms by reference to which whatever is capable of definition must be defined’ (Moore 2004 [1903]: 9–10). We should trust our intuitions about the good, rather than search for another property in which our judgements of the good are grounded.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“comic talents as a weapon in the service of what he saw as his and James’s revolution”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“biting satirist.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“of an afterlife was verifiable—one just had to wait and see.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“best keys to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth’ (VRE: 136). James suffered from depression and often wondered whether life was worth living.13 He sought the religious experience that might sooth his troubled soul, but it did not come easily to him.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“The thesis I defend is, briefly stated, this: Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such circumstances, ‘Do not decide, but leave the question open,’ is itself a passional decision—just like deciding yes or no—and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“comfortable or one’s life more harmonious can determine whether a belief is true or reasonable to believe.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“Truth, James and Peirce both think, is ‘whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“Reality, like experience and consciousness, is continuous. James thinks that Bergson, with his account of continuity, is on the right path in ‘remanding us to the sensation life’ (PU:”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“Their names, to be sure, cut them into separate conceptual entities, but no cuts existed in the continuum in which they originally came”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“relations between sensations are ‘just as immediately given’ as are the individual sensations themselves. Sensations are not isolated atoms, but are part of the ‘sensational flux’ (PU:”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein