#deflationism

[itsmightyfunny]

Perhaps you will say 'Are you sure that your story is the real one?' But what does it matter what reality is outside of myself, so long as it has helped me to live, to feel that I am, and what I am?

Baudelaire

[itsmightyfunny]

Human rationality, to Hegel, is not a faculty possessed by human beings, like sensibility or the imagination, which they exercise in isolation as monadic units. He thinks of rationality as the considerations we offer each other when our actions affect what others would otherwise be able to do. Rationality is a social practice and it has a history, as do the elements connected with it, such as the concept of subject or agent.

Robert Pippin

[itsmightyfunny]

Philosophy persistently and with the claim of truth, must proceed interpretively without ever possessing a sure key to interpretation; nothing more is given to it than fleeting, disappearing traces within the riddle figures of that which exists and their astonishing entwinings. Thus it reaches so few “results.” It must always begin anew and therefore cannot do without the least thread which earlier times have spun, and through which the lineature is perhaps completed which could transform the ciphers into a text.

Adorno

[itsmightyfunny]

The geometer who draws his figures on the blackboard produces in so doing strokes that are actually there on a board that is actually there. But his experience of what he thus produces, qua experience, affords just as little ground for his sight and thought of the geometrical essence as does the physical act of production itself.

Edmund Husserl

[itsmightyfunny]

We want to replace wild conjectures and explanations by quiet weighing of linguistic facts.

Wittgenstein

[itsmightyfunny]

There is no activity called “knowing” which has a nature to be discovered, and at which natural scientists are particularly skilled. There is simply the process of justifying beliefs to audiences. None of these audiences is closer to nature, or a better representative of some ahistorical ideal of rationality, than any other.

Rorty

[itsmightyfunny]

To say that the parts of properly analyzed true sentences are arranged in a way isomorphic to parts of the world paired with them sounds plausible if one thinks of a sentence like "Jupiter has moons." It sounds slightly less plausible for "The earth goes round the sun", less for "There is no such thing as natural motion", and not plausible at all for 'The universe is infinite." When we want to praise or blame assertions of the latter sort of sentence, we show how the decision to assert them fits into a whole complex of decisions about what terminology to use, what books to read, what projects to engage in, what life to live. In this respect resemble such sentences as "Love is the only law" and "History is the story of class struggle." The whole vocabulary of isomorphism, picturing, and mapping is out of place here, as indeed is the notion of being true of objects. If we ask what objects these sentences claim to be true of, we get only unhelpful repetitions of the subject terms - "the universe", "the law", "history". Or, even less helpfully we get talk about "the facts," or "the way the world is.”

Rorty, Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism

[psycheapuleius]