Philosophers From The United States

"Social psychology is especially interested in the effect which the social group has in the determination of the experience and conduct of the individual member."

"There is, of course, the critical difference between the pressure of hands against each other, and that of the stone against the hand: that in the case of the pressure of the hands against each other there is the sense of effort in each hand, while in the case of the stone there is only the sense of resistance in the stone against the pressing hand. However, the resistance remains an identical content of the two. Furthermore, the resistance of the hand arises only over against that of the stone. The stone defines the hand as necessarily as the hand the hand. It is a fundamental experience in which each object involves the other. It is that from which geometrical congruence is abstracted. Each surface, that of the hand and that of the stone, is given as immediately as the other, and the resistance of the one is given as immediately as that of the other. The abstraction of it in physical science is inertia. Out of the experience arise the physical thing and the organism. Neither is prior."

"[George Herbert Mead] approach completely changes the meaning of intentionality, inasmuch as here action is no longer understood as the realization of ends set beforehand, in contrast to the theories of rational action and their transformation in the sociological theory of action. For the pragmatists, the setting of ends is not an act of consciousness that takes place outside of contexts of action."

"Social psychology has, as a rule, dealt with various phases of social experience from the psychological standpoint of individual experience. The point of approach which I wish to suggest is that of dealing with experience from the standpoint of society, at least from the standpoint of communication as essential to the social order. Social psychology, on this view, presupposes an approach to experience from the standpoint of the individual, but undertakes to determine in particular that which belongs to this experience because the individual himself belongs to a social structure, a social order."

"Man lives in a world of Meaning. What he sees and hears means what he will or might handle."

"The proximate goal of all perception is what we can get our hands upon. If we traverse the distance that separate us from that which we see or hear and find nothing for the hand to manipulate, the experience is an illusion or a hallucination. The world of perceptual reality, the world of physical things, is the world of our contacts and our manipulations, and the distance experience of the eye and the ear means first of all these physical things. Physical things are not only the meaning of what we see and hear; they are also the means we employ to accomplish our ends."

"Sociologists such as George Herbert Mead and Charles Horton Cooley thought of society as a human laboratory where they could observe and understand human behavior to be better able to address human needs, and they used the city in which they lived as a living laboratory."

"Physical things are perceptual things. They also arise within the act... It is in the operation with these perceptual or physical things which lie within the physiological act short of consummation that the peculiar human intelligence is found."

"I share the conviction held by many others that the movement of thought called "symbolism" is of great significance. Not only does this movement cut across the traditional lines of division among philosophers, but it coordinates in a remarkable way the work of linguists, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and biologists, in so far as their work connects with the topic of mind. In the degree that the symbolic movement is significant, a work which develops systematically the basis of the movement, and at the same time applies this analysis to the topic of mind and to certain basic philosophical problems, can at least claim to be an important contribution to critical thought. Whether the claim is substantiated depends, of course, on the quality of the work itself."

"The Encyclopedia presents a contemporary version of the ancient encyclopedic ideal of Aristotle, the Scholastics, Leibniz, the Encyclopedists, and Comte."

"The term "meaning" is not here included among the basic terms of semiotic. This term, useful enough at the level of everyday analysis, does not have the precision necessary for scientific analysis. Accounts of meaning usually throw a handful of putty at the target of sign phenomena, while a technical semiotic must provide us with words which are sharpened arrows. "Meaning" signifies any and all phases of sign-processes (the status of being a sign, the interpretant, the fact of denoting, the significatum), and frequently suggests mental and valuational processes as well; hence it is desirable for semiotic to dispense with the term and to introduce special terms for the various factors which meaning fails to discriminate."

"Semiotic itself neither rests on nor necessarily implies a particular philosophy. A science of signs no more decides between an 'empirical' and a 'non-empirical' philosophy than it decides between a 'naturalistic' and a 'supernaturalistic' religion. In itself it cannot force one to believe only scientifically verified statements, nor to use only scientific discourse, nor to form one's appraisals and prescriptions in the light of science. It will nevertheless have a profound influence on the course of philosophy, since it deals with topics peculiarly relevant to philosophic systematization... In this sense, the philosophy of the future will be semiotically oriented. But the nature of this influence will not always be the same, and will depend upon the role which given individuals and societies assign to scientific knowledge."

"A language in the full semiotical sense of the term is any intersubjective set of sign vehicles whose usage is determined by syntactical, semantical, and pragmatical rules."

"In 1931, Tarski proved quite simply that... there is no complete language of science. ...Tarski's proof... essentially consists in showing that, as soon as you not only exhibit the statements but add to them the statement, "is true," you are in trouble because you are bound to be landed in contradictions like the one which arises in the ."

"I think that I have learned more from you than from any other living thinker, except perhaps Alfred Tarski... but not even excepting Russell."

"It's interesting... Tarski, although his English was weak, had a very good sense of language and he kept on asking me "Is that really good English?" Not in the sense of being grammatically correct, but, well for example, Helmer was very fond of using the word "tantamount" and Tarski got the feeling that somehow it's not a word used very often. Actually his instincts for language were extremely good. I suppose that was connected with his general work on formalizations and metalanguages. Anyway, I was just a proofreader."

"The present article is almost wholly devoted to a single problem—the definition of truth. Its task is to construct—with reference to a given language—a materially adequate and formally correct definition of the term 'true sentence. This problem, which belongs to the classical problems of philosophy, raises considerable difficulties. For although the meaning of the term 'true sentence' in colloquial language seems to be quite clear and intelligible, all attempts to define this meaning more precisely have hitherto been fruitless, and many investigations in which this term has been used and which started with apparently evident premisses have often led to paradoxes and antinomies (for which, however, a more or less satisfactory solution has been found). The concept of truth shares in this respect the fate of other analogous concepts in the domain of the semantics of language."

"Logic is justly considered the basis of all other sciences, even if only for the reason that in every argument we employ concepts taken from the field of logic, and that ever correct inference proceeds in accordance with its laws."

"There can be no doubt that the knowledge of logic is of considerable practical importance for everyone who desires to think and infer correctly."

"According to Morris, syntactics is the relation between a given sign-vehicle and other sign-vehicles. There is a critical distinction here (that many cartographers have missed) between Morris's "syntactics" and the linguistic subcategory of "syntax". While syntax puts emphasis on word order and parsing (i.e., on a linear sequence), syntactics is much broader in scope. Syntactics allows for any kind of among-sign relationships. Morris (1938, p. 16) makes this point explicitly in his statement that there are "syntactical problems in the fields of perceptual signs, aesthetic signs, the practical use of signs, and general linguistics."... At least three kinds of sign relationships seem to fall under Morris's umbrella of syntactics (Posner, 1985, in French; cited in Nöth, 1990, p. 51). These include:"

"It is perhaps worth while saying that semantics as conceived in this paper (and in former papers of the author) is a sober and modest discipline which has no pretensions to being a universal patent-medicine for all the ills and diseases of mankind, whether imaginary or real. You will not find in semantics any remedy for decayed teeth or illusions of grandeur or class conflicts. Nor is semantics a device for establishing that everyone except the speaker and his friends is speaking nonsense."

"The fundamental significance of the work of Charles William Morris is based on the fact that he was a philosopher in the widest sense of the term, a man who changed the world, leaving it a different place than it had been before. Morris left behind a large number of writings, but not all have been made available, and the breadth of his work as a whole has gone unrecognized. His contributions to sign theory have gained a firm foothold in international semiotic discourse, but his axiological studies as well as his work on the theory and history of science have largely been ignored, as have his writings on the subject of mind and his essay on the various paths of life."

"If a mathematician wishes to disparage the work of one of his colleagues, say, A, the most effective method he finds for doing this is to ask where the results can be applied. The hard pressed man, with his back against the wall, finally unearths the researches of another mathematician B as the locus of the application of his own results. If next B is plagued with a similar question, he will refer to another mathematician C. After a few steps of this kind we find ourselves referred back to the researches of A, and in this way the chain closes."

"For reasons mentioned at the beginning of this section, we cannot offer here a precise structural definition of semantical category and will content ourselves with the following approximate formulation: two expressions belong to the same semantical category if (I) there is a sentential function which contains one of these expressions, and if (2) no sentential function which contains one of these expressions ceases to be a sentential function if this expression is replaced in it by the other. It follows from this that the relation of belonging to the same category is reflective, symmetrical and transitive. By applying the principle of abstraction, all the expressions of the language which are parts of sentential functions can be divided into mutually exclusive classes, for two expressions are put into one and the same class if and only if they belong to the same semantical category, and each of these classes is called a semantical category. Among the simplest examples of semantical categories it suffices to mention the category of the sentential functions, together with the categories which include respectively the names of individuals, of classes of individuals, of two-termed relations between individuals, and so on. Variables (or expressions with variables) which represent names of the given categories likewise belong to the same category."

"In Foundations of the Theory of Signs (p. 6), the three terms in question were defined follows: pragmatics as the study of "the relation of signs to interpreters", semantics as the study of "the relations of signs to the objects to which the signs are applicable", syntactics as the study of "the formal relations of signs to one another.""

"Charles Morris (1901-1979) was a student of George Herbert Mead at the University of Chicago and later editor of the widely known collection of Mead's lectures, Mind, Self, and Society (1934). Morris helped to create "the Viennese connection" to American philosophy in the 1930s, hoping to clarify pragmatism by making use of the foundationalist, verification model of truth promised by the logical empiricism of Rudolph Carnap and others."

"Tarski tried to publish his theorem (the equivalence between AC and "every infinite set A has the same cardinality as A × A") in Comptes Rendus, but Fréchet and Lebesgue refused to present it. Fréchet wrote that an implication between two well known (true) propositions is not a new result, and Lebesgue wrote that an implication between two false propositions is of no interest. And Tarski said that after this misadventure he never tried to publish in the Comptes Rendus."

"The fact that black voters have voted over 90 percent Democratic for decades leaves them almost wholly without power. Democrats—paradigmatically, the Clintons—feint in their direction during general elections, trying to assure turnout and using them to bash Republicans as bigots and—in the usual fashion—as emblems of their own goodness."

"The progressive approach has left American racial inequality intractable: a permanent, institutionalized, chronic, insoluble condition. And the electoral process has left black people without any political leverage."

"There's no reason for Republicans to waste any time on black voters; there are no votes there under any conditions. Rand Paul went to Ferguson and Baltimore to talk racial healing: no one cared or even noticed."

"Since Jesse Jackson ran for president, and perhaps up until the movement, the Democratic Party has dominated and used black leadership."

"I think American white conservatives and white liberals are, by and large, both racist. But the liberals believe they’re not racists—in fact, they believe in nothing else with so much commitment. They insist they don't have a racist bone in their bodies; they don't even see race; they were over that a long time ago."

"What white people learned from the Civil Rights era was how not to appear to be racists, even to themselves. They came away from the 1960s knowing that racism was a matter of using the wrong words or expressing the wrong attitudes publicly. They trained their internal monologues to mirror an egalitarian or deracinated public discourse: no slurs, just a continual stream of . That was the essence of white anti-racism: don't say the wrong thing."

"Behind all the Great-Society-style /anti-poverty/education programs lurked all the old stereotypes: blacks as animalistic, criminal, sexual, violent, and above all, as time went on, as . The white s are always diagnosing the dysfunctions and prescribing a cure for the black family: high-rise housing projects, and standardized testing, wars on poverty or drugs, self-esteem seminars. A good portion of the African-American population was simply institutionalized or interned, in public housing complexes, in urban schools, and in one of the biggest prison systems the world has ever known. It all amounts to a sprawling race gulag in which people are both dependent and hedged about with restrictions."

"The entrapment of black voters in the Democratic party has been a disaster, and it’s one of the reasons that progress on has been infinitesimal or at best incremental since the ."

", where we pluck your best, brightest, most ambitious or conformist, and invite them into our elite institutions. This has had some effect on upward mobility, but its primary purpose is to parade as conspicuously as possible the non-racism of the people who run the institutions. It’s primarily another way for white people to mutter to themselves, “I am not a racist.” And it’s had the effect of dividing black communities and families, like mass incarceration in the other direction."

"The Democratic Party has exploited black leadership."

"American progressivism maintains a hyper-consciousness of race, obsessively emphasizing its centrality to human identity and relentlessly breaking down populations by racial categories. If nothing else, aggressive affirmative action requires that everyone be identified racially. When it’s time to measure political opinions, nothing is as salient as race, and the Trump phenomenon gets explained almost exclusively in terms of racial distributions, as white rage or white nationalism."

"The two-party system is breaking down into a race system."

"If one behaved as a good citizen or a charitable person simply because one was dreadfully scared of the state placing one in jail, one would not be a good citizen or person but barely more than a circus animal."

"Ethics requires the kind of personal reflection, in the end, that no one else can do decisively for any individual."

"[C]oercive human interactions [are] destructive, even where the coercion is urged from honorable motives, and advocates confining the use of physical force in human relations to instances of the administration of justice understood as the protection and maintenance of individual (negative) human rights."

"While individualism was once widely hailed in Britain and especially the United States, today it is deemed amoral and heartless. The individualist viewpoint is unable to promise honestly that everyone will eventually be completely well-off. Critics find this defeatist and insist that ‘we must do better’ while calling upon the forces of the state to see that we do."

"If welfare and equality are to be primary aims of law, some people must necessarily possess a greater power of coercion in order to force redistribution of material goods. Political power alone should be equal among human beings; yet striving for other kinds of equality absolutely requires political inequality."

"[T]here is little doubt that only a totalitarian government aims to take on every possible concern of the citizenry."

"To Marx any talk of rights possessed by people equally, unalienably, absolutely, and universally would have to await the communist epoch when all persons will have reached a common nature, total equality and perfection. Until then people are in a state of incompletion and imperfection, incapable of justifying equal human rights."

"Regulatory policies are inherently redistributive; that is, they involve the seizure of earned income for purposes of allocating this income in ways the government’s policymakers believe are more important than do those whose income has been seized."

"[The media] assume, in the way they address politicians or report on social problems, that whatever is important to society must be a matter of public or state concern."

"Politicians are leaches, mostly."

"The institution of taxation is not a civilized but a barbaric method to fund anything... it amounts to... a gross violation of human liberty."