Quotes About Pragmatism

You can't go by on hope. It doesn't pay the bills and it doesn't save lives. - Michael St. Pierre

Truth is not always about pragmatic problem solving and making things "work," but about reconciling contradictions. Just because something might have some dire effects does not mean it is not true or even good. Just because something pleases people does not make it true either.

Moderates always seem to deal in hopes rather than in facts.

Sin embargo, los moderados siempre parecían fiarse más de las esperanzas que de los hechos.

Se trata de pragmatismo político, nada más.

Who do you think you are, Jane Eyre? Grow up. Be sensible. Don't get carried away.

Entwined with the strand of conservatism in the Democratic party is the strand of empiricism.

It is better to be a pragmatist than a lunatic.

The practical statesman took precedence over the uncompromising prophet.

Build what you need as you need it, aggressively refactoring as you go along; don't spend a lot of time planning for grandiose, unknown future scenarios. Good software can evolve into what it will ultimately become.

We haven't shed our engineering pragmatism, so we accomplish things in the simplest manner possible. It helps with budget, obviously. We're not getting rich off web video, and we're supporting two families with our income, so we need to keep as much of the budget to ourselves.

Politics is the art of the next best.

When you're failing, there's a very powerful incentive to put ideology aside and just do what seems to work.

Myself, I'm a post-ideological conservative.

Don't be afraid to have a reality check. Taking risks is OK, but you must be realistic.

I don't really give into all that philosophical talks that 'money is not everything.'

Brandom's critics, and more generally those critics of pragmatism who hold fast to their strong "realistic intuitions," want something much more substantial and nonperspectival. They want acknowledgment of a hard-core reality that is not "contaminated" by human subjectivity or perspective.

Peirce shifts our attention from the origins of ideas and hypotheses to their consequences for our conduct.

A unifying theme in all the classical pragmatists as well as their successors is the development of a philosophical orientation that replaces Cartesianism (in all its varieties).

Although "being-in-the-world" is not an expression that any of the classical American pragmatists ever used, it beautifully articulates the pragmatic understanding of the transaction that takes place between human organisms and their environment – a transaction that involves know-how and is the basis for knowing-that.

Rorty is just as dismissive of James's many references to 'experience' – a word that appears in almost every text that James ever wrote. In short, Rorty's pragmatism is a pragmatism without experience. And frankly, I agree with those who have strongly argued that to eliminate experience from pragmatism (old or new) is to eviscerate pragmatism, to leave us with a gutless shadow of pragmatism.

The expression "pragmatism" is like an accordion; it is sometimes stretched to include a wide diversity of positions and thinkers (not just philosophers) and sometimes restricted to specific doctrines of the original American pragmatists.

From the perspective of the logical empiricists, the pragmatic thinkers were viewed as having seen through a glass darkly what was now seen much more clearly. The myth developed (and unfortunately became entrenched) that pragmatism was primarily an anticipation of logical positivism, in particular, the positivist's verifiability criterion of meaning.

Sometimes, out in the world . . . being exactly what people want and expect . . . well, maybe it isn't a good thing but it's a smart thing.