Quotes About Instrumentalism

If you organize your life around your own wants, other people become objects for the satisfaction of your own desires. Everything is coldly instrumental. Just as a prostitute is rendered into an object for the satisfaction of orgasm, so a professional colleague is rendered into an object for the purpose of career networking, a stranger is rendered into an object for the sake of making a sale, a spouse is turned into an object for the purpose of providing you with love.

Copenhagen interpretation Niels Bohr's combination of instrumentalism, anthropocentrism and studied ambiguity, used to avoid understanding quantum theory as being about reality.

Instrumentalism a la John Dewey follows pragmatism in general, but especially emphasizes that the validity or utility of an idea — we have gotten rid of truth, remember? — derives from the instruments used in testing the idea, and will change as instruments improve. Like the other theories discussed thus far, Instrumentalism has had more direct influence on social science (and educational theory) than on physical science, although vastly influenced by physical science.

Operationalism, created by Nobel physicist Percy W. Bridgman, attempts to deal with the common sense objections to Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, and owes a great deal to pragmatism and instrumentalism. Bridgman explicitly pointed out that common sense derives unknowingly from some tenets of ancient philosophy and speculation — particularly Platonic Idealism and Aristotelian essentialism — and that this philosophy assumes many axioms that now appear either untrue or unprovable.

It is one of the most characteristic and destructive developments of our own society that man, becoming more and more of an instrument, transforms reality more and more into something relative to his own interests and functions.

We are increasingly abandoning Aristotle's view of paideia—learning and habituating virtues for personal flourishing and the common good—in favor of technical-instrumental education leading to private wealth for some, argues philosopher Richard Eldridge: "to abandon the cultivation of virtues and instead to teach only in order to produce measurable outcomes is to capitulate to an individualist culture of instrumental control and private satisfactions."44