Crane's Citation of Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein is said to have asked his students why people used to think that the sun went around the earth. One replied: ‘because it looks as if the sun goes around the earth.’ To which Wittgenstein is said to have responded: ‘and how would it look if the earth went around the sun?’ The obvious answer—‘exactly the same!’—can be given to the analogous question about mind and brain: why did people use to think that the mind was not the brain? Because it seems as if the mind is not the brain? And how would it seem if the mind were the brain?

Crane, 2001, Elements of Mind, p.67

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Frankfurt on Bullshit

For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshuit

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Frankfurt on Bullshit

Her statement is grounded neither in a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true. It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth — this indifference to how things really are — that I regard as of the essence of bullshit.

Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit.

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John Austin on Excuses

Here, surely, is just the sort of situation where people will say ‘almost anything’, because they are so flurried, or so anxious to get off. ‘It was a mistake,’ ‘It was an accident’ -- how readily these can appear indifferent, and even be used together. Yet, a story or two, and everybody will not merely agree that they are completely different, but even discover for himself what the difference is and what each means.*

*You have a donkey, so have I, and they graze in the same field. The day comes when I conceive a dislike for mine. I go to shoot it, draw a bead on it, fire: the brute falls in its tracks. I inspect the victim , and find to my horror that it is your donkey. I appear on your doorstep with the remains and say -- what? ‘I say, old sport, I’m awfully sorry, &c., I’ve shot your donkey by accident’? Or ‘by mistake’? Then again, I go to shoot my donkey as before, draw a bead on it, fire -- but as I do so the beasts move, and to my horror yours falls. Again the scene on the doorstep -- what do I say? ‘By mistake’? Or ‘by accident’?

from “A Plea for Excuses,” in John Austin, Philosophical Papers, 1970. London: Oxford University Press: 184-185.

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Popper Quotes Mengers on Definition

Definitions are dogmas; only the conclusions drawn from them can afford us any new insight.

K. Mengers, Dimensionstheorie, 1928

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Russell On Philosophy

Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite answers to its questions since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy

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Haack On Old Deferentialists and New Cynics

The Old Deferentialists, taking the rationality of science for granted, assumed that there must be a uniquely rational method of inquiry exclusive to the sciences; the New Cynics, noticing the failure of efforts to articulate what that uniquely rational method is, conclude that science is not a rational enterprise, in fact, that the whole idea of objectively better or worse conducted inquiry is ideological humbug. Neither the Old Deferentialism nor the New Cynicism will do: the former is too uncritically deferential to science, the latter is too uncritically critical. 

Susan Haack, Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate, p.3

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