Cheryl Misak > Quotes

“What sort of philosophy one chooses depends…on what sort of man one is;”
― Cheryl Misak, Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers

“Though designing the house in which modern rational choice/utility/decision theory would inhabit, it is not clear that Ramsey would have chosen to reside there himself. For one thing, while he provided a logic of decision, he did not think that all human action and decision should be crammed into the strictures of rational choice theory, as many economists and social scientists today seem to assume. In his 1928 work in economics, he would make it clear that choosing to maximize utility is a moral decision, one which puts utility before justice and equality.”
― Cheryl Misak, Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers

“The second major contribution of pragmatism to the study of belief is to take seriously Alexander Bain’s idea that a belief is a disposition to act. Bain, a contemporary of the early American pragmatists who knew at least one of them (Holmes), had broken with traditional British empiricism. Bain rejected the idea that a belief was a certain intensity or vividness in the mind, and had argued that belief was, rather, a disposition to behave: It will be readily admitted that the state of mind called Belief is, in many cases, a concomitant of our activity. But I mean to go farther than this, and to affirm that belief has no meaning, except in reference to our actions; the essence, or import of it is such as to place it under the region of the will.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“Complex entities like physical objects or other minds are logical constructions from the immediately given entities of sensation, so that the data yielded by acquaintance in a given case are simply ‘defined as constituting’ the complex object in question (PLA:”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“There is no answering a question about axioms from outside the system (WVC: 128–9). A contradiction, for instance, ‘can only occur among the rules of a game’ (WVC: 124). Wittgenstein employs a metaphor that he was frequently to use. Just as the rules of chess delimit certain moves in that game, the idea of a logical contradiction only makes sense in ‘the true–false game, that is, only where we make statements”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“Russell and Moore (like James) were educated by Hegelians.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“terms like ‘good’ and ‘bad’ into non-ethical ones like ‘pleasing’ and ‘displeasing’ commits what Moore called the ‘naturalistic fallacy’. The good is intrinsically valuable and cannot be analysed in more fundamental terms. It is ‘one of those innumerable objects of thought which are themselves incapable of definition, because they are the ultimate terms by reference to which whatever is capable of definition must be defined’ (Moore 2004 [1903]: 9–10). We should trust our intuitions about the good, rather than search for another property in which our judgements of the good are grounded.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“The minutes for 24 November 1916, for instance, show the group worrying that a false judgement ‘has nothing as its object’.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“There is the question: “How is the word ‘truth’ properly used?” This is a question for the dictionary, not for philosophy’ (CP 6: 116, 1910). In a letter to Ottoline Morrell he puts his need for truth of a more transcendent sort thus: ‘the worship of my life … is Truth. That is the something greater than Man that seems to me most capable of giving greatness to Man. That is why I hate pragmatism’ (CP 6: liii, 1911). And that is why James hated logical atomism.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“Our ‘astonishment that anything at all exists’ is the ethical. It is just that ‘Every attempt to express it leads to nonsense’ (WVC: 93). In a subsequent meeting he expands on this point: Everything I describe is within the world. An ethical proposition never occurs in the complete description of the world, not even when I am describing a murderer. What is ethical is not a state of affairs.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“They make truth the subject of empty metaphysics. For the very idea of a world, independent of believers, and of the items within it to which beliefs or sentences might correspond, seems graspable only if we could somehow step outside our corpus of belief, our practices, or that with which we have dealings.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“will continue to fit with experience, evidence, and argument—for only such beliefs are really settled, after all. It is not so easy to end the irritation of doubt. It is not so easy to fix belief. But when a belief is successfully fixed—when it is really ‘indefeasible’—it is true.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“biting satirist.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“The thesis I defend is, briefly stated, this: Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such circumstances, ‘Do not decide, but leave the question open,’ is itself a passional decision—just like deciding yes or no—and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“Their names, to be sure, cut them into separate conceptual entities, but no cuts existed in the continuum in which they originally came”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“In ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’, he sets out the nature of belief as follows. Belief has three ‘properties’: ‘First, it is something that we are aware of; second, it appeases the irritation of doubt; and third, it involves the establishment in our nature of a rule or action, or, say for short, a habit’ (W 3: 263). We shall see Ramsey adopt this view wholesale, although he was more subtle about the whether or not we have to be aware of belief.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“Doubt is of an altogether contrary genus. It is not a habit, but the privation of a habit.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“truth is that property of beliefs that enables us to succeed in our actions.”
― Cheryl Misak, Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers

“of an afterlife was verifiable—one just had to wait and see.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“different collateral beliefs or different preferences. Peirce”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“In ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’, he asserted that the disposition to behave, when circumstances were appropriate, is but one ‘property’ of belief—others being that belief is something we are aware of and that it quells the irritation of doubt”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“best keys to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth’ (VRE: 136). James suffered from depression and often wondered whether life was worth living.13 He sought the religious experience that might sooth his troubled soul, but it did not come easily to him.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“As he was to put it later, in the 1918 course of lectures in London that became The Philosophy of Logical Atomism: ‘you can get down in theory, if not in practice, to ultimate simples, out of which the world is built, and … those simples have a kind of reality not belonging to anything else’ (PLA: 234).”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“relations between sensations are ‘just as immediately given’ as are the individual sensations themselves. Sensations are not isolated atoms, but are part of the ‘sensational flux’ (PU:”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“theory falls into the realm of the inexpressible.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“We must not anachronistically point to the extreme views expressed in later decades, on which meaning reduces to effects or behaviour, or system-inputs and system-outputs. It is better to call Peirce’s theory a pragmatist account of meaning—one that says that effects or behaviour must be part of the analysis of meaning.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“[Carnap’s Aufbau] reminded me strongly of William James’s pragmatic requirement, that the meaning of any statement is given by its ‘cash value,’ that is, by what it means as a direction for human behavior. I wrote immediately to Carnap, ‘What you advocate is pragmatism.’ This was as astonishing to him as it had been to me.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“My dying words to you are “Say good-by to mathematical logic if you wish to preserve your relations with concrete realities!” ’ (CWJ 12: 103, 1908). Russell made his reply in a letter to the logician Philip Jourdain: ‘I would much rather, of the two, preserve my relations with symbolic logic.’14”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“comfortable or one’s life more harmonious can determine whether a belief is true or reasonable to believe.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein

“can doubt one belief and inquire about it, but we cannot doubt all our beliefs and inquire about them all at once. Some things have to be held constant.”
― Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein