Idea About Ideas Quotes

“If we are looking for alternative visions of American life in the decades following the Civil War, Homes, James, Peirce, and Dewey are not the figures we would turn to.  This has something to do, no doubt with their temperaments and their politics, but it is also a consequence of their attitude toward ideas.
What was that attitude?  If we strain out the difference, personal and philosophical, they had with one another, we can say that what these four thinkers had in common was not a group of ideas, but a single idea -- an idea about ideas.  They all believed that ideas are not "out there" waiting to be discovered, but are tools -- like forks and knives and microchips -- that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves.  They believed that ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals -- that ideas are social.  They believed that ideas do not develop according to some inner logic of their own, but are entirely dependent, like germs, on their human carriers and the environment.  And they believed that since ideas are provisional responses to particular and unreproducible circumstances, their survival depends not on their immutability but on their adaptability.”
― Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America