“Philosophers often behave like little children who scribble some marks on a piece of paper at random and then ask the grown-up "What's that?" - It happened like this: the grown-up had drawn pictures for the child several times and said: this is a man, this is a house, etc. And then the child makes some marks too and asks: what's this then?”
― Culture and Value
― Culture and Value
“The high success of Newton's astronomy was in one way an intellectual disaster: it produced an illusion from which we tend still to suffer. This illusion was created by the circumstance that Newton's mechanics had a good model in the solar system. For this gave the impression that we had an ideal of scientific explanation; whereas the truth was, it was mere obligingness on the part of the solar system, by having had so peaceful a history in recorded time, to provide such a model.”
― Collected Philosophical Papers, Volume 2: Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind
― Collected Philosophical Papers, Volume 2: Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind
“The truthful—though unhelpful—answer to the question: "How did we come by our primary knowledge of causality?" is that in learning to speak we learned the linguistic representation and application of a host of causal concepts. Very many of them were represented by transitive and other verbs of action used in reporting what is observed. Others—a good example is "infect"—form, not observation statements, but rather expressions of causal hypotheses. The word "cause" itself is highly general. How does someone show that he has the concept cause? We may wish to say: only by having such a word in his vocabulary. If so, then the manifest possession of the concept presupposes the mastery of much else in language. I mean: the word "cause" can be added to a language in which are already represented many causal concepts. A small selection: scrape, push, wet, carry, eat, burn, knock over, keep off, squash, make (e.g. noises, paper boats), hurt. But if we care to imagine languages in which no special causal concepts are represented, then no description of the use of a word in such languages will be able to present it as meaning cause. Nor will it even contain words for natural kinds of stuff, nor yet words equivalent to "body", "wind", or "fire". For learning to use special causal verbs is part and parcel of learning to apply the concepts answer to these and many other substantives. As surely as we learned to call people by name or to report from seeing it that the cat was on the table, we also learned to report from having observed it that someone drank up the milk or that the dog made a funny noise or that things were cut or broken by whatever we saw cut or break them.”
― Collected Philosophical Papers, Volume 2: Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind
― Collected Philosophical Papers, Volume 2: Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind
“It is easiest to tell what transubstantiation is by saying this: little children should be taught about it as early as possible. Not, of course, using the word 'transubstantiation', because it is not a little child's word. But the thing can be taught, and it is best taught at mass at the consecration, the one part where a small child should be got to fix its attention on what is going on.”
― Faith in a Hard Ground: Essays on Religion, Philosophy and Ethics
― Faith in a Hard Ground: Essays on Religion, Philosophy and Ethics
“What ways are there of getting human beings to do things? You can make a man fall over by pushing him; you cannot usefully make his hand write a letter or mix concrete by pushing; for in general if you have to push his hand in the right way, you might as well not use him at all. You can order him to do what you want, and if you have authority he will perhaps obey you. Again if you have power to hurt him or help him according as he disregards or obeys your orders, or if he loves you so as to accord with your requests, you have a way of getting him to do things. However, few people have authority over everyone they need to get to do things, and few people either have power to hurt or help others without damage to themselves or command affection from others to such an extent as to be able to get them to do the things they need others to do. Those who have extensive authority and power cannot exercise it to get all the other people to do the things that meet their mutual requirements. So though physical force seems a more certain way of producing desired physical results than any other, and authority and power to hurt or help and sometimes affection too, more potent than the feeble procedure of a language-game as the one with 'Bump!' that I described, yet in default of the possibility or utility of exerting physical force, and of the possibility of exercising authority or power to hurt and help, or of commanding affection, this feeble means is at least a means of getting people to do things. Now getting one another to do things without the application of physical force is a necessity for human life, and that far beyond what could be secured by those other means.”
― The collected philosophical papers of G.E.M. Anscombe
― The collected philosophical papers of G.E.M. Anscombe
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