The criterion which we use to test the genuineness of apparent statements of fact is the criterion of verifyability. We say that a... sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express--that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as true, or reject it as being false.... To make our position clearer, we may formulate it in another way. Let us call a proposition which records an actual or possible observation an experiential proposition. Then we may say that it is the mark of a genuine factual proposition, not that it should be equivalent to an experiential proposition, or any finite number of experiential propositions, but simply that some experiential propositions can be deduced from it in conjunction with certain other premises without being deducible from those other premises alone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Will TV kill the theater? If the programs I have seen, save for "Kukla, Fran and Ollie," the ball games and the fights, are any cr...iterion, the theater need not wake up in a cold sweat.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have always taken as the standard of the mode of teaching and writing, not the abstract, particular, professional philosopher, b...ut universal man, that I have regarded man as the criterion of truth, and not this or that founder of a system, and have from the first placed the highest excellence of the philosopher in this, that he abstains, both as a man and as an author, from the ostentation of philosophy, i.e., that he is a philosopher only in reality, not formally, that he is a quiet philosopher, not a loud and still less a brawling one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is just as wrong to judge paintings from the point of view of pictures as it is to judge pictures from the point of view of pai...nting. A painting has its own rule, its own justification within itself. A picture has its criterion outside itself, in the external reality it imitates. Several critics have recently made the remark that nonrepresentational art has this major defect, that being unrelated to external reality, it has no criterion by which it can be judged. The argument would be valid if the art of painting were the art of picturing. As it is, all judgments and appreciations of paintings founded upon their relation to an external model are irrelevant to painting. A painting is the embodiment of a form in a matter; the whole being of a picture is determined by the relationship that obtains between the image itself and some external reality.... As compared with a painting, whose ultimate end is to achieve a fitting object of contemplation, images are characterized by their ambition to represent all the objects they include, and to represent these objects with all the details that are compatible with their pictorial representation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness... with which it seeks its truth.... Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If we are to take for the criterion of truth the majority of suffrages, they ought to be gotten from those philosophic and patriot...ic citizens who cultivate their reason.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If a criterion were wanted for telling a novel from a fable or a tale or a romance (or a drama), a simple rule-of-thumb would be t...he absence of the supernatural. In fables and fairy tales, as everyone knows, birds and beasts talk. In novels, they don't; if you find birds and beasts talking in a book you are reading you can be sure it is not a novel. That takes care, for example, of Animal Farm. Men in novels may behave like beasts, but beasts in novels may not behave like men. That takes care of Gulliver's Travels, in case anyone were to mistake it for a novel. The characters in a novel must obey the laws of nature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the ...Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To regard the successful experiences which ensue from a belief as a criterion of its truth is one thing--and a thing that is somet...imes bad and sometimes good--but to assume that truth itself consists in the process by which it is verified is a different thing and always bad.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »