To suppose that "I know" is a descriptive phrase, is only one example of the descriptive fallacy, so common in philosophy. Even if... some language is now purely descriptive, language was not in origin so, and much of it is still not so. utterance of obvious ritual phrases, in the appropriate circumstances, is not describing the action we are doing, but doing it ("I do"): in other cases it functions, like tone and expression, or again like punctuation and mood, as an intimation that we are employing language in a special way ("I warn," "I ask," "I define"). Such phrases cannot, strictly, be lies, though they can "imply" lies, as "I promise" implies that I fully intend, which may be true.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Science is analytical, descriptive, informative. Man does not live by bread alone, but by science he attempts to do so. Hence the ...deadliness of all that is purely scientific.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Both art and physics are unique forms of language. Each has a specialized lexicon of symbols that is used in a distinctive syntax.... Their very different and specific contexts obscure their connection to everyday language as well as to each other. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy just how often the terms of one can be applied to the concepts of the other. "Volume," "space," "mass," "force," "light," "color," "tension," "relationship," and "density" are descriptive words that are heard repeatedly if you trail along with a museum docent. They also appear on the blackboards of freshman college physics lectures. The proponents of these two diverse endeavors wax poetic about elegance, symmetry, beauty, and aesthetics. While physicists demonstrate that A equals B or that X is the same as Y, artists often choose signs, symbols, and allegories to equate a painterly image with a feature of experience. Both of these techniques reveal previously hidden relationships.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Acts themselves alone are history.... Tell me the acts, O historian, and leave me to reason upon them as I please; away with your ...reasoning and your rubbish! All that is not action is not worth reading.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hard times accounted in large part for the fact that the exposition was a financial disappointment in its first year, but Sally Ra...nd and her fan dancers accomplished what applied science had failed to do, and the exposition closed in 1934 with a net profit, which was donated to participating cultural institutions, excluding Sally Rand.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak ...in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send cheques to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The concept of a person is logically prior to that of an individual consciousness. The concept of a person is not to be analysed a...s that of an animated body or an embodied anima.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a necessary condition of one's ascribing states of consciousness, experiences, to oneself, in the way one does, that one sho...uld also ascribe them, or be prepared to ascribe them, to others who are not oneself.... The ascribing phrases are used in just the same sense when the subject is another as when the subject is oneself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »