Instrumentalism Quotes

Epistemology has always been affected by technologies like the telescope and the microscope, things that have created a radical shift in how we sense physical reality.

I don't work with anyone out of a sense of charity. I use people as long as they are useful to me.

We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.

Man is/the symbol-using (symbol making, symbol-misusing) animal/inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative)/separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making/goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order)/and rotten with perfection.

Reason is a bee, and exists only on what it makes; his usefulness takes the place of beauty.

Monarchy and aristocracy, valuable and useful as I think them, are still valuable and useful as means, and not as ends.

In Charn [Jadis] had taken no notice of Polly (till the very end) because Digory was the one she wanted to make use of. Now that she had Uncle Andrew, she took no notice of Digory. I expect most witches are like that. They are not interested in things or people unless they can use them; they are terribly practical.

Materialist philosophies that treat human beings as machines or animals possess the high ground in our culture - academia, the most powerful media and many of our courts.

Everywhere the means is erected into the end, and the end itself is forgotten.

The breath of the flute player: does it belong to the flute?

The true'to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as 'the right' is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.

The time will come when the evil forms we have known can no more be organized. Man's culture can spare nothing, wants all material. He is to convert all impediments into instruments, all enemies into power.

Americans should expose China to Christian values so in order that time shall have been secured for the Chinese to absorb the ideals which in ourselves are the result of centuries of Christian increment..

Modern definitions of truth, such as those as pragmatism and instrumentalism, which are practical rather than contemplative, are inspired by industrialisation as opposed to aristocracy.

The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.

Man is a means and not an end, and he is a means to economic or political ends which are not really ends in themselves but means to other ends which in their turn are means and so ad infinitum.

Whoever does not philosophize for the sake of philosophy, but rather uses philosophy as a means, is a sophist.

Technological man can't believe in anything that can't be measured, taped, or put into a computer.

We are concerned with things. We are concerned with success. We are concerned with money. We are concerned with instrumentalities.

My body is an instrument for me to use.

Everybody gets excited about technology, but it doesn't interest me in the least. I'm only interested in it if it makes my job easier or cheaper. They're tools.

External instruments are only extensions of the biological instrument.

Maybe I'm being a bit harsh on philosophers, but they have not been very kind to me... I have been variously called nominalist, an instrumentalist, a positivist, a realist, and several other ists. The technique seems refutation by denigration: If you can attach a label to my approach, you don't have to say what is wrong with it... I am sure that Einstein, Heisenberg and Dirac didn't worry about whether they were realists or instrumentalists.

We may treat of the Soul as in the body - whether it be set above it or actually within it - since the association of the two constitutes the one thing called the living organism, the Animate.Now from this relation, from the Soul using the body as an instrument, it does not follow that the Soul must share the body's experiences: a man does not himself feel all the experiences of the tools with which he is working.

The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away.