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To get at the meaning of a statement the logical positivist asks, What would the world be like if it were true? The operationist asks, What would we have to do to come to believe it? For the pragmatist the question is, What would we do if did believe it?

Abraham Kaplan

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Abraham Kaplan
Age: 75 †
Born: 1918
Born: June 11
Died: 1993
Died: June 19
Philosopher
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World
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Positivist
True
Pragmatist
Come
Pragmatists
Believe
Statement
Would
Logical

More quotes by Abraham Kaplan

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Every discipline develops standards of professional competence to which its workers are subject... Every scientific community is a society in the small, so to speak, with its own agencies of social control.
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Give a small boy a hammer and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.
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A philosophy which speaks, even indirectly, only to philosophers is no philosophy at all and I think the same is true if it speaks only to scientists, or only to jurists, or priests, or any other special class.
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Experience is of particulars only.
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We are forever asking Nature whether it has stopped beating its wife.
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There is nothing more inspiring than having a mind unfold before you. Let people teach who have a calling. It is never just a job.
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We are caught up in a paradox, one which might be called the paradox of conceptualization. The proper concepts are needed to formulate a good theory, but we need a good theory to arrive at the proper concepts.
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Mathematics is not yet capable of coping with the naïveté of the mathematician himself.
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The price of training is always a certain trained incapacity: the more we know how to do something, the harder it is to learn to do it differently.
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A problem is something you can do something about. If you can't do something about it, then it's not a problem, it's a predicament. That means it's something that must be coped with, endured.
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