Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)
Context: Hume noted for all time that Berkeley's arguments did not admit the slightest refutation nor did they cause the slightest conviction. This dictum is entirely correct in its application to the earth, but entirely false in Tlön. The nations of this planet are congenitally idealist. Their language and the derivations of their language — religion, letters, metaphysics — all presuppose idealism. The world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is successive and temporal, not spatial.
“The fiction of an ideal language composed of pure atomic statements is as metaphysical as the fiction of Laplace's 'spirit'. Scientific language, with its ever growing equipment of systematic symbol formations, can by no means be regarded as an approximation to such an ideal language.”
Source: 1930s, "Protocol Statements" (1932), p. 91
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Otto Neurath 23
austrian economist, philosopher and sociologist 1882–1945Related quotes
Source: Evolution and Theology (1900), p. 19.
Source: The Principles of Art (1938), p. 268
Source: The Principles of Art (1938), p. 269
As cited in: Geza Revesz, The Origins and Prehistory of Language, London 1956. footnote pp. 126-127; As cited in: Adam Schaff (1962). Introduction to semantics, p. 313-314
Language (1921)
Pt. II, sec. 4, "The Ideal Writer"
The Philosophy of Style (1852)
Context: The ideal form for a poem, essay, or fiction, is that which the ideal writer would evolve spontaneously. One in whom the powers of expression fully responded to the state of feeling, would unconsciously use that variety in the mode of presenting his thoughts, which Art demands.
New York City (p. 284).
States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (1980)