conceptual confusion Quotes

Where jargon turns living issues into abstractions, and where jargon ends by competing with jargon, people don't have causes. They only have enemies.

There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.

If it looks like a hallway, feels like a hallway, and acts like a hallway—is it important to figure out that it isn’t a hallway?

The Master made it his task to destroy systematically every doctrine, every belief, every concept of the divine, for these things, which were originally intended as pointers, were now being taken as descriptions. He loved to quote the Eastern saying "When the sage points to the moon, all that the idiot sees is the finger.

When you think about it, 12:15 P.M. is actually 11:75 A.M.

Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday

I don't really like the term 'artist.' I'm not sure what it means. It's a bit like 'love.'

Intelligence is not to be confused with intelligence.

The usage of the words "public" and "public sphere" betrays a multiplicity of concurrent meanings. Their origins go back to various historical phases and, when applied synchronically to the conditions of a bourgeois society that is industrially advanced and constituted as a social-welfare state, they fuse into a clouded amalgam. Yet the very conditions that make the inherited language seem inappropriate appear to require these words, however confused their employment.

The description is not the described; I can describe the mountain, but the description is not the mountain, and if you are caught up in the description, as most people are, then you will never see the mountain

Some changes of language are to be regretted, as they lead to false inferences, and society is always a loser by mistaking names for things.

the word 'justification' has itself had a chequered career over the course of many centuries of debate. As the major historian of the doctrine has noted, the word has long since ceased to mean, in ecclesial debates, what it meant for Paul himself - which is confusing, since the debates have gone on referring to Paul as though he was in fact talking about what they want to talk about. It is as though the greengrocer treated you to a long discussion of how onions are grown, and how best to cook with them, when what you had asked was how much he would charge for three of them.

If an urn lacks the characteristics of an urn, how can we call it an urn?

But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.

Hence it happens that one takes words for concepts, and concepts for the things themselves.

Quand celui à qui l'on parle ne comprend pas et celui qui parle ne se comprend pas, c'est de la métaphysique When he to whom a person speaks does not understand, and he who speaks does not understand himself, that is metaphysics.

Beauty? To me it is a word without sense because I do not know where its meaning comes from nor where it leads to.

Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is "established by the State".

The doctrine (of) maintaining that the language of daily life, with words used in their ordinary meanings, suffices for philosophy . . . I find myself totally unable to accept . . . . Because it makes almost inevitable the perpetuation amongst philosophers of the muddle-headedness they have taken over from common sense.

I mean, you hear the word 'globalization' over and over and over again. Globalization, globalization, globalization. Rarely has a word gone so directly from obscurity to meaninglessness without any intervening period of coherence.

It's so hard for me to wrap my head around the concept of truth, I don't even know what people mean by it.

Many of the questions we ask God can't be answered directly, not because God doesn't know the answers but because our questions don't make sense. As C.S. Lewis once pointed out, many of our questions are, from God's point of view, rather like someone asking, "Is yellow square or round?" or "How many hours are there is a mile?

Why, can you imagine what would happen if we named all the twos Henry or George or Robert or John or lots of other things? You'd have to say Robert plus John equals four, and if the four's name were Albert, things would be hopeless.

Here I beg you to observe in passing that the scruples that prevented ancient writers from using arithmetical terms in geometry, and which can only be a consequence of their inability to perceive clearly the relation between these two subjects, introduced much obscurity and confusion into their explanations.