Max Black Quotes

• Fine doesn't mean fine! The scale goes: great, good, okay, not okay, I hate you, fine.

  Max Black

  Hate, Mean, Scales

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• Understanding a metaphor is like deciphering a code or unraveling a riddle.

  Max Black

  Understanding, Unraveling, Metaphor

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• We find out soon enough that the universe is not capricious: the child who learns that fire burns and knife-edges cut know that there are inexorable limits set upon his desires. Language must conform to the discovered regularities and irregularities of experience.

  Max Black

  Children, Cutting, Fire

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• ... I still wish to contend that some metaphors enable us to see aspects of reality that the metaphor's production helps to constitute. But that is no longer surprising if one believes that the world is necessarily a world under a certain description - or a world seen from a certain perspective.

  Max Black

  Believe, Reality, Perspective

  Max Black (1990). “Perplexities: Rational Choice, the Prisoner's Dilemma, Metaphor, Poetic Ambiguity, and Other Puzzles”

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• No doubt metaphors are dangerous- and perhaps especially so in philosophy. But a prohibition against their use would be a willful and harmful restriction upon our powers of inquiry.

  Max Black

  Philosophy, Doubt, Would Be

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• ...a metaphor that works in one society may seem preposterous in another.

  Max Black

  May, Metaphor, Seems

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• ... a result once generally accepted by mathematicians is seldom retracted, and then only with great pangs.
  The Nature of Mathematics

  Max Black

  Accepted, Mathematics, Results

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