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USEFUL

                                             July 21, 2010

      Simone de Beauvoir, commenting
      on Sartre's "Being and Nothingness":

      "... [Man's] passion is not inflicted on him
      from without.  He chooses it.  It is his
      very being and, as such, does not imply the
      idea of unhappiness.  If this choice is
      considered as useless, it is because there
      exists no absolute value before the passion
      of man, outside of it, in relation to which
      one might distinguish the useless from the
      useful.  The word 'useful' has not yet
      received a meaning ... It can be defined
      only in the human world established by
      man's projects and the ends he sets up."

        -- "The Ethics of Ambiguity" (1948)
           Chapter I, "Ambiguity and Freedom"
           p.11

Here, Sartre/de Beauvoir
places a finger upon a         Arguably, though, this is all not far off from
common weakness with           something Charles S. Peirce would say.
many conceptions of
"pragmatism".                    Gallie, summarizing Peirce:

                                 " [his] insistence that, save in relation to
 Pragmatism is, at least         physical actions (real or imagined), no word,
 loosely speaking, the           symbol, or conception has any definite meaning.
 notion that philosophic         We might reasonably say, then, that the general
 ideas should be evaluated       conception of human knowledge which underlies
 based on their utility,         Peirce's maxim is an essentially
 on their usefulness.            experimentalist one."

 Just as a scientific                          --W.B. Gallie,
 concept would be regarded                     "Peirce and Pragmatism" (1952)
 as meaningless if it had                      Chapter I: Introductory:
 no hope of leading to an                      Pragmatism and Pragmatists, p.18
 experimental test, so a
 philosophic concept should
 be evaluated by insisting         Peirce refutes a claim of Berkeley's that
 it be grounded in                 for an idea to be meaningful we must be
 practical human affairs.          able to visualize it: he cites irrational
                                   numbers as an example.

                                         RADICAL_MINUS
 DANGEROUS_IDEAS
                                                         That's an example of
 INTO_THE_BRAINPAN  Peirce at his best: he
                                                         has at his fingertips
                                                         conceptual examples that
                                                         a specialist in the
   The questions are always:                             humanities might miss.

   What is riding on the issue?                       PEIRCE_THE_MAN
   What is really at stake?



   There's an obvious
   problem here though:
   Useful?  Useful for what?
   By what criteria will we              The point de Beauvoir was making
   evaluate usefulness?                  is that choosing what we care about
                                         can't be evaluated in terms of what
   If we settle that question that       we care about.
   question all other answers will
   follow.  Simple, eh?                      So that then is "the absurdity",
                                             the choice seems both crucial
                                             and yet meaningless, or at least
                                             arbitrary.
                                             
                                             Really though, the way we make 
                                             such meta-decisions is in the 
                                             light of previous such decisions...
                                             the existing mental state is the 
                                             context out of which all later 
                                             mental states evolve. 
                                             
                                             Calling that evolution "the result
                                             of making choices" begs a lot of 
                                             questions.  





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