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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
place a finger upon a                      Arguably, though, this is all
common weakness with                       not far off from something like
many conceptions of                        what Charles S. Peirce would say:
"pragmatism".
                                           Gallie, summarizing Peirce:

                                           " [his] insistence that, save in
                                           relation to physical actions
                                           (real or imagined), no word,
                                           symbol, or conception has any
                                           definite meaning.  We might
                                           reasonably say, then, that the
                                           general conception of human
                                           knowledge which underlies
                                           Peirce's maxim is an essentially
   Pragmatism is, at least                 experimentalist one."
   loosely speaking, the
   notion that philosophic                     --W.B. Gallie,
   ideas should be evaluated                   "Peirce and Pragmatism" (1952)
   based on their utility,                     Chapter I: Introductory:
   on their usefulness.                        Pragmatism and Pragmatists
                                               p.18
   Just as a scientific
   concept would be regarded
   as meaningless if it had
   no hope of leading to an
   experimental test, so a           Peirce refutes a claim of
   philosophic concept should        Berkeley's that for an idea
   be evaluated by insisting         to be meaningful we must be
   it be grounded in                 able to visualize it: he
   practical human affairs.          cites irrational numbers as
                                     an example.
       DANGEROUS_IDEAS
       INTO_THE_BRAINPAN                                   RADICAL_MINUS

   The questions are always:                    That's an example of Peirce
                                                at his best: he has at
   What is riding on the issue?                 his fingertips conceptual
   What is really at stake?                     examples that a specialist
                                                in the humanities might
                                                miss.

   There's an obvious                           PEIRCE_THE_MAN
   problem here though:
   Useful?  Useful for what?
   By what criteria will we
   evaluate usefulness?

   So, all we have to do is to settle
   that question, and all others will
   follow?  Is *that* all?

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