On Public and Private Criteria

“One can indeed prove something to be real by appealing to the experiences and testimony of others, but the existence of such experience and such testimony, and of such others, must be something whose tests lie, or could lie, in a man’s own experience, and of whose validity he alone is the final judge. A number of persons can entertain and verify some hypothesis in a co-operative manner, performing the same experiments, witnessing their outcome and drawing the same conclusions, but they can do so only because each, with his experiences, is given in the experiences of each other, so that, while all carry out common tests, the tests are also carried out by each man severally.” Transcendence of the Cave, p. 29-30)

On the Mechanical View of Human Agency

If, per impossible, the mechanistic views of a barbarized science should turn out to be the provable truth of things, this would be a truth by which we, as practical, inventive, value- and pattern-oriented beings, could not live, and on which we should have, in all but the lowest instrumentalities, to turn our backs.  Truth of this type would neither be worth knowing or applying, and the suasions of a nocturnal Council might not be too much in order to secure its suppression. These suggestions need not, however, be taken too seriously.  For the science which sees all things in terms of manipulative mechanisms is arguably the product of a transient manipulative phase of human society, which, even as we think and write, is busily in process of destroying itself, and creating an order in which the unified and the purposive will have as irreducible and as firm a place as the mechanically conditioned and the manipulable (Plato, The Written and Unwritten Doctrines, p. 411-12)