[lbo-talk] Civilization or Accumulation? - reply to Henwood and Pollak

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Sun Aug 8 22:39:00 PDT 2004


On Sat, 7 Aug 2004, Jonathan Nitzan wrote:


> There is a common quote, attributed in various versions to Arthur
> Schopenhauer, Arthur C. Clarke and Leo Szilard, which goes something
> like this: "Every new truth passes through three stages. In the
> beginning the experts ridicule it as 'nonsense.' Then they dismiss it as
> 'trivial.' And in the end we learn that they 'said it all along.'"

Fwiw, it's actually William James, from his 1907 book _Pragmatism: A New Name For Some Old Ways of Thinking_. It's from Lecture 6, paragraph 2:

URL: http://www.dal.ca/~dhevans/5562/PragConc.html

I fully expect to see the pragmatist view of truth run through the

classic stages of a theory's career. First, you know, a new

theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but

obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that

its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it. Our doctrine

of truth is at present in the first of these three stages, with

symptoms of the second stage having begun in certain quarters. I wish

that this lecture might help it beyond the first stage in the

eyes of many of you.

<end quote>

Michael



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