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“The ideal of explication differs not only from previous philosophy, and from Carnap’s own previous framework of rational reconstruction, but also from most present analytic philosophy. It differs from Quine’s influential programme, for instance, encapsulated in Neurath’s metaphor of reconstructing the boat of our conceptual scheme on the open sea, without being able to put it in dry-dock and reconstruct it from new materials. In Carnap’s framework, our collective mental life is not – to adopt the metaphor – all in the same boat. It consists rather of a give and take between two kinds of communicative devices that operate in different ways. Carnap’s boat is only one of these two parts, not both. It is the medium of action and practical decisions, in which vague concepts of ordinary language have a continuing, perhaps essential, role. This is not, in Carnap’s terms, a proper linguistic ‘framework’ at all. It is a medium not for the pursuit of truth but for getting things done, and it is well adapted to this purpose. To improve it further, we chip away at it and replace its components, a few at a time, with better ones – and this reconstruction, it is true, we carry out at sea. But the better components we acquire from the ports we call at, where we go shopping for proper linguistic frameworks. We take on board better materials and better navigational instruments that help us to reach whatever ports we hope to visit in future – where we can again bring on new and improved materials and instruments. Sometimes, the improved instruments will so influence our knowledge of where we are going that the whole plan of the journey will be revised, and we will change course. But the decision what port to head for next we have to make on board, in our pragmatic vernacular, with whatever improvements we have incorporated up to that point.”

“The ideal of faith in ourselves is of the greatest help to us. If faith in ourselves had been more extensively taught and practiced, I am sure a very large portion of the evils and miseries that we have would have vanished. Throughout the history of mankind, if any motive power has been more potent than another in the lives of all great men and women, it is that of faith in themselves.”

“The ideal of having a real job that you risk your soul in and make good or be damned, belongs to the heroic age of capitalist enterprise, imbued with self-righteous beliefs about hard work, thrift, and public morals. Such an ideal might still have been mentioned in public fifty years ago; in our era of risk-insured semimonopolies and advertised vices it would be met with a ghastly stillness.”

“The ideal of the rule of law, along with equality under the law, is one of the bases of tolerance. It means that, one way or another, governments themselves must act in accordance with the law- a responsibility they sometimes try to evade. The treatment of asylum seekers in Australia is an example, where successive Commonwealth governments have produced a series of changes to the law. In a liberal-democratic society the rule of law also means that there must be open discussion about those laws and how they are being upheld in the courts. It also means predictability- known rules about the relationship between people and governments, and in certain matters, between individuals. It is intended to mean fairness - no one should be condemned unheard, and hearings must be carried out openly by courts or tribunals as independent of governments as possible. (In their wars against asylum seekers, governments have shuffled procedures around as if they were fairground illusionists.)”

“The ideal pecuniary [financial] man is like the ideal delinquent in his unscrupulous conversion of goods and persons to his own ends, and in a callous disregard of the feelings and wishes of others and of the remoter effects of his actions; but he is unlike him in possessing a keener sense of status, and in working more consistently and far-sightedly to a remoter end.”

“The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering-a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons-a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting-three hundred million people all with the same face.”