F. C. S. SCHILLER
But Schiller has not been able to confine his humor to that uniquity, Mind! He allows it to creep into his contributions to Mind-without-the-exclamation-point and other serious journals. He is a keen debater and does not follow the ordinary rules of fencing, but frequently disconcerts his antagonists by parrying their thrusts with a pun or a personality. He is, so far as I know, the first philosopher to find room for jokes in his formal philosophy, as the following passage shows:
When we map out the whole region of Truth-claim or Formal Truth, we find that it contains (1) lies, (2) errors, (3) methodological fictions, (4) methodological assumptions, (5) postulates, (6) validated truths, (7) axioms, and (8) jokes.
Most philosophers in fact would not only ignore his eighth category, but would neglect his first and second, accepting any statement that claimed to be true and devoting themselves to the study of its logical implications. But the pragmatist is more interested in finding out how and in what way an assertion comes to be called true and how it makes good its claim after it has been asserted. As Schiller puts it:[1]
- ↑ Address on "Error" before the Congresso Internazionale di Filosofia, Bologna, 1911.
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