Usage examples for Posits

Famous quotes with Posits

• Stevenson posits a single bird that consumes the centuries: "the nightingale that devours time."

  Robert Louis Stevenson
• When semiotics posits such concepts as 'sign', it does not act like a science; it acts like philosophy when it posits such abstractions as subject, good and evil, truth or revolution.Philosophical entities exist only insofar as they have been philosophically posited. Outside their philosophical framework, the empirical data that a philosophy organizes lose every possible unity and cohesion.Good or bad are theoretical stipulations according to which, by a philosophical decision, many scattered instances of the most different facts or acts become the same thing.

  Umberto Eco
• “Pascal’s Wager never appealed to me. It seems logically...shallow.” “Perhaps because it posits only two choices,” said Aenea. Somewhere in the desert night, an owl made a short, sharp sound. “Spiritual resurrection and immortality or death and damnation,” she said. “Those last two aren’t the same thing,” I said. “No, but perhaps to someone like Blaise Pascal they were. Someone terrified of ‘the eternal silence of these infinite spaces.’” “A spiritual agoraphobic,” I said. Aenea laughed. The sound was so sincere and spontaneous that I could not help loving it. “Religion seems to have always offered that false duality,” she said, setting her cup of tea on a flat stone. “The silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty.”

  Dan Simmons
• Aside from the equation it draws between making money and being good, the modern ideal of a successful life posits a further linkage between making money and being happy. This latter association rests on … assumptions. First, it is presumed that identifying what will make us happy is not an inordinately difficult task. Just as our bodies typically know what they need in order to be healthy… so, too, the theory goes, can our minds to be relied upon to understand what we should aim for so as to flourish as whole human beings. … Second, it is taken for granted that the enormous range of … consumer goods available to modern civilization is not merely a gaudy, enervating show responsible for stoking desires bearing little relevance to our welfare, but is, rather, a helpful array of potentialities and products, capable of satisfying some of our most important needs.

  Alain de Botton
• Robin is a lumper, an über-lumper, which may please his beleaguered readers on the left, but makes his entire enterprise incoherent. He fails to see that it is based on a glaring fallacy of composition: he posits a class, isolates a characteristic of one of its members, and then ascribes that characteristic to every member of the class.

  Corey Robin

Synonyms:

parakeet, paraquet, paroquet, parrakeet, parroket, parrot, parrot, parakeet, paraquet, paroquet.