Pragmatic Competence Quotes

It seemed to a number of philosophers of language, myself included, that we should attempt to achieve a unification of Chomsky's syntax, with the results of the researches that were going on in semantics and pragmatics. I believe that this effort has proven to be a failure. Though Chomsky did indeed revolutionize the subject of linguistics, it is not at all clear, at the end the century, what the solid results of this revolution are. As far as I can tell there is not a single rule of syntax that all, or even most, competent linguists are prepared to agree is a rule.

In a capitalist economy inside money exists primarily to disperse the power of money creation away from the government and toward a market-based system in which banks compete to create money.

For Nietzsche and Dostoevsky alike, freedom—even the ability to act—requires constraint. For this reason, they both recognized the vital necessity of the dogma of the Church. The individual must be constrained, moulded—even brought close to destruction—by a restrictive, coherent disciplinary structure, before he or she can act freely and competently. Dostoevsky, with his great generosity of spirit, granted to the church, corrupt as it might be, a certain element of mercy, a certain pragmatism. He admitted that the spirit of Christ, the world-engendering Logos, had historically found, and might still find, its resting place—even its sovereignty—within that dogmatic structure.

But American capitalism was not ideologically rigid. It was never the laissez-faire laboratory of purist, principled imaginations. The strength of the system came through its pragmatism and flexibility, juggling competing and contradictory ideas, just as Carnegie did personally, and eventually finding political solutions to seemingly intractable issues, especially after the scars of the Civil War. Just as successful species adapted to changes in their environment, democracy would shape capitalism to adapt to social conditions, with compromise emerging as the best form of insurance against any risk of revolution. This middle ground, forged by the clashing interactions of capitalism and democracy, a free people acting to check free markets, would give rise to the regulatory framework that would govern its economic system.

About the Bacharach Leadership Group: Training for Pragmatic Leadership™ “Vision without execution is hallucination.”—Thomas Edison The litmus test of pragmatic leadership is results. The Bacharach Leadership Group (BLG) focuses on the skills necessary to lead and move agendas. Whether in corporations, nonprofits, universities, or entrepreneurial start-ups, BLG instructors train leaders in the core competencies necessary to execute change and innovation. At all levels of the organization, leaders must master ideation skills for innovation, political skills for moving change, negotiation skills for building support, coaching skills for engagement, and team leadership skills for going the distance. The BLG approach: 1. ASSESSMENT BLG will assess your organizational challenges and leadership needs. 2. ALIGNMENT BLG will align its training solutions with your organization’s challenges and culture. 3. TRAINING BLG training includes options for mixed-modality delivery, interactive activities, and collaboration with an emphasis on application. 4. OWNERSHIP BLG provides continuous follow-up, access to the exclusive BLG mobile apps library, and coaching. Whether delivering a complete leadership academy or a specific program or workshop, BLG will partner with you to get the results you need. To keep up to date with the BLG perspective, visit blg-lead.com or contact us at info@blg-lead.com.

General Bautista is just about the only thing that has gone right in the last 24 hours. Pragmatic, experienced, and competent, he’s taken the whole “yes, magic is real and your government has been hiding its existence from you” in stride.

A woman gone quiet with her troubles was enough to unnerve most men. Benjamin Portmaine was not just any man—he was the one fellow in the land who did not believe that the competent, independent, pragmatic appearance Maggie Windham showed the entire world was the sum total of the woman. He was the man who wanted not only to know Maggie’s dreams but to make them come true. “It

[U]nderdetermination problems can't be made to go away by logic alone. They can only be mitigated by having plenty of data. Pragmatically, one should stop worrying that one's model is underdetermined at the point where it would take superogatory levels of ingenuity to find a competing one.

As the first treasury secretary and principal architect of the new government, Hamilton took constitutional principles and infused them with expansive life, turning abstractions into institutional realities. He had a pragmatic mind that minted comprehensive programs. In contriving the smoothly running machinery of a modern nation-state—including a budget system, a funded debt, a tax system, a central bank, a customs service, and a coast guard—and justifying them in some of America’s most influential state papers, he set a high-water mark for administrative competence that has never been equaled. If Jefferson provided the essential poetry of American political discourse, Hamilton established the prose of American statecraft. No other founder articulated such a clear and prescient vision of America’s future political, military, and economic strength or crafted such ingenious mechanisms to bind the nation together.

Political elections give us the illusion of choice. Whether many parties compete or two predominate parties compete, the choice they offer is a false choice. Each party typically portrays itself as the solution, urgently warns that the opposing party (or parties) will bring catastrophe, and makes promises it knows it cannot keep. In just one thing are all parties united: the illusion that politicians have the answer to life’s difficulties. In that assertion is the problem. It is a false assertion that the government—whichever party is in power—will save us. Elections are choices between two (or several) false narratives. So long as we look to politicians and governments for our salvation, we will be disappointed. There is but one Savior: Jesus Christ. He is mighty to save if we will have Him. He will not deceive us and He will not force us to accept Him. He offers truth, deliverance, protection, and peace. We must vote in every election: that is the pragmatic and prudent thing to do so long as we live in this fallen and imperfect world. Because that is the case, we see elections for what they are: moments in time when false narrative shift, and therefore occasions to realign ourselves with the Great Governor, Jesus Christ, who alone can save us.

Pierce is referring to the collapse of collective narrative, which is what we are experiencing as a culture: left and right relying on their own news sources, Raw Story and the Daily Caller, MSNBC and Fox News. Not only that, but even the factions are factionalized, and have been since at least the 1960s. Purity, the rabid fervor of the true believer (the same for all extremists, left and right), versus pragmatism, competence.

Since, moreover, the Bolsheviks were by old habit an intensely argumentative party, given to debating their political issues in ideological terms, an aspiring leader had to be convincing theoretically as well as pragmatically. No matter how competent he might be as a technician of power, he had to prove himself as a political and ideological leader in the Lenin tradition. He had to engage in a contest not simply for power but also for the succession.