Top 7 Quotes & Sayings by Max Black

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American philosopher Max Black.

Last updated on April 21, 2025.

Max Black was an Azerbaijani-born British-American philosopher who was a leading figure in analytic philosophy in the years after World War II. He made contributions to the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mathematics and science, and the philosophy of art, also publishing studies of the work of philosophers such as Frege. His translation of Frege's published philosophical writing is a classic text.

American - Philosopher | February 24, 1909 - August 27, 1988

Source: Wikipedia

...a metaphor that works in one society may seem preposterous in another.

Max Black

Fine doesn't mean fine! The scale goes: great, good, okay, not okay, I hate you, fine.

Max Black

We find out soon enough that the universe is not capricious: the child who learns that fire burns and knife-edges cut know that there are inexorable limits set upon his desires. Language must conform to the discovered regularities and irregularities of experience.

Max Black

... I still wish to contend that some metaphors enable us to see aspects of reality that the metaphor's production helps to constitute. But that is no longer surprising if one believes that the world is necessarily a world under a certain description - or a world seen from a certain perspective.

Max Black

... a result once generally accepted by mathematicians is seldom retracted, and then only with great pangs. The Nature of Mathematics

Max Black

Understanding a metaphor is like deciphering a code or unraveling a riddle.

Max Black

No doubt metaphors are dangerous- and perhaps especially so in philosophy. But a prohibition against their use would be a willful and harmful restriction upon our powers of inquiry.

Max Black

Top 7 Quotes & Sayings by Max Black

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