[quote="Pinnacle of Reason"]Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?"
--Pragmatism (1907)

Given the no idea is completely valueless, meaning every conceivable idea has a unique and distinct use. How can there be an idea that is unpragmatic? Indeed, if all ideas are pragmatic, what use is of the value system of pragmaticism? Doesn't that make pragmaticism the first unpragmatic idea?  :wink:[/quote]

i like the way you think.

maybe it's just a matter of emphasis, degree, scale, reflection.
the idea that we should be reflective of the fact that the only value of an idea is in how it can be applied to life.  actually, i inadvertently made a categorical difference (as opposed to 'emphasis') by putting value and practicality in direct proportion.  i think.  unless we say that in an ultimate sense, meaning *is* practicality.  although we'd have to allow practicality for purposes purely in the ongoings in the head; epistemic refinement.   it makes sense, kinda, that meaning would require practicality, because one would think that the source/origin of cognition (or understanding) and meaning is in practicality.   although that leaves in question whether meaning can take a runaway course where some particular nugget of meaning can be completely divorced from practicality (in essence and not merely because its practicality is impotent in practice).  sorry, i said practicality in practice.  i guess that makes sense.

anyway, re the emphasis thread, i was thinking of a similar problem today.  or was it yesterday.  anyway, i looked up thelema.  the basic tenets seemed vacuous to me, because they're what we can't /help/ but live out whether we're aware of it or not.  (i guess this would be the second non-pragmatic idea)  except that i suppose paying *attention* to their truths in tokenized form could help one free themselves of tangled bonds they place themselves in, by their choice to believe in what culture tells them are the rules of conduct.  so it's about attention, and also maybe in both cases it's about annihilating convoluted problems more than it is about using the truth itself as if it's a novel idea.   (in the case of pragmatism, what's getting annihilated is the convolution of runaway meanings and meaning systems that are too indirectly and impractically related to practice.  for example, it may be useful in some way to know how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but it's probably not worth the time and you may not have the capacity to apply it well)