Language and Philosophy 9783110870633, 9789027923615

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JANUA LINGUARUM STUDIA M E M O R I A E N I C O L A I VAN WIJK D E D I C A T A edenda curat C. H . VAN S C H O O N E V E L D Indiana University

Series Minor,

157

LANGUAGE AND PHILOSOPHY

by

JUSTUS HARTNACK State University College of New York at Brorkport

1972 MOUTON THE HAGUE • PARIS

© Copyright 1972 in The Netherlands. Mouton & Co. Publishers, The Hague. No part of this book may be translated or reproduced by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, permisión from the publishers.

Printed in Belgium by NICI, Ghent.

in any without

form, written

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Section 2 in Chapter III and part 2 in Chapter V have appeared in respectively MIND LXXXI, 1972, and The Philosophical Quarterly 22, 1972. I am grateful to the editors of these Journals for permission to use the material.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgement

5

Introduction

9

Chapter I 1. What is a language, and what does it mean to speak a language ? 2. What is a concept?

14 17

Chapter II 1. Language and behavior 2. Language and intention

26 31

Chapter III 1. Language and consciousness 2. Language and thinking

38 48

Chapter IV 1. Language and perception 2. Language and sensations

61 79

Chapter V 1. Language and existence 2. I - a language user

86 93

Chapter VI 1. Language and acts 2. Language and morals

110 122

Concluding remarks

134

Bibliography

136

Index of names

138

Index of subjects

139

INTRODUCTION

Not so many years back one might read such statements as : "Philosophical problems are really nothing but problems of language", or "Philosophy is really nothing but an examination of the logical syntax of language". Such statements were, of course, rather provoking since it is obviously incorrect to maintain that different philosophical problems can be reduced to, or should be identical with, problems of language. Philosophical problems have, so to speak, their own individuality. As the often quoted Bishop Buder has i t : "Everything is what it is, and not another thing". But even though it is an obviously false statement it does not exclude that there is a relation between philosophy and language. That such a relation exists follows from the simple fact that in order to be conceived, thought, and understood, a problem has to be formulated in a language (which, of course, is not the same as to say that the problem is a problem of language or a linguistic problem). Language is a necessary (but not a sufficient) condition for philosophical thought. As will be argued in this book it is impossible to think, to believe, to act, or to be conscious without a language. But to repeat it once more, it does not imply that thinking, believing, acting, and being conscious, are identical with language. Philosophical problems are of course not IDENTICAL WITH linguistic problems. But this does not exclude that philosophy DEPENDS ON language. It is tempting to quote what Hegel wrote in his preface to his Science of Logic, because Hegel often has been accused of violating the logic of language. It is in human Language that the Forms of Thought are manifested and laid down in the first instance. In our day it cannot be too often

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recalled, that what distinguishes man from the beasts is the faculty of Thought. Language has penetrated into whatever becomes for man something inner - becomes, that is, an idea, something which he makes his very own; - and what man transforms to Language contains concealed, or mixed up with other things, or worked out to clearness a Category.1

Besides the distinction between the erroneous view that philosophic problems are identical with problems of language and the correct view that philosophic problems depend on language, there is another important distinction. Language may be studied, and in fact is studied, as a scientific discipline. Such studies lead to specific philosophic problems; these problems are problems of the philosophy of language or the philosophy of linguistics and they constitute a special kind of philosophic problem. It is a class of philosophic problems as are, for example, philosophic problems of mathematics, of jurisprudence, or of the natural sciences, etc. To maintain there are philosophic problems connected with the study of language is surely different from maintaining that philosophic problems depend upon language. In this book I shall not be concerned with the philosophic problems of language. I shall be concerned with certain fundamental metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical problems and their dependence on language. A study of the history of philosophy is in many respects a study of the dependence of philosophical problems on language. It is in many respects an illustration of how philosophers have argued by investigations into the meaning, use, and logic of expressions and words. It is something which has been practiced not only in this century; it was practiced by Aristotle, Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, Locke, Kant, David Hume, and several others. What might be maintained, is that it is primarily in our day, especially in the twentieth century, that philosophers have been conscious of the special characteristics of philosophic problems and philosophic arguments. Philosophic thought has, so to speak, 1 Science of Logic, transleted by Haldane, Preface to second edition, p. 39f.

INTRODUCTION

11

achieved greater self-consciousness. By and large this has been to the advantage of philosophy because it tends to force the philosopher to keep him on his task. He now has to discipline himself; he is now less tempted to deviate into psychological, scientific, or mathematical problems. That such a temptation has existed, and still exists, should be a surprise to none; there are, for instance, many problems connected with the mind. And is it not the task of psychology to study the mind and the problems connected with the mind ? Of course it is; and this is precisely why the philosopher has to take care not to be tempted to do a piece of psychology. The psychologist investigates such psychological phenomena as seeing, hearing, etc.; in short, phenomena of perception. To the philosopher perception is also a problem; however, he does not study psychological phenomena, but instead the problems which arise by the use of such perception verbs as 'to see' and 'to hear'. 2 Furthermore, both the psychologist and the philosopher study thinking. Or rather, the psychologist studies thinking while the philosopher studies 'thinking'. The single quotes around the second use of the word 'thinking' are important because they show a difference between what the psychologist and the philosopher study. The psychologist studies what in fact happens when a person is thinking, while the philosopher studies the problems which arise by the use of the verb 'to think'. The fact that philosophy has achieved greater self-consciousness - has been conscious of the nature of philosophy - has also sharpened the philosopher's sense for what kind of problems belong to philosophy and what kind of problems do not; and it has led him to a study and a cultivation of the philosophical argument. 2

If we are enquiring into problems of perception, i.e., discussing questions about the concepts of seeing, hearing and smelling, we may be taken to be tackling the questions of opticians, neurophysiologists or psychologists, and even fall into this mistake ourselves. It is then salutary to keep on reminding ourselves and one another that what we are after is accounts of how certain words work, namely words like 'see', 'look', 'overlook', 'blind', 'visualise', and lots of other affiliated expressions, "Ordinary Language", Philosophical Review, 1953, 185.

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To talk about language is to talk about only part of the story. The remaining part concerns concepts. This is of philosophical importance because the philosophic significance of language is derived from the fact that besides being determined by ordinary grammatical rules - sometimes called the rules of surface grammar - language is also determined by certain rules which are independent of convention, geography, and time - these are rules belonging to what are called the rules of depth grammar. It is a rule of surface grammar that in English you say 'I see', but 'he sees'. It is not an instance of depth grammar; it is a rule which happens to be so, but it is not a logical necessity. There is no guarantee that one day it may not change. But independent of surface grammar, independent of whether one speaks English, German, or French, one cannot say, for* instance, that one knows that it is Thursday today, but that it nevertheless may be the case that one is mistaken. Or say that one made an error in saying that one knew it was Thursday - because it was in fact Friday, and then add that, nevertheless, in saying it was Thursday one did know that it was Thursday. That it is impossible to say that sort of thing is not due to any rule of surface grammar one may be able to express such things without violating any of these rules. The reason one cannot say so is due to the rules of depth grammar. The rules of depth grammar are seldom formulated explicitly. They are rules which are determined by the relevant concepts. It is because we have knowledge of the concept 'knowledge' that we know we cannot use the expression 'to know wrongly'. It surely is not the other way round. It is not that we, so to speak, DISCOVER that we in fact do not use an expression such as 'to know wrongly'. It is not by observing our own language habits that we acquire knowledge of the concept of 'knowledge'. It would be almost as it would be if we maintained that we acquired knowledge of the conceptual fact involved in de concept of such games as football and baseball, namely the fact that the point of such games is to win, by observing the behavior of the different teams. A person who is ignorant about the details of a certain game may not know what counts as scoring or what

INTRODUCTION

13

situation should occur in order that a team could be counted as a winner; but he is not ignorant about the fact that the point of the game is to win. It would be even more absurd if it was maintained that the members of the team themselves discovered by observing their own behavior that the point was to win. The different rules for the| activities on the athletic field are therefore, in the last analysis, determined by, among other things, what it means to play a game, or, expressed differently, by the concept of a game. Depth grammar appears thus to presuppose concepts. But what is a concept ? And what is the relationship between concepts and language ? In the next chapter I shall try to answer these questions.

CHAPTER I

1. WHAT IS A LANGUAGE, AND WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO SPEAK A LANGUAGE ?

Language is something which is spoken, or, in case of a dead language, something which has been spoken. Language is an instrument by means of which something is said. Language is used to do such things as make propositions, ask questions, issue orders, describe, name, express emotions, etc. To speak is thus not just to issue sounds; it is not even to issue words. A parrot may be capable of uttering words and may even be able to utter sentences; but in a certain and important sense it can SAY nothing. It is unable to ask questions, to make a proposition, to state something, or to issue orders. The parrot which utters the words : Is it Sunday today ? is not puzzled about what day of the week it is; it is asking no question and it is demanding no answer. It would indeed be misleading if one answered the parrot by saying: "Yes, it is Sunday today". Nor does the parrot which utters the sentence: "I promise to lecture tomorrow" make a false promise; it is making no promise at all. What is the difference between the parrot which utters the sentence : "I promise to lecture tomorrow" and the person who utters the same sentence and thereby makes a promise ? The difference may be expressed in different ways. One may say that the parrot has no knowledge of (has no consciousness of) what it is doing, but that the person knows! that he is making a promise. The person knows what a promise is (he possesses the concept 'promise') and he uses the sentence 'I promise to lecture tomorrow' to make a promise. The parrot does not! know what a promise is

WHAT IS A CONCEPT

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(it does not possess the concept 'promise') and, consequently, does not use the sentence to make a promise. When the parrot utters the sentence it is making sounds (the parrot is performing a phonetic act) that may be regarded and explained as a stimulusresponse process; it would be absurd however to regard and to explain a person's utterance of a sentence as a stimulus-response process instead of - what in fact it is - an expression of a decision to make a promise. A person who speaks, i.e. a person who SAYS something, performs what is called an ILLOCUTIONARY ACT. The parrot does not perform any illocutionary act; it is unable to do so. It performs phonetic acts. If, for instance, I use a sentence to make a promise I have performed an illocutionary act, namely the act of making a promise. Instances of other illocutionary acts will be such acts as to make a promise, to ask a question, to issue a command, to make a report, to give a description, to name, to identify, to warn, etc.1 Without over-simplifying the matter, one may say that a language is an instrument which may be used to perform illocutionary acts. In other words, a language requires a language-user. A condition for the language-user to be able to perform an illocutionary act is that he has knowledge of the act language may be used to perform. If the user of the sentence: 'I promise to lecture tomorrow' uses it to make a promise it presupposes that he knows what a promise is. He must possess the concept 'promise'. The condition of performing the illocutionary act to issue a command is that the language-user knows the concept 'command'. The condition to perform the illocutionary act to make a knowledge claim is that the language-user has the concept 'knowledge'. A condition of being able to use language in accordance with the rules of depth grammar is that the language-user possesses knowledge of the relevant concepts. We all possess sufficient knowledge of our ordinary concepts 1

Concepts such as 'phonetic act' and 'illocutionary act' were introduced by the British philosopher J. L. Austin. C f . : How to do things with Words, 1962.

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to perform ordinary illocutionary acts. We are all able to make promises, to make statements, to ask questions, etc. But our knowledge is not extensive enough. In a certain sense I know quite well, for instance, what it means to think; I do not violate rules of depth grammar when I make ordinary statements about thinking. If I say such things as : "I am thinking and thinking but am unable to find a solution", "I thought so", "I think he will be here tomorrow", etc., nobody will have difficulties in understanding what I mean. But in order to have full knowledge of the concept of thinking I must also know under which logical category the different illocutionary acts fall. If, for instance, I say: "I am thinking and thinking but I cannot reach any conclusion" I must be able to answer certain questions concerning the logical category of the concept of thinking. If I say I am thinking and thinking without reaching any conclusion, is that tot be involved in a process which belongs to the same category as a physical process, and consequently, submitted to the same rule of depth grammar as the concept of a physical process ? Or does it belong to the category of speech-act and consequently submitted to the depth grammar of this concept, or does it belong to an altogether different category ? Or take the concept T . We all know how to construct first person sentences, and normally no person has doubts about the meaning of such sentences. But if I say, "I took a walk", would this be, as for instance the French philosopher Descartes (1596-1650) would have us believe, a proposition about a combination of a body and a soul taking a walk ? Or is it, as the German philosopher Leibniz (1646-1717) thought, an unextended point of force (what he called a monade) which is taking a walk (or, rather, a monade which has such perceptions which could be called 'to take a walk') ? It was because the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) committed a category mistake that he arrived at the absurd conclusion that the word 'I' was a meaningless word. Hume arrived at his absurd conclusion because he made the erroneous assumption that a word, in order to be meaningful, had to be a name of something observable. But to conceive of the concept 'I' as belonging under

WHAT IS A CONCEPT

17

the category of a name is to categorize it wrongly. The concept is not only not meaningless; it also has necessary function in our language - although it is a function which is extremely difficult to map out exactly. Augustine (354-430' A.D.) is often quoted as saying that he has an ordinary knowledge of the concept of 'time', but he does not possess a! full knowledge of it - that is, he does not have a knowledge which permits him to make philosophic propositions about time. In other words he cannot make category propositions about time. Augustine says; "What is time then? If nobody asks me I know it; if I want to explain it to the person who asks me then I do not know."2 2.

WHAT IS A CONCEPT?

If concepts are necessary conditions for the use of language (conditions for performing illocutionary acts) it seems to be necessary to answer the question : What is a concept ? To answer this question is by no means an easy matter. It is easier to say what a concept is not. A concept is not - which sometimes has been maintained - a word. Germans, Frenchmen, and Italians have a German, a French, an Italian word for what in English is called knowledge. If the word was identical with the concept the German, the Frenchmen, and the Italian would be using three different concepts instead of using just one and the same concept. Furthermore, a word is spelled with so many letters, has a certain place in the sentence, begins with capital letters after a period, may be pronounced correctly or incorrectly, etc. But it has no meaning to say that a concept has so and so many letters, has a certain place in the sentence, begins with a capital letter after a period, and may be mispronounced. The reason a concept cannot be identified with the relevant word or words is the simple one that the correct use of words presupposes the concept. It has been maintained that a concept is identical with the rules of depth grammar, the rules for the uses of the relevant words and expressions. But this is not correct either. Suppose that in a *

Confessiones Liber XI, 14.

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hundred years or so it is accepted as correct use of language (i.e. correct from the point of view of depth grammar) to say such things as : "I promise to come but do not count on it". What would we say ? Either we may say that something has been accepted as correct which in fact is not correct, because it is a violation of the rules of depth grammar to use one and the same sentence to give a promise, and at the same time pronounce that one should not count on it (one would therefore maintain that it is a misunderstanding of what the concept 'promise' involves), or we may say that by the expression 'I promise', they apparently do not mean the same as we did a hundred years back. The expression is not an application of the same concept. It is not an application of the concept 'promise' (if it were, as just mentioned, it would be incorrect from the point of view of depth grammar). It is the same phonetic act, but not the same illocutionary act. Either one is unable to perform the illocutionary act of making a promise; or the act is performed by help of quite different phonetic acts. Whatever function the expression 'a promise' might have (or expressed differently : Whatever illocutionary act is performed by uttering the words [performing the phonetic act 'I promise']), it has nothing to do with the concept of a promise. The concept of promise may not be in use a hundred years from now; for different reasons it may have lost its significance. But even if it has ceased to be in use it COULD have been in use. It may be expressed by saying that the concept 'promise' exists potentially. It is not actualized and there is no word for the concept; as a matter of fact the concept is not known; but in a certain sense it exists potentially. It exists potentially in the same way as numbers do. A s there are infinitely many numbers it follows that there are infinitely many numbers which nobody ever has counted to, used, or even thought of. Nevertheless, it is possible to say that such numbers exist - they exist implicity in the series of numbers. In a certain sense they are not actualized, but it is possible for them to be so. In the same sense one may say that whenever we have a language it is always possible to actualize the concept of promise in that language; in other words it is always possible

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to have expressions and words by help of which one can perform the illocutionary act of making a promise. The criterion of whether it is possible to perform such acts in a certain language is whether in that language expressions and words exist which follow the rules of depth grammar determined by the concept of a promise. As it is the concept that determines the rules of depth grammar, it follows that a concept cannot be identified with the rules for the use of the relevant expressions and words. Furthermore, if the concept was identical with the rules for the use of the relevant words or the expressions, it would be necessary to say either that the rules are as they are because it is the way we happen to use the words and the expressions - in which case one could not speak about correct or incorrect use of language - or to say that the rules are as they are by necessity - in which case it would be necessary to ask from where the rules derive their necessity. One could not say that the necessity was derived from the concept; because according to the view now under discussion the concept is nothing but the rules. One had to refer or point to something over and above the concept - something which determined that the concept (and thereby the rules) are as they are. In other words one had to postulate a concept about the concept. Nor can a concept be identical with the definition of the relevant words or expressions, because one may discuss whether a given definition of a certain word or expression is correct. And this can only be done if one already has knowledge of that which should be defined. If one had no such knowledge one could not - as in fact we can - evaluate whether a proposed definition is correct, adequate, or proper. However, it is one thing to say what a concept is not; it is quite another thing, and a more significant thing, to say what it is. Unfortunately it is a very difficult thing to do; it is something which one has to approach along different routes. In many respects there is no essential difference between animal and man. Both man and animal are organisms whose different reactions, movements, and behavior may be explained and described by help of relevant principles and laws from the

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natural sciences. On one point, however, there is an essential difference between man and animal. Man is a language-user. Not only can man, as can animals, issue sounds; but man's language ability is not limited to that which limits the animal's verbal behavior, namely to cries or sounds which express such things as pain, joy, anger, and fear. Man constructs sentences and man can apply and use these sentences to such things as to make statements, give reasons, give evidence, or describe, and numerous other things. The number of possible illocutionary acts is legio. Note that one ISSUES or EMITS a cry, but one does not issue or emit a description, a denial, etc. One GIVES a description, MAKES a denial, etc. This simple linguistic fact illustrates the essential difference between the sounds animals make in different situations and the sentences man uses to perform different illocutionary acts. One way to express the difference is that man applies language with the INTENTION to perform this or that illocutionary act. The sounds of the animal are STIMULUS-RESPONSE phenomena and therefore phenomena which cannot be explained by help of the concept of intention. Although the concept of intention shall not be further examined in this chapter it is obvious that it involves the concept of language as an instrument. And as an instrument it presupposes a purpose - the purpose for which the instrument is an instrument. It presupposes, therefore, knowledge about the illocutionary act which results from the correct use of a certain sentence or a certain expression. To perform the illocutionary act of making a promise, a knowledge of the concept 'promise' is necessary, i.e. knowledge of what a promise is. A person who, in proper circumstances and in proper contexts, issues the sentence 'I promise to' obviously has not made a promise if he is ignorant about what a promise is. It is necessary to distinguish between having a concept about something and the concept which one has knowledge of. To say about a person that he has a concept about something is to say something about that person. I may say, for instance, that it took him a long time to acquire or to learn the concept, or that he is still somewhat uncertain about it. To say that a person has

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knowledge of a concept is thus to say something about that person namely that he has acquired knowledge of that concept; but I am also saying something which is not about him, but about that which is known - saying it at least by implication. I am saying or implying, that there is a concept of which he has acquired knowledge. That which is the object of one's knowledge, or that which one has knowledge of, must necessarily exist independent of the person who has, or has acquired, that knowledge; if this were not the case we could not speak about acquiring knowledge; instead we should speak of inventing or creating (one does not acquire knowledge of that which one invents or creates). To have a concept about something thus implies the existence of something which is independent of the person who knows the concept. One may also have a concept about activities. One may have a concept of such activities as driving a car, hunting, playing the piano, or solving mathematical problems. But also in such cases it must be correct to say that these activities exist independent of the person who acquires, or attempts to acquire, a concept of them. The concept is that which determines how the relevant words and expressions are used; it is the concept which determines the rules of depth grammar. The rules of depth grammar carry a certain necessity with them. The necessity is not of a mathematical or of a formal logical kind; if one violates a rule of mathematical or formal logic the result is a contradiction. But if one violates a rule of depth grammar the result is not a logical contradiction. To violate a rule of depth grammar is to go against what sometimes is called the logic of the concept. If I say: "I promise to come but do not count on it" it is not a formal contradiction; it is to violate the logic of the concept 'promise'. But what does it mean to say that concepts have a certain logic ? It is true of some concepts, although not of all, that we have them because they serve a certain purpose. It is true of such concepts as 'promise' and 'knowledge'. They are not necessary presuppositions for the use of a language - one may very well have a language in which it is impossible to construct such sentences as 'I promise to do it'

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or 'I not only believe it; I know it'. But presupposing that the fundamental function of language is to inform, and since it is a fact that a person either knowingly or unknowingly may misinform, it follows that it is useful, if not necessary, that there are ways by which the person who receives the information can trust the truth of it - can trust that there is sufficient evidence to guarantee its truth. The existence of a language thus involves the possibility for such concepts as the concept of promise and the concept of knowledge. They exist potentially. And in any reasonably developed language these concepts will not only be possibilities, but actualities - they will have been actualized. Concepts which belong to this class are the purpose for which the word is introduced and the explanation why the rules of depth grammar are as they are. They are the RATIONALE behind the rules. The concept of knowledge, for instance, that is the concept which in English is expressed by the word 'knowledge', is actualized when a proposition is made in such a way that the person who hears the proposition understands that there is sufficient evidence to guarantee its truth. However, there are other types of concepts. Concepts such as 'truth', 'existence', and 'reality' are not just concepts we have because they are useful to have - i.e. concepts which exist potentially in any language but which do not necessarily have to be actualized. They are concepts which are NECESSARY PRESUPPOSITIONS for the use of any language. The concept of truth, for instance, is not a concept it has been useful to actualize; it is a concept without which it would be impossible to make statements, to assert propositions, or to make descriptions. Because to state or to make a proposition is, according to the very meaning of the verbs, to state that something is the case. The word 'statement' would lose its meaning if the concept of truth was not presupposed. It may seem to be an argument against this view that we often make propositions in which the word 'true' occurs - it is possible to say, for instance: "What he said was in fact true". But if it is the case that a statement cannot be made without the

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concept of truth being presupposed, it would seem to be a logical impossibility to make a proposition in which the word truth occurs as part of the proposition - i.e. a proposition stating that something or other is in fact true. A photocopy has no meaning if it does not involve that there is something which has been photocopied. The concept 'photocopy' has the concept 'the photocopied' as a presupposition. And just as little meaning as it would have to maintain that the thing that is photocopied could be part of the photocopy itself, just as little meaning would it have to say that the concept of truth could be both a presupposition of a proposition and at the same time be part of that proposition. But how then to explain a proposition as: "What he said was in fact true" ? The first thing to emphasize is that the concept 'truth' has meaning only if the concept 'falsity' has meaning. No concept has meaning if the 'polar' concept does not have meaning. In order that the concept 'darkness' can be meaningful one must know what it means to say that something is not dark; in order to know what it means to say that somebody is winning, one must know what it means to say that somebody is losing, and so forth. The concept 'falsity' is thus conceptually (or dialectically as Hegel would say) contained in the concept 'truth'. However, the two concepts are not on the same level - the concept of truth has logical priority over the concept of falsity. It has priority in the same way as the concept of winning has priority over the concept of losing (in a game or in a war the purpose is to win - these activities would lose their meaning if there was nothing called to win, which, of course, does not imply that these activities always result in winning; or rather, it is a logical necessity that there also is a loser). The logical priority of the concept of winning can also be explained this way : If a team has lost a game one may ask why it lost and what went wrong in order that certain defects may be corrected. But if the team has won, one does not ask why it won, or what went wrong. If a proposition is false one asks the reason. Was it made in order to mislead, or was it a proposition which

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was made out of ignorance, or was there insufficient evidence ? But if the proposition is true one never asks why it is true. The proposition that the concept of truth is a presupposition for the concept of proposition must be understood in the same way as the concept of winning is a presupposition for the concept of a game. And just as one has participated in a game even though one is the loser, just so is a proposition still a proposition even though it is a false proposition. As it is always possible for a team to lose a game the question of whether it did or not is consequently of importance. Likewise it is of importance to ask whether a proposition is true or false : because being a proposition it must be one or the other. From a logical point of view there is therefore nothing wrong in a proposition which maintains that another proposition is true or false. That this is so follows from the fact that the concept of truth is logically connected with the concept of falsity, and that a proposition must be either true or false. It has been, and is still being, discussed what one should understand by truth; but any discussion is obviously about what is the correct analysis of the concept. To speak of the correct analysis presupposes that one already has a knowledge of the concept. If one did not possess such a knowledge how would it be possible to argue that one analysis was more adequate or more correct than another ? It would indeed be impossible to talk about analysis; it would be possible only more or less arbitrarily to choose or decide what one should wish to understand by it. In other words, the analysis would not be an analysis but a decision or a convention. To learn to speak (i.e. to learn to perform not only phonetic acts but also to perform illocutionary acts) is to learn to understand the concept of truth. To learn to state that something is the case or to make an assertion is to learn to apply the concept of truth. And to have learned to apply the concept of truth is to be able to use expressions or sentences in which the word 'truth' is a constituent; i.e. to learn to use such expressions or sentences without violating the rules of depth grammar. Or rather, one has

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knowledge of the concept to the extent that one is able to apply the relevant words or expressions without violating the rules of depth grammar. But as mentioned before, it is one thing to be able to use words, expressions, and sentences without violating the rules of depth grammar; it is quite another thing to know the rationale behind these rules. To acquire such knowledge is a philosophic task, and only when this task is completed is a full understanding of the concept obtained. The concept is consequently identical, not with the rules of depth grammar, but with the rationale behind these rules. What is true of the concept of truth is also, at least to a great extent, true of a concept such as existence. To speak about things, events, and occurrences, is to speak about something about which one has to say that it either exists or does not exist. To speak about spiders, committee meetings, and chemical processes is to speak about something which exists; to speak about goblins, Utopian states, and language-using spiders is to speak about things, events, and occurrences which do not exist. A condition for learning to speak about things, events, and occurrences is to possess the concept of existence - not vice versa. However, the philosophic task is, just as it is with the concept of truth, to know the rationale behind the rules of depth grammar governing the verb 'to exist'. And to know the rationale is to know the concept. A different class of concepts is the class of empirical concepts. The concept 'cat' is an empirical concept; because it is the condition for perceiving, identifying, recognizing, and speaking about a cat. To possess the concept of a cat is a condition for being able to identify an animal as a cat. Knowledge of the concept is acquired through a study of animals belonging to that concept. To learn to identify and to recognize an animal as a cat is to learn the concept of a cat. The empirical concepts seldom involve philosophical problems; but the fact that the empirical concepts constitute a condition for the perception, the identification, and the recognition of things as belonging to this specific type is in itself of philosophic importance.

CHAPTER II

1.

LANGUAGE AND BEHAVIOR

In the last chapter it was maintained that an essential difference between animals and man is that man has a language while animals do not. That it is an essential difference nobody will deny. But is it also a difference implying a logically unbridgeable gulf? Naturally, it is in the interest of science to deny that there is such a gulf. The difference is, so it has been maintained, that language is a more developed form of behavior, but a behavior which is not logically different from that of animals. Man's linguistic behavior should therefore be explainable and describable by means of the same laws which explain and describe the behavior of animals. And the behavior of animals is explained and described as everything else is explained and described in nature, i.e. by means of the methods and principles of the different natural sciences. However understandable this tendency is, it is nevertheless questionable if it is correct. I shall argue that the view that man's linguistic activities can be conceived, explained, and described as behavior is fallacious. By behavior I mean such activities which can be explained by help of the concepts of stimulus and response. Many human activities fall under this concept. The anger or joy expressed in the face, or displayed by spontaneous expressions and gestures are, at least normally, phenomena explainable by stimulus response concepts. They are explainable in the same way as are all other phenomena of the natural sciences. There is a radical difference, however, between expressions of anger, and assertions and statements. An expression of anger may

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be characterized as an instance of verbal behavior. But an assertion does not fall under the concept of behavior; it is a speech act. Some of the decisive logical differences between verbal behavior and an assertion or a proposition are these : (1) Verbal behavior is neither true nor false; an assertion or a proposition must be either or; (2) A proposition is made on the basis of more or less evidence; but the concept of evidence cannot be meaningfully applied to verbal behavior; (3) The concept of intention is applicable to the concept of speech acts (illocutionary acts), but not applicable to verbal behavior; (4) Verbal behavior may be conceived as an effect, but it is irrelevant to conceive of a speech act as an effect of something. If one regards language as a form of behavior, i.e. as a kind of extended or developed form of verbal behavior, it is impossible to apply the concepts of truth or falsity - i.e. concepts which, as mentioned before, are necessary conditions for the existence of a language. What is true or false are propositions, or what may be expressed by help of propositions : suppositions, beliefs, views, etc. But behavior can be neither true nor false. It has no meaning to say that objects, movements, occurrences, and processes, in themselves, should be either true or false, but that which is stated or maintained about them is either or. One may make mistakes in an attempt to identify an object or a process as a certain kind of object or a certain kind of process, or in describing the object or the process. A golf ball may be identified as an egg and the proposition : "This is an egg" is therefore false; but the golf ball is neither true nor false. It would have just as little meaning to call facial expressions of anger or pain true. As an objection to this view it may be maintained that a phenomenon such as a cry of pain may be false. One may wish to pretend to have a pain and therefore cry out in pain. Would it not then be a false cry of pain ? This it is not. One may characterize a cry of pain as high or low, and as groaning or piercing, and in many other ways; but however it is characterized, all the characteristics will belong to the same category as those by means of which we characterized

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verbal behavior. If one is simulating (or pretending) - and this is what one is doing if one is crying out in pain in order to appear to have a pain - then what is false is not the verbal behavior but the proposition which is implied by the cry of pain, namely the proposition: "I have pain". My verbal behavior is perceived as a cry of pain and as such it involves the just mentioned proposition. It is IMPLIED by the verbal behavior, but is not IDENTICAL with it. A cry of pain is not a proposition about pain; it is an expression or a sign of pain. But it is an expression which has meaning only if the mentioned proposition is implied. In this respect there is a radical difference between a cry of pain and a proposition. If I maintain that today is Thursday, it is not a sign that it is Thursday today; that it would be if I saw Mr. Smith go to the bank and I knew that he went to the bank only on Thursday. From the sign to the thing the sign is a sign of, one arrives by inference. But from a proposition to that which the proposition is about, one does not arrive by means of inference. If the answer to my question, "What time is it ?" is : "It is four o'clock", I do not infer that the time is four o'clock - as I would do if the answer had been : "It is closing time". A proposition has a truth-value, i.e. it is either true or false; and it is made because the one who makes the proposition, presupposing he does not want to deceive the person he speaks to, holds it to be true. In other words, he has some evidence for assuming it to be true. This is a decisive difference from verbal behavior. Because verbal behavior is understood and explained as a stimulus-response phenomenon; that is, a phenomenon which is explainable by the law of nature and occurs as an effect of the relevant stimuli. To ask about truth-value has, as mentioned before, no meaning; instead one asks about its causes and about what it is an expression or sign of. But one does not ask questions about what a proposition is an effect, of, or what it is an expression or a sign of. The logical relevant questions to ask are whether the person who makes the proposition knows whether it is true or not, whether he is convinced, or whether he only believes or assumes it; in other words, one asks about the evidence he has

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for his proposition. To make a proposition is to maintain that something is the case; consequently, one does not infer from the proposition to that which the proposition is about. Of course, a proposition permits inferences to other propositions. If I know that today is Thursday I also know that it will be Friday tomorrow; and if I believe that the time is approaching four o'clock I may infer that the time is approaching closing time. But from an instance of verbal behavior one can make no inferences; because one infers only from what is true or false to something which also is true and false, and as verbal behavior is neither nor, it follows that no inferences are possible. This seems to contradict the just mentioned view that verbal behavior is not an assertion but is a sign, and that one inferred from the sign to that which the sign is a sign of. How is this possible if a sign has no truth-value? The answer is as before : One does not infer from the sign but from the proposition which is signified by the sign. This does not mean that the person who hears my cry of pain should be in doubt about what it is a sign of; he is, anyhow normally, immediately aware that my expression is an expression of pain; it does not take him longer to understand that I have pain than it would do if I make the proposition: "I have pain". But that the proposition : "I have pain" nevertheless has a logical status which is different from my cry of pain may be seen from the fact that it would not be a logical error - although perhaps unnecessary to ask the person who cries in pain the question: "Do you have pain ?", as it would be to ask the same question to a person who says: "I have pain" - it would be an error if the question is asked as a genuine question ? It may perhaps be objected that I have talked about propositions and assertions as if language was constituted only of propositions and assertions. But our speech acts include many other acts. We issue warnings, make threats, ask questions, issue commands, and express emotions. The point is, however, that these different speech acts (these illocutionary acts) can be performed and will have meaning only under the presupposition that the relevant propositions and assertions are understood and pre-

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supposed. If I warn somebody against driving on a certain road because the road is slippery, I presuppose that the person to whom I speak knows and understands the proposition: "This road is slippery", as well as the proposition: "Slippery roads are dangerous"; and if I threaten a person with something, for instance p, if he does not do a thing, for instance q, then both he and I must understand what is meant by the propositions p and q. It seems, therefore, that propositions and assertions within any language enjoy logical priority; they appear to be the fundamental illocutionary acts and therefore to be presupposed by all other such acts. But if this is the case it would seem that animals which issue cries of warning only can do so if both the animals which warn and the animals which are warned understand the presupposed propositions and assertions. But animals do not issue warnings. In a certain sense they do not warn at all, as little as they make threats, ask questions, or make requests. They do not do so since an animal has neither the concept of warning, the concept of threat, the concept of a question, and the concept of request. It does not have these concepts and, consequently, cannot use sentences for the purpose of warning, making threats, asking questions, or making requests. But even if the animal cannot speak, and therefore cannot make propositions, ask questions, etc., it does not exclude, so it may be maintained, that it may understand or conceive the situation or occurrence the proposition is about. In the chapter on language and consciousness the objection will be met. At this time it suffices, therefore, to point out that the condition for understanding or conceiving a situation, an occurrence, or an event is that it is conceived by means of the concepts which are used by making the relevant propositions and assertions. This does not mean, however, that one cannot talk about the consciousness of animals. Animals - anyhow the 'higher' animals - are able to recognize, to identify, to expect, to pay attention, to listen, etc. But it does not mean that these verbs have the same meaning when predicated of animals as when predicated of man; or expressed differently, their meaning depends on whether they are used by language-using beings or non-Ian-

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guage-using beings. To explain the activities of the latter the concept of stimulus-response is sufficient. One of the reasons that speech acts (the performance of illocutionary acts) cannot be regarded and explained as behavior is precisely that speech acts cannot be regarded as stimulus-response phenomena. And one of the reasons that it cannot be so is, as mentioned before, that the performance of an illocutionary act - for instance the making of a proposition - is an intended act. The concept of intention is consequently an important concept for the understanding of language. 2.

LANGUAGE AND INTENTION

Suppose a person performs an illocutionary act, for instance the act of asserting something. The persons talked to learn the assertion by listening to what is said. But the person who makes the assertion, how does he learn it ? It would be absurd to maintain that it was in the same way as the persons talked to. If I make the assertion : "There is a committee meeting tomorrow night at eight o'clock", I do not learn what is asserted by listening to my own words. I know what I want to say while I am saying it. Indeed, I know it even before I begin the assertion. I know it, not because I have rehearsed the assertion with my 'inner silent' voice - if that had been the case I would not have learned the silent assertion because I listened to that assertion with my inner ears; I would have known even that assertion before it was made - I know it because it is my intention to make it. The intention is a necessary (although not a sufficient) condition for using a sentence to SAY something. Or expressed differently: The intention is a necessary condition for the performance of an illocutionary act. Suppose I inadvertently say : "There is a committee meeting tomorrow night at eight o'clock". It was not my intention to say it; it was a slip of the tongue, I disclose what I should not have disclosed. But to make a slip of the tongue is not to make an assertion. An assertion is something for which I am prepared (or at least ought to be prepared) to give evidence. But one does not

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give evidence for a slip of the tongue and does not have any obligation to do so. However, it is one thing to understand that the intention is a necessary condition for performing an illocutionary act; it is quite another thing to understand what an intention is. Since Wittgenstein it has been customary to point to the fact that an intentional act lacks the element of surprise. If, so to speak, I DISCOVER that I do something, then it is the same as to say that I am not doing it intentionally. Suppose I tell somebody that there is a committee meeting tomorrow night at eight o'clock. I do not discover that I am making this assertion by listening to my own words. It is not something I DISCOVER. I do not know it later than the moment I am going to assert it. But what is the object of my intention ? I surely have not (at least not normally) formulated the sentence, or rehearsed it, before I utter it. It is not the sentence which is intended; it is the assertion. A sentence and an assertion belong to different logical categories. The sentence is instrumental for the making of the assertion (the making of the promise, the issue of a command, etc.). Different sentences can be used to express one and the same proposition or assertion. The sentences: (1) "There is a committee meeting tomorrow night at eight o'clock" and (2) "Tomorrow night at eight o'clock there is a committee meeting" are two different sentences but they express one and the same proposition. And if (1) and (2) are translated into other languages the result is just as many sentences as there are languages into which the sentences are translated. But it is still one and the same assertion. It is only after one knows which assertion to make that one constructs the sentence; it surely is not the other way round. It is not after the construction of the sentence that it is discovered which assertion one has been making or is about to make. The assertion or the proposition has thus logical priority over the sentence. But what does it mean to say that an assertion or a proposition is intended ? It is not the same as saying that I have decided to make the assertion. A decision is, at least normally, presupposing a situation where one has deliberated which of two possibilities

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to choose, and then making a reasoned choice of one of these possibilities. The knowledge I have of my intended acts does not fall under the concept of prediction. I am not a contemplator of my own thoughts, speech acts, and other acts - a contemplator who has made sufficient observation of my own thinking and acts to be able to predict and calculate my next thought and act. The knowledge I have of my intended acts is not of this type. If it were, it would not be me who thought, asserted, and acted. I would only be the contemplator, not the author and executor. A condition for asserting that there is a committee meeting tomorrow night at eight o'clock is that I know this is the case. In the assertion I express a knowledge I possess. The knowledge involved in an intentional act, is both a knowledge about that which is asserted and a knowledge that it will be asserted. Knowledge about that which is asserted is a presupposition for the knowledge that it will be asserted. The knowledge which is presupposed - for instance the knowledge that there is a committee meeting tomorrow at eight o'clock - I may have had for more than a week. T o say that I have had this knowledge for more than a week is not to say that it has been in my thoughts all this time. T o say that I have known it for more than a week is to say that when and where it has been relevant I have been able to answer questions and make assertions concerning the time and place for the meeting. I may decline an invitation to a party on account of the meeting. I am able to inform the committee member who has forgotten about it, etc. It is in this sense that knowledge about that which is asserted is a presupposition for the assertion. The assertion is, so to speak, an actualization of this knowledge; it is actualized by such things as a question about what is going to happen tomorow night, or a question about the time of the committee meeting, or the question of why I am not going to the party tomorrow night, etc. Suppose I wish to make the following assertion: "Peter is coming for dinner tomorrow". What occasions me to formulate this sentence instead of, for instance, the sentence : "Tomorrow Peter is coming for dinner" ? While the assertion presupposes

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that I already possess knowledge of that which the proposition of the assertion is about, then the sentence I utter does not presuppose that I have had knowledge of that sentence before. The sentences one uses are not sentences one already has had knowledge of. To be able to speak a language is not to use an immense number of previously constructed sentences - sentences which the speaker has knowledge of. To speak is not a display of an ability to remember and produce relevant sentences out of a class of previously learned sentences. To speak a language is to be able to construct sentences never constructed before and to understand sentences never heard before. To hear and to understand that which is heard is not a question of recognizing or remembering previously learned sentences. In other words, the speech activity is a creative process. 1 It is not something which can be explained as behavior (i.e. as a stimulus-response phenomenon). It is something the language user is undergoing, not something which happens to him. It is something he is doing; it is an act. What should be understood by an intention ? The first thing to note is that the concept is used in connection with human acts and human speech. It involves, as already mentioned, that the thing done intentionally is the object of immediate knowledge. The person who is doing something intentionally does it knowingly; the element of surprise is absent. The knowledge one has of one's own acts and assertions is not based on observation, evidence, or inference. It is an immediate knowledge. The answer to the question what one does is the same answer one would give to the question about one's intention. In other words, intention is logically related to the 'what' of an act or of an assertion, but not to its 'why'. Suppose I tell somebody that the time is eight o'clock. Why do I say this ? It surely will not be accepted as an answer if I said : In his Language and Mind Noam Chomsky speaks of "The creative aspect of language" and maintains that "the normal use of language is innovative, in the sense that much of what we say in the course of normal language use is entirely new, not a repetition of anything that we have heard before", (p. 10).

1

LANGUAGE AND INTENTION

35

"It was my intention to say so". The question 'why' requires a motive, a purpose, or an occasion as an answer - but not an intention. My motive to assert the just mentioned proposition is that I would not like to see the person to whom I am talking be too late for his bus. The purpose is to get him to hurry up, and the occasion is that I discover that the time is eight o'clock. The intention is neither the motive, the purpose, nor the occasion. A s just mentioned, the motive is that I would not like to see him be too late. But it would be no absurdity to say: "Even if I do not like to see him be too late, he must learn to look after the time himself' - as it would be if I said : "Although it is my intention to tell him what time it is, I am not going to". The purpose of the assertion : "Time is eight o'clock" is to get him to hurry up. But it is quite possible that I could assert the proposition without having any purpose in mind. I might assert it simply as an answer to the question : "What time is it ?" To answer a question is not (at least normally) to do something for a purpose. The occasion to make the proposition is that I noticed the time. But as to the motive, it would be no absurdity if I said: "I noticed that the time was eight o'clock but I did not tell it to him" - as it would be if I said :"It is my intention to tell it to him but, nevertheless, I am not going to". As already mentioned, an intention is not identical with a decision. A decision is, if not always, then at least often, a result of a deliberation. A necessary condition for having made a decision is that one is able to give a reason for the act one has decided to perform - an act which one must be able to identify and describe i.e. an act one must be able to identify and describe by help of concepts. But only seldom is an assertion an expression of a decision. The answers I give to the many questions the authorities ask me concerning my name, address, profession, day and year of birth, etc. are an expression of an intention - I do not learn my address, my profession, etc. by listening to my answers - but it would be misleading if I maintain that the answers I give were an expression of a decision. If somebody asks me why I answered the question about my name by saying that it is Justus Hartnack, all

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I could give as an answer to the admittedly rather odd question is I did so because it is in fact my name. In special situations (e.g., if one is being interrogated by the enemy) one may of course decide whether one should give the correct or an incorrect answer, or maybe no answer at all - in both cases my answer would correctly be classified as a decision. But in most cases my assertions, although expressions of intention, are not expressions of a decision. Thus, an intention can not be identified with decision. A necessary condition for an act to be an act, e.g., the assertion of a proposition, is that the concept of intention applies; in other words, the person who performs an act can answer a question about the WHAT of the act (but not necessarily its WHY). He must know the WHAT of the act - i.e. must be able to identify and describe it. His knowledge about the act is, as mentioned many times, not based on observation of what he is doing, or an inference from evidence. His knowledge is immediate, non-empirical, and a non-inferential. The verbal expression of a decision would be an assertion such as : "This is what I shall do" where the word 'this' refers to something that must be identifiable and describable. Thus it follows that a person who does something from a decision necessarily must know which act it is he is about to perform. Although the concept of intention cannot be identified with the concept of decision, the intention may be regarded as a degenerated decision. The two concepts are therefore logically connected : (1) None of them is used as an answer to questions about the 'why' of the act, but both are used to answer questions about its 'what'. (2) The concept of decision and the concept of intention are both logically connected to the performance of the decided and the intended act. Neither of the following two propositions would be meaningful (correct from the point of view of depth grammar) : (a) "I have decided to do A but I may do something else - I am still uncertain". (b) "It is my intention to do A but I may not do it. I am still uncertain". (3) For every intended act it is true that it could have been decided (and in some situations in fact is decided). It is true of every intended act that the expression:

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"This is what I shall do" could be used (and in some situations in fact is used). It is this feature, common to decision and intention, that the decided as well as the intended act are both objects of immediate, non-empirical, and non-inferential knowledge.

CHAPTER III

1.

LANGUAGE AND CONSCIOUSNESS

Does consciousness depend on language - depend in the sense that if there were no language there would be no consciousness either ? To make such an assertion would be hazardous and bordering on absurdity. Neither the cow nor the horse can speak, but they can see, hear, and smell. And as seeing, hearing, and smelling are states of consciousness, it follows that consciousness cannot depend on language. Of course, everything depends on what one means by consciousness - what one means by such conscious states as seeing, hearing, and smelling. But although it would be provoking to assert that animals can not have consciousness, it would be almost trivially true to assert that the kind of consciousness applying to language-using beings is different (even radically1 different) from the kind of consciousness which is true of non-language-using beings. Let us start by examining the concept of consciousness as it applies to language-using beings. To be conscious is necessarily to be conscious of something. This 'something' which is the necessary object of consciousness - the object without which consciousness could not be consciousness - is the intentional object1 (a term used already by the scholastic philosophers; in the 19th century it came into fashion again with Franz Brentano's (1838-1917) use of it. The intentional object is not necessarily an existing object. For instance, if I am thinking of a book I have just read, then the intentional object exists; but if I am thinking 1

This concept of intention has nothing to do with the concept of intention which was examined on the preceding pages.

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of a book I hope one day to write, the intentional object is a non-existing object. Brentano's theory of the intention as an essential characteristic of all phenomena of consciousness was taken over and further developed by Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), who is regarded as the founder of the philosophic movement called phenomenology. An analysis of the phenomenological movement shall not be undertaken here. It is a misunderstanding, however, to conceive of the phenomenological thesis (the thesis that all phenomena of consciousness are intentional) as the result of a psychological observation or a psychological theory. That would require that one could observe a phenomenon of consciousness. But if I am thinking of something, say, A, then my attention is directed at A; it is A which is the intentional object. My attention is obviously not directed at my thinking of A. When I am thinking of A it is not my thinking of A which is the intentional object but, as already mentioned, A. If the intentional object was my thinking of A I would not be thinking of A, but be thinking of my thinking of A - which would mean that I did not think of A at all. Instead of conceiving of the phenomenological thesis as a psychological thesis, one must conceive of it as a logical (depth-grammatical) thesis. It is not on the basis of empirical investigations that one arrives at the thesis that consciousness requires an intentional object. If a person should maintain that he quite often is conscious without being conscious of anything, the conclusion must be that he does not understand the meaning of the words he is using. It is important to emphasize, however, that the phenomenological thesis is not something which happens to be true for this or that language. It must necessary be true for any language. But if the concept of consciousness necessitates an intentional object, might it not be due to the fact that consciousness in itself happens to be so structured - that, in other words, it is one of the facts of this world and that it would not be logically impossible that consciousness could have been structured differently ? Could it not have been structured without necessitating an intentional object ? But to entertain such a proposition would be a misunderstanding.

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It is a misunderstanding to believe that the facts enjoy logical priority over the concepts. It is in fact the other way round : Our concepts determine what kinds of facts we have.2 The fact that we speak of thinking, seeing, and doubting, depends on the concepts we have - a language which could not use expressions corresponding to the English expressions, 'I think', 'I see', etc. would, if it had any concept of consciousness at all, not be the concept corresponding to our concept. Without concepts there would be nothing we could be conscious of - nothing we could think of, or doubt, and nothing we could hear or see - because it is with the help of concepts we identify things as being this or that. I cannot think, for instance, of a horse, without having the concept 'horse' (which implies that I am able to use expressions containing the word 'horse'); if I doubt the proposition that the weather tomorrow will be fine I must necessarily have all the concepts which are used in order to make this proposition (i.e. not only the concept 'weather' but also the concept 'fine weather' - which concepts I cannot have without also knowing what bad weather is; furthermore I must have the concept 'tomorrow', which in turn presupposes many other concepts). It is a simple truth of conceptual logic - and consequently not a truth determined by the structure of the world - that if nothing could be an object of consciousness, if there was nothing to think of, nothing to hear, nothing to doubt, etc., then there would be no thinking, hearing, doubting, etc. If there is nothing which could be the content or 2

This is one of the points Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) felt he had to change. In his work Tractatus Logico - Philosophicus he thought that language was a picture of the fact, and that language, therefore, only was correct if it pictured the fact correctly. In his later work, plublished posthumously, Philosophical Investigations, the view of language as the picture of the facts was abandoned. In his influential work Thought and Action (1960), Stuart Hampshire writes: "After the early experiment of Russell and Wittgenstein, most contemporary philosophers are probably convinced that the idea of 'the facts', which are already individuated in reality independently of our forms of reference to them, is an illusion that cannot be given a sense. We divide and re-divide reality into its segments and sub-segments along the lines of our practical interests, which are reflected in our conventions of reference." (p. 216).

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object of consciousness there can be no consciousness either - an empty consciousness is no consciousness. Not to be conscious of something is not to be conscious at all. That consciousness has an intentional object is therefore not a truth which, in the last analysis, depends on the structure of the world, i.e. a truth which therefore would be contingent. The proposition that to be conscious is to be conscious of something is a truth of conceptual logic, and, consequently, a truth which is not determined by what might be called the logical form of consciousness;3 on the contrary, it is conceptual logic which determines what necessarily must be regarded as consciousness. On the other hand, the fact that our concepts are applicable to something shows something about the world. This may be illustrated by a simple example. That we have games (for instance, games of football) is a contingent fact. It is not a logical necessity that such games should exist. It is quite possible that the game called football does not exist; it may even be conceivable that there is nothing called games at all. But it is a fact that we do have such games; it is therefore also a fact that we have the depth-grammatical rule that in a game there must be a winner. In any language where the concept of game is used the mentioned depthgrammatical rule must be obeyed. But, obviously, there would be no games if human beings were not the kind of beings who thought that such things were amusing, interesting, and useful; and that, for instance, the football field has the dimension, it in fact has is, of course, a convention - but a convention which is conditioned by the physical strength and stamina of human beings. Another example : We all agree that it has no meaning to talk about eating if there is nothing one eats. How should we answer a person who claims that the reason for this linguistic fact is that the organisms inhabiting this planet happen to be so constituted that we cannot * To say that consciousness has a logical form would mean, therefore, that consciousness, independent of our concepts and language, in itself had a logical form. It was the view Wittgenstein held in Tractatus. In 2.18 he says : "What any picture, of whatever form, must have in common with reality, in order to be able to depict it — correctly or incorrectly — in any way at all, is logical form, i.e. the form of reality."

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eat unless there is something to eat ? It is, of course, correct that it is a fact of this world that all organisms eat. Mice as well as men eat, and it is true of men as well as of mice that when they eat, they eat something. But the non-language-using animal has, needless to say, no knowledge (is not conscious) of what it does when it is engaged in the act we call to eat. It is conceivable that there was a time when the verb to eat did not mean quite what it means today; it might have been the case that it was used in such a way that it referred to a process of chewing and of swallowing, independent of whether it was a chewing and a swallowing of something. According to this meaning of the verb 'to eat' a person who was chewing and swallowing, but chewing and swallowing nothing, would correctly be said to eat. It is thus the concept which determines the fact - and not the fact which determines the concept. The necessity of the verb 'to eat' requiring an accusative is, of course, not something which has been impressed upon us by the structure of the world. On the contrary, it is the concept which determines what should be counted as a fact. One might imagine language-using-beings who did not have the concept of consciousness we have. Instead of talking about consciousness as something which necessarily requires an intentional object, it might be imagined that there were beings who conceived of consciousness as if it were constituted exclusively by means of the object. One would therefore not use expressions as : "I am thinking of a mathematical problem", but "A mathematical problem exists here and now", or instead of saying: "I see a cat in the distance" one would say : "A visual picture of a cat in the distance exists here and now". According to this model, consciousness is conceived as if it were a screen on which different things are shown; there could be no talk, therefore, about the intentional object of consciousness; and this seems to contradict what I just said : If and when we speak of consciousness it is a logical necessity that there is an intentional object. The point is, however, that the just pictured model of consciousness - let us call it the screen-model - cannot be carried through. It conflicts with the model - a model we cannot be without - according to

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which one cannot talk about consciousness without implying at least one of such sentences as : 'I am thinking', 'I am doubting', 'I am seeing', and 'I am reading'. Admittedly there have been attempts to develop one form or another of the screen-model. The attempts have often been made as a protest against Descartes' famous statement "Cogito ergo sum" ('I think, therefore I am'). The German philosopher Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (17421799) maintained that all Descartes correctly could have said was: "Es denkt" ('It thinks').4 Lichtenberg's contemporary, the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776), attempted to give a system in with the different phenomena of consciousness were not regarded as phenomena belonging to a certain 'I'. His negative result to his desperate attempt at finding a sense impression of the T is known. The attempt is paradoxical already from the start. He says as follows : "For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call MYSELF, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch MYSELF at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception." 5 When Hume concluded that no T exists, it is tempting to ask what he meant by the word 'I' in the above quoted sentence. And it is almost comical when Bertrand Russell (18721970), in his work Analysis of Mind, writes that instead of the misleading form, 'I think' one ought to write, 'It thinks in me' or, better still 'There is a thought in me'. 6 The famous and much studied and read American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842-1910) - brother to the novelist Henry James - applies an example from Kant in order to show that all that is needed with respect to an 'I' is the thought 4

Moritz Schlick (1882-1936), a German philosopher and one of the founders of Logical Positivism (also called the Vienna School), writes in his Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre "Lichtenbergs wahre Bemerkung, Descartes hätte statt "ich denke" nur sagen dürfen: "es denkt", ist nicht nur ein geistreicher Einfall, sondern sollte eigentlich zum obersten Prinzip der Psychologie gemacht werden." (p. 147f). 6 Treatise, Book I, Part IV, Section VI. 8 p. 18.

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that one just had. James has this to s a y : As Kant says, it is as if elastic balls were to have not only motion but knowledge of it, and a first ball were to transmit both its motion and its consciousness to a second, which took both up into its consciousness and passed them to a third, until the last ball held all that the other balls had held, and realized it as its own. It is this trick which the nascent thought has of immediately taking up the expiring thought and 'adopting' it, which is the foundation of the appropriation of most of the remoter constituents of the self. Who owns the last self owns the self before the last, for what possesses the possessor possesses the possessed.7 Whatever the example may illustrate, it also illustrates this: Since it is presupposed that the balls have consciousness and are therefore also able to speak (else they could not have consciousness), it follows that each ball necessarily must be able to use the T

The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, 1891, 339-340. Kant uses the example to show that the consciousness of a permanent and identical 'I' as a condition for knowledge does not by necessity imply the existence of a permanent and identical 'Transcendent Ego'. Kant puts it as follows: "The identity of the consciousness of myself at different times is therefore only a formal condition of my thoughts and their coherence, and in no way proves the numerical identity of my subject. Despite the logical identity of the 'I', such a change may have occurred in it as does not allow of the retention of its identity, and yet we may ascribe to it the samesounding T , which in every different state, even in one involving change of the thinking subsject, might still retain the thought of the preceding subject and so hand it over to the subsequent subject." In a footnote Kant says: "An elastic ball which impinges on another similar ball in a straight line communicates to the latter its whole motion, and therefore its whole state (that is, if we take acount only of the positions in space). If, then, in analogy with such bodies, we postulate substances such that the one communicates to the other representations together with the consciousness of them, we can conceive a whole series of substances of which the first transmits its state together with its consciousness to the second, the second its own state with that of the preceding substance to the third, and this in turn the states of all the preceding substances together with its own consciousness and with their consciousness to another. The last substance would then be conscious of all the states of the previously changed substances, as being its own states, because they would have been transferred to it together with the consciousness of them. And yet it would not have been one and the same person in all these states." Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith, A 363-364 p. 342.

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word 'I' and use it in the sense in which this word necessarily is used; that is to refer to one and the same 'I' - in other words, implying the identity James wanted to explain away by his example. To be conscious is to be active. To think, to see, to daydream, etc. is to act. They are acts performed by a person; they are acts for which the concept of intention (understood as the concept treated in the preceding chapter) is a necessary presupposition. To give up this model and to accept the screen-model is to be involved in unsolvable problems. It would be a model one could choose freely if one could go through with it; but if it leads to paradoxes, contradictions, or absurdities it must of course be abandoned. But, as I shall show in a later chapter, one cannot be without the concept 'I'; one cannot be without a dualism between an 'I' and that which is the object of the consciousness of this T . Furthermore, one cannot be without the distinction between the active and the passive. I perform an act, I do something when, for instance, I am thinking; but I do not perform an act and I do nothing when, e.g. I have a headache or am in a bad mood. But if we say, as we necessarily must say, that to be conscious is to be conscious of something, then not very much has been said. It is necessary to examine what it means to be conscious and what types of things can replace the word 'something' - i.e. what types of things can constitute the intentional object of consciousness. To be conscious means that at least one of the following mental verbs can be applied : 'to think', 'to see', 'to imagine', 'to deliberate', 'to daydream', 'to read', and several others. If no mental verbs can be applied, it is the same as saying that there is no consciousness. One cannot be conscious of anything if it does not involve having knowledge of that one is conscious of. I must be able to answer questions about what I am conscious of. Independent of whether my mental activity in a certain moment is to think, to daydream, to memorize, or something else, I must be able to say what I am thinking of, what I am daydreaming about, or what I am going through in my memory. One cannot think of something

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without simultaneously knowing what one is thinking of; one cannot be engaged in having certain memories without knowing what it is one has the memory of; one cannot daydream about something without knowing what is going on in one's daydreams. In other words, one cannot have consciousness of anything without having concepts - the concepts without which one cannot conceive, understand, think, or describe anything. To conceive of something it is necessary to conceive of it as something, and what it is conceived of depends upon the concepts we possess and apply - depends, that is, on our language. Language is thus a condition for consciousness - for consciousness in so far as it involves being conscious of, or having knowledge of, the intentional object. Animals cannot, therefore, have this type of consciousness. Admittedly, a dog can see, hear, and smell, and a dog can react to certain words and expressions, can recognize his master, show joy and fear, and several other things; but it cannot have consciousness in the sense according to which it means being conscious of what it sees, smells, and hears. When a dog reacts to words and expressions, its reaction must be understood as a stimulus-response reaction. If it recognizes a certain person as his master it does not mean that it possesses the concept of a master; it does mean, however, that due to proper stimulation of its senses it displays what could be called 'recognizing-behavior'. There are cases where it is justified to maintain that if a predicate, properly applied to man, is applied to an animal it involves a change from consciousness to behavior. If on a safari I suddenly see a lion I shall probably run in order to save my life. But if I try to kill a spider and the spider escapes by running away, I may say that the spider is running in order to save its life. But it will be wrong to infer that the spider was conscious of a danger and that it was this consciousness or this knowledge which caused it to run. The expression 'to run for one's life' involves consciousness if applied to man; applied to animals, however, it can be understood as applying only to behavior. In his epistemological work, Critique of Pure Reason, Kant maintained that one cannot think and object (i.e. conceive an

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object as an object) without help of concepts. And as it is only in a language that a concept can be applied, it follows, all in accordance with Kant, that one cannot think of an object (conceive an object as an object) without a language. Kant distinguishes between intuition and thinking. A condition that something can be intuited is that it is intuited as being at a certain place at a certain time. But as the thing that is intuited cannot be conceived without the help of concepts ("Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind"). 8 Kant has to admit that all consciousness is conditioned by concepts9 and, consequently, also by language. To think an object is, therefore, by means of concepts, to pass a judgment about the object. To be conscious of the object is to be able to apply at least one concept to it.10 A view of consciousness and its linguistic conditions different from that held by Kant is the view held by the British philosopher John Locke (1732-1804). Consciousness, according to Locke, is constituted of what he calls ideas. The ideas exist and are what they are, independent of the existence of a language. And as consciousness is constituted of ideas, it follows that the existence and nature of consciousness exist independent of language. Language, still according to Locke, consists simply in names given to the ideas - ideas which exist prior to the language. The tendency in contemporary philosophy, however, is more Kantian than Lockian. Today, few would accept the view that there are ready-made ideas and that language consists of nothing but giving names to such ideas. In what follows, such concept as 'seeing', 'thinking', and 'sensation' shall be examined in order to show, so far as these concepts are concerned, the connection between language and consciousness. 8

Critique of Pure Reason, B 75. "We cannot think an object save through categories; we cannot know an object so thought save through intuitions corresponding to these concepts." B 165. 10 "Now the only use which understanding can make of these concepts is to judge by means of them". B 93.

8

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LANGUAGE AND PHILOSOPHY 2.

LANGUAGE A N D THINKING

What is thinking? Both psychologists and philosophers have tried to answer this question. Psychologists and philosophers do not ask the same sort of questions however. The psychologist may be intersted in what could be called the phenomenology of thinking, while the philosopher is interested in problems connected with the concept of thinking. The philosopher does not attempt to answer questions about the content of consciousness when one thinks; he is not, qua philosopher, interested in discovering the observational data of thinking. Some of the questions the philosopher asks, and attempts to answer, are these : Is thinking a process, and if so, is it a process which can be identified with physiological or chemical processes, or is it a process of quite another character - for instance, a process which involves a special kind of phenomena, i.e. phenomena belonging to another type of process than the type to which physiological and chemical processes belong? Is thinking something I do but, nevertheless, something I do which is radical different from that which I do when I do something with my body ? Is thinking identical with my speech, be it with my audible voice or with the inner silent voice; or is thinking not identical with speech, yet depending on i t ? These are the kinds of problems the philosopher is occupied with. In what follows I shall attempt to answer some of the questions and shall try to show the relation between language and thinking. The first thing to notice is that the verb 'to think' is used in different ways. Sometimes it is used in the same way as the verb 'to assume' or 'to believe'. If in answer to the question whether Mr. Smith is at home, I say that I do not think so, I have used the verb 'to think' in the sense of believing. We use the verb in a different sense, however, if we say that no human being can help thinking if he is awake. In this sense, it is used to refer to any kind of mental activity. A third use - and this is the use which primarily will be investigated on the following pages - is the sense of pondering or speculating. One attempts by speculation to find a solution to a problem or to draw a conclusion. If one uses the

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verb 'to think' in the sense of believing or assuming, it is not used as a verb which refers to a process; it iS not referring to anything that occupies time; it is not a process verb. It does not take time to assume or to believe; one cannot be interrupted in the middle of assuming or believing. But if the verb is used in the sense of speculating or pondering it is obvious that we are talking about a process. One speculates for a short or a long time, and one may be interrupted while speculating. It is due, among other things, to the fact that thinking, in the just mentioned sense of the word, can be a process which creates a philosophic problem. What kind of a process is thinking ? It has been attempted to identify thinking with the mental images one often, if not always, has during the process of thinking; it has also been attempted to identify thinking with the behavior of the thinking person, primarily his verbal behavior; and, finally, it has been attempted to identify thinking with the neuro-physiological processes in the brain. But attempts to identify thinking with any of the just mentioned three processes creates difficulties. The view that thinking is identical with, i.e. is definable in terms of, mental images derives its plausibility, at least in part, from the fact that in certain situations thinking seems to be inseparably connected with mental images. If I am asked to think of, for example, the Empire State Building, I seem to be asked to create a mental image of the Empire State Building. Furthermore, it is a fact that many human beings, perhaps most human beings, have mental images when they think. The connection between thinking and mental images is general enough to explain the assumption that thinking is identical with mental images. However, such an identification is logically untenable. To think, in the sense of to speculate or to ponder, is an attempt to find out; a thought is, therefore, either true or false, or is successful or not. But it is nonsense to say that a mental image is either true or false, or is successful or not. To have a mental image is not a way of finding out. Moreover, it is not nonsense to assert that different persons may think of one and the same thing and at the same time assert that they have different images. The criterion

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of two persons thinking of the same thing must be the answer they give to the question what they are thinking of, and such an answer will belong to another logical category than the answer to the question what mental images they have. Suppose that two persons, A and B, both are thinking of how many floors a certain building has. A is trying to find the answer by creating a mental picture of the building and then counting the floors. B, however, is trying to remember what he has read in a description of the building.Obviously, to answer the question what they are thinking of, A and B give the same answer, namely how many floors the building in question has; but they will give quite different answers to the question of what mental pictures they had. The view that thinking is identical with neuro-physiological processes in the brain does not come out any better. Although such processes are necessary conditions for thinking, it is not correct to assert that thinking is identical with these processes. If these processes were identical with my thinking, identical in the sense that it was what I meant by thinking, how could I know when I was1 thinking and when I was not thinking ? The fact that I have solved a difficult mathematical problem could then not be what in fact it is, namely a criterion of what I had been thinking; it could only be evidence from which I could infer that I had been thinking. But the knowledge I have of my own thinking is surely not an inferred knowledge. The sentence : "I am thinking of the problem x" obviously does not mean the same thing as the sentence : "The neuro-physiological processes y now occur in my brain". That thinking is identical with neuro-physiological processes is maintained by the neo-materialists.11 The neo-materialists recognize that thinking and brain processes belong to different II

The neo-materialistic theory, also called the identity theory, was introduced by U.T. Place in his article : "Is Consciousness a Brain Process", The British Journal of Psychology, 1956. In philosophic circles, however, the theory became better known through an article by J.J.C. Smart : "Sensations and Brain Processes", Philosophical Review, 1959. The Australian Philosopher D.M. Armstrong's book A Materialist Theory of Mind, 1968, is a defence of the neo-materialistic theory.

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logical categories; they belong to different logical categories as do for instance the concept 'nation' and the concept 'citizen'. Obviously, the concepts of nation and citizen are two different concepts. A nation may have been in existence for more than a thousand years, but its citizens have not. A nation may declare war, but its citizens cannot. But even though they belong to different logical categories it will not be correct, so it is argued, to assert that a nation exists as a special entity over and above its citizens. The identity asserted in the neo-materialistic theory between brain processes and thinking may be called contingent identity. What is meant by contingent identity can be explained thus. Expressions such as 'light rays' and 'electromagnetic waves' describe one and the same thing, despite the fact that the two descriptions belong to different logical categories. A light ray, for instance, is a straight line, which an electromagnetic wave is not. The same is the case with respect to 'brain process' and 'thought'; they have contingent identity. One of the reasons that the neo-materialists are unwilling to say that thoughts exist over and above the brain processes is our ingrained tendency to regard material objects, i.e. extended entities in space and time, as paradigms of existence. But this is untenable. Nobody would deny the existence of numbers, nations, propositions, language, philosophy, and many other things - things which under no circumstances could be called material objects or could be defined in terms of them. T o say that there are numbers is not to say that there are mystical entities which, so to speak, exist somewhere; it is, among other things, to say that there is a certain number system according to! which the different number words are used in certain ways; and if it is asserted, as it necessarily must be, that there are nations, then it is asserted neither that there exist mystical entities nor that there only exist citizens; it is asserted, among other things, that there is a concept, namely the concept 'nation', which is satisfied by at least one value (for example the value England, Germany, or France). The proposition that thoughts exist is a trivial proposition which is

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different from the equally trivial proposition that brain processes exist. The proposition, "Thoughts exist" is consequently not identical with the proposition, "Brain processes exist".12 The just stated objections to the identity theory cannot be regarded as a defence of the assumption that a thought should be a special entity different from a brain process. It is only argued that it is correct to maintain that the proposition, "Thoughts exist" is true and logically different from the proposition "Brain processes exist". Another argument against the theory of contingent identity is this.13 The number of possible brain processes (independent of whether these are conceived as different combinations of neurons or something else) is necessarily a finite number. But the number of a person's thoughts is an infinite number. A person may think of any number whatever. If thinking has contingent identity with brain processes, there will be a time when all the different combinations of neurons have been exhausted - but there will still be new numbers to think of. It is therefore impossible that thoughts can be identical with brain processes. The view that thinking is identical with behavior is, if not absolutely fallacious, at least ambiguous, insufficient, and misleading. The kind of behavior behaviorists identify, or at least primarily identify, with thinking is speech, including the speech I make with my inner silent voice. But despite the rather persuading arguments which are forwarded in favor of the behavioristic thesis, it cannot be upheld. The first thing to notice is the ambiguity of the term 'speech-acts'. The term may refer to the 12

The best analysis of the concept of existence is given by Bertrand Russells, cf. "On Denoting", Mind, 1905. According to Russell existence is a concept which can be predicated only of what he calls prepositional functions. In the proposition 'thoughts exist' and 'brain processes exist' the words 'thoughts' and 'brain processes' are prepositional functions; and if one says that thoughts and brain processes belong to different logical categories one says thereby that the two prepositional functions are of different logical type. It is not thei concept of existence which is different; what is different is the different prepositional functions. 13 The following argument is introduced by Raziel Abelson; cf. "Refutation of Mind-Body Identity", Philosophical Studies, December 1970.

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physical occurrence of certain words. In this sense of the term, a parrot may perform speech-acts. But by speech-acts may also be meant only such acts by means of which something is said or something is expressed. In this sense of the term, a parrot cannot perform a speech-act. If a parrot utters the sentence "Today is Tuesday" it is not SAYING that today is Tuesday. The parrot does not intend to inform us of the name of the day. But to say that to perform a speech-act is to say something or is to convey a piece; of information is also, by implication, to say that thinking cannot be identical with such speech-acts. To listen to another person is to be informed of his thoughts. It is to learn what piece of information it is he wants to convey. But, obviously, I do not get informed about my own thoughts by listening to my own speech. I do not learn what I want to say by listening to what I say. What I say is no surprise to me. I do not find what I am saying by listening to my own words. I may learn that today is Tuesday by hearing somebody say that it is Tuesday. And if later I am asked how I know it is Tuesday today, I may answer that I heard somebody say so. But I cannot answer by saying that I heard myself say so. There is a difference, however, between saying something with one's inner silent voice and saying something to a person. In the latter case, the purpose is to convey information to that other person; in the former case I am not conveying information to anybody. I do not intend to inform myself about what day it is by saying with my inner silent voice that today is Tuesday. To be sure, I may be in doubt as to what day it is and may try to find out. I may remember that yesterday was Monday and consequently conclude that today is Tuesday. But when I state the conclusion I already know that which is stated, namely, that today is Tuesday. The stating of the conclusion does not serve the purpose of informing anybody, not even myself. On this point, it is important to make a distinction between a thought and a thinking process. Let me begin by analyzing the concept of thought. When I conclude that today is Tuesday, there are two things which ought to be emphasized. What somewhat

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misleadingly is called the drawing of a conclusion is not itself a process. There is no special mental process taking me from the premise to the conclusion. Just as to understand is to have understood, so to draw a conclusion is to have drawn it. And to have drawn a conclusion is to have seen that a certain proposition follows from certain premises. It is an assertion the reason for which includes one or more premises. But while concluding is no process, the stating of the conclusion is. As I have argued, the stating of the conclusion presupposes that the conclusion is drawn - if it were not so, I would learn about the conclusion by stating it, or, to emphasize the absurdity, I should have to observe, more or less as a spectator, what I was stating before I could have knowledge of the conclusion. Not all thinking, however, consists of drawing conclusions. I may perform such acts as doubting a certain proposition, denying it, or regarding it as a possibility, or of rejecting it as a possibility. Now, such acts constitute acts of thoughts. A thought, therefore, is an act which is different from the act of stating the thought. I can state a conclusion or state my rejection of an assertion in English or French; I can state it in a form which is grammatically correct or incorrect, etc., but I cannot conclude in a form which is either English or French or grammatically correct or incorrect. This does not mean, however, that I perform two acts : a thoughtact and the act of stating the thought. If it were two acts, it would be conceivable that I could perform one without the other. But it would make no sense to talk about thoughts which were not expressed or formulated. If they were not expressed in language, I would not know that I had them. They would not be part of my consciousness. It should consequently make sense, which it obviously does not, to maintain that I may have had many thoughts of which I would not have the slightest knowledge. At this point it may be objected: "Surely a Beethoven, e.g., when composing a piece of music, is thinking and may be thinking hard and well, and surely he need not be formulating his thoughts in words or even be able to do so. How could he com-

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pose a sonata in English or German ? " It admittedly would be absurd to maintain that a composer is composing a sonata in English or German - as it would be absurd to maintain that a person is concluding or doubting in English or German. When a person is thinking or doubting there must be an answer to the question: "Thinking and doubting what ? " And the answer to that question must necessary be a sentence in one language or another. If a person is composing or creating something there must also be an answer to question: "Composing or creating what ? " The answer to this question, however, does not have to be expressed in a language; it may be the playing of the composed piece of music. If this is so it seems to throw doubt on my assertion that a thought necessarily has to be expressed in language. In order to meet this objection it is important to clarify to what extent the concept of artistic creativity, e.g., the concept of composing music, falls under the concept of thinking ? It is important to clarify in what sense it is correct to say that a Beethoven, e.g., when composing a piece of music, is thinking. Suppose a dog is barking and it barks in such a way that it results in a melody never heard before. And suppose furthermore that the dog quite often repeats that melody. Why would we not say the dog had composed a melody? One kind of answer would be that the dog did not intend to do what in fact it did; it did not have it in mind; it did not know what it was doing. Verbs like 'to try' and 'to attempt' imply the application of the concept of intention. Whatever I try to do and whatever I attempt to do (including composing a sonata) it cannot be the case that I am ignorant of doing it. Now, to have knowledge of something is, among other things, to be able to answer the question: "Knowing what ? " While knowledge as such is neither in English nor in German, the expression of knowledge is in a language. In other words, I cannot be said to be composing unless I intend to do so. To intend to do something implies, among other things, that one knows what one is doing, which in turn implies a distinction between knowledge and the expression or stating of that knowledge. If an English speaking person and a German

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speaking person both are trying to compose a sonata they both know what they are doing, namely trying to compose a sonata. It would make no sense to say that the English speaking person had an English piece of knowledge and that the German speaking person had a German piece of knowledge. But the English speaking person, in so far as he is conscious of his knowledge (and would we say that a person was composing if he did it unconsciously?), formulates it in English, while the German speaking person formulates it in German. In order! to throw some light on the rather difficult problem of the relation between a thought and the stating of it, let us first look into the language of thought. Whenever by thinking we arrive at a certain proposition, we use such terms as 'therefore', 'consequently', and 'it follows'. We may write down an instance of reasoning in a certain logical order beginning with premises and ending with the conclusion. By such a systematization of our reasoning; we are led to believe that this is a psychological report of what in fact took place. However, that this is not so is easy to see. Suppose I wonder what day of the month next Monday is. As I happen to know what today is Tuesday, March 24th, I conclude that next Monday is the 30th. What psychologically happened may be something like this. I added 7 to 24 and subtracted 1 and thereby arrived at the number 30. However, this makes sense only because I know that there are 7 days in a week and I know that Monday is the day before Tuesday. But this certainly was not part of what happened psychologically. Nevertheless, the two propositions (the proposition that there are 7 days in a week and the proposition that Monday is the day before Tuesday) constitute part of my knowledge and a knowledge which is a necessary condition for the validity of the result. It is a condition for the validity, and not a psychological cause. But although it is not a psychological occurrence, it is nevertheless something I know. To know something, however, is not a psychological occurrence. For most of my life I have known that there are 7 days in a week and that Monday comes before Tuesday. But I have not spent most of my life expressing that knowledge. To

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know these propositions is, among other things, to be able to make assertions which are justifiable by them. It is to be able to formulate them if needed and requested. It is what makes the proposition that it is the 30th, something which I do not learn by the stating of it, but makes it something I know while stating it. If I want to make explicit the validity or justification of an assertion, I may write down all the premises and presuppositions from which it follows. But quite obviously, I cannot use such terms as 'it follows', and 'therefore', unless I have already arrived at the conclusion. The language which applies these terms is not a language which describes the actual psychological processes. It is a language which is used to write down the logical structure of it and to prove the validity of it. The surgeon, while he is operating, knows what he is doing. If he should justify or explain each of his acts, it would require hours of quotations from medical books and journals. He most certainly does not cite all medical theories or principles while he is operating; he is not rehearsing his knowledge, but is applying it. He is displaying his knowledge in his act. To the extent that his acts are explainable and justifiable by principles and theories we may apply the language of thought: we may say that from that specific observation he sees or concludes that this or that act is required. Again, whenever he formulates or states the conclusion, it is a conclusion he already knows - he knows it as an instance of applied knowledge. To characterize it as applied knowledge implies, among other things that, while he is performing the act, he can at any moment, if needed or requested, explain or justify the act. His knowledge is his reason (but of course not the cause) for it. A reason, in this sense, is not an act occurring prior to the act for which it serves as a reason. It is not an act but the principles, theories, hypotheses, etc. which validate, explain, or justify it. Let me sum up what I have been trying to say about thoughts. Thoughts are not identical with the formulation or stating of them. Yet whenever there is a thought, it is also formulated or stated. A thought may be such activities as drawing a conclusion, asserting

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a proposition, having doubted it, having rejected it, having set it forth as a proposal or hypothesis. But whether it is one or the other, it is always an application of knowledge - a knowledge which is presupposed for all thinking. A thought is thus a non-time-consuming act, and an act which is an application of knowledge. Earlier in this chapter I made the distinction between thought and thinking. It may be maintained, although a bit trivially, that thinking consists of thoughts. Thinking is the stream of thoughts. But if thinking consists of thoughts, which are not time occupying processes, how can thinking be a time occupying process ? The clue to the answer is that a thought has to be formulated or expressed; and while there is no process called 'drawing a conclusion' or 'questioning an assertion', to formulate or to express a conclusion or to formulate or express a doubt about an assertion is a process. A thinking process may thus be something like this : an assumption a which is formulated as the proposition p is succeeded by the rejection of a. The rejection is expressed in the proposition q, and so forth. While to assume, to reject, to doubt, or to guess is to have assumed, to have rejected, to have doubted, or to have guessed, this is not the case with respect to the stating of our assumptions, doubts, or guesses. To state an assumption, is not to have stated it. I can be interrupted in the middle of stating an assumption, but I cannot be interrupted in the middle of assuming or doubting. Expressed in a simplified way: to get an idea is to have got it, but to state an idea is not to have stated it. Why does a thought have to be expressed or formulated ? This it must, unless we are willing to admit that there are thoughts which neither are, nor even can be, a content of consciousness. But to deny that thoughts necessarily constitute elements of consciousness is to eliminate an essential part of the meaning of the concept of thought. In criticizing the behavioristic view, I said that the attempt to identify thinking with speech is, if not absolutely fallacious, at least ambiguous, insufficient, and misleading. It is fallacious

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because it fails to distinguish between a thought and the expression of it. That this distinction is necessary, as I have argued, is seen by the fact that a presupposition for the expression of a thought is the thought itself. But the behaviorists see correctly that whenever there is a thought, there also is an expression of it. Or, in other words, there can be no thoughts and no thinking if there is no language. In the beginning of this chapter, I said I would concentrate on thinking in the sense of speculating or pondering. I should like to conclude, however, by saying a few words about thinking in the sense in which it is used when talking of daydreaming or being conscious. It is the use we have when we say such things as : no human being can help thinking when he is neither unconscious nor sound asleep. Thinking, in this sense, is not necessarily trying to find out, draw conclusions, or solve problems. I may simply be entertaining myself. I may imagine that I am involved in all kinds of actions differing from giving a speech, playing soccer, or walking down Fifth Avenue. It is this kind of thinking for which there is the greatest inclination to assume that it is identical with having mental images. If I am thinking of myself walking down Fifth Avenue, I am having mental images of myself taking this walk, and it seems quite natural to assert that these mental images are both necessary and sufficient conditions for saying that I am thinking of myself walking down Fifth Avenue. The first thing to notice, however, is the rather trivial point that the images are created by me. The occurrence of the images is not something that happens to me; it is not something I am undergoing; it is something I do. I am picturing myself doing or undergoing something; I am not seeing pictures of myself doing or undergoing something. Although I may catch myself thinking of myself walking down Fifth Avenue, it is nonetheless an activity I could have let be; I may blame myself for being engaged in this kind of thinking instead of doing my work. My picturing is not an occurrence of which I am a passive contemplator or spectator. As has often been pointed out: to have a mental image, e.g.,

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having a mental image of myself walking down Fifth Avenue, is not to observe myself walking down a mental image; it is to imagine or to picture myself walking down Fifth Avenue. When I am having mental images I am not a contemplator or spectator at all. I am a performer. If I picture myself walking down Fifth Avenue I must at every moment of this activity know what I am doing. The picturing I am doing at this or that moment is not coming as a surprise to me. Which pictures are coming up on the TV screen I have to learn by looking, but I do not learn about my mental images by looking at them. I do that as littie as I learn about my own words in my speech by listening to them. I utter the words I do utter because they are instrumental in saying what I want or intend to say; and I produce the mental images I do produce, because such images are instrumental in picturing what I want or intend to picture. To want or intend to picture myself walking down Fifth Avenue and to decide to picture it, are not mental processes. I cannot be interrupted in the middle of my wanting, intending, or deciding, but, most obviously, I can be interrupted in the act of picturing myself taking that walk. In saying, as I have done, that to have a mental image of x is not to observe an image of x, but to imagine observing x, I have said nothing with respect to the ontological significance of the expression 'mental image'. The fact that the concept of a mental image has a logic which is different from such concepts as 'screen pictures', and the concept 'photographs' is obviously of great philosophic importance but neither falsifies nor verifies any ontological doctrine. However, concerning recent attempts to reduce not only mental images, but all mental concepts, to brain events, I may quote Butler's often quoted, anti-reductional proverb : "Everything is what it is and not another thing". The concept of thinking, as I have tried to show, has a logic different from the logic of such concepts as the concept 'brain events' or the concept 'observing mental images'. The language of thinking has a logic all of its own. What I have been able to do in this chapter is to point to only a few, but, I hope, not unessential features of this logic.

CHAPTER IV

1. LANGUAGE AND PERCEPTION

In this chapter the relation between language and sensations shall be examined; or rather, the relation between two different forms of sensation and language : (1) Perception, and (2) Sensation. By perception I mean the knowledge we acquire of the world through our sense organs - i.e. the knowledge we acquire through our eyes, ears, nose, and tongue. By sensation I mean that which one is conscious of when touching something or feeling something. In this section I shall concentrate on visual perception. Perception in general, and visual perception in particular, has been the object of many different philosophical investigations. Already the simple question WHAT we see when we see something creates problems. The question is not meant as a question about what it is I see in this or that situation. The question is meant as a category question: Does my object of perception belong to the category of material object, or does it belong to what in the 17th and 18th century was called ideas? Or does it belong to an altogether different category ? At first glance, the view that we see material objects seems correct. I see trees, tables, chairs, spiders, and stones. If such objects do not belong to the category of material objects it seems that nothing does. Nevertheless, serious objections may be raised against such a view. Let us, as an example, take the philosopher John Locke. Locke was a friend of the famous scientist Robert Boyle and was therefore well informed about sense physiology. He knew a great deal about what goes in the organism when a sensation occurs. Locke knew about light rays, retina picture, the visual nerve, and brain processes.

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The sense physiological processes could not be identical with the sensation, i.e. the visual experience. They could constitute only the necessary conditions. They could constitute the last organic or physical cause. The physiological processes effect the ideas of sense - ideas which are creations in the mind. The visual sensation, for instance, is a process involving the following elements : (1) the external object, (2) the light rays reflected from the object and effecting the eye, (3) the physiological processes, and finally, (4) the visual picture created by these processes, or, in Locke's language, the idea created by these processes. One seems thus compelled to distinguish between the external and the visual picture or idea. One seems, furthermore, compelled to assume that what one sees is not the external object itself but the idea in the mind. But if we have knowledge of nothing but the ideas, we are cut off from having any knowledge of the object itself. If we never can have perceptions of the object what, then, can we know about this object ? And if we do claim to have knowledge of it, with what right do we do this ? The duplication of existence (or, if one prefers, of the ontological) in two fundamentally different entities - objects (which exist independently of being perceived and therefore exist objectively) and ideas (which exist only in the perceiving person's mind and therefore exist only subjectively - has created great philosophical puzzles. On one hand it is absurd to maintain that, for example, the piece of paper on which I write and the pencil with which I write are only ideas in my mind and that the real object - thé object which is a cause of the ideas of perception - is completely unknown. On the other hand, it seems necessary to assert just that. If I perceive the odor of a rose it seems obvious that it is the chemical processes in my nose which produce that particular odor which is characteristic of roses. I cannot identify the quality of the odor with the chemical processes. The description of the odor and the description of the chemical processes are quite different. What is true of odor is true also of sound, taste, and visual perception. Without going into details about this difficult problem, the following remarks will suffice. The philosophic task must be to show

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that this duplication which sense physiology is believed to necessitate is an expressoin of insufficient philosophical thinking; the task, furthermore, must be to show how scientific results are compatible with a conception which does not involve such a duplication; it must be shown that the results of science do not entail a distinction between objects and ideas of perception. It is, in other words, a task which implies that the results of the sciences are philosophically relevant in the sense that an insufficient philosophical training leads the scientist to advance more or less absurd metaphysical views - views which it is a task of philosophical thinking to reveal as absurdities. Locke's formulation of the problem of perception throws some light on the relation between science - the natural sciences in particular - and philosophy. The following possibilities are conceivable : (1) All metaphysical problems and views are, in the last analysis, expressions of a defective scientific insight. As science progresses one metaphysical view after another becomes falsified. Scientific insight substitutes metaphysical speculation. (2) There are genuine metaphysical problems which it is the philosophical task to solve; but it is only science which can formulate them. The genuine metaphysical problems have scientific research as a presupposition. (3) Due to a lack of philosophic training, scientists often think that their theories and results justify certain metaphysical views. It is then a philosophic task to show that these are rooted in a misunderstanding, and that the propositions which express these views are pseudo-propositions. All three possibilities have been asserted. The first possibility has, quite naturally, been entertained primarily by scientists with a special interest and training in philosophy. It is among such scientists that one finds assumptions which repudiate what philosophers have said. One may find such views expressed that, for example, what Kant says about space and time is an expression of a defective scientific understanding, or that what Zenon finds paradoxical concerning movement is an expression of lack of mathematical knowledge. Concerning such views, however, it ought to be noted that as philosophic problems, by definition, are different from scientific

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problems, a metaphysical problem and a metaphysical view can never substitute, or be replaced by, a scientific theory. Scientific problems and philosophic problems have different roots; they belong to different logical universes. They cannot, therefore, be in competition. A more serious debate is fought between the second and the third possibility. About this debate much more can be said than can be done here. The following remarks must therefore suffice : Locke apparently accepts the second possibility. As we shall see presently, he finds himself compelled by science to certain philosophic views. It does not occur to him that what science says (and says correctly) does not necessitate the philosophic assumption he readily accepts. And Locke is not the only one who accepts possibility (2). We may find representatives for this possibility during the whole history of philosophy. Nevertheless, it is the third possibility which most philosophers today are inclined to accept. In what follows we shall find an affirmation of (3). We shall see how philosophical analysis may show that the absurdities - believed to be implied by the natural sciences - in fact do not follow. I shall try to show that it is neither correct to say that one sees material objects nor that one sees ideas. I shall try to show that the object for perception belongs to another1 logical category than that of entities - i.e. entities such as ideas or objects. The first point to emphasize is that to see involves seeing that something is the case. I see that the sun is shining, that the door is closed, and that Mr. Jones is driving in his new car. In such cases, what I see belongs to the category of facts. To see that so and so is the case is to see a fact. 1 Obviously, I cannot meaningfully say that I establish an object or a sense-datum. The difference between an object and a fact involves, among other things, that an object must be somewhere while it is nonsense to say that a fact is somewhere. The dog is in the street, but the fact that 1

Of course I may just as well say that I see Mr. Jones driving in his new car. But this is a grammatical difference only. There is no logical difference between saying that I see that Mr. Jones is driving in his new car and saying that I see Mr. Jones driving in, his new car.

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the dog is in the street is not itself in the street. To see is to establish a fact. Or rather, it is, on the basis of visual evidence, to believe to have established a fact. The reason it cannot be to establish a fact, but has to be to believe to have established it, is the following. I can see wrong but I cannot establish wrong. I can report that I see that Mr. Jones is driving in his new car, and if it turns out not to be Mr. Jones but Mr. Smith I saw wrong. I certainly did not see Mr. Jones. Nevertheless, although I was mistaken in my belief, I did see something. But if I report that I have established that Mr. Jones is driving in his new car and it turns out not to be Mr. Jones but Mr. Smith I did not establish wrong. I did not establish anything at all. I believed that I had established, but my belief was wrong. However, I may not see that Mr. Jones is driving in his new car. I may just see Mr. Jones' new car. If so, it seems difficult to say that I see that such and such is the case. I cannot say I see that Mr. Jones' new car. And if I say that I see that there is Mr. Jones' new car I am saying something different from what I say when I say that I see Mr. Jones' new car. There is not only a grammatical difference between the two reports: (1) I see Mr. Jones' new car, and (2) I see that there is Mr. Jones' new car. It seems to be a straightforward case of seeing a material object. And of course, in a certain sense this is correct. It is important to note, however, that a condition of having seen Mr. Jones' new car must be that at least one sentence of a certain class is true. And the members of this class are all sentences reporting that I see that such and such is the case. I cannot have seen Jones' new car unless I have seen that it has four doors, or that it has red seat covers, or that its color is blue, or that something else is the case. If there is nothing about Jones' new car that I have seen in the sense of 'seeing that', I certainly have not seen it. On the other hand, having seen it implies nothing else besides at least one sentence of the type 'seeing that'. Now suppose somebody asks me to draw a picture of what I see.2 I then draw a picture of Jones' new car. Now if to see Jones' '

Cf. Wittgenstein's Philosophical

Investigations

II XI, 193 : "What do

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new car is to see something in the sense of 'seeing that', how can I draw a picture of what I see ? I can draw a picture of a car but I cannot draw a picture of a fact. If my drawing of Jones' new car is a drawing of what I see, it seems to follow that I do not see facts but objects. But, of course, if it is correct that I see Jones' new car in terms of 'seeing that' and my drawing is a picture of that car it follows that I also see the drawing in terms of seeing that. In other words, to draw a picture of what I see is to draw a picture of that about which I ascertain certain facts. It has often been asserted that to perceive an object involves having sensations, where the concept of having sensations means the same as seeing sense-data. At best, this is a misleading way of saying that to perceive an object involves being able to report seeing in the sense of 'seeing that', and involves nothing else over and above that. At its worst, it is to imply that to perceive an object is to be aware of sense-data. The attacks on sense-data theories have been numerous, and I shall not add to the number of these attacks. There is one point, however, to which I want to pay attention. To be aware of a sense-datum most often is conceived of, not in terms of 'seeing that' but rather in terms of 'being presented with'. According to this conception, to see or to be aware of a sense-datum is passively to receive a sense-impression. And if this is so, it would seem a logical impossibility ever to be wrong. It has no meaning to say that the presentation of a sensedatum could be wrong. It could not be our seeing that was right or wrong; it would have to be our description of it. And as we certainly can see wrong, as well as right, it is, I think, a rather decisive argument against any sense-data theory which implies that we are aware of sense-data. The assertion that to see is to believe to have established a fact is not without difficulties, however. It makes sense to say that a human being establishes a fact, but it does not make sense to say that a bird establishes a fact. Nevertheless, it makes perfectly good sense to say that a bird sees. To establish a fact is to apply you see there ?" - "I see this" copy).

(and then a description, a drawing, a

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concepts. If there were no concept-applying beings or, which is the same, language-using beings, there would be no fact either. What we see depends upon the concepts (the language) we have. If a doctor sees an X-ray of my stomach he sees different things than I would if I were to look at the same picture. The difference is due neither to different retina pictures nor to the doctor's better eyes. It is due to the fact that he possesses concepts which I do not possess. Suppose there were beings who possessed only two concepts: the concept of moving bodies and the concept of bodies not moving. Confronted with the same world and having the same pictures on their retinas as we have, would they see the same as we do ? Obviously not. They would have no possibility for seeing anything but moving bodies and not moving bodies. Suppose I watch a bird. I see that the bird catches sight of a creeping earthworm. The bird reacts immediately and swallows the earthworm. Does the bird see the creeping earthworm ? It would be misleading to say that the bird does not see it. In fact it does see it. Nevertheless, there is a sense, even a nonPickwickian sense, according to which it does not see it. We may think of seeing as a physiological process or we may think of it as a conscious act. If we are thinking of human beings we think of seeing as a conscious act. If we think of animals we think of seeing as a physiological process. If I affirm that I have seen something I must be able to say what I have seen, although it does not have to be a definite answer. I may be unable to say what exactly I am seeing, but I must be able to say something about it. I may say that I cannot see what exactly it is, but it is something brownish and that apparently it is not moving. If I cannot say even that much, if I can classify it in no way whatever, I am not seeing anything. If I cannot apply any of such fundamental concepts as color, size, shape, or movement, a claim to have seen something must be rejected. Man is a concept-using animal, and in the sense in which a human being can see, a bird cannot see. However, its eyes and organism may be affected in such a way that the bird reacts appropriately. If its eyes are

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affected by light rays reflected from: a creeping earthworm it may react by catching the earthworm. And this is all we require, and can require, in order to say that the bird is seeing the creeping earthworm. But did the bird see a creeping earthworm ? A moment ago I said it would be misleading to deny that it did. The proper answer is, I think, that the bird saw something, namely that which I call a creeping earthworm; and that is why I can say that the bird saw the creeping earthworm. But this does not imply that the bird saw it AS a creeping earthworm. In the sense of seeing in which to see is to see something as something the bird does not see. In fact, it never sees anything as something. Somewhere Mr. Warnock asserts that to see something does not entail that the object seen is seen as something.3 An infant in arms does not possess any concepts, and does not therefore pass any judgment. According to Warnock, however, as an infant in arms I may have seen Lloyd George. Now, did I really see Lloyd George ? Obviously, in a certain sense I saw Lloyd George. The person who caught my eyes, the person whose picture was on my retina, was the person whose name was Lloyd George and who for some time was England's prime minister. But I certainly did not see him as that. I did not see and could not have seen him as anything. So in that sense I did not see Lloyd George. I saw Lloyd George only in the sense in which a bird would have seen him. I said before that to see is, on the basis of visual evidence, to believe to have established a fact. But what am I to understand by 'visual evidence' ? It looks, after all, as if a sense-datum theory is introduced : It is on the basis of sense-data that I believe myself able to establish a certain fact. And a sense-datum is supposed to be something I see in the sense of being presented with. Suppose I see a flag in the distance. I see its color is white. I have established the color of the flag, and I have established it on the basis of visual evidence. And this visual evidence, as it "

Proceedings

of the Aristotelian

Society,

LV, 204 f.

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seems, must be the presentation in the visual field of a white color; it must be the occurrence of a white sense-datum. To see an object, therefore, is conditioned by seeing sense-data. It is true that there is a white color to be seen, but it is not true that I see a white color. Because what I see is that the flag is white. And this is not identical with seeing a white color. The proposition: "There is a white flag" entails the proposition "There is a white color"; but the proposition I see a white flag does not entail the proposition " I see a white color". When I see that the flag is white I do not see two things : both that the flag is white and a white color. There may be situations where all I see is a single color. I may look through a microscope and see nothing but a white color. And yet, what I see is not a white color. I see something which is white, or I see a white dot, or I see what looks like a white cloud, and so on. Furthermore, and of no less importance, if I do not ascertain (or believe to have ascertained) then I do not see it as white, and therefore do not see it at all. By this I do not mean to say that I do not see anything if I have never learned the use of the name white, or have learned but forgotten. It is conceivable that one day I see a color I have never seen before. However, the color may be describable. I may find similarities with some known colors, or may find that it falls naturally between some special colors. But even if the color is indescribable I shall nevertheless see it as a color, provided of course that I have the concept of color. If I happen not to have that concept I do not see any color at all. If the concept of seeing belongs to the category of ascertaining or finding out, it seems to involve some queer questions. To ascertain or to find out is to apply a method; but it surely is to stretch the meaning of the word 'method' beyond the legitimate if all cases of seeing are said to involve a method. If I look out of the window and see that the sun is shining my seeing does not constitute any method. I do use a method if, say, I find out the time by looking at a specially constructed sun-dial. If I find out the time by seeing the train passing by and I know that the train passes by at four o'clock my seeing involves an inference. But if

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looking at the weather is a method or an inference, then everything is a method and an inference. However, if to see is 'to see that', then to see is to pass a judgment. To say that I see that the sun is shining is certainly to pass a judgment and a judgment I could not pass unless I possess the relevant concepts. To pass a judgment is to ascertain by applying concepts; but to apply concepts is neither to apply a method nor to infer. In the preceding I have quite often used the expression 'seeing as'. And this raises the question of the relation, if any, between 'seeing that' and 'seeing as'. 'Seeing that' is to see that something is the case. 'Seeing as' is to see something as something. However, a person who sees that something is the case also sees something as something. And a person who sees something as something also sees that something is the case. If I see that there is a squirrel in the tree it follows that I see that the animal in the tree is a squirrel, i.e. I see the animal in the tree as a squirrel. And if I see something as a car I do so because I have ascertained at least one relevant fact about the object, a fact which makes me sure, or at least makes me believe, that it is a car. Many will protest against this. In Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein considers a case of seeing a 'picture-face', that is, a drawing of a face, and it is a drawing which I could not possibly see as anything but a picture-face. He then says : "It would have made as little sense for me to say 'Now I am seeing it as...' as to say at the sight of the knife and fork 'Now I am seeing this as a knife and fork'. This expression would not be understood." 4 And this is of course correct. If I see an ordinary chair it would not be correct if I said, "I see it as a chair". I may use the expression 'seeing as' in cases where things can be seen as different things. It is possible to make a drawing in such a way that it may be seen now as rabbit and now as duck. Reporting on how I see the drawing I may say, "Now I see it as a rabbit", or "Now I see it as a duck". Or I may see something in the distance and be 4

II XI, 195.

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unsure about what it is I see; I believe, however, that it is a dog. I may say, then, that I see it as a dog, or that I take it for a dog. The function of the expression 'seeing as' is, in such contexts, to inform the persons I speak to about my uncertainty. It is also correct that first-person uses of the expression 'seeing as' are diferent from third-person uses. If I see a picture-rabbit simply as a picture-rabbit from the first it would be out of place if I reported that I saw it as a picture-rabbit. But as Wittgenstein says: "Nevertheless someone else could have said of m e : 'He is seeing the figure as a picture-rabbit". 5 There may be many other observations to be made about the uses of the expression, but my purpose is not to clear up these uses. My purpose is to show that there is a difference between what, in a certain situation, I can say and what in fact is the case. Admittedly, if I clearly see a creeping earthworm I cannot say that I see it is a creeping earthworm. But from this it does not follow that, as a matter of fact, I do not see it as a creeping earthworm. I am here presupposing a point which I stressed earlier in this section. I am presupposing that a condition of seeing is an application of concepts. The bird, therefore, is not seeing it as a creeping earthworm. It is in fact not seeing it as anything. A creature that possesses the concept of moving bodies and the concept of not-moving bodies, and possesses no other concepts, will not see the creeping earthworm as a creeping earthworm but will see it as a moving body. A small child who possesses the concept of an animal, but who has never heard of an earthworm and does not know what it is, will not see it as an earthworm but will see it as an animal. And, finally, you and I, who know what an earthworm is, will see it as a creeping earthworm. As concept-using animals we do see, therefore, in terms of 'seeing as' as well as in terms of 'seeing that'; to have seen in terms of 'seeing that' presupposes having seen in terms of 'seeing as'. And to see in terms of 'seeing as' presupposes seeing in terms of 'seeing that'. It is a peculiar, and interesting, fact that we all 6

Philosophical

Investigations

II XI, 195.

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see something as something and that, at the same time, we are prohibited, except in special cases, from using the expression: 'I see the object x as x\ This peculiarity - if peculiarity it is - is not restricted to the expression 'seeing as'. I cannot say "I know that p, but I may be wrong". But there may be cases where I say "I know that p" and say so correctly; nevertheless, it may turn out that p is false.6 If this is so I have the peculiarity that it was correct to use the expression 'I know that p' despite the fact I did not know. I did not know because I definitely cannot say: "When I said that I know that p I did know but it turned out that I was mistaken". To conceive of seeing as cases of 'seeing that' and 'seeing as' may look like oversimplification and undue reductionism. At the top of p. 193 in Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein says : Two uses of the word 'see'. The one: "What do you there?" - "I see this" (and then a description, a drawing, a copy). The other: "I see a likeness between these two faces" - let the man I tell this to be seeing the faces as clearly as I do myself. The importance of this is the difference of category between the two 'objects' of sight.

But is it true that there is a difference of category between these two objects of sight ? Of course, in a certain sense there is. I can draw a pucture of the face I see, but I cannot draw a likeness I see between two faces. Nevertheless, if I am right in maintaining that to draw a picture of what I see is to draw a picture of that about which I ascertain certain facts, then both of Wittgenstein's examples are examples of 'seeing that'. Indeed, in somewhat the same sense in which I can draw a picture of the face I see, i.e. the face about which I ascertain certain facts, I can draw a picture of the two faces, i.e. the two faces between which I can see a likeness. Whatever logical difference there may be between these two objects of sight, they both belong to the category of the ascertained. No doubt, it may serve a purpose to distinguish between many 8

Cf. Austin: "Surely, if what has so far been said is correct, then we are often right to say we know even in cases where we turn out subsequently to have been mistaken". "Other Minds", Philosophical Papers, 66.

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categories of objects of sight. If I see Jones' new car I can say that I see an object. If I see a car collision I can say that I see a happening. If I see an acrobat I can say that I see a performance. If I see that John is taller than Jones I can say that I see a relation. There may be many other categories but, as I have tried to show, they are all cases of both 'seeing that' and 'seeing as'. The philosophical problems connected with the concept of seeing are, by and large, problems centering around the problem of naive realism. Naive realism is a problem only in an indirect way. Naive realism neither can be nor needs to be proven. Naive realism is not regarded as true because it has been proven to be. It is regarded as true unless it is proven to be false. The way to prove naive realism is to show that there are logical errors in the arguments trying to refute it. Furthermore, naive realism may best be defined in terms of the assumptions that stand if the arguments against it fail. Many of the arguments seem, among other things, to show that there is no numerical identity between the external or physical object and the visual pictures one is presented with when one sees it. We may conclude, therefore, that such a numerical identity is essential to naive realism. I shall mention two arguments which seem to show that our visual experiences or visual pictures are numerically different from the external object. The first argument is what has often been called the causal argument. Seeing is conditioned by processes in the eye, the optical nerve, and the brain. Seeing is conceived of as a creation of a sense impression, created by these processes. Obviously, such sense impressions are numerically different from the external object which is the cause of the processes. If the argument is correct, naive realism is false, and if naive realism is correct the argument is false. It should be clear from the preceding, however, that this concept of seeing is mistaken. The model is fundamentally wrong. To see is not to be confronted with a picture, it is not to contemplate such a picture. The processes are necessary conditions of seeing, but they do not cause or produce visual pictures. To see is to ascertain, or to believe to

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have ascertained, a fact. And a condition of ascertaining a fact is to be able to 'see as', which in turn is possible only by possessing and applying concepts. The difficulties and problems arising from the concept that seeing is to be presented with a picture are well known. They are all the difficulties connected with the representative theory of perception and with phenomenalism. They are even difficulties which, according to Strawson, make impossible any language. Identification and re-identification of things referred to are necessary conditions of communication; but such a re-identification would be impossible if we could not ascribe numerical identity to experienced material bodies. Within the representative theory of perception and phenomenalism, however, there is no room for the concept of numerical identity. But all these difficulties seem not to arise if seeing is conceived of as 'seeing that'. If we are able to free ourselves from thinking of seeing in terms of a contemplation of a passively received or given picture, there is nothing to support the belief that processes in the brain produce a sense impression. The neurological processes are surely necessary conditions for seeing but they do not constitute sufficient conditions. This was clear already to Locke. Talking, not about seeing but about hearing, he says : How often may a man observe in himself, that whilst his mind is intently employed in the contemplation of some objects, and curiously surveying some ideas that are there, it takes no notice of impressions of sounding bodies made upon the organ of hearing with the same alteration that uses to be for the producing the idea of sound! A sufficient impulse there may be on the organ; but it not reaching the observation of the mind, there follows no perception: and though the motion that uses to produce the idea of sound be made in the ear, yet no sound is heard. Want of sensation in this case is not through any defect in the organ, or that the man's ears are less affected than at other times when he does hear: but that which uses to produce the idea, though conceived in by the usual organ, not being taken notice of in the understanding, and so imprinting, no idea on the mind, there follows no sensation.7

* An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Book II, ch. IX section 4.

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The important point to note is not so much what Locke means by the expression "take notice of". What is important is his emphasis on the fact that the neurological processes are necessary but not sufficient conditions of perception in themselves. However, this important insight did not induce Locke to give up his representative theory of perception. It could have led him to the idea that the mind was able to take notice of things in rerum natura instead of ideas of sensation. Of course, what Locke calls "taken notice of in the understanding" is a crude expression of the fact that to see is to apply concepts and, consequently, to pass judgments. Suppose I want to draw a complicated geometrical figure. I cannot do that unless certain neurological processes occur. Such processes are necessary conditions for the proper movement of my hand and fingers. It would be misleading, however, if it was asserted that these processes produced and explained the drawing. If asked why I draw this or that particular line the answer is not in terms of neurology. The appropriate answer is in terms of geometry; no answer can be given and no answer can be understood unless the person who gives the answer and the person who gets the answer possess certain geometrical concepts. In like manner the explanation of why I see the things I do see is in terms not of neurological processes, but of what it is I want to see and the conceptual apparatus I possess. The other argument I want to mention and shortly examine is the argument from illusion. The argument is used to show that objects of perception cannot be classified as material objects but must be classified as sense-data. The point of the argument is that we see something which is not the case. I see a bent stick which is not bent. I see two books on the table but there really is only one. I see a little white dot but it really is a rather big white horse. What is it that I see if I see two books on the table despite the fact that there really is only one book ? If by a book I mean an ordinary material object, I cannot say that whenever I press my eyeball I see two books; because I do not increase the number of existing material objects in the world by just pressing my

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eyeball and do not annihilate them by taking away my finger from the eyeball. But if it is not a book I see, what is it then ? Of course, in a certain sense I see only one book; I see only one book simply because there is only one book to see. If I assert that I see that there are two books on the table, I am mistaken. But is there a sense according to which it is correct to say that I see, not two books but two sense-data (or, to put it rather inelegantly, two bookish sense-data) ? This has been affirmed by Ayer but denied by Austin. In this other sense of 'to see', I cannot see wrong. The thing I see may not really exist and it cannot have other properties than the properties I see. In his Foundations of Empirical Knowledge Ayer writes: In one sense, the sense in which the man can say truly that he sees the star, it is necessary that what is seen should really exist, but not necessary that it should have the qualities that it appears to have. In another sense, which is that in which the man can say truly that what he sees is no bigger than a sixpence, it is not possible that anything should seem to have qualities that it does not really have, but also not necessary that what is seen should really exist.8 Austin's argument against this assumption is not quite convincing. 9 To the question "What do you kick ?" I can give different true answers. I may say "I kicked a piece of painted wood", or I may say "I kicked Jones' front door". It is two different ways of characterizing one and the same object (or, rather, in the former answer I have DESCRIBED the object; in the latter answer I have IDENTIFIED it). But, as Austin points out, it does not mean that I have used the verb 'to kick' in two different senses. Or, to take another of Austin's examples, I can say "I saw an insignificant-looking man in black trousers", or I can say "I saw Hitler". In the former case I have described the person, in the latter case I have named him, but it does not mean that I have used the verb 'to see' in two different senses. However, these examples do not constitute arguments against Ayer's view, because, as Professor " p. 23. " Austin, Sence and Sensibilia, 9 8 / / .

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White points out,10 in Austin's example the answers are different but not incompatible. In Ayer's examples, however, the answers are not only different, they are incompatible.11 Nevertheless, Austin's conclusion, if not his argument, is correct. The alleged second sense of the verb 'to see' does not exist. There is not one sense according to which I see a huge star and another sense according to which I see a speck no bigger than a sixpence. If I say that I see a speck no bigger than a sixpence I am mistaken, because what I see is in fact a huge star. I may of course say that what I see looks like a speck no bigger than a sixpence. Provided I am a person not completely ignorant about astronomical matters, my utterance cannot be taken as an expression of uncertainty about what it is I am seeing - as it would be if in a state of doubt I said, "It looks like Jones". To say that it looks like a speck no bigger than a sixpence must mean, therefore, that I know quite well that I see a huge star, but that in another context I would have had good reasons to say that I saw a speck no bigger than a sixpence. If, say, I had been in a rather dark room and had looked at the wall, a speck would have looked as the star now looks. But whether I see a straight stick that looks bent or I see a huge star that looks like a speck no bigger than a sixpence, I must have, so it will be argued, a presentation of a visual picture of a bent stick or a speck no bigger, than a sixpence or a visual experience of two books instead of just the one that is on the table. It seems as if we have great difficulties, almost insurmountable difficulties, in freeing ourselves from the model of seeing as a contemplation of a picture passively received. But nothing is presented to us, there is nothing we can pick out as being the given in our experience. A condition of saying that something is experienced, a condition of saying that something is seen, is that this something is not given but asserted or ascertained. If I lost 10

"The alleged ambiguity Whether or not Ayer patible may be debatable. patible. This is a question, II

of 'see'", Analysis, vol. 24. is right in maintaining that they are incomWhite argues (p. 2) that they are not incomhowever, which I shall not investigate further.

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my power of ascertaining, if I lost, that is, my power of employing concepts, nothing would be seen. A metaphysical question seems unavoidable. If to see involves applying concepts, the concepts must necessarily be applied to something. What is this something to which the concepts are applied ? This question seems to make a Kantian answer almost inescapable. But if it means that we should assert the existence of an X, of a Ding an sich, the answer is illegitimate. If I see a blue tie, the only answer I can give to the question to what the concepts 'blue' and 'tie' are applied is that they are applied to the blue tie. It is the only possible answer simply because it is in fact a tie and it is in fact blue. To ask what a thing is, is to ask by which concepts it is to be comprehended. It is therefore a contradiction to assert that there is something not yet conceptualized. I can identify and characterize things, that is conceive of them, by different conceptual systems. I can conceive of, for example, a person by conceiving of him as an organism, or as a person whose character is so and so, or as a citizen having certain duties, or in many other ways. But whether he is conceived of in one way or the other he has been conceived of as something. It would have no meaning to ask what the person is 'in itself, to ask what he is if he is not conceived of by help of any conceptual system. A person is not a something, not an X, to which we apply different concepts and in terms of which we conceive of him. And if I had not seen the blue tie as a blue tie I would have seen it as something else. It would have no meaning to ask what it is in itself if by in itself we mean a not yet conceptualized X an X which potentially is a blue tie, a potentiality which is actualized if and only if the concept 'tie' and 'blue' are applied to it. So I conclude that the fact that we see by applying concepts does not entail any kind of metaphysical dualism. And if furthermore it delivers us from some of the difficulties rooted in the old model of the concept of seeing, i.e. the screen-model, it must be to the credit of the new model.

LANGUAGE AND SENSATIONS 2.

LANGUAGE AND

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SENSATIONS

It is useful to distinguish between three different categories of sensations : (1) The sensation we have when we feel that something is smooth, wet, or hot; (2) The sensations we describe as itching, burning, pricking, or stabbing; and finally (3) Sensations we describe as painful. They constitute three different types of what normally are called sensations. To classify them as belonging to different types involves, among other things, that they have different relationships to language. Let us begin by examining (1), i.e. the type of sensation according to which we say that we feel that something is wet, cold, smooth, etc. What is it we feel when we feel that something is hot or cold ? An apparently correct, although trivial, answer seem to be this - we feel wetness, coldness, smoothness, etc. But this answer, however trivial it may appear, is not correct. The first thing to notice is an ambiguity in the expression 'that which we feel'. The word 'that' in the just mentioned expresssion may be understood in two ways. It may be understood to refer to a non-reducible phenomenon of consciousness, or content of consciousness, which one might call the sensation of something wet, something smooth, something cold, something hot, etc. It is this supposed phenomenon of consciousness, or content of consciousness, which has been called THE RAW FEEL.12 The belief that something called RAW FEEL should exist would imply that there should be a phenomenon of consciousness common to man and animal. But) the word 'that' in the expression 'that which we feel' may also be understood to mean that which is known through the sensation, i.e. that something hot or cold, or smooth, etc. What we feel (i.e. that which the word 'that' refers to) is the fact that something is hot, cold, smooth, wet, etc. According to this meaning of the word 'sensation', it is to ascertain that something 13

The expression 'raw feel' was introduced by the psychologist Tolman in his work Purposive Behaviour in Animal and Man. The expression is quoted from B.A. Farrell's article "Experience", Mind, April 1950.

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is the case - that it is the case that something is hot, cold, smooth, etc. The parallel between this use of the verb and the use of the verb 'to see' is obvious; just as to see is to ascertain, or believe to be able to ascertain, that something is the case, just so, is to feel (in the here examined sense of 'to feel'), to ascertain, or to believe to have ascertained, that someting is the case. And just as it was a logical error that to see should be to have an idea or a sense-datum presented - what constitutes the given in the content of experience - just so is it a logical error to believe that to feel (still in the here examined sense of the verb), should be to have a sensation presented to one - a sensation constituting the given. I can be conscious of no sensation if it is not conceptualized as something. Sensations falling under type (1) are thus dependent on a language. An animal reats to what is hot and what is cold, what is wet, etc. If one applies the word 'sensation' to animals the word does not refer to sensations of which the animal has consciousness; the animal is not conscious that something is hot, cold, smooth, etc. The reason is the simple one that it has no such concepts at its disposal. Suppose I want to know whether some clothes are dry. I feel with my hand and find that they are wet. I feel that they are wet. I may report that the clothes are wet and back my report by saying that I felt it. I do not say that I felt wetness and from this inferred that the clothes were wet. I neither felt wetness nor did I have any sensation of wetness. I simply felt that the clothes were wet. To feel that the clothes are wet is neither to assert nor is it to imply the feeling of wetness or the occurrence of any sensation of wetness. The expressions, " I feel that the clothes are wet" and " I have a sensation of wetness", play quite different roles in our language game. If I feel the clothes and say that I have a sensation of wetness it means that I am not quite sure of how to answer the question "Are the clothes dry ? " I am not ready to give a straight yes or no answer, but report that there seems to be some evidence in favor of a negative answer. If I say I feel that they are wet I assert that they are wet. If I say that I have a sensation of

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wetness I do not assert anything. I am giving only slightly more than a hint. In general, then, to report that one has a sensation of X is not a report of a special occurrence called 'sensation of X'. It is to give non-conclusive evidence for attributing the property X. It is not to ascribe the property X, but it is to say that it may be ascribable. Now let us turn| to the (2) use. According to this use I can be said to have sensations in different parts of my body. I speak about a pricking sensation in my leg and a burning sensation in my finger. It seems, thus, as if I here have to do with describable occurrences. I DESCRIBE the sensation as pricking or itching; and offhand, at least, it seems to make sense to say that the burning sensation in my finger OCCURS. But, all the same, it is correct to say that sensations are describable ? If I pinch myself in my arm I feel it. How should I describe this feeling or sensation? Of course, I can say that I have the kind of sensation one has whenever one is pinched; but this is not to describe the sensation. It is to tell how I got it, namely, by being pinched. It is not any better to say that it is a pinching sensation, because all you can say of a pinching sensation is that it is the kind of sensation one gets whenever one is pinched. And likewise with all the other predicates we use to describe sensations. A pricking sensation is the kind of sensation one has whenever one is pricked with a needle, a burning sensation is the kind of sensation one has whenever one burns oneself, and so on. What we describe seems to be the physical cause of the sensation, never the sensation itself. It seems to be indescribable. It is important to note, however, that the impossibility of describing a sensation is not due to a defect of our language. That is, it is not a defect that could be remedied by constructing another and more advanced language. It would be possible to invent special names for all the different sensations, but we would not thereby have described them. It would be impossible in any language, however developed and however rich, to characterize and to describe sensations. The reason why this is so is not a

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factual one. As I shall try to show, the reason is a logical one. Suppose a doctor gives me an injection. I can feel his needle in my arm. I cannot say that I feel two things, partly the needle in my arm and partly a prickling sensation. I only feel one thing, namely, the needle, and, consequently, do not feel any sensation. But now suppose that, without knowing it, I have a thorn in my sock and that the thorn pricks me. As I do not know of the thorn I cannot say that I feel the thorn. What I can say is that I have a pricking sensation. And to say this is to say that it is; as if there were a needle-like object that pricks me. The 'as if' is here used as the 'as if' in the expression "It looks as if it is going to rain, so we had better take our raincoats", and not as the 'as if in "The tea is so dark that it looks as if it were coffee". In other words, the expression "I have a pricking sensation" is used in this situation to give some evidence, though not conclusive evidence, of there being an object that pricks me. As long as I am in ignorance of what it is that pricks me, I cannot say that I feel the thorn; but after having found the thorn in my sock I may say that it was no wonder I had a pricking sensation because what I felt, though without knowing it, was the thorn. That is, it is meaningless (in this context) to say, "I both feel the thorn and a pricking sensation", but not meaningless to say, "What I felt when I had the pricking sensation was a thorn pricking me". However, in many situations when I say that I have a pricking sensation it may turn out that there is no object that pricks me. But this will not get me to withdraw my statement that I have a pricking sensation, and by that statement I shall still mean that it is as if an object is pricking me. At the same time, however, it is obvious that the 'as if' is not now used as it is in "It looks as if it is going to rain" but is used as "The tea is so dark that it looks as if it were coffee". According to this use, not the slightest hint is given with respect to what it is I am feeling. All I am saying is that it feels as it would feel if something were pricking me. With, this change of the use of the 'as if goes a change of the logic of the expression "I have a pricking sensation". As long as

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my statement is meant to be evidence for a pricking object, it is falsified if in fact there is no such object. But if my statement is not meant to be such evidence, the statement cannot be falsified this way. The only way to falsify it will be to show that this kind of sensation is not the kind of sensation one has when one is pricked. Another difference is this. Suppose I complain of a burning sensation in my stomach. By this complaint I am not giving any hint about my stomach being on fire. I have not said anything whatsoever about what it is I feel when I have this burning sensation. My doctor may tell me, however, that what I feel is my ulcer. Now compare this with the situation when I can say that what I felt when I had the pricking sensation was the thorn. There is a logical difference between the expression "feeling the thorn" and "feeling the ulcer". In the sense in which I can feel the thorn I do not feel the ulcer. That would imply that I could touch the ulcer with my finger - and if I could it surely would not be a burning sensation as it would if, unwittingly, I touched a hot stove. The relation between the pricking of the thorn and the pricking sensation is radically different from the relation between the ulcer and the burning sensation. It would be no genuine question to ask how it feels when a thorn pricks - at least not if the answer expected is that it gives a pricking sensation. But it would be a genuine question to ask how an ulcer feels. And it would be a genuine answer (though perhaps a false one) to say that it gives a burning sensation. The pricking sensation ceases to be a pricking sensation the moment I discover the thorn. For I shall now have to say that I feel the thorn and it would make no sense to guard myself by using the non-committal concept of sensation. But the burning sensation does not cease to be a burning sensation because I learn that it is my ulcer I feel. It would still be meaningful (though perhaps false) to deny that it is the ulcer I feel - it could be something else - but it would be meaningless to deny that the thorn that pricks me can be described as a pricking sensation.

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Let us finally examine the (3) use. Suppose I have a slight headache. It is so slight that I cannot say it hurts. My headache does not ache. It is barely noticeable. In the course of the day my headache gets more intense, and it is now justifiable to say it is painful. Now, what does it mean to say that one has a pain ? What must be added to a sensation in order to justify calling it painful ? It is obvious that a pain is not a new sensation added to the one that I say hurts. If I have an injection, I can say that I feel the needle and that it hurts. This does not mean that I feel two things, partly the needle and partly a special sensation or feeling called pain. I only feel one thing, namely, the needle. If a pain were a special sensation it should make sense to ask whether a pain was painful or not. There should, furthermore, be a general answer to the general question, "How does a pain feel ?" But there is no such general answer. I can tell how a special pain feels and it will be a description identical with the description of the sensation that is painful. I may say that it feels as if a knife is cutting me or as if something is burning me. In other words, most sensations can, if they are sufficiently intense, be painful. And to say they are painful is not to add another characteristic on a par with the characteristic of being either burning, stabbing, or pricking. To say that a stabbing, burning, or pricking sensation is painful is to say something about our attitudes towards and reactions against it. It is to say that it is a sensation we mind having, react against, try to avoid, and, more generally, it is a sensation which is displayed in this specific behavior we call pain behavior. What is the relation between language and pain. If we subtract language from consciousness - consciousness in the sense according to which one is conscious of the fact that one has pain - what will we have left ? Can I have a pain I do not reflect on, a pain I cannot conceive as a pain - not because it is conceived as something else, but simply because nothing is conceived as something? If there ever is a justification for talking about RAW FEELS it must be here. The dog howling from pain FEELS something, but it has

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no understanding or conception of - has no consciousness of that it has pain. But not to be conscious that one has pain does not imply that one does not have pain. Attempts to identify pain with pain behavior do not hold. Although one may infer with certainty, at least so far as animals are concerned (man may control his pain behavior), from pain behavior to pain, it is not correct to IDENTIFY pain with pain behavior. The veterinarian who anesthetizes the dog before he operates on it does so, not in order to eliminate its pain behavior, but in order to eliminate the pain. The neo-materialistic theory that pain can be identified with neurophysiological processes seems therefore not to be tenable; if it were one would be compelled to maintain that the neurophysiological processes would be FELT - they may even afford pain. And then we are where we were before!

CHAPTER V

1.

LANGUAGE AND EXISTENCE

If I speak to a person I receive an impression of him. I notice that his hair is dark, that he is quite tall, of normal weight, and several other things. But there is one thing it would have no meaning to say that one notices, namely that he exists. It is not one of the many different things I can predicate of him. The presupposition for being able to predicate something about him is that he exists. Expressed differently: About that which one can point to or name, one cannot meaningfully say that it exists; or, rather, one can say neither that it exists nor that it does not exist; because existence is a presupposition for being able to point to or name it. One asks about existence only if non-existence is conceivable. One may ask whether there are illiterate persons in a certain country. The proposition, "There are (there exist) illiterate persons in this country" is meaningful. Admittedly, one may predicate existence about what appear as proper names. The word 'Socrates' is ordinarily used as a proper name. But if one should wonder whether in fact there did exist a person by that name one may ask the question, "Did Socrates exist ?" But it is only apparent that the word 'Socrates' in the just mentioned sentence is used as a proper name. What one asks about is really this. "Did there ever exist a person who fits the description one gives of the person or figure who is known under the name 'Socrates' ? To give a description of such a person is to mention all the predicates which have to be predicated about that person. In other words, what one asks is whether all the predicates which are involved in the word 'Socrates' are, or have been, applicable

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to a person. However, if I say, "Socrates was married to Xantippe" I use the word 'Socrates' as a proper name; it follows, therefore, that I cannot predicate existence as long as the word is used as a proper name. I cannot in one and the same proposition say: "Socrates was married to Xantippe, was the teacher of Plato, and existed". If I do ask whether Socrates existed, I do not use the name Socrates as a proper name. Thus, the word 'existence' is used to maintain that certain predicates are applicable to something, or to ask whether these predicates are applicable to something. If one cannot mention any predicates at all, one cannot talk about existence. If I say that x exists I have only said something if I can mention at least one of the predicates which are involved in the word 'x\ Furthermore, the predicate, or the predicates, must be genuine predicates; they must not be negative predicates. If, for instance, all I can say about x is that it is unextended and invisible, I have said nothing. The requirement that one can talk about existence only if one has predicates, characteristics, or descriptions, can be satisfied, of course, only if there is a language, or, which is involved, there are concepts. If we had concepts different from the concepts we in fact have, there would be a different world. We would have classified and divided up the world differently; because it is by means of concepts that we classify, describe, and divide up the world. It is therefore incorrect to suppose that existing things are what they are independent of our language and concepts, and independent of whether there is any language at all. To say that existence depends on language must not be misunderstood; it must not be taken to mean that such different languages as English, French, and German imply different types of existence. The decisive point is not the fact that these different languages use different words and are governed by different grammatical rules. The decisive thing is the conceptual system which the language is an expression of. Suppose we have two language-using groups; and supose that the language of each group is different from the other in the sense that it is an expression of a radically different conceptual system; it would then be

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impossible to translate any of the languages into the other. That which exists according to one language would not, except incidentally, exist according to the other language. There would be two different ontologies. The consequences of having two radically different conceptual systems would be that what exists according to one system would not exist according to the other. There will be two different worlds. It is doubtful, however, whether one may have two radically different conceptual systems. Through the whole history of metaphysics, metaphysicians have attempted to show that there must be certain fundamental concepts without which one could not know, conceive, or describe the world. One may argue, for instance, that there must be the concept 'object'. As a fundamental substance of the world one must have things; i.e. extended material objects which can be identified and reidentified. In order to do this one must be able to apply space-time coordinates. A condition for identifying a thing as something is the existence of the relevant concepts. A condition for identifying a thing as being numerically the same thing as an earlier experienced thing is the possibility of determining its location in space at two different times.1 If existence of material objects is a condition for a language, and language is a condition for consciousness, it follows that there could be no consciousness if there were no material objects.2 When the concept of existence has the metaphysical interest it in fact has, it! is due, at least partly, to the fact that philosophical thought often has been led to infer the existence of transcendent entities, i.e. entities which transcend possible experience. In the 11th century Anselm thought that our concept of the perfect 1

Cf. P.F. Strawson's Individuals, 1959. * In a world without material objects there could not be what one calls a public language. If a language would be possible it would have to be a private language - i.e. a language which each individual language-user had to construct himself and learn by himself and which could not be controlled and verified by reference to external objects. The logical impossibility for such a language has been argued for by Wittgenstein: cf. Philosophical Investigations.

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necessitated the existence of a perfect being (i.e. the existence of God). And from the incompleteness, the dependence, and the imperfection of the empirical world Thomas Aquinas thought that he had to infer the existence of the unconditioned, the independent, and the unperfect. Descartes thought it necessary to assume the existence of a soul - the existence of what he called a thinking but non-extended substance. Kant would not accept the validity of any inference from the existence of the empirical to the existence of the transcendent, and he attempted to show, not only that it was erroneous, but also that it was necessitated by the structure of reason; that, in other words, the logic of our concepts transcends the empirical.3 As we have seen, Russell showed that existence only can be meaningfully predicated of expressions which mention properties. A sentence having existence as a grammatical predicate is, according to Russell, used to assert that the mentioned properties are applicable to something. If, for instance, I maintain that the abominable snowman exists, what I am saying, then, is that the properties of looking as the animal in question is supposed to look, and of living in this or that place, are applicable to a manlike animal. If one prefers to express it by help of symbols it may be expressed thus : If AS stands for all the properties which one presumably can ascribe to the abominable snowman, then one is saying that there is at least one value for x will make the propositional function 'x has AS' a true proposition. It ought to be noticed that'x' cannot be a name of that which AS applies to. Its function is to inform that there is something - something which is neither named nor pointed at - about which one can say that it has the properties AS. If I say that the abominable snowman does not exist, then what I am saying is that nothing will make ' It is interesting to note the difference between Kant's predecessor, David Hume and Kant. While Hume always attempted to give a psychological explanation of why we have the metaphysical (and, according to Hume, erroneous, or even meaningless) beliefs we in fact have, Kant attempted to show that it is a logical necessity that reason transcends; the empirical - logical in the sense that it is not something we just do but something we necessaril must do.

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the propositional function 'x has AS' a true proposition. Russell expresses it, as mentioned earlier, by saying that the verb 'to exist' can be predicated only of propositional functions, or what he also calls descriptions, or, in certain connections, incomplete symbols. What he means by a propositional-function may be explained thus : Instead of using the expression 'the abominable snowman' I may write ASx. This expression is not a proposition - it cannot be used to assert anything; it is not an assertion; it is not an expression which is either true or false; it has no truth value. It will be a proposition only if a value is given to x\ if, for instance, I substitute a name the result is a proposition which is true or false. It will be a proposition which can be used to assert either something true or something false. It is expressions such as 'ASx' that Russell calls a propositionalfunction; it is about these only (or descriptions or incomplete symbols) that one can predicate existence. If 'AS' does not apply to anything, 'AS' is a description which describes nothing; and if it does apply to something 'ASx' is a description describing something - describes that whose name one substitutes for x. As Quine expressed it in his well known essay "On What There Is" : To exist is to be a value of a variable.4 In other words, a condition for applying the word 'existence' is the possibility of translating the word or the expression to which 'existence' should be applied into a propositional-function. And this is possible only if one is able to mention certain properties. Needless to say, these properties need not be empirical. With respect to truth value the proposition, "Numbers exist" is just as unproblematic as the proposition, "Lions exist". But from a philosophic point of view there is a great difference. It is unproblematic to write down the propositional-function for the word 'lions', but is is complicated and problematic to write down the propositional-function for the word 'number'. Depending on how one writes down the propositional-function of a word like 'ghost' the proposition 'Ghosts exist' is either true 4

First published in Review of Metaphysics, 1948, later reprinted in Quine's book From a Logical Point of View, 1953.

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or false. The proposition is true if it means that reports exist about certain experiences certain persons claim to have had - experiences which they claim to be experiences of ghost-like beings. The proposition is debatable (to express it mildly) if it is asserted that these reports are about ghost-like beings who exist independently of whether they are observed or not. The proposition "Man has a soul" is true if the propositional-function into which the word 'soul' is translated mentions only such things which truly can be said of human beings, such things, for instance, as they are beings who think, discuss, are happy, depressed, angry, etc. However, if it is expressed as, for instance, Descartes did it, namely as an unextended but thinking substance, it will be impossible to translate it into a propositional-function - since there are no genuine properties which could constitute such a propositional-function. In a previous chapter I maintained that the concept of existence, just as the concept of truth, belongs to a class of concepts which could be called the categories of language. They are concepts which are logically connected with the concept of language. A problem wich was examined in connection with the concept 'truth' was this : if truth is a category how is it possible, within language, to assert something which is false and, furthermore, to assert that a proposition is false? If I maintain that Napoleon won the battle at Waterloo I am maintaining something which is false - but all the same it is an assertion IN language and not a proposition ABOUT language. But, as it was pointed out, the point is that although a language would not be a language - not be an assertion - if it was not the case that the assertion asserted that something is the case, the concept of truth has meaning only if the concept of falsity also has meaning. Consequently, it must be logically possible for an assertion to be false; it is therefore necessary that one might ask whether a given assertion is true or false. Likewise with the concept of existence. Although it would be a logical impossibility to make an assertion if there was nothing to assert anything about, i.e. if nothing existed, the concept of existence has meaning only if the concept of non-existence also

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has meaning. Consequently, it must be possible to assert that something does not exist. It is not without importance to emphasize the difference between the concept of existence and the concept of reality. Shadows, mirror images, waxworks, and hallucinations - while one would never deny that such things exist one may, dependent on the context, say that they are not real. A waxwork of Bismarck is not the real Bismarck; but it is a real piece of waxwork. The shadow of Bucephalos is not the real horse; but it is a real shadow. Reality presupposes existence, but existence does not presuppose reality.5 The aspirations of classical metaphysicians to find criteria for existence and reality were accordingly based on a misunderstanding. Whether the abominable snowman exists is determined differently from the way the existence of a certain mathematical theorem is determined. To assert that something is real is to assert that it is not unreal in a specific sense. I only say that it is not the real Bismarck if it could be the case that it was a waxwork of him; or that this is a real (a true) Rembrandt and not just an imitation; or that this is a real duck and not just a decoy. Obviously, if this is so it has no meaning to try to find a general criterion which all real things must satisfy in order to be real. If the decoy is a real decoy (and not just something which resembles a decoy) and, consequently, not a real duck, it is, at one and the same time, both real and not real. One of the most difficult problems concerning existence is the problem of how to understand the proposition which, ever since Descartes used it as his basic epistemological and metaphysical 6

Austin calls the word 'real' a trouser-word. It is the negative use of the word which, as Austin expresses it, wears the trousers. "A definite sense attaches to the assertion that something is real, a real such-and-such, only in the light of a specific way in which it might be, or might have been, not real. 'A real duck' differs from the simple 'a duck' only in that it is used to exclude various ways of being not a real duck - but a dummy, a toy, a picture, a decoy etc.; and moreover I don't know just how to take the assertion that it's a real duck unless I know just what, on that particular occasion, the speaker has it in mind to exclude", Austin, Sense and Sensibilia, 70.

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proposition, has been object for discussion, namely the proposition "I think therefore I am". One reason that this proposition has been object for philosophic discussion is the problem of what to understand by the word T . Closely connected with this problem is the problem of the criterion or criteria of personal identity : What justifies me in saying that I am one and the same person from birth to death ? 2.

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The word T is a necessary word in language. Kant expressed it by saying that "It must be possible for the 'I think' to accompany all my representations". Expressed slightly differently : For every proposition made there must be a person who can say, "I made this proposition". A proposition which is made must necessarily be made by someone. A language must necessary presuppose a language user. But what should be understood by a language user has lead to, and leads to, disagreement and discussions. Let us begin by investigating the Cartesian proposition : "I think therefore I am". Descartes made this proposition as his most fundamental philosophic proposition. And few things, if any, could appear more self-evident than that each person has the right to use the verb to exist in first person singular, present tense. How would it be possible to have doubts about one's own existence ? A presupposition for doubting one's own existence is that one exists ! In other words, the very attempt to doubt it affirms it ! And if anybody should make the assertion, "I do not exist" then he has, by the very making of that assertion, affirmed his existence.6 The proposition 'I exist' is self-verifying while the sentence "I do not exist" is self-destructive.7 However, it is a * The way the concept of existence, in this context, should be understood is in contrast to not being born, or have been born but dead. Obviously, anybody may say that he does not exist as something. For instance, on St. Helena, Napoleon could have said : "I do no longer exist as emperor of France" a Christian may say that he exists as a sinner. Any individual may say that he exists as a person, etc. * Cf. Hintikka : "Cogito ergo sum", Philosophical Review, 1962.

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question whether this is correct. As we have seen, the verb 'to exist' can be used in propositions in which the grammatical subject is, or can be translated into, a propositional function (description or incomplete symbol). But is the word 'I' in thef proposition 'I exist' a propositional function ? Obviously, it is not a proper name. If I say that I exist, and if 'I' should be a proper name, the proposition should not change its logical character if instead I said, "Justus Hartnack exists". But there is a logical difference between the following two propositions, both asserted by m e : (1) "I exist" and (2) "Justus Hartnack exists". Persons who happen not to know that my name is Justus Hartnack (or happen to know it, but do not know whether I am speaking about another person of the same name) may doubt the truth of (2), or be in doubt about whom I am speaking. But this is logically impossible with respect to (1). It makes sence to ask me who Justus Hartnack is, and the answer "Justus Hartnack is me" is contingent and informative to persons who happen not to know me. But it does not make sense to say (and surely would not be an informative answer to the question, "Who am I ?"), "I am me". If 'I' were a proper name it should have (if used by me) the same logical status as 'Justus Hartnack'; and this it obviously does not have. A may ask B who Justus Hartnack is, and B may point to a person in the room and say : "This is Justus Hartnack". But B, pointing to the same person cannot say : "This is me". Furthermore, if I suffer from amnesia I may ask whether my name is Justus Hartnack; but it would have no meaning to ask whether I am me. But is the word 'I' a propositional-function or a description ? Is it possible to translate the word 'I' in the proposition "I exist" into a propositional-function ? The condition is that there are such properties which apply to only one person and that this person is me. Furthermore, the result - if it has to be accepted as a translation of the proposition "I exist" - must have the same logical character as the translated proposition. As it would be a self-destructive proposition to say that I do not exist, it must also be a self-destructive proposition to say that the translated proposition is false for any possible value (that, in other words, there

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is no person to whom the properties apply). But to deny the translated proposition would be an ordinary false proposition and not a self-destructive proposition. We now seem to be in a dilemma. If the word 'I', in the proposition "I exist", is not a propositional-function (and this seems to be a condition for accepting the proposition "I exist" as a meaningful proposition), the problem is what kind of word it is. Quite likely, many will protest against the view that the expression, "I exist" should be meaningless. It will be argued that every person knows that it is a fact that he exists. And if it is a fact that I exist it must also be correct to assert it. But notice the following. It is a contingent fact that I exist. The answer to the question of who it is that exists must be a propositionalfunction or description. The answer will be that it is a person whose name is so and so, is born at this specific time in this specific place, and whose parents were these specific persons, etc. In other words it will be a list of all the characteristics which are the necessary, and - in this situation - also the sufficient conditions for writing down the propositional-function in question. There is however, a logical difference between the two propositions : (1) "it is a fact that I exist", and (2) "I exist". The proposition (1) is contingently true. It is a contingent fact that I am born, a fact depending, among other things, on the contingent fact that my parents met; the proposition involves a propositionalfunction. The proposition (2), however, is neither contingent nor does it involve any propositional-function. A presupposition for the performance of my different activities is, obviously, that I exist. That I exist cannot, therefore, be one of the activities for which my existence is a presupposition. If I work in my garden I am not thereby engaged in two activities, partly to work in my garden and partly to exist. And if I make a proposition or am thinking of something I am not engaged in two activities either. My existence is a presupposition for whatever proposition I may make or whatever thought I may have. If I use the sentence 'I exist' to make what is believed to be a proposition, i.e. the proposition "I exist", it consequently must

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have my existence as a presupposition. In other words, it would be a proposition about a presupposition for being able to make propositions at all. Admittedly, one may express this presupposition in a proposition. But notice the difference between the following two propositions : (1) A person may make propositions only under the presupposition that this very person exists. (2) I can make propositions only under the presupposition that the proposition (made by me), "I exist" is a true proposition. (1) is a trivially true proposition; but it is not difficult to see that (2) cannot be a proposition at all. If the sentence 'I exist' were a proposition it would require (according to [2]) that the proposition "I exist" must be a presupposition ! And a presupposition for making this proposition must again be the proposition "I exist", and so on infinitely. That the sentence 'I exist' cannot be a proposition can also be seen by the following argument. A condition for counting an expression as a proposition is that it is an expression which is either true or false. There must be circumstances or situations which made it either true or false, i.e. it must have truth conditions. To understand a proposition is to understand what makes it a true proposition. And that can be understood only if it is also understood what would make the proposition false. One must be able to understand the circumstances that would make it a false proposition. If the sentence 'I exist' could be used to make a proposition, there must be circumstances which would falsify it. But it is logically impossible that there could be such circumstances. And if it is without meaning to apply the concept 'false', it is also without meaning to apply the concept 'true'. But an expression which can be neither true or false is not a proposition. Descartes arrived at the proposition "I think, therefore I am" by applying the methodological doubt. He wanted to reach a proposition it was logically impossible to doubt, and from this proposition to deduce other true propositions. But, as we have seen, although the proposition is immune against the methodological doubt, it has nevertheless transcended the logical permissible. It is an error of depth grammar. Descartes could not have

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made any further progress if this was all from which he had to derive further propositions. However, he had an important 'as' clause. He maintained that he existed as a thinking being. And it was by an analysis of the concepts he believed inherent in his mind that he thought he was able to make any further progress.8 But if the word 'I' is neither a proper name nor a propositionalfunction, what is it then ? Different theories have been proposed. One theory is that the word 'I' refers to a transcendent ego, i.e. an entity which necessarily always must be outside all experience. Sense impressions, thoughts, daydreams, pain, etc., are sense impressions, thoughts, daydreams, and pains which a person has, something which constitutes the content of a person's experience. If one uses the screen model, the content - the sense content will be that which occurs on the screen. Obviously, the screen itself cannot be one of the pictures which occurs on the screen it can do so as little as a box may be one of the things which are in the box, or as little as my right hand can be one of the things I have in my right hand. The I which experiences cannot constitute part of the content of my experience. Even though this argument seems to be compelling, it is nevertheless not quite satisfactory; at least not if it is conceived as an ontological theory, i.e. conceived as a theory about an existing entity. It is not satisfactory because its explanatory value depends on whether one understands or can make sense of what is meant by a transcendent ego. But it is difficult, not to say impossible, to understand because it must forever be unknown. To explain something by referring to a concept whose meaning, at best, is doubtful, perhaps meaningless, is from an epistemological point of view unsatisfactory, always unacceptable. 8

Among such concepts (ideas) is the concept of the perfect and the infinite. He infers the existence of this concept from the fact that he has a concept of the imperfect and finite. The fact that he is a doubting person proves, so he thinks, that he is a finite and imperfect being. He would not have been able to predicate about himself that he was finite and imperfect if he did not have the concept of the finite and the imperfect; and these concepts he could not have unless he also had the polar concept i.e. the concept of the perfect and the infinite.

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Another theory is that the word 'I' should refer to the organism or the body of the speaker. The advantage of this theory should be that a transcendent entity is avoided - a body is something which can be studied empirically. But the difficulties seem not to be less. If I report that I am seeing an airplane, I say that I see an airplane, and it would be rather difficult to express it in any other way. I do not say that my body or my organism sees it. And if I decide to take a walk I cannot express this by saying that my body has decided to take a walk. Furthermore, if I use the expression 'my body' or 'my organism' one must explain what should be understood by the word 'my'. It cannot refer to the organism of the speaker because 'my organism' would then mean something like 'the organism of the speaker's organism' which, of course, would be absurd. It is impossible to be without the personal pronoun. What should I say instead of 'my' in expressions such as 'my body' or 'my organism' ? If I have reported that I have decided to take a walk I might try to say something like this : (1) "The body which right now is sitting on the only sofa in this room has decided to take a walk". Even though one might disregard that it is nonsense to say that a body can decide, the logical character of this proposition is different from the proposition: (2) "I have decided to take a walk". According to (1) it is a contingent fact that the person who has decided to take a walk is the speaker. But according to (2) it is a logical necessity. In the Blue Book, Wittgenstein distinguishes between what he calls "the object-use" and "the subject-use" of the word T . According to the object-use one may substitute 'my body' for the 'I'. If I say that my weight is 170 pounds I may substitute, according to Wittgenstein, 'my body' for the word T . As we have seen, this does not solve the problem. To the question of what the expression 'my body' refers to Wittgenstein is silent. According to the subject-use, the expression 'my body' cannot be substituted for the word 'I'. But, still according to Wittgenstein, the word may be eliminated. If, for instance, I say (1) "I have a pain" I may, according to Wittgenstein, say instead : (2) "There is a pain"; but it is only according to surface-grammar that one

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can eliminate the word T . It is only if the context unambiguously indicates that it is me who has the pain that (1) and (2) are identical - which proves that (1) and (2) have different logical status; because according to (2) it must depend on the context who it is that has the pain. The proposition "It is painful" may be substituted for the proposition: "He has a pain" as well as for the proposition "I have a pain"; whether it is substituted for one or the other the situation may show. But in (1), one is told who it is that has pain. It is information which is independent of context and situation. We seem to be in a dilemma. On the one hand the use of the word 'I' seems to be a necessity. On the other, we are puzzled about what the word means. It can be neither a proper name nor a propositional-function, nor can we substitute such expressions as 'this body' or 'this organism'; and to let it refer to a transcendent ego will be to violate the morals of epistemology. However, the reason why the word 'I' does not refer to anything might be that it is not an ontological word, i.e. a word which refers to 1 anything which exists. A closer examination of the logical function of the word in language might throw light on its meaning. It is a necessity of depth grammar that psychological verbs demand an intentional object. I can neither see nor hear nor think unless I see, or hear, or think of something. The intentional object - the accusative of the verb - is the object of consciousness; it is the constituent of the content of consciousness. Whatever we know and whatever we are conscious of must be an accusative for what could be called a mental verb. But a mental verb -> a cognitive verb - cannot be used unless it also has a nominative. There must be a subject. The subject may be a personal pronoun and it may be in either first, second, or third person; but whether it is one or the other, it is necessary that for every use of the verb there must be a first person use. First person use of cognitive verbs enjoys logical priority. It is presupposed by second and third person use. The use of the word 'I' does not imply any ontology. Thus, it implies neither an I which refers to a soul or to a body. Suppose

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I say, as for instance Descartes and Berkeley said, that I am identical with my soul or my mind. If this was the case the proposition "I am a soul" would be the same proposition as the proposition "My soul is a soul", Which obviously is not the case The latter proposition is a tautology, even a trivial tautology, while the former is not a tautology. And the same is true of the proposition that I am identical with my body. The proposition, "I am a body" should then be identical with the proposition, "My body is a body", which, of course, is not correct either. It has been asserted that the word 'I' is an index word, i.e. a word which indicates that the person referred to is the person who speaks. No doubt, this is sometimes the case; but not always. If somebody asks me, "Who put this book on the table ?" and I answer, "I did", it might be correct to say that the word T has been used as an index word; I wish to inform the person who asks the question that it was I, and not another person, who put the book on the table. But suppose somebody asks m e : "Where have you been ?" and my answer is : "I have been out for a walk", the word 'I' has not been used as an index word. I inform the person who asks the question that I have been out for a walk and not been to the post office, or been in the garden, or something else. It might be objected that in the latter case I could have answered without the use of the word 'I'; and this is of course correct. It would have been understood if I said, "Out for a walk". However, the point is that it is logically possible to use the word 'I'. And if it is not used it is presupposed. By such application the word is not used as an index word. It is a necessary condition for the use of any cognitive verb. Or expressed in epistemological terms : The concept 'I' is a necessary condition for all knowledge (and, therefore, cannot itself be an object for knowledge). As the word 'I' never can be the accusative for a cognitive verb it follows that it can never refer to anything which can be the object of knowledge. That the word 'I' does not refer to anything which can be known can also be seen by the following example. Suppose that a person A observes a bird. The proposition, "Peter observes a

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bird" is consequently a true proposition. It is a proposition about the fact that Peter observes a bird. Now suppose that Peter himself expresses this fact. He will then make the following assertion : "I observe a bird". The two propositions (1) "Peter observes a bird" and (2) "I observe a bird" are both true propositions and they are both about the same fact. If I make the assertion "Peter observes a bird" I verify it by, among other things, observing that Peter is looking in the direction of the bird and he is following the movement of the bird with his eyes. If Peter is making the assertion "I observe a bird" he can verify this proposition only with respect to whether it, in fact, is a bird that he observes. It would have no meaning if he also would try to verify whether it were he or possibly another person who observed the bird; he does not examine whether his eyes are directed to the bird. The difference between (1) and (2) is, among other things, that the truth conditions of (1) are what must be observed in order that I or somebody else can assert (1); but with respect to (2) it would be absurd to assert that the truth-conditions of (2) (namely, that the person who speaks and uses the word 'I' is the person who observes the bird) also must be observed by the person who makes the assertion in order to know whether the assertion he is making is in fact true. If Peter correctly says, "I observe a bird" he knows that it is correct without observing the bird. He does not need to verify that he is looking in the direction of the bird and that his eyes are following the bird. 9 Since the word 'I' is a condition for making assertions with the help of a cognitive verb, it cannot itself be that which the assertion is about. In distinction from ontological transcendentalism, one might call this view logical syntactical transcendentalism. The word 'I' cannot refer to anything which is known - because that which can be known (that which can constitute the intentional object) requires a subject for that knowledge - requires, that is, the use of the word 'I'. And as everything which meaningfully can be said to exist also can be the object of knowledge, it follows '

Cf. Shoemaker, Self-Knowledge

and Self-Identity,

1963, 83 £.

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that the word 'I' cannot be a name of anything which exists; it does not have any ontological meaning. If I say that I exist as a thinking being, or as a body, or as an organism, or as a freely acting being, etc., it is a misunderstanding to think that the word 'I' stands for respectively a thinking being, a body, an organism, or a freely acting person. It is a misunderstanding to believe that there is an identity between that to which the word 'I' refers and that to which the different expressions refer. If I say that I exist as a thinking being or as a body it means that I possess concepts such that I can conceive of myself as being one or the other. Ontologically I am both an organism, a thinking being, or a being with a mind, a freely acting person, etc., I may express it by saying that I exist as x. I may substitute whatever is true of me ontologically for x (that I am an organism, a being with consciousness, a freely acting person, etc.). However, what cannot be substituted for x is the expression an 'I'. Under no circumstances could I say that I exist as an 'I'. But whenever I assert something about my ontological status I must do so by means of the word 'I'. It is I who exists as this or that. The result thus arrived at is that the word 'I' is a word whose use is a logical syntactical necessity, a word the use of which is necessitated by the logical structure of language. It is a word with no ontological significance. But when this is said it ought also to be said that the philosophical problem connected with the 'I' not only has been but still is one of the most difficult problems within philosophy. A satisfactory solution has still to come. From Hume to Wittgenstein, Ryle, and Strawson, it has been the object of philosophical investigations and speculations. Hume thought he had arrived at an unsolvable conflict. On the one hand he thought it was necessary to deny that the word 'I' could be given any meaning; on the other hand he saw that we could not be without the word. Wittgenstein, Ryle, and Strawson have made valuable contributions; but none of these contributions seems to be a satisfactory solution.10 10

In an article "On 'I'", Mind, January 1970, Jerry H. Gill has shown the still unsolved problems in connection with the word T .

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As we have seen, Wittgenstein thought that in the object-use one could substitute the expression 'my body' for the word T , but he did not explain what the word 'my' referred to. And with respect to the subject-use, i.e. the use he thought was superfluous, it turned out that it was presupposed. Ryle speaks about the elusive self; a review may be a review of a book. This review may itself be the object of still another review, and so on. But no review can be a review of that very same review, i.e. no review can be a review of itself. I may comment, criticize, and pass judgments not only on other people's thoughts, sayings, and propositions, but also on my own sayings, thoughts, and propositions; and just as a review cannot be a review of that very same review, just so cannot a comment be a comment on that very same comment. It may be a comment on the preceding comment or thought. The thought I have just now cannot be object for my thinking before I have the next thought. According to Ryle this explains why it has been thought necessary to assume the existence of a transcendent ego. But the transcendent ego, still according to Ryle, may be object for the next thought, and thereby be known. Although this no doubt is correct, it is not an answer to the question what the word T means. Because it is true of every thought that it is the thought of a certain person, i.e. a person who can use the verb 'to think' in the present first person singular. What Ryle is speaking about is the content of thought - the intentional object of thought - but not about the subject of thought.11 However, it seems obvious that Ryle has presupposed In the Concept of Mind Ryle says: "At a certain stage the child discovers the trick of directing higher order acts upon his own lower order acts He has listened to stories before, and he has told stories before, but now he tells stories to his own enthralled ear. He has been detected in insincerities and he has detected the insincerities of others, but now he applies the techniques of detection to his own insincerities. He finds that he can give orders to himself with such authority that he sometimes obeys them, even when reluctant to do so." p. 193. Furthermore: " T o concern oneself about oneself in any way, theoretical or practical, is to perform a higher order act, just as it is to concern oneself about anybody else. To try, for example, to describe what one has just done, or is now doing, is to comment upon a step which is not itself, save per accidens, 11

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the concept 'I' (and not explained it); he says such things as that the child learns the trick of directing a higher order act upon his own lower order act. What the 'his' means is not explained. Strawson maintains that the word 'I' refers to what he calls a person. The concept of a person, according to Strawson, is a concept which cannot be further analyzed and further reduced. It is a logically primitive concept. Of a person one may predicate what he calls M-predicates (i.e. predicates applicable to material objects) and what he calls P-predicates (i.e. predicates applicable to states of consciousness). But to say that the word 'I' refers to a person is not to say what the word 'I' means; if it did, the proposition, "I am a person" would be identical with the proposition "A person is a person", which of course would be absurd to maintain.12 Language is an activity. It is something I perform; and a necessary condition for performing the activity is that I possess concepts. To possess concepts is to be able to perform such activities as thinking, speaking, perceiving, etc. It is to be able to perform acts of consciousness. The model of consciousness I have called the screen model can be characterized as being passive. Consciousness is constituted of passively received sense impressions; it is something which happens, something which occurs; it is something to which one is a spectator. But to be a spectator is something which one can do or let do. The things to which I am a spectator occur independently of my watching it or not - if I close my eyes the things happening on the screen do not for this reason stop; they continue undisturbed. To be conscious of something becomes therefore something contingent. It is contingent whether I choose to be spectator or not. With the collapse of the screen model the contingency also disappears. Let me sum up why consciousness as something active had to be substituted for consciousness as something passive. (1) Conone of commenting. But the operation which is the commenting is not, and cannot be, the step on which that commentary is being made." (p. 195). u Cf. P.F. Strawson Individuals, I, 3.

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sciousness is conditioned by language. (2) Language is conditioned by the concept of intention. (3) Language, and thereby consciousness, becomes an act; it is something I do, something I perform. The concept of 'I' is, as already mentioned, a necessary condition for language and thereby also for consciousness; it is consequently outside all knowledge. To speak a language is a performance. The concept of the 'I' as a performer is thus a necessary condition. Obviously, one cannot speak about a performance if there is no performer. And who is, then, the performer ? Not my body, not my mind, not a transcendental ego, not something I can name or even point to; because all these things, all of which exist and which I can do something with - I can raise my arm, I can open the window, I can think of a problem, etc. - all such things I can speak about as mine; consequently, they cannot be identical with my self. That the word 'I' is a necessary condition for language, and thereby also for consciousness, might be seen if one examines a problem about personal identity. One may distinguish between two kinds of identity : qualitative identity and numerical identity. Qualitative identity presupposes two different entities - two entities separated with respect to space (i.e. they occupy different regions of space at one and the same time - as do for example, the Empire State Building and the Eiffel Tower), but not with respect to time. To call them qualitatively identical is to say something about their properties, namely that the properties of the one are identical with the properties of the other. Two cars of the same make and the same year, and two copies of one and the same morning newspaper are, at least by and large, qualitatively identical. To speak about numerical identity is to speak of only one entity, but to speak about it, at least two different times. The concept of personal identity involves the concept of numerical identity. Already the use of the word 'I' demonstrates this. If at this very moment I say that I was born in 1912, I am saying that a person who was born in 1912 is a person who has numerical identity with me. The application of first person sin-

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gular, past tense, shows that we presuppose personal identity. One may speak about numerical identity within different areas; and of many of these areas it is true that it may be difficult to find the criteria according to which we decide whether there is numerical identity or not. We speak of one and the same university; or that this university was established so many years back, and do so despite the fact that one knows quite well that nothing of the original university - neither bricks nor windows nor anything else - is from that time. In the course of years and centuries everything has been replaced. We speak about one and the same family, or that two different sentences express one and the same proposition, and so forth. Since Locke it has been customary to distinguish between the identity of man and the identity of a person. According to Locke, man's identity is constituted by the indentity of the body. One has the same body from birth to death. Yet even Locke understood that this was not quite correct; because what he calls the particles of the body vanish and are replaced by others; this way nothing is left of the original body after a period of time. He maintained that the identity of the body and, therefore, also of man, is constituted by the structure of the organism. It is of greater philosophical interest, however, to find the criteria for personal identity. Locke thought the criterion is self-consciousness, which in turn is constituted of memory. It is the memory of performed acts which is the criterion of being the same person. 13 However, neither memory nor consciousness or self-consciousness can be the criteria for personal identity. So far from constituting the criteria for personal identity, they presuppose personal identity. What I remember must be expressed by means of the word ' I ' : "I remember clearly the first day I saw him", "I remember episodes from the time when I was between two and three years old", etc. None of these memory claims can be used as the criteria that I am the same person as I was at the time the memory is about. The propositions are evidence (but of course not proofs) that the things I claim to remember in fact did occur; u

Cf. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II, xxvii, 6 ff.

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but it would be meaningless to claim that they constitute criteria that I was me ! It would be nonsense to say, "I remember that I was me" (or nonsense to say, "When I thought I remembered I was me I was mistaken - I really was you !"). Any memory can be expressed by help of the verb 'to remember' in first person singular. The things I remember having been a witness to, participated in, or underwent, I necessarily must express by help of first person pronoun. The identity of a person is not the object of the memory; it is a presupposition. If I remember wrongly it is not that I am mistaken about my personal identity; I may be mistaken about what in fact I did witness, or participate in, etc. Suppose one day it is possible to perform a brain transplant; suppose furthermore that a person A receives the brain of another person B. When A receives B's brain he thereby also receives B's memory; and to receive B's memory is to receive B's consciousness. In other words, we have a case of a person, let us call him C, who has A's body and B's consciousness. However, C must necessarily identify himself with B. C will call himself B, he will have B's opinions, belief, and taste. He will say such things as, "I remember being in Paris last year", and if he talks about his travel he talks about B's travel and about what B experienced on that travel, and he does so in first person singular. But in doing so he presupposes that he is talking about himself. Of course, it must be a riddle to him to see why he does not look like B (i.e. the person he calls 'himself), but that he looks like A. He will be puzzled and he will probably not be able to give any explanation. However, it will not lead him to be suspicious about his own identity - it will not lead him to doubt that he really is not B but A; or rather, it would be an absurdity if he should believe that he was not himself but another person; it would be an absurdity he could not express in language without violating the depth grammar of that language. To have a consciousness is to have a language. And as far as that consciousness, and therefore also language, constitutes personal identity, it is, as the example of the brain transplant illus-

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trates, presupposing language. Personal identity is a necessary condition for consciousness and language. The use of the word 'I' - a word, as argued above, which is an expression of personal identity - is the condition of consciousness and language.14 Let me conclude this chapter with two examples which show how the concepts of consciousness and of personal identity seem to reach their limit. We get into situations where the meaningful application of the word 'I' seems to be transcended. The first example is taken from Roderick F. Chisholm.15 I have modified and simplified the example, however. Let us suppose a person A who by some kind of biological and physiological processes is split up into two persons, B and C. Both B and C have /4's memories. B calls himself A, has A's memories, ^4's opinions and taste; and exactly the same is true of C. Both B and C will claim to be numerically the same person as A. Who is right, B or C ? Is A now the person B or the person C ? It has no meaning to say that two persons, who both use the word 'I', are one and the same person; nor can it be said that neither B nor C are A; because both B and C have A's consciousness; and having A's consciousness presupposes numerical identity with A. What this shows is, among other things, that the use of the word 'I' has certain presuppositions, for instance, the presupposition of personal identity. Wherever this presupposition is not satisfied the rules for the use of the word 'I' are transcended. The other example is also taken from Chisholm and is also somewhat modified. Suppose that a person A is going to have a painful operation. A is offered the brain of another person, B. A would be able to receive B's brain just before the operation, and after the operation get his own brain back. It is presupposed that A in receiving B's brain also receives B's memories and 14

One is here reminded of Kant's Transcendental Apperception which, according to Kant, constitutes a necessarily condition for concepts (and, consequently, also for language). The Transcendental Apperception is thus a necessary condition for knowledge. 15 Cf. "Identity through Time", Contemporary Philosophic Thought. The International Philosophy Year Conference at Brockport. Language, Belief and Metaphysics, 163 ff.

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consciousness and that, consequently, he identifies himself with B. After A has received B's brain we will call him C. According to C, the person A exists only as a person he knows who is about to undergo a painful operation. He will be surprised to hear therefore that he is going to have such an operation. The person A is not a person who has any consciousness. The person who says, "Tomorrow I shall be operated on" identifies himself, not with the person A but with the person B, and is in fact the person we call C. In receiving another person's brain during the operation and having his own brain back after the operation, should A be concerned about the painful operation he is about to undergo? Is it possible for A to be unconcerned ? Is it correct to say that A will not feel any pain. And is it correct to say that B, whose brain has been taken out and given to A and who might have received A's brain, will not feel any pain ? If B has become A and it is A who is going to be operated on should not then B be the one who has the pain ? On the one hand it seems as if it must be A who feels the pain: It is A's body who is undergoing the operation and, so to speak, receives the pain. On the other hand, it seems that the person who says, "I have a pain", i.e. the person C, must be the one who feels the pain.

CHAPTER VI

1. LANGUAGE AND ACTS

Is there any relation between acts and language ? And if there is, what is this relation ? To act is not necessarily the same as to speak, although to speak is to act. If I work in my garden I do not therefore perform a speech act, but to report about my work is, obviously, to perform a speech act. But even though to act is not the same as to speak, it might well be the case that language is a condition for acting. On the following pages I shall attempt to prove that this is the case. We apply the concept of behavior both to animals and human beings. The concept of act, however, is reserved only for human beings. When my cat is licking its paws and my dog is barking angrily, they are behaving and not acting. But if I am scolding somebody, taking a walk, or reading a book, I am acting. Am I also behaving ? Of course I am. This does not mean, however, that the description of my behavior also is a description of my acts. Or rather, it does not mean that the language of behavior and the language of acts are two different languages describing one and the same phenomenon. It does not mean, therefore, that the language of acts can be reduced to (and for scientific purposes and scientific respectability ought to be reduced to) the language of behavior. If a description and an explanation of an instance of behavior is complete - if it is complete, for example, in terms of being a complete stimulus-response description (an S-R description) - it has described and explained whatever there is to be described and explained about the behavior in question. But it has neither described nor explained the act. It would be tempt-

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ing, however, to assume that without the language of behavior we could not have any language of acts. It is from the behavior a person displays that I am able to infer what kind of act he is performing. I observe that he is walking and I infer that he is taking a walk (and not just going to the grocer's). I observe that he is looking at an open book and that his eyes are moving in a special way, and I infer that he is reading a book (and not just heeding the kinaesthetic sensations caused by the movements of the eyes). It would be tempting to make such an assumption but it would be correct only with modification. It is only because I already understand the language of acts that I am able to infer an act from a particular instance of behavior. Behavior is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for inferring another person's acts. In what follows I shall try to outline some of the logical characteristics of the language of acts and thereby throw light on such questions as why that language cannot be reduced to the language of behavior (an S-R language). Why, that is, a description of behavior cannot be a description of an act. I shall try to show the logical incongruity between an S-R language and a language of acts. There is something artificial about the use of the term 'act'. We ask each other questions about what we are doing, but not about what acts we are performing. This may be a trivial linguistic point, although not quite. The concept of doing is broader than the concept of behaving. To the question, 'What did you do last Sunday ?', I answer that I slept most of the day. Or to the question of what I did on my vacation, I can answer that I was hospitalized. To none of these questions do my answers contradict the suggestion that I did something. But neither to sleep nor to be hospitalized is to act. It has been maintained that the concept of an act is logically tied to the concept of responsibility, that in other words it should be possible to employ the concept of an act in situations only where questions of responsibility are raised. This claim may be disputed: there is a difference between the fact that seldom, if

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ever, do we concern ourselves with questions of acts unless in one way or another it is connected with questions of responsibility, and the assumption that the two concepts are LOGICALLY connected. But even if there should be such a connection it would still leave us with the philosophic question of what we are to understand by the concept of an act. Let us begin with noticing that the term act is a class term. If a person is performing an act there must always be an answer to the question, Which act ? Whenever I say that a person is performing an act it must be possible to add a 'namely clause' or, to borrow an expression from Ryle, a 'namely-rider'. The answer to the question, Which act ?, or which comes to the same, an expression constituting ai namely rider, is a name of a specific act. Reading a book, peeling potatoes, mowing the lawn, or digging the garden, will all qualify; no more questions and no more namely riders are necessary or even possible. Is there something which all instances of acts have in common? This seems to be a necessary condition in order to satisfy our natural craving for a definition. It would be tempting to assert, what sometimes has been asserted, that an intention is, if not a sufficient, then at least a necessary condition for constituting an act. Admittedly, it is ordinarily the case that when I act my act is intended. To say that something is done with intention is first of all to presuppose that we are dealing with doings which it is within our power to do or to refrain from doing. Furthermore, it is to say that the agent knows what he is doing,; not only while he is doing it but also when he is about to do it. Suppose I am hammering nails into the wall. It is obviously not the case that I know what I am doing by DISCOVERING it. It cannot be a surprise to me that I am hammering nails. In a certain sense of 'because', I start to hammer nails into the wall because it is my intention to do so. And I intended to do it because I wanted to put a picture on the wall. But suppose, on the other hand, that I get angry and lose control of myself and that, in this state of mind, beat another person. It is an act that results from no decision and there has been no intention. I may suddenly find

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myself beating the other person. It would be rather arbitrary, however, to decide that I did not act. Or suppose that I find myself whistling a melody. There was no intention, but I could not say that I did not act. After I have shaved in the morning I rinse my razor-blade. It certainly is an act, but seldom an act I am heeding; while I am doing it I may be absorbed in thinking of something else. I may not be aware of what I am doing, and quite often I cannot remember whether I have done it or not. It is therefore an act with no intention in it. Nor would it be correct to say that a purpose is a necessary or sufficient condition for the existence of an act. When I act I usually do it on purpose. If I am hammering nails into the walls I am, at least normally, doing it on purpose. But quite often I would be at a loss for an answer to the question of why I am doing what in fact I am doing. If I am asked why I am whistling all I could say would probably be that I felt like it. If I scratch my scalp nervously a physiologist or a psychologist might be able to tell why I am doing it. But these explanations are answers to two different kinds of 'why', none of which is relevant for the question of the purpose. Or suppose that on one of his daily walks Kant was asked why he was taking a walk. He might possibly have answered that it was what he was used to do at this specific time of the day. But to answer a 'why' in terms of habit is not to give information concerning a purpose. Or suppose he said that he took a walk because he liked it. This will not do either. Compare the following answers to the question of why I am taking a walk : (1) Because I like to see the trees in bud. (2) Because I like to get fresh air. (3) Because I like to take a walk. Or expressed differently: (1) The purpose of taking a walk is to see trees in bud. (2) The purpose of taking a walk is to get fresh air. (3) The purpose of taking a walk is to take a walk. Obviously (3) is a case where the wheelsi of our language are spinning idly, or, as Wittgenstein also expresses it, our language is on a holiday. Nothing has been said about why I am taking a walk - except that I feel like it and that there is no reason why I should not do as I feel.

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Let me take another example. A soccer-player is off-side. He does not know it and he does not hear the umpire's whistle. He kicks the ball and he scores. But because he is off-side his score is invalidated. His intention and his purpose was to score, and this is what he believes himself to have accomplished. Now, he did perform an act, the act of kicking the ball, but it was not the act he intended and purposed to perform. His intention and purpose was to score, not just to kick the ball. Consequently, he performed an act without an intention and without a purpose. It may be objected that since he could not score without kicking the ball, the kicking of the ball must also have been intended. But this is not correct. I intend to do the act X. In order to do X, I must do a, b, and c. If I succeed in doing X, I have performed one and only one act. But if it were correct that I also intended to do a, b, and c at one and the same time I would have performed four acts, which is absurd. If the soccer player intends to score and he does score, he performs one act, not two. If he does not score, i.e. he does not accomplish what he intends to do, then, and only then, will it be correct to say that he performed the act of kicking the ball - that is, an act without an intention. Likewise, if I intend to turn on the light and accordingly push the button, I do not perform two acts but only one, namely the act of turning on the light. But, if due to some failure in the electrical system, the light does not turn on, it is correct to say that I performed the act of pushing the button. But it is not the act I intended. There are acts, however, for which both an intention and a purpose are necessary conditions. The umpire is decreeing a free kick because he thinks that one of the players has been tripped by a player from the other team. The player, however, denies the charge. What is the criterion that he tripped the other player ? First of all he must know what it means to trip. Secondly, it must have been his intention to do it, and he must have succeeded. If one of these conditions has not been fulfilled, he has not tripped the other player. Are there acts which would not be acts if there were no purpose ? A person gets up from his chair and walks over to the

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bookshelf. He takes down Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, reads the first page of the Aesthetic, replaces the book and returns to his chair. Let us suppose that the moment he gets up from his chair he is asked what he is doing and that he answers that he intends to read the first page of the Aesthetic in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Thus, it is an intended act. But then suppose he is asked why he does it and that he is unable to answer the question. That is, the act is not a RATIONAL act. Presumably, after some investigation a psychoanalyst could explain why he did it. But suppose the psychoanalyst declares that there is no explanation, not in the sense that an explanation is too difficult to find, but simply because there in fact is no explanation. It is an act without any motivation. We could not call it an act. It would be an instance of irrational behavior. Is it possible, however, to have an intention without at the same time having a purpose ? That is, is it possible to know what I am about to do - something I do because it is my intention to do it - and then deny the existence of a purpose ? Could I, by intention, take a book from the shelf, read the first page, and at the same time be unable to answer the question why I am doing it ? I could, of course, answer the question on an irrational level. If, for example, I have some kind of irrational and inexplicable urge to take the Critique down and read the first page of the Aesthetic, I may try to curb my urge but it is so strong that once in a while I have to give in to it. All I can say, if asked why I am doing it, is that I like to do it. But, of course, doing something because one likes to do it is neither to do it on purpose nor to do it with a motivation. What I have tried to show so far, is that neither intention nor purpose seem to constitute necessary or sufficient conditions for an act to count as an act. How then do I determine the necessary and sufficient conditions for an act ? As I have tried to show, it is quite possible to perform acts despite the fact that there is neither intention nor purpose. But this does not imply that such acts COULD not be, and in fact often are, performed with intention and with a purpose in mind. To say that there COULD be intention is to say that I COULD tell myself

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or others what I am about to do, well knowing that it is an act it is within my power to do and to refrain from doing. But this means that I must be able to NAME or to DESCRIBE the act. In the expression 'I shall do X' I must be able to replace X with a name or a description. If I cannot, I have not acted with intention; in fact, I have not even acted; because a necessary condition for performing an act is that the agent is able to name or describe what he is doing. I can take a walk. A necessary condition for taking a walk is, of course, that I am physically equipped to do so. But this is a necessary condition only; it is not a sufficient condition, for I cannot take a walk if I do not know what it means to take a walk. I must possess the concept of 'taking a walk'. If I did not have the concept I could never answer a question about what I was doing by saying that I was taking a walk. If per impossibile I could act without the relevant concepts, I would be logically cut off from ever knowing what I was doing and there could be no justification for saying that I was acting. A horse can walk but it cannot take a walk. No doubt, a horse could be drilled, by some kind of conditioned reflexes, to walk a certain distance in a certain direction and to return, but it would be a conceptual error to claim that it was taking a walk. Admittedly, we do characterize many animal-activities by expressions that seem to imply that they perform acts. The bird is building a nest and the dog is burying its bones. And we say so, because it is in fact correct to say so. But because this is the case it does not follow that the bird and the dog are acting. They are in fact logically precluded from doing so. They have no conceptual system (and, as Hampshire has observed, this is the reason why they are precluded from having a language); consequently, they cannot have any knowledge of what they are doing. What they do can be explained only in an S-R /anguage; it is because WE can describe and characterize their behavior as we do. To know what we are doing, or, which is the same, to know how to name, to identify, or to describe our acts, involves the knowledge of the completed act. We must know what counts as the completed or accomplished act. And to know this is of course

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also to know what counts as a failure; it is knowing when the act is a misfire and therefore not the intended act. Quite often we have names or verbs which express the fact that an intended act is unsuccessful. Such names or verbs could be called act-negating expressions. To say that I missed is to say that I did not do what I intended to do. I wish to move a vase from one table to another but happen to drop it. The verb 'to drop' is, in many contexts, an act-negating expression. So are 'to flunk', 'to err', 'to invalidate', and 'to misfire'. The fact that an act-negating expression is applicable does not imply that no act was performed. The off-side soccer-player did not score; he did kick the ball but he missed receiving the point. But the player who intends to kick the ball and misses, and the student who flunks a course do not perform an act. There is no act called 'to miss' or 'to flunk'. Instructions are given in how to kick a ball and how to pass a course, but there exist no instructions in how to miss and how to flunk. It is possible, of course, to imagine situations where the intended act is to miss. The clown, the actor, and the bribed soccer-player may intend to do an act awkwardly, incorrectly, or unsuccessfully. In order not to reveal that he missed the kick by intention the bribed soccerplayer may have to traiii in how to miss a kick. But it is obvious that the expression 'to miss a kick' has now taken on a different meaning. According to the original meaning, he is missing if he does not miss the kick. Concepts, and therefore language, are thus necessary conditions for an application of the concept of an act. An act that cannot be identified and described is not an act. But how are acts identified ? Suppose I am watching T.V. and see Who's Afraid of Virginia

Woolf? with Elizabeth Taylor acting the main part. If asked what I am doing the following answers will be appropriate : (1) I am watching T.V. (2) I am seeing a play by Albee. (3) I am seeing Elizabeth Taylor. (4) I am seeing Who's Afraid of Virginia

Woolf?

These are four different answers to one and the same question, but they are four compatible answers. Nevertheless, as I do only

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one thing it would seem as if only one of the answers could be right and that the other answers therefore must be wrong. However, the fact that all four answers are correct shows that there is nothing which could be called the act as such. Which act a person is performing depends upon how the agent chooses to identify his act. If I answer the question by saying that I am seeing Elizabeth Taylor, it would be a misunderstanding if somebody said, 'This is not correct. You are seeing an Albee play'. Or if I answer that I saw Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? I could not be corrected by being told that I watched T.V. The way I describe my act or identify it is not arbitrary, however. It depends upon the context. All four answers are correct but, in different contexts, they do not have the same relevance. If the person who asks me what I am doing knows that I am watching T.V. but wants to know the program, my answer, in order to be relevant, must be that I am seeing a play by Albee or that I am seeing Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? Or suppose I am building myself a garage. A small child observes me with great interest and notices that I am picking up a brick. He asks me what I am doing and I tell him that I am going to lay the brick on top of some of the other bricks. Then an old friend passes by and he asks me the same question. He would be, if not insulted at least surprised, if I gave him the same answer as I gave the child. The answer I have to give this time must be that I am building a garage. Also the knowledge of the person who asks the question is supposed to determine what kind of answer should be given. If I ask a professor of chemistry what he is doing he may answer that he is trying to find out how much sugar there is in a certain fluid. But if one of his colleagues asks him, his answer will be much more technical and probably, to me, incomprehensible. It is thus our language, and the concepts employed in that language, which determine the acts we perform. With a different conceptual system we would have other kinds of acts. Suppose we have two different tribes. They are living in exactly the same circumstances and are physiologically exactly alike. Nevertheless, they have two different conceptual systems.

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As the physiological processes of their organisms are the same, the two S-R languages are translatable one into the other. Predictions made according to one language can also be made according to the other language - predictions that can be verified. But the two act-languages will be different. The first tribe may have the concept of taking a walk, being engaged, worshipping, and punishing. The second tribe, however, if it does not have these concepts can perform none of these acts. It is not a physical but a conceptual impossibility. And this of course shows that the S-R language is logically different from an act-language. It is common to distinguish between an act and its consequences. It is a distinction which it is important to draw and which is drawn in our everyday life as well as in philosophy. It would be a mistake, however, to conceive of that distinction as something absolute. It is a distinction which is relative, and it is relative to our language. In order to show this let me take Hart's example of the man who puts poison in his wife's coffee. Which act has he performed? If the answer is that he put poison in his wife's coffee, the obvious question is whether, as a consequence, she died. But if the answer is that he murdered his wife by putting poison in her coffee this question is ruled out; it is no longer a possible consequence of his act; it is a part of the act itself. Let us suppose that his wife in fact did die. Both descriptions are consequently correct. But that does not mean that he performed two acts : the act of putting poison in his wife's coffee, and the act of murdering her. If his wife does not drink the coffee I may, depending on the context, say either that he put poison in his wife's coffee or that he made an unsuccessful attempt to murder her. But, as before, I cannot say that he performed two acts: the act of putting poison in his wife's coffee and the act of attempting to murder her. And again we see the logical difference between description in an act language and description in an S-R language. Whether a description by the S-R language is correct or not depends upon what experience reveals. But whether a description of an act is

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correct or not does not, at least not exclusively, depend upon the data of experience. Observation of the motion of my body shows that I walk to Grand Central Station. But no observation, however detailed, can show whether I am taking a walk or just measuring the time the walk takes. It is time to sum up some of the logical differences between the S-R language and the language of acts. The S-R language is a language obeying the rules of a scientific language. That is, it is a language in which we describe, predict, and explain. The language of acts, however, has none of these properties. First of all, strictly speaking there are no descriptions in the language of acts. If by descriptions I mean the language game by which I inform others or myself about the look or appearance of a person, thing or situation, the language of acts is not used to describe. I describe a person as tall and fat, a house as white and big, and a situation by telling, for example, how many people there were and what they were doing. And, of course, in that sense the language of acts does not describe. We identify, name, characterize, classify, and announce decisions. If I am putting on my overcoat, and at the same time declare that I am going for a walk, I am announcing a decision. During my walk I meet a friend who asks me what I am doing. If I answer that I am taking a walk, I am not describing what I am doing but am identifying it. Nor do we use the language of acts to make predictions. If I announce that I am going to take a walk I am announcing a decision and not making a prediction. If I predict something I must be able to support my prediction with reason. I must be able to answer how I know it. But if I say that I am going to take a walk it would be nonsensical to ask how I know it. My decision or intention to take a walk is not a reason. It seems, however, that I can say, 'I predict that after having talked to him tomorrow I shall decide to go to Paris'. But the concept of prediction and the concept of decision exclude each other. It is part of the meaning of the expression 'making a decision' that before the decision is made one does not know what

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the result will be. If I push a billiard ball I know what will happen. But as long as I am in the process of making up my mind I do not know and cannot (logically cannot) know what the result will be. So even if I say, 'I predict that tomorrow I shall decide to accept the offer from Paris' I, am not making a prediction, but am either just making a guess (which, of course, cannot qualify as a prediction) or I am announcing an already made decision. The reason I am not making a prediction is this. If I know how I shall decide I eliminate a presupposition for making a decision, namely that I do not know before I decide. To say that I have just now decided what to do is, among other things, to say that just now did I find out what to do. This does not mean, of course, that my decisions are unpredictable. It only means that they cannot be predicted by ME. It is a conceptual impossibility to predict our own decisions, but no conceptual impossibility to predict other people's decisions. However, it is one thing to assert that one cannot predict one's decisions; it is quite another thing to say that one cannot predict one's acts. In a sense I can certainly predict some of my acts. I can predict that I shall shave tomorrow morning, that I shall walk to the subway station, give a lecture at the university, etc. Of course, I can predict these acts only under the presupposition that they are not subject to decision. It is because I more or less HAVE to shave, HAVE to take the subway, and HAVE to give a lecture - such acts which (except in the logical sense) are not subject to choice and therefore to decision, I shall call degenerate acts - it is because I more or less HAVE to do these things that I can predict that I will do them. In a certain sense, therefore, I can predict some acts; but in a certain other sense I cannot. Although I can perform acts without intentions or decisions it must be the case that there COULD be intention. And intention, it will be remembered, requires two things: that I know what I am about to do and know that it is an act which it is within my power to do as well as not to do, i.e. an act subject to decision. And although the existence of neither an intention nor a decision are necessary conditions for an act, the concept of intention and

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decision are nevertheless what one could call categories of the language of acts. Without the existence of such concepts we could have no language of acts. 2.

LANGUAGE A N D MORALS

All through the history of morals there has been a tendency to classify morals in two different ways. Either morals have been thought of as something subjective, something relative, something non-cognitive (for instance as an expression of emotion). Or morals have been conceived of as something objective, something absolute, something cognitive. In Greek philosophy the Sophists were subjectivists while Plato and Aristotle were objectivists. In modern philosophy Hume is among the non-cognitivists while Kant is a representative of the cognitivist. As might have been expected, in our day there is less tendency to classify morals as either one or the other; the tendency, rather, is to break down such distinctions. In what follows I shall attempt to point to some of the subjective and non-cognitive aspects of morality and, at the same time, point to some of its objective and cognitive aspects. In doing so I shall try to show how morality depends on language. Has morality anything to do with language ? The answer is that only language-using beings can act morally. Dogs, cats, and horses can be faithful, affectionate, angry, etc., but they can act neither morally right nor morally wrong. This is something only human beings can do, and they can do so only because they are language-using beings. Let us begin by observing that a great many of our concepts, and therefore also of our words, are not purely descriptive words but are also evaluating. They are evaluating in either a positive or a negative way. Positive words are such words a s : kindhearted, tolerant, good, tactful, understanding, and polite. Negative words would be : rude, criminal, tactless, egotistic, opportunistic, and untrustworthy. The above mentioned words are both evaluative and descriptive. And yet, it is not quite correct to say that they are descriptive.

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A description may be incomplete, adequate, relevant, or complete. I may describe a house in such a way that the person who hears my description knows exactly what the house looks like. I may describe a person's behavior in such a way that each movement is described. Obviously, in this sense of being descriptive, the above mentioned words do not describe. A person may be tactless, criminal, cynical, polite, kind, egotistic, etc. in infinitely many ways. If I know that a person has done something criminal, I am informed about what kind of act it is but not informed about the act itself. He may have stolen, betrayed, beaten somebody, killed somebody, and hundreds of other different things. By the use of such words I have not so much described an act as I have classified it. The act belongs to the class of criminal acts, the class of tactful acts, the class of egotistic acts, etc. Although one may be unable to define each class, we all have sufficient knowledge to be able to judge whether a certain act belong to a certain class. We do not need to be jurists in order to be able to classify an act as a criminal act. We do not need to be psychologists in order to judge whether an act is an egotistic act or not. Often, if not always, no serious disagreement exists with respect to judging whether an act belongs to one or another class. However, in cases where there might be disagreement, we bring forth arguments pro et contra. Whether an act should be classified as one or the other there are just as definite, or if one wants just as weak, criteria as there are for the application of such concepts as 'a hilly country', 'a hot day', 'a job with great responsibility', etc. 1 Is there anything in common among all negative words, something which justifies calling them negative? Whether one is tactless, impolite, cynical, or rude, it is behavior which leads to, or at least normally will lead to, one or more human beings offended, hurt, depressed, or unhappy. They all have what could be called a negative effect. If I say about a person that he is tactless I have, consequently, partly classified his act and partly criticized it. One That we have objective criteria for the use of both negative and positive words has been argued by Philippa Foot. Cf. "Moral Arguments", Mind, 1958.

1

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has criticized it by submitting it under the concept of being tactless. According to which criteria may one be criticized for being tactless ? It is, of course, undebatable that the word 'tactless' is used to criticize, as are other negative words. What is criticized is the behavior characterized as tactless. If somebody should maintain that, at least in general, one ought to be tactless, one would indeed be puzzled; the appropriate question to ask would be why one should be tactless. It is possible that he would give some kind of a psychological (or, rather, pseudo-psychological) explanation to the effect that it is good for human beings to be hurt. However misunderstood his explanation might be, it nevertheless is some kind of an explanation, an explanation which - at least in principle - could be verified or not. But suppose he does not give any explanation. He only insists that, in general, one ought to be tacdess. He does not believe that, in the last analysis, it would lead to a better world with happier human beings. He just insists that he cannot see why one should not hurt other human beings. One would then have to ask him whether he thinks it is better for a person to be offended than not to be offended. If his answer is that it is better to be offended, he has committed himself to give an explanation why he thinks it is better, an explanation which EX-HYPOTHESIS he does not have. And if he admits that it is better not to be hurt or offended, he thereby has admitted that one ought not to be tacdess. Because this is what the word 'better' means. To say that something is better than something else is, among other things, to say that it is what one ought to choose, aim at, or do. If one maintains that A is better than anything else but at the same time recommend that one should choose something else, for instance B, without giving a special explanation, it proves that one has not understood the meaning of the word. A person who says that one ought, or ought not, to perform a certain act having negative effects, has accordingly committed himself to answering questions about whether it would be better, or not better, to have these effects. If he denies that the word 'better' has any relevance to such a situation he

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denies to apply a word which necessarily must be applied when we speak about acts having either a positive or negative effect - i.e. a word which must be applied as necessary, as must, for instance, the word 'fast' or 'slow' when we speak about movement. To maintain that one ought to be, or may be allowed to be, tactless, and at the same time maintain that one has no reason for it, is thus to go against some of the most fundamental rules of language. Of concepts such as 'stealing', 'lying', and 'untrustworthiness' negativity is constituted, not only by the negative effects such acts have; that to steal, to lie, and to break promises often have negative effects everybody knows, but, as just mentioned, there are other reasons for the negativity of these concepts. To steal, to lie, and to break promises violate the rules that one must not steal, one must not lie, and one must not break promises. Let us begin by examining the rule that one must not steal. The concept of stealing presupposes the concept of property. In a society or a world in which the concept of property does not exist it is logically impossible fori the concept of stealing to exist. If the concept of stealing exists the concept of property also exists, and if the concept of property exists the concept of stealing also exists. It does not of course mean that whenever there are people having property there are also thieves. It means that whenever there are people who have property, then, and only then, are the logical conditions for stealing satisfied. Of these two concepts, the concept of property and the concept of stealing, the concept of property has1 logical priority. The concept of stealing presupposes the concept of property; but the concept of property does not presuppose the concept of stealing. One cannot speak about violating a rule without presupposing a rule to violate. In other words, the sentence "This is to steal" is meaningful if, and only if, the concept of property exists. The sentence "This is to steal" has meaning if, and only if, it is logically possible to use such sentences as "This is mine", "This belongs to you", and "I gave it to you as a present". To say that something is property, or, which is the same, to say that some-

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body owns something, is to say that the thing owned cannot be used or taken away without the owner's consent. To call an act stealing is to say that it is an act violating the rules packed into the concept of property. To call an act stealing is already to say that it is a violation of certain rules, namely the rules that follow from the concept of property. The function of the word 'wrong' in the sentence "Stealing is wrong" is not to add anything to the concept; rather it is to underline and to emphasize what is already implied in the concept of stealing. The sentence "Stealing is wrong" is therefore utterly different from a sentence like "Vegetables are healthy", but very similar to a sentence like "Overeating is unhealthy". The function of words like 'over' and 'too' is usually to say that something should have been or should be different (cf. "This is too much", "This is to overdo things", etc.). The sentence "Stealing is wrong" is, indeed, almost identical in logical structure with the sentence "Violations of rules are wrong". It would be to go against an essential part of the meaning of the concept of 'rule' and an essential part of the meaning of the concept of 'violation' if one said that it is not wrong to violate rules. Let us turn to the rule that all promises ought to be kept. Obviously, the sentence "Promises ought to be kept" has meaning if, and only if, the concept of promise exists. If the concept of promise does not exist it is logically impossible to give a promise and, a fortiori, to keep or break a promise. What does it mean to give a promise ? If I give a promise to another person, this other person has a right to blame me if I do not act as I promise to act. By giving a promise I bind myself to act as promised. From the concept of promise, therefore, it logically follows that to break a promise is blameable, i.e. it is wrong. The sentence "To break a promise is wrong" has therefore the same logical character as the sentence "Stealing is wrong". The third rule is that one ought not to lie. The concept of lying presupposes the concept of asserting. Only assertions or propositions can be either true or false. The concept 'to assert' is different from such concepts as 'to assume', 'to think', and 'to believe'. If I assume that something is the case and my assump-

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tion is false, it would be nonsense to say that I was lying. But if I assert that something is the case and my assertion is false I may be lying - but of course need not be. If I am convinced of the truth of my assertion and it nevertheless is false, I am mistaken but am not lying. But if I know or have good reason to believe that my assertion is false, I am lying - and I am lying even if my assertion turns out to be true. What are the conditions for making an assertion ? An assertion is an instrument of communication. Its function is to inform the person or persons spoken to about a certain state of affairs. The assertion is accordingly of fundamental importance in any language. However, a necessary condition for making an assertion is that the person making the assertion is himself convinced of its truth. If this was not the case there would never be the slightest reason to believe any assertion. No assertion made by any person would ever constitute a reason to believe that something is the case. Assertions could no longer fulfil their purpose. They would cease to be assertions. What would happen if lying was a rule ? The situation is a logical impossibility. To lie is to assert something which one knows, or has good reasons to believe, to be false. The function of a lie is to deceive the person or persons spoken to. But if the person or persons spoken to know that any assertion is false, a lie can no longer deceive. The lie can no longer fulfil its purpose. If it is granted that deception is part of the meaning of the concept of lying, it follows that if lying was a rule, lies would no longer be lies. The concept of lying presupposes the concept of assertion; and the concept of assertion presupposes the concept of truth. If the truth of an assertion was not a presupposition for making an assertion, there could be no assertions. The concept of lying presupposes the concept of truth. To learn to speak is to learn to speak the truth. One cannot learn to lie unless one has learned to speak the truth. To lie, therefore, is to break the rules contained in the logically prior concept of assertion. The sentence "Lying is wrong" is therefore of similar logical structure as the sentence "Stealing is wrong" and "To break a promise is wrong".

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Whether the concept of promise is introduced in a language or not, whether the concept of property is actualized or not, have of course, nothing to do with morality. They are conventions which are introduced, eliminated, or kept, depending on whether they are found practical or fruitful. What we have seen is that, so far as language is concerned, there is no room for subjectivity, relativity, or non-cognitivism. There is no room for different conceptions with respect to the evaluating expressions of language. If one has a positive word one cannot say, at least not without completely disregarding the meaning of this word, that it is no better than that which the corresponding negative word stands for. A person who thinks that unhappiness, all circumstances being equal, is better than happiness, to be hurt better than not being hurt, to be depressed better than not being depressed, ignores the meanings of the words 'better', 'happiness', 'unhappiness', 'depressed', 'hurt', etc. Naturally, the disagreement is not about such things. However, it is important to emphasize the logical power of our moral concepts; it is important to emphasize as an argument against the often heard views about the relativity of morality. Not seldom is it maintained - maintained almost as an undebatable dogma - that morality changes from generation to generation - not in the sense that one generation has a higher moral standard than another generation (i.e. adheres to the principles of morality to a higher degree than another generation, but in the sense that one generation has another moral system than the preceding generation), and, so one says, there are no criteria by which to judge that the moral system of one generation is better or more correct than the moral system of another generation. But, as we have seen, such a view is to ignore the evaluation built into many of our concepts and, consequently, also in many of our words and expressions. It is part of the meaning of these words and expressions that one necessary must apply words such as 'better', 'worse', 'good', and 'bad'. It is important to note that a word like 'better' is applied not only in contexts where happiness or well-being is the result.

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The logic of our language cannot be used as an argument for utilitarianism. We have concepts such as 'dignity', 'elegance', and 'pride'. And if one has to choose, all circumstances being equal, between the dignifying and the undignifying, the elegant and the inelegant, and between pride and humiliation, it would also be to ignore the meaning of our concepts and expressions if, in general, the choice would be lack of dignity, inelegance, etc. But neither 'dignity', 'elegance' nor 'pride' are utilitarian concepts. The reason for defending one's dignity is not because dignity increases happiness. The proud person who does not subject himself to humiliation quite often has to pay the price of suffering. It might be objected that somewhere between dignity and the lack of dignity, and between elegance and inelegance, we have the concept of being natural or unaffected, and that this is to be preferred to both dignity and elegance. Both dignity and elegance, so it may be objected, are, or may be, expressions of something unnatural or affected. No doubt it is correct that 'the natural' is a positive expression and that 'the unnatural' is a negative expression; but it is not correct that dignity, elegance, and pride fall under the unnatural. Admittedly, affected or artificial 'elegance' exists. But precisely because it is affected or artificial, and consequently not natural, we do not have what could be called the true or genuine elegance, or the true or real dignity. Although our language, so to speak, guarantees a moral system which is immune against subjectivism, relativism, and non-cognitivism, it is nevertheless a fact that no small disagreement exists concerning the Tightness or wrongness of this or that act. it is important to notice, however, that what language guarantees is not what in this or that concrete situation is the right thing to do; it only guarantees the conceptual connections between positive words and expressions and the application of concepts such as 'ought to do', 'better to do', etc. And for the application of the evaluative words and expressions, objective criteria exist. As any concrete situation has many aspects, it is often debated which aspects, in this or that situation, are relevant or should have

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priority. It is a problem which is important if there is a conflict among the different aspects. Situations may be so complicated that agreement can be almost impossible to reach and the possibilities for verification very small. The person who has the greater insight, the better judgement, the greater sensivity, etc. will be the person who is able to find the better solution. The fact that there are situations where agreement is virtually impossible is not an argument for the subjectivity, the relativity, or noncognitivism of morality. However, there are aspects of morality where subjectivity seems to be a fact. Every situation gets its moral character - positive or negative - through the concepts we apply to it, i.e. through the language we use to describe it, identify it, characterize it, classify it, or name it. Which facts one is confronted with depends on the words and expressions we choose to describe it, characterize it, identify it, etc. Due to the richness of our language and to the complications of each individual situation it will always be possible to apply both negative words - let us call them «-predicates - and positive words - let us call them p-predicates. Whether for instance one and the same fighting group should be described or characterized by help of «-predicates, predicates such as : terrorists, law-breakers, defenders of imperialism, etc., or ought to be described with such p-predicates as : freedom-fighters, liberators, the advance guards of democracy, the people's army against injustice and suppression, etc. About persons one may, according to the circumstances, apply such n- and p-predicates a s : an oratorically gifted person, a demagogue; a person with natural authority, a person greedy of power; a person who is undogmatic and unprejudiced, a person who ignores generally accepted manners; etc. Sometimes attempts are made to change an expression or a word which is either neutral or maybe even positive into a negative expression or word. The expression 'the establishment' is in itself a neutral word. That something is established is not in itself either good or bad. It depends on what it is that is established. If it is something bad it is of course bad that it has been estab-

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lished, but if it is something good it obviously cannot be bad - it cannot be bad to establish something good ! The attempts to change the expression 'establishment' to be an «-predicate presupposes that only what can be characterized by «-predicates are established. To argue that something is bad only because it is established is of course to argue in a circle. The established is bad because it is established ! Which «-predicates are applicable to the establishment might of course be debated - and indeed are debated. But the fact that it is established cannot be one of the arguments. An attempt to change a predicate from being a p-predicate to an «-predicate is the predicate 'law and order'. When the word 'law' has been conceived of as an «-predicate the criticism is not against the content of the law, but against the fact that the laws have been enforced. Evidently, it cannot be the case that the attempt to change the expression 'law and order' from being a p-word to an «-word should imply that lawlessness should be a p-word - concepts such as 'community' and 'state' imply laws. The concept of law would necessarily be destroyed if at the same time it was maintained that laws should not be obeyed. One may believe, of course, that there should not be any state or community, or that there ought to be a radically new society; but this is hardly what is meant by changing the expression 'law and order' from being a p-predicate. Likewise with the word 'order', If 'order' should be an «-predicate then 'disorder' should be a p-predicate. But for such a point of view no argument has been (or could be) given. One might possibly mean (but if so the expression is misleading) that law and order can be upheld in different ways. It can be upheld in ways which can be described by help of «-predicates (rigorously, brutally, dogmatically, inflexibly, etc.) or by p-predicates (with sense of proportion, with sense of the essential, no more rigid than necessary, human, etc.) Whether one chooses to apply «-words or p-words in a given situation depends, at least to a certain degree, on the preconceived attitude of the person who is using these words. The choice is therefore subjective. And yet, not quite. Because the preconceived

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attitude is, and ought to be, something which can be an object for debate and argumentation, i.e. something falling under the concept of rationality. The reason is the simple one that an attitude necessarily has to be expressed by help of n- or p-predicates. If a person says that he does not like the person A he must, to the question why he does not like him, give an answer by means of «-predicates. And it is a condition for the use of n- and p-predicates that they should be used only if one has a reason for using them. If I assert that certain «-predicates apply to A (as for example being tactless or untrustworthy) then if the assertion should be taken seriously at all, one must be able to give reason or justification for using such predicates. If a person asserts that he does not like it and cannot give any «-predicates, his assertion cannot have greater weight or greater interest than the assertion that he prefers sweet wine to dry wine. This kind of subjectivity is thus, in the last analysis, a subjectivity which can be reduced to objectivity. The result of this examination of the logical structure of the language of morals has been that the view that moral is subjective, relative, and non-cognitive, cannot be upheld. Morality has another aspect, however. Moral judgments involve norms for right behavior. In a way, this is also involved in the language of science. To learn physics is, among other things, to learn how to behave in a physics laboratory. The difference is, the experiments I perform in a physics laboratory I perform out of interest - if it did not interest me I could stop studying physics. But the norms involved by morality are not something I have to follow or have to obey only if they interest me (it is not because it does not interest me to hurt other people that I should not do it). Quite often it is even against my interest to obey the norm of morality. Whether I follow them or not is something I, and only I, decide. As a rule normal human beings obey the general laws of morality - if or when they do not they know, at least normally, that they have done something they ought not to have done. Suppose, however, that a person P knows quite well what he ought and what he ought not to do. He knows for instance quite well that

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it is not correct to be tactless. Nevertheless, he quite often is. It is not because he is ignorant of the rule that n-predicates are applicable to tactless behavior; in other words, he is not ignorant that it is something wich must be judged as incorrect behavior. He is tactless, simply because it does not suit him not to be. He cannot see that the fact his attitude is incorrect should be a motive for him not to do it. However, if he understands the meaning of words such as 'correct', or 'right', he will understand that it is the way all other human beings ought to act - if he does not think so he has not understood what the word 'correct' means. Obviously, he cannot regard himself as an exception if he is unable to give a reason for it.2 If he cannot give any reason he has given up obeying the rules determining the use of the language of morality. If so, he cannot even say that it is wrong to be tactless; he has cut himself off from using words such as 'right', 'wrong', and 'better'. To the extent that he accepts this language, to that extent he has answered his own question why he personally should act in accordance with the norms of morality.

' To understand that in a given situation a certain type of act is the right act is to understand that it is irrelevant who the person is - whether it is me or any other person, provided that the relevant circumstances are similar. Thi^ is the essential truth in Kant's famous moral law. The most important works on moral philosophy published within the last ten years or so emphasize, at least by and large, the same principles. Cf., e.g., R.N. Hare's Freedom and Reason, 1963, and Marcus Singer Generalizations in Ethics, 1961. Hare speaks about the universalizability principle and Singer about the generalization principle.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Somewhere in this book I asked the question whether there is an essential difference between animal and man, or whether there is a difference in essence. The answer is that there is a difference in essence, and this difference is due to the fact that man, and only man, is a language-using being. It is on account of language that man can think, have consciousness of what he is doing, can decide, can act, can have intentions, and can know when he is happy, depressed, or has pain. And it is as a result of language that man, and man alone, can accept and obey principles. Man is the only being in Nature who has freedom. Because without a language there could be no possibility for choosing between different alternatives, or for choosing between accepting or rejecting a simple existing possibility. Obviously, one cannot choose, accept, or reject without knowing what it is one is choosing, accepting, or rejecting. And, as argued many times on the preceding pages and chapters, this presupposes the use of concepts and, accordingly, the use of language. Man's situation thereby becomes unique. It is a trivial truth that man is part of Nature - is a product of Nature. At the same time, however, man, qua his freedom, is able to TRANSCEND Nature. Animals cannot act and they have no freedom. Their behavior is explained as scientifically predictable reflexes to certain stimuli. Animal behavior is predictable with all the necessity implied by the natural sciences. Animals are subjected to the laws of the natural sciences. Animals are not even contemplators or spectators of their own behavior; because to be a contemplator or spectator implies that what is contemplated is conceived or understood; but animals have no possibility to have knowledge of what they do. Man, on

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the other hand, acts, has intentions, can choose and be responsible; consequently, man is not passively submitted to impulses and stimuli. He is able, therefore, by insight, understanding, and intelligence to act against impulses and stimuli. Furthermore, he is able to reflect on and to understand his own unique situation. Man is thus able to rise above his own nature. He is, as sometimes expressed, able to transcend himself, or, if one prefers: In man, Nature has transcended himself. The categories of human existence - i.e. the concepts necessary in order to understand the uniqueness of human existence - are therefore different from the categories of animal existence. To explain animal existence the categories needed are the categories necessary to explain an organism. They are the categories of the natural sciences - categories for sciences such as biochemistry and physiology. But the categories of man's existence are different; categories are needed such as the concept of 'act', 'intention', 'freedom', and 'responsibility'. But a further investigation of and justification for this assertion will be to move into the area of existentialism. And this is not what this book should be about.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alexander, Peter, Sensationalism and Scientific Explanation, 1963. Anscombe, G. E. M., Intention, 1957. d'Arcy, Eric, Human Acts, 1963. Armstrong, D. M., Perception and the Physical World, 1961. —, Bodily Sensations, 1962. —, A Materialist Theory of the Mind, 1968. Austin, J. L., How to do Things with Words, 1962. —, Sense and Sensibilia, 1962. Ayer, A. J., The Concept of a Person, 1963. Black, Max, The Labyrinth of Language, 1962. Brand, Myles, (ed.), The Nature of Human Action, 1874. Brentano, Franz, Psychologie vom Empirischen Standpunkt, 1874. Brown, D. G., Action, 1968. Chomsky, Noam, Language and Mind, 1968. Cowal, S., Scepticism and the First Person, 1966. Descartes, René, Meditationes, 1641. Evans, C. O., The Subject of Consciousness, 1970. Fink, Hans, Moralbegrundelse og Logik, 1970. Foot, Philippa, "Moral Arguments", Mind, 1958. Foot, Philippa (ed.), Theories of Ethics, 1967. Gill, Jerry H„ "On T " , Mind, 1970. Hamlyn, D. W., The Psychology of Perception, 1957. —, Sensation and Perception, 1961. Hampshire, Stuart, Thought and Action, 1959. —, Freedom of the Individual, 1965. Hampshire, Stuart, and H. L. A. Hart, "Decision, Intention and Certainty", Mind, 1958. Hare, R. M., Freedom and Reason, 1963. Hume, David, A Treatise on Human Nature, 1739. Husserl, Edmund, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und Phänomenologischen Philosophie, 1913. James, William, Principles of Psychology, 1891. Kant, Immanuel, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781 and 1787. Lewis, H. D., The Elusive Mind, 1969. Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, Philosophische Aphorismen, 1776. Louch, A. R., Explanation and Human Action, 1966. Margolis, Joseph (ed.), Contemporary Ethical Theory, 1966.

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Melden, A. I., Free Action, 1961. Mischel, Theodore, Human Action, 1969. Mundle, C. W. K., A Critique of Linguistic Philosophy, 1970. Nowell-Smith, P. H., Ethics, 1954. Powell, Betty, Knowledge of Action, 1967. Price, H. H., Thinking and Experience, 1953. Pucetti, Roland, Persons, 1968. Quine, W. V., "On What There Is", Review of Metaphysics, 1948. Ramsey, Ian, "The Systematic Elusiveness of ' I ' " , Philosophical Quarterly, 1955. Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures, The Human Agent, 1968. Russell, Bertrand, "On Denoting", Mind, 1905. —, Analysis of Mind, 1921. Ryle, Gilbert, Philosophical Arguments, 1945. —, The Concept of Mind, 1949. —, "Thinking and Language", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. Vol. XXV, 1951. —, "Feelings", Philosophical Quarterly, 1951. —, "Ordinary Language", Philosophical Review, 1953. —, Dilemmas, 1954. —, "Sensations", Contemporary British Philosophy, third series, 1956. —, "A Puzzling Element in the Notion of Thinking", Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 44, 1958. —, "Some Problems about Thinking", Contemporary Philosophic Thought, 1970. Searle, John R., Speech Acts, 1969. Searle, John R. (ed.), The Philosophy of Language, 1971. Shoemaker, Sydney, Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity, 1963. Singer, Marcus, Generalizations in Ethics, 1966. Strawson, P. F., Individuals, 1959. Taylor Richard, Action and Purpose, 1966. Taylor, Charles, The Explanation of Behavior, 1964. Urmson, J. O., The Emotive Theory of Ethics, 1968. Warnock, G. J., Contemporary Moral Philosophy, 1967. Warnock, G . J . (ed.), The Philosophy of Perception, 1967. White, Alan R. (ed.), The Philosophy of Action, 1968. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, The Blue and Brown Books, 1958.

INDEX OF NAMES

Anselm, 10, 88 Aquinas, Thomas, 10, 89 Aristotle, 10, 122 Augustine, 17 Austin, John Longshaw, 15, 76ff. Ayer, A.J. 76ff. Berkeley, 100 Boyle, Robert, 67 Brentano, Franz, 38

James, William, 43 Kant, Immanuel, 10, 47, 89, 93, 122 Leibniz, 16 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 43 Locke, John, 10, 47, 61ff„ 64, 106 Plato, 122

Chisholm, Roderick M., 108

Quine, Willard Van Orman, 90

Descartes, 16, 43, 89, 91, 93, 96, 97, 100

Russell, Bertrand, 43, 89ff. Ryle, 104ff.

Hegel, 9, 23 Hume, David, 10, 16, 43, 102, 122 Husserl, Edmund, 39

Strawson, 104ff. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 40, 70, 98, 102, 113

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Assertion, 27 Act-language, 119ff. Act-negating expressions, 117 Behavior, 26, 110 of language, 117ff. pain, 85 verbal, 27 Behavioristic view, 58 Brain processes, 52 Cognition, 122 Concept, 17 empirical, 25 knowledge, 24 of intention, 20, 32 of promise, 18 Conceptualization, 78 Consciousness, states of, 38 Contradiction, 21 Decision, 35 Depth grammar, 12ff. Dialectics, 23 Ex-hypothesis, 124 Existence, 22 criteria, 92 Identity theory, 52 Illocutionary act, 15 Illusion, argument from, 75 Index-word, lOOff. Intention, 20, 32ff. Intentional object, 38 Language user, 15

Logic, conceptual, 23 truth of, 41 Mental images, 49ff., 59ff. Metaphysical views, 63 Misfire, 117 N-predicate, 130ff. Neo-materialism, 50ff. Neuro-physiological processes, 50ff. Non-cognition, 122, 128 Non-empirical, 36ff. Non-inferential, 36ff. Numerical identity, 105ff. Object use, 98 P-predicates, 130ff. Perception, 61 objects of, 75 problem of, 63 theory of, 74 Phenomenology, 39 Philosophical, Problems, 10 Phonetic act, 15 Raw feel, 79 Reality, 22 criteria, 92 S-R language, 119ff. Sensation, 61 Sense data, 64, 76 physiology, 63 theory, 66 Sophism, 122 Speech-act, 53

140 Stimulus-response concept, 20 phenomenon, 20, 34 process, 15 reaction, 46 Subject use, 98

SUBJECT INDEX Thinking process, 58 Transcendant Ego, 97, 99, 103, 105 Truth, 22 Truth-value, 90 Utilitarianism, 129