Some Dilemmas of Naturalism 9780231890908

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SOME DILEMMAS OF NATURALISM WOODBRIDGE DELIVERED NUMBER

SIX

LECTURES AT

COLUMBIA

UNIVERSITY

Some Dilemmas of Naturalism

WILLIAM RAY DENNES Mills Professor of Mental and Moral University of

φ

Philosophy

California

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK

I960

Copyright

© i960 Columbia

University

Published in Great Britain, India, by the Oxford University Press London, Bombay, and Karachi Library

of Congress

Catalog

Press, New

and

Card Number:

Pakistan

60-6029

York

CONTENTS Analysis or Metaphysics? Aleaning

ι

29

The Empirical

and the

The Naturalistic Reason and Moral

Fallacy

Logical 83

Imperatives

WOODBRIDGE LECTURES A t his death in

1940 Professor Frederick

W o o d b r i d g e left a bequest to C o l u m b i a University f o r the purpose of bringing distinguished philosophers to the University f r o m time to time and for making their lectures available through publication. Some of

Pro-

fessor Woodbridge's friends m a d e substantial additions to this bequest, and thus made it possible for the late President B u t l e r to establish the W o o d b r i d g e M e m o r i a l F u n d . T h e W o o d b r i d g e Lectures are delivered triennially. A l l these series have been published in book f o r m by the C o l u m b i a University Press. 1. W i l m o n H . Sheldon, Process and Polarity 2. G e o r g e P l i m p t o n A d a m s , Man and 3. Sterling Power L a m p r e c h t , Nature 4. H a r r y T o d d Costello, A Philosophy

Metaphysics and

History

of the Real

and the Possible 5. Clarence I r v i n g Lewis, The Ground and

Nature

of the Right 6. W i l l i a m R a y Dennes, Some Dilemmas of Naturalism

SOME DILEMMAS OF

NATURALISM

1. ANALYSIS OR METAPHYSICS? No one of my generation who discusses philosophical issues at Columbia University can fail to be reminded (and very vividly reminded) of the great diversity of the insights and emphases that have been developed there under the names "naturalism" and "empiricism". Indeed, no responsible laborer in the philosophical vineyard in our times, however much he may differ with them (as they indeed differed among themselves), can have failed to profit in one way or another from the work of Woodbridge, of Dewey, of Montague, and of Edman—not to mention the work of the distinguished scholars who now constitute Columbia's philosophical faculty. I should like to record the debt I myself incurred to Frederick J . E. Woodbridge when, many years ago, as a prospective student of medicine, I heard the lectures he gave at Berkeley as Visiting Mills Professor of Philosophy. When he discussed John Locke, I was struck by his dramatic insistence that, although we can examine the structure and measure the capacity of a ship

2

Analysis

or

Metaphysics?

before it sails, we can do neither of these (nor indeed anything else) with a mind before, and except as, it thinks, or more accurately, except as it just is thinking and communicating. W o o d b r i d g e developed this theme into a two-pronged analysis: on the one hand, of respects in which confirmation by experience is indispensable to the serious appraisal of beliefs; and, on the other hand, of respects in which what he then called "logical f o r m " was indispensable to expressing beliefs and to communicating them. Even a freshman, totally ignorant of philosophy as I was, caught some sense of the nature and the fascination of issues that later study might reveal as, in one context or another, r u n n i n g through most of the history of Western thought, and as still central to the work of critical intelligence in our own times. I have since come to recognize that in Woodbridge's California lectures there were also important warnings, which I did not then detect, against a certain family of confusions that seem today, as at most other times, to constitute a chief occupational hazard in philosophical work. I refer to the peculiar troubles that creep u p on us when we try to work o u t interpretations of notions that are basic in explanation, since in many cases it appears that we must use those very notions themselves (even if under novel names) in the course of developing and stating our interpretations. For every is after all a language!

metalanguage

It is the k i n d of difficulty that

Kant fell into in much of what he wrote of things-inthemselves, in spite of the powerful warning he had himself expressed by his insistence that the categories of

Analysis

or Metaphysics?

3

the understanding cannot be applied to anything that is not experienceable. Indeed, it has always been much easier, and is today much easier, to warn ourselves against such dangers than it is to avoid them. But there is a good deal of consolation in recognizing that much that would otherwise almost certainly have been missed has been, and still may be, achieved by trying to sail so close to the wind that we take the risk that our sails may fail us. I suppose that no sailor with a harbor to reach or a race to win intends to luff, still less to fall into irons; but what sailor has not learned things he would not willingly forget by precisely such frustrations? We might hope—indeed, it has been the great hope of most epistemologists and of many semanticists, a hope that revives with every new proposed criterion of meaning, truth, or probability—that sailing as close as we can into the philosophical wind would teach us to recognize just where our sails must in fact fail us, so that we could the better chart our own work, and perhaps also help others than philosophers to chart theirs. But before we conclude these discussions we shall examine some grounds for doubting that there can be any satisfactory way of specifying a precise boundary line (or a single criterion) which, in the face of the philosophical hazard mentioned, will separate fruitful work from confusion, sense from nonsense or even from intellectual shipwreck. A year after Woodbridge, John Dewey visited Berkeley as Mills Professor of Philosophy. In a hundred contexts he illustrated what he called the funding-in-experi-

4

Analysis or

Metaphysics?

ence of meanings and of evaluations, and developed his searching doubts about attempts to distinguish logic and philosophy from science, about the dichotomy between the empirical confirmation of beliefs on the one hand and the logical certification or mathematical proof of statements on the other; and his even more drastic challenge of the distinctions usually drawn between theoretical activity and the biological and practical conflicts that no doubt generate inquiry, and between the meaning and truth of beliefs and the fruitful adjustment of practical conflicts to which some believings contribute. As I look back over the forty years since I was, in a very small way, his pupil, it seems to me that, although he worked fTom a direction and in an idiom removed toto caelo from theirs, Dewey showed up as well as the recent English analytical philosophers have done, and often more usefully, the unsatisfactoriness of some of the rigid distinctions customarily accepted by philosophers and some of the pretentious doctrines that have been thought to depend upon such distinctions. But in those days Dewey was also insisting, with regard to the notion of transformative operation, as he was to write later of the category of experience, that if it were to be acceptable as fundamental in the interpretation of our explanatory undertakings it could as such entail no restrictions upon what might exist or what might be imagined or meant. Yet somehow he felt that it made all the difference whether or not we accepted the notion as fundamental. I am sure that I have not been alone in finding, then and since, in Dewey's work,

Analysis or Metaphysics?

5

an inter-mixture of the enlightening and the puzzling (even the opaque) which has made it one of the great exemplars of the promise, but also of the frustrations, of honest and courageous intelligence trying to cope with a bewildering world. T h e r e are, of course, the strongest reasons to recognize that Dewey was as fully aware as anyone of difficulties in the philosophical position that he developed. Whenever I am puzzled by his seeming to identify what, even for his own purposes, may need to be distinguished as meaning from use, as the reference of symbols from the causes and effects of their utterance, I remember a talk I had with him after I had read his argument that what we mean by "that patch of red" is not what people call a sense datum but is rather our stopping automobiles, stanching wounds, and a considerable further range of operations. I asked him whether he was not aware at that moment of the small red light on the brass case of the furnace thermostat in his study, and aware of it as a color patch distinct from the functioning of the furnace and from any operations he or others might carry out to raise or lower the temperature of the room, or indeed to accomplish anything else. "But of course," Professor Dewey answered, as I remember his words, "the red patch is not itself the operations it grows out of and leads into, but the whole importance of noticing the patch of color is constituted by what we and others do about it, and the further doings these lead into and influence." Except for consummatory delight, as in certain structured color experiences to which

6

Analysis

or

Metaphysics?

Dewey later did a great deal of justice in his writings on visual art, I think what he told me that morning about the importance of color patches is a wholly acceptable doctrine, although some of us may feel that it is essential more explicitly to distinguish noticed colors, and all sorts of observed entities, from what may constitute the importance of noticing them even in order to understand that very importance itself, and to give it desirable development and effect. But I must not go on in this vein. If I have allowed myself a moment of reminiscence it has only been as one way of suggesting that California owes intellectual debts to Columbia which we have not found, and indeed may never find, the means to repay. Let me make clear at the outset that the strands of naturalistic thought which I am to discuss are considerably more limited, naive, and simple-minded than were most of the themes that occupied Woodbridge and Dewey. But the recollections I have mentioned are by no means unrelated to certain present concerns. For in the course of their efforts to make sense of the notion of cognitive meaning, rather prominent in recent naturalistic and empiricist thinking, many of the ablest of our contemporaries have concluded that we are forced to interpret the meaning and the truth of statements in terms of their relations to "total adjustment" —a position remarkably similar to Dewey's interpretation of meaning and truth in terms of the fruitful adjustment of conflicts in practice, the release of obstructed activity, and consequent growth. Certainly one

Analysis

or Metaphysics?

η

of the tacks on which we sail closest to the wind is the attempt to construe the cognitive meaning of explanatory beliefs (whether those developed in our everyday doings or in our most recondite science) in such a way that we may become progressively clearer about what empirical evidence would confirm them or would rule them out, coupled with the familiar doctrine that, except for analytic but factually empty necessities, generated whenever we use symbols to express such beliefs, we are seriously justified in holding only those which are thus confirmed. But this kind of interpretation of the cognitive meaning of beliefs, or of the sentences that express them, seems to develop autogenous dilemmas. For if we say that synthetic declarative statements mean those states of affairs, those qualitied and related events, the occurrence of which as asserted would make the statements true, are we really doing philosophical interpretation or are we insinuating a restrictive (and even an intellectually crippling) metaphysics? We shall, of course, have to look further into the notion of cognitive meaning before we can deal with that dilemma. And if we should tentatively accept that notion, I fear we shall find a whole phalanx of further dilemmas marching down upon us. Must we, for example, concede that universal statements (such as scientific laws) are meaningless, or else abandon that particular notion of meaning? Must we deny cognitive meaning to statements about so-called "unobservable entities", or else reject the notion of meaning in question as restrictive or viciously reductive? Must we, as

8

Analysis or

Metaphysics?

some critics have insisted, reject this particular conception of meaning or else admit as cognitively significant many disjunctive statements and the negatives of many conjunctive statements, which anybody with his head screwed on straight must recognize as nonsensical? Do attempts by so-called "empiricists" and "naturalists" to explain and appraise this notion of meaning themselves use "meaning" in the very sense that is in question and thus bog down in a kind of typal confusion? What about the meanings (extensional or intensional) of class-names, if we are to ascribe cognitive meaning in the sense mentioned to the statements in which they occur? If we talk of states of affairs, or of the factors of event, quality, and relation, are the differences between these factors introduced de facto, but in no sense de jure, by our own contingent operations of categorizing? If philosophers who work in the tradition of empiricism and naturalism survive these challenges, is it only to encounter such further dilemmas as those about the meanings of memory-statements and probability-statements; about the meaning of references to private experience (which may be indispensable if we are not to distort the factor of intention); about the possibility of imaginative speculation; about the possibility (denied, for example, by Quine) of individual statements having cognitive meaning; and about the cognitive meanings of moral and other value judgments. For the most part, but not always, such dilemmas are less formal than the patterns of argument which the textbooks of logic call "dilemmas, constructive and de-

Analysis or Metaphysics?

9

structive." Old Thomas Blundeville who, with Elizabethan versatility, turned to writing logic only after he had published his treatises On the Arte of Ryding and Breaking Greate Horses and on The Number of Counsellors a Prince Ought to Have, described dilemmas as each "made of two members, repugnant to one another, whereof which soever thou grantest thou art, by and by, taken." 1 Now I have no lack of appreciation for such scholastic dilemmas. Indeed, a few years ago one of them served me (and, I think, served justice!) rather well. I argued with a skeptical college president that if women do not differ essentially from men, then one could not fairly deny to well-qualified women appointments to teach philosophy; whereas if women do so differ from men, then it is especially important that well-qualified women teach philosophy, since philosophy undertakes to ignore no major sector of human experience or, indeed, of being. But, either women do so differ or they do not so differ (and before I finish I hope to say a critical word or two about some of the things involved in the present fashion of rejecting Excluded Middle!), therefore . . . And the young woman got the job. And I suppose that old Blundeville, in hell with Aristotle or in paradise with Thomas Aquinas, had occasion to record the operation of one more instance of dilemma as he had defined it. • T h o m a s B l u n d e v i l l e [fl. 1561], The Arte of Logick. Plainely taught in the English tongue, according to the best approued avthors. Very necessary for all students in any profession, how to defend any argument against all subtill sophisters and cauelling schismatikes, and how to confute their false syllogismes and captious arguments" ( L o n d o n , 1617),

p. si-

ίο

Analysis

or

Metaphysics?

B u t in these discussions I shall generally mean by "dilemmas" something a good deal less formal and artificial, namely, predicaments in which what appear to be justified opinions, or justified ways of analyzing or interpreting beliefs and evaluations, seem nevertheless to require us to accept sets of beliefs that are either irreconcilable with one another or otherwise unsatisfactory. I shall want to show how such predicaments force themselves upon us in one sort of naturalistic interpretation of scientific explanation and of moral judgments, although a good many of them constitute problems for reflective intelligence generally. But what do I mean by referring to a particular sort (and I must add a fairly naive sort) of naturalistic interpretation and the conception of cognitive meaning that may go with it and may help to generate such dilemmas as those I have listed? If there were space, the best way to identify the philosophical position which I shall be discussing would be for us to remind ourselves in some detail of several of the most striking manifestations in the history of Western thought of the cleavage between, on the one hand, thinkers who have believed that so far as we can hope to explain at all what goes on in the ivorld—outside our skins and inside them—it is by examining and reporting the observed relations of stretches of determinate (i.e., qualitied) process (in some usages, things) to their constituents and to other stretches of process and by constructing confirmable hypotheses about f u r t h e r ranges of related events (the hypotheses—some

Analysis or Metaphysics?

IT

of them, perhaps, inferences from prior reports—to be confirmed, not merely by constructing systems of compossible hypotheses but by relevant observation); and, on the other hand, thinkers who believe that such explanation only multiplies puzzles—that it merely supposes, or at best reports, more facts to be explained and tells us, as Aristotle complained of Democritus' work, only what generally happens or is supposed generally to happen, but nothing at all about why it happens. T h e second group of thinkers has not by any means been confined to men who have said that events as they occur are unintelligible unless controlled and explained by Pythagorean ratios, by Platonic forms, by Aristotelian entelechies, by natural laws distinct from the patterns of events but enforcing conformity to those patterns, by commands of a deity, or by transcendentally deduced organizers of experience. Not at all. T o take only one example: whereas Leucippus and Democritus were content to explain the course of things by observed shapes and motions of bodies plus supposed shapes and motions of the very tiny atoms they believed composed them, Epicurus (perhaps influenced indirectly by Aristotle's criticism) seems to have thought that, to explain some sets of motions by findings or hypotheses about their relations to other sets of motions was only to multiply the transactions to be explained and not really to explain any of them. Serious explanation must go beyond all the occurrences of motion to a factor that made bodies move. And what was that? Their heaviness! In other words, instead of regarding

12

Analysis or

Metaphysics?

as natural what was observed to happen, he seems to have thought that such persistence and regularity of motions of things as were thus observed and inferred, were in themselves most unnatural and required something distinct from the motions in question in order to explain them. But since he believed that heaviness would make all atoms fall in parallel paths, he concluded that there must be something other than the mere fact that they did not so behave (something, that is, distinct from their relations to other events), in order to produce (and the belief in it to explain), the fact that many atoms did get together in clusters. And that explanatory factor was what? It was the swerve of moving particles! And so on and on. I think we should not laugh at Epicurus but rather thank him for giving us such a clear example of what is likely to occur whenever we are not content to regard explanatory theories as hypotheses about the relations and constituents of what happens, but try to construe them as accounts of factors distinct from the happenings, and from the whole range of happenings, and controlling them. It is as if we were to say of gravity that it is of no explanatory use if it is conceived of as the pattern of relative motions of bodies in a field, and that it does yield explanation only if it is conceived to be a force behind the motions which it enforces. Now in the course of what we have come to believe to be our careers as animals interacting with a complex environment of processes, human and other, we are aware of what it would be wonderfully convenient to

Analysis or Metaphysics?

13

follow Heraclitus in calling "flux." It makes sense to say that segmentations of what some call flow or process, though not, I think, the similarities and differences manifested in various stretches of it, are not something we find but something we make. We are aware of some of the segments into which by our fluctuating attention or our deliberate classification, we cut process; and we are aware of such segments (often called events or occurrences or sets of these) as exhibiting what are ordinarily called qualities, and also relations to other segments with their clusters of qualities and relations. But is it our interpreting, our categorizing, that generates the qualities and relations we say we notice? If that were so we could never find any evidence to confirm the belief since, ex hypothesi, any evidence would itself have to be something noticed. Of course, few of us would doubt that our activity of distinguishing in attention occurrences with their qualities and relations is the result of many millions of years of biological struggle, change, and adjustment as well as of illimitable ranges of pro cesses in what we sometimes call the universe around us. T h e Astronomer Royal has recently estimated that "the universe," as he phrases it, "has programmed the genes" of each newborn human baby with no fewer than ten billion of what he calls "items of information"! And most of us believe that the physiological processes that go on when we perceive or imagine or remember, and when we utter statements, are probably much more complicated than anything our best psychology and physiology have made out. But it will not do to say

j4

Analysis or Metaphysics?

that what is meant by such categories as event, quality, and relation, and what is meant by our awareness of occurrences which we may describe as clusters of particular instances of what is meant by such categories, or that what is meant by statements about what we are thus aware of, are any of them reducible to the histories in which (and out of which) we may believe that such awareness and the use of such categories have developed. They are not thus reducible in the sense of being identical one with the other. And also they are not reducible in the sense that one might be tempted to claim that an account of the historical genesis of, and the adaptive physiological processes that go on in the course of, the perceiving, the discriminating, and the reporting of qualitied and related events, puts our interpretation of these on another philosophical level (better or worse). For even if our knowledge of such origins and processes were much more complete and trustworthy than in fact it is, it would itself consist only in beliefs about further ranges of events with their qualities and relations, and not in something more ultimate than, or different in kind from, the objects of awareness and belief whose origins and supporting processes it would purport to set forth. I suppose that no one knows any very large part of the histories of human physiological development and conditioning and of human customs and technologies, without which most of us believe that no one would be likely to hear and appreciate a structured passage in Bartok's Second Suite for Orchestra; but this could not justify us in

Analysis or Metaphysics?

15

saying that what is now heard is really constituted by the millennia of developments that probably led up to the production of the music and the present hearing of it. Hearing sounds is simply not inferring their causes, or the causes of our attention to them. But our situation is not so simple; and reliance on something very close to common sense is not so easy as all this seems. In what ways do utterances like " T h e traffic light ahead is now green," and "There are two spires on Chartres cathedral," mean, or what do they mean? And is it satisfactory to say that we confirm such utterances by looking at the traffic light in question and at Chartres cathedral? There are so many eccentricities of memory and so many slips of attention —wouldn't it be better to say that the more serious support for believing what either of these utterances asserts would be the convergence of behavior (including talking) of many neighboring travelers on the street or of many visitors to Chartres, which convergence may correct my own eccentricities or those of any other individual observer? "Yes, of course," we may answer; but after a moment's reflection, "No." For (1) we may simply be changing the subject of discussion from traffic lights and church spires to the behavior of various people; and (2) if we have not thus changed the subject of discussion but are dealing with the same subject by way of something we may call "really serious evidence," then what way have we of determining the behaviors of people, convergent or divergent, except by the very sort of observation that we had set out to correct by

16

Analysis or Metaphysics?

shifting to a more sophisticated account of the confirmation of beliefs about traffic lights and church spires? Some have suggested the use of photographic and phonographic devices and photoelectric counters to determine what a group of people are doing. But if we claim by such means to confirm or disconfirm our initial utterances, it will be obvious that we shall have sooner or later to depend simply upon looking at the photographs or the graphs or the tabulations which the instruments have produced, and to rely upon our own or someone else's observation of ways in which some sorts of events in the doings of crowds are correlated with these or similar graphs or tabulations, or upon such observation plus our own or someone else's inferences as to what goes on when the behavior of people in crowds is thus recorded. But what are we to say of the attempt to interpret the cognitive assertions used in explanation as either descriptive of states of affairs, of existents qualitied and related, the occurrence of which as so described would make the assertions true, or else as auxiliary analytic statements that reflect definitions (either stipulated or used without being formulated), or as a combination of factors of these two sorts? Is such philosophical analysis of what goes on as explanation (whether common sense or scientific) really itself through-and-through a disguised but crude and restrictive—even a crippling— metaphysic? Does it, under the mask of interpreting factors central in explanation and evaluation, really amount to a pretended science, and indeed to some-

Analysis or Metaphysics?

ιη

thing more than a science, namely the claim that there exist determinate related events, and that there exists nothing else, and that there is therefore nothing else to talk about? I am sorry to say that I do not see how a completely clear resolution of this dilemma is possible. If we construe explanation as consisting in structures of confirmed or conformable beliefs about events in the world and their qualities and relations (structures in which terms are employed with defined meanings), then the constructings, the intendings, and the definings occur as events in our intellectual lives whose locus is surely not outside of nature, or the world. Some of these acts may be acts by which we stipulate limits (as Aristotle suggested in Metaphysics Μ and N) which patterned events may approach even if they never reach them; and by their approach justify us in regarding them as entities belonging to some class named, for example, by a class-name like "triangle." But what are we to say about the notion—or the dogma—that we experience process, that process experienced is never indeterminate in quality, and that we experience existents as enduring within the span of attention only in their relations to changes in their contexts, which changing relations constitute a kind of change (namely, duration) in the enduring existents? Are such notions no better than attempts to carve up whatever exists in accordance with the language habits we happen to have inherited? What are the alternatives? What would justify us in

18

Analysis

or

Metaphysics?

saying that nothing really goes on, or if anything does go on it has qualities and relations different from those we say we notice, or that what goes on not only lacks the traits we notice b u t has no traits at all that resemble what we name by class-names like "quality" and "relation"? I hope it is not viciously dialectical to say baldly in respect to the first question that I am aware of acts or processes of intending and of talking even when (if ever) I say or think or try to think that nothing goes on; and I can find no justification for being more skeptical of the occurrence of other processes which I am quite as directly aware of. But does what goes on have the qualities and relations I notice? Short of appeal to a mystical reason or to some sort of revelation the acceptability of which there is no way to establish, the kind of evidence offered for a negative answer would seem to be my own noticing, or somebody else's noticing, qualities and relations other than those in question. But such evidence would amount, in one's own case, to one's turning one's attention away from some objectives and onto others. But one would thus be aware of f u r t h e r ranges of qualities and relations quite compatible with (and actually forming a complex relational structure with) those first in question. Neither of these transactions would be evidence against belief that existents had the traits first referred to. In the case of other observers, whatever they notice and report in their individual perspectives will be compatible among themselves and compatible also with

Analysis

or Metaphysics?

ip

whatever I notice in my perspective. A logical difficulty can arise only if some one of us pretends that one perception swallows up, or is reducible to, or (although different) is really identical with what another perception is. T h e occurrence and relations of varying perceptions may strain accepted causal laws, psychological and other. But the function of laws is to set forth the structure of occurrences, not to rule out any because it is inconvenient to incorporate it. If the above questions are meant in a very metaphysical sense—e.g., are there any processes at all (or any existents) out of all possible attention, and if so have they any properties, qualitative or relational?— then the questions are such that towards the answering of them no evidence could be available either to us or to angels or to deities, if there are such beings and they are aware of anything. T o have serious grounds for saying that our awareness amounts to imposing modes of categorizing that introduce traits, structures, similarities and differences, into existents, which introduced features are not traits of the existents, would require us to be aware of the existents as they are, uncategorized, although the criticism depends precisely upon identifying all awareness with such categorizing. If the doctrine were true, it could never be known to be true. Objects certainly can exist out of attention and be possessed of the traits any of us may notice. It will not do to argue that processes of perception are so elaborate that the objects supposed to prompt them cannot have the traits we perceive. T h a t would be no better

2o

Analysis or Metaphysics?

than arguing that a friend's singing as heard cannot possibly resemble his singing as reproduced by means of a magnetic tape recording and playback, since the intervening processes involved are so elaborate. Few of us are content to believe that what exists is no more than our intermittent experiences, and the notion of continuing processes no more than an economical convention. But since the so-called metaphysical issues just mentioned are issues with respect to which no evidence could be accessible to us, pro or con, the questions that come home to us are rather these: (1) Is explanation of what we suppose to happen in the world no more than belief about patterns of qualitied and related events? Does explanation consist in beliefs the statement of which takes the form of synthetic declarative sentences, asserting that events distinguishable by their qualities occur in certain relations —and of course, much more characteristically, general or causal or law-statements which invite us to construct particular synthetic statements in patterns offered by the law-statements and to test them in experience? Such statements would not function as they do unless some of the symbols employed in them had specific (however elastic) sense and specific (however elastic) reference. And this characteristic of statements (and of thought) is reflected in the sentences we call analytic. (2) Do naturalists use these distinctions to satisfy themselves that no event logically requires any other: that outside of logic and mathematics we have probable knowledge only, and not metaphysics if that is a

Analysis or Metaphysics?

21

statement of transcendental necessities? If so, naturalism confronts dilemmas with respect to the defensibility of the analytic-synthetic distinction. It faces the question whether we can make sense of meaning in intension as well as in extension. But does such naturalism in any case exclude a priori from the world such beings as disembodied spirits, or a deity that is said to be perfect, unchanging, and not related to any processes in the world in ways that would justify ascribing duration to him? If by "disembodied spirits" are meant careers of remembering, expecting, hoping, fearing, or any of these or other activities thought to resemble those of conscious bodily organisms, but without any bodily (i.e., spatially extended) accompaniments, then there is nothing in the categories of such a naturalism as I have been sketching that excludes intelligible reference to such beings, still less excludes their occurrence. No distinguishable processes or phases of process are strictly inseparable. Of course, if any given individual finds that he cannot conceive of, think about, or talk (even to himself) intelligibly about hopes and fears except as transactions in which bodily spread or heartbeat or depressed or rapid breathing and the like are parts, then it is his inability, and not the categories of any philosophy, that prevents his meaning anything by the phrase "disembodied spirits". Or better stated, he simply in fact does not mean anything by the phrase. And the negative conclusion would, of course, be merely truistic if he should define terms like the word "re-

22

Analysis

memberings" as including

or

Metaphysics?

reference to bodily processes

spread out in space. If, however, one means by "disembodied spirits" what was suggested above, then they may or may not exist and the only serious problem is: what is the evidence for or against belief

in

their

existence? By terms like " G o d " and "deity" men have meant many sorts of things: in the West, usually an intelligence—creative, wise, loving, aware of acts of prayer and worship, indeed aware in one way or other and controlling

in one

way or other all events in

the

universe. Adjectives like "omniscient," "benevolent,"

2

" o m n i p o t e n t " have generally been used to refer to the completeness of such features in deity, and not to the sublation or eradication of them. N o w if one means something of that sort by the term " G o d " , and does not mean any of the various sorts of things that Aristotle or Spinoza or A l e x a n d e r or Whitehead seem to have meant by the term, then nothing in the categories, or in the ways of explaining, characteristic of the naturalistic position we are considering entails the nonexistence of such a being. T h e whole problem is: what evidence is there for or against the existence of such a deity? If the notion of deity is defined (as it is by many) in such a way that all possible states of affairs or their opposites must be said equally to reflect his being and his nature, then the assertion that there

is

evidence

3 It w o u l d of course be i m p o s s i b l e to a t t r i b u t e such a characteristic as b e n e v o l e n c e to Aristotle's d e i t y , t h e P r i m e M o v e r ; as it w o u l d b e b l a s p h e m y to ascribe it to Deus sive Natura sive Substantia as S p i n o z a u n d e r s t o o d Deus.

Analysis

or

Metaphysics?

for the existence of God becomes an empty truism. If there are self-consistent theories that represent deity as totally transcendent of the factor of process and yet aware of processes and thus related to them, I have not yet encountered such a theory. Aristotle indeed described what he called the Prime Mover as transcendent of change, b u t only by making his so-called activity indistinguishable from what is asserted of the selfidentity of any entity (or, in Santayana's language, the self-identity of any essence); b u t Aristotle left us with no intelligible account of the Prime Mover's selfidentical nature since its thinking-its-own-thinking cannot be further characterized or its content in any way determined. N o one, so far as I know, has made out the validity of Aristotle's argument, from the premise that it is impossible for change to cease (even if that premise be accepted) to the conclusion that there must be a Prime Mover, itself changeless, to guarantee that the impossible will not happen—namely, to guarantee that not all substances will cease from enduring and moving towards, or away from, the realization of their essences. And if it were true that all substances endure through shorter or longer careers and move out of love (nearly always unconscious lovel) for the ideal called "completely realized activity," then it would be the occurrence of such love, and the occurrences by which such love is accompanied or followed, that would constitute a n d exhaust what might very loosely be called the influence of Aristotle's Prime Mover upon the world. If one means by "the possible" what is described (or

24

Analysis or

Metaphysics?

asserted) by statements that are free of self-contradiction, then the doctrine that possibilities are infinite is analytically true. Hence Whitehead could quite properly say that his notion of the primordial nature of God as the infinitude of possibilities is materially implied by any and every proposition. His notion of God is indeed a notion of God as transcendent of events, even though the notion is specified by means of occurrent operations of defining. But it is hard to see that God so conceived would have any of the characteristics usually ascribed to deity in Western religious thinking and in Western theologies. For is not the notion precisely what is meant by saying that any statement that asserts anything and is not self-contradictory may be either materially or analytically true? And Whitehead's notion of the consequent—as contrasted with the primordial—nature of God, far from being the notion of a deity independent of events and change, appears to be the conception of God as the totality of objects ingredient into events, that is, the totality of actual occurrences. But while I believe that what purports to be an interpretation of explanation and evaluation, in terms of reference to qualitied and related events, is not a restrictive metaphysic which could as such justify such assertions as that disembodied spirits or gods do not exist, I do not doubt that beliefs about what is going on and has gone on and will go on in the world, outside us and in our own careers, are always interwoven with all the attempts that anybody makes at philo-

Analysis or Metaphysics?

25

sophical analysis of notions like those of meaning, of evidence, of truth, of falsity, of probability, and of value, which notions seem to be involved in such beliefs about the world. For surely our philosophical interpretations are themselves events in the world. Quine has written of the pale gray fabric of the lore which we, as individuals, inherit from our fathers and may modify a little ourselves—a fabric of sentences "black with fact, and white with convention" in which, he says, he can distinguish no "quite black threads . . . nor any white ones." We must, I think, agree up to the hilt that material beliefs (some of them very general, and perhaps appropriately called "metaphysical"), supposals and their confirmation, and also practical activities, are as much interwoven with philosophical interpretations as are, according to Quine, experience-supported and linguistically-certified factors in our beliefs. But I think Hume was right in insisting that if we are to assert such interweaving, we can (and indeed must) make distinctions of reason where we do not pretend to make separations in existence, even if we cannot be perfectly sure, in any single instance, of the precise extent to which a sentence is in fact used to express a synthetic, and the extent to which it is used to express an analytic, proposition. Indeed, is it not because, and only because, of what Quine himself means by the phrase "satisfactory explication"—a meaning which he has not himself explicated in ways that would even remotely meet the requirements he demands that others meet who try to explain analyticity

26

Analysis

or

Metaphysics?

—that he is able to discard explications of analyticity and of the meaning, truth, and confirmation of individual sentences, substituting for the latter triad a totally unexplicated phrase: "contribution to total adjustment"? But are philosophical work and philosophical insight better conceived, as some of our English contemporaries conceive them, as corrections of deviations from ordinary language? Words like "profound" are danger signals, if not positive affronts, in the eyes of the philosophers (actually, as we all know, very variegated in their work) who have come to be called "Oxford Analysts." But I know of no other appropriate adjective (and, unlike most of them, I use it with respect) for their discernment and appreciation of the predicament we fall into if, by constructing metalanguages, or using any language (natural or artificial) as a metalanguage by means of which to discuss the functions and relations of symbols (or of symbolized notions) in scientific and moral statements, we think we have thus escaped using and exhibiting in our metalanguages some of the very sorts of symbolizing (or of symbolized notions) which we (falsely) believe we are only mentioning and analyzing, but not using. Actually, most of the able workers in formal logic and in semantics believe, I think, that their constructions are useful ways of intimating, of helping us to see, what we are doing, rather than (independently of such doings in their own development) telling us what we are doing when we relate symbols in ways roughly called defining, inferring, and

Analysis

or Metaphysics?

so on. T h e r e f o r e

I should

27 think

Nelson

Goodman

completely right when he says that "the constructionalist . . . looks u p o n the verbal analyst as a valued and respected, if inexplicably hostile, ally." A n d since I have mentioned the O x f o r d Analysts (who owe far too m u c h to G . E. Moore and, some of them, to Wittgenstein, to deserve the ascription of a pure O x o n i a n lineage), let me also pay them my respects for emphasizing (and using) the insight of H u m e and o t h e r s — t h e insight that the scientific establishment of probabilities plus the logical and mathematical development of analytic necessities do not by any means exhaust the activities that are given the general name of "reason." T o consider (or " t o make us see") the differences between a variety of specific

"must-sentences,"

some of which may express causal laws but perhaps each differently, others beliefs (supported by the former) about means-ends relations, others logical necessities or a priori guide lines, and still others moral imperatives — t o do such work is not itself exactly to develop causal correlations, or logical derivations, or moral

impera-

tives. Is it not the experience of most of us that, in reflecting upon what are offered us as explanations, or as proofs, or as moral judgments (commonsensical or sophisticated), it is by what we would call some sort of intuitive recognition, rather than by scientific confirmation or by logical derivation, that we satisfy ourselves of features that may seem to us the most important in each. U n l i k e the O x f o r d analysts, I see no way of stating, or even of approximately stating, what we may

28

Analysis or Metaphysics?

thus recognize except by descriptive sentences aided by stipulative definitions, illustrating by examples what we may thus try to state. Of course, such statements never satisfy us—no statements can ever satisfy us, if we expect of them that they should specify all the complexity, all the nuances, of what we intend. But as Aristotle saw, this is not a fault in statements, but a virtue; since their complete rendering of their subject matter would leave us simply their subject matter, and nothing at all we could use as statements. And more than this, such statements will probably always employ at least some of the very factors they purport to explicate; but it is precisely thus that they may "show" more than they say. Finally, although work in a toolshop is probably the last analogy our Oxford colleagues would be likely to welcome, I confess I often think of them as dedicating themselves for perhaps a century, like pre-evangelical laborers in our philosophical wilderness, to sharpening our recognition of the versatility of the verbal tools which their successors (and ours) may some day be able to use in developing philosophies—yes, even systematic philosophies—much more satisfactorily than could have been done without their preparatory labors. But if they are a swarm of John the Baptists, it is hardly yet time for us to attempt work like that of the other John who reported from Patmos visions of a new heaven and a new earth. We need rather to examine certain more detailed questions about the meanings of statements.

2. MEANING Is it satisfactory to say that at least one part o£ the work we call philosophy is the attempt men make to become as clear as they can about what they and others are doing when they describe and explain (whether in everyday discourse or in the most recondite science) and when they judge one sort of thing to be better than another? If that is part of the work of philosophy, then it is not surprising to find that those who attempt it are not content merely to observe, to remember, to develop expectations and to check these, but try to make out what it is to perceive, to remember, to expect, and \vhat it is to adjust further actions to such expectations as have been in part confirmed. T h e y will probably even want to inquire whether awareness is reliable—or whether it should on occasion be advised by some authority, Reason or other, to go hang itself. But such attempts are perpetually threatened by the risks of circularity or distortion, or else of condemnation to silence about what is ineffable. For how can we examine awareness, perception, and inference, how can

_jo

Meaning

we interpret supposals and their confirmation, without in the very process being aware of various things (including, of course, sentences uttered) and making and confirming or rejecting various inferences—without, that is, using, and relying on, the very sorts of activities whose nature (and perhaps whose reliability) we seek to examine? And what in the world do we mean by "reliability" in such contexts? And how do we judge it, except by using still more of the very factors whose reliability we thought we needed to examine? If we attempt to avoid such circularity by trying to test our interpretations of statements and beliefs against an uncategorized flow of experience, then many of the ablest of our contemporaries warn us that in itself the flux of experience—or the content of uninterpreted experience—is a process so amorphous that it is equally patient of an indefinite number of diverse categorizations, but that restriction to any one pattern of categorization would distort it—would turn from gTeen to gray the golden tree of life, would murder in order to dissect, as anatomy has been said to presuppose a corpse. Unfortunately, typal advice, useful as it is at many junctures in logistic construction, does not help us very much with the cluster of dilemmas I have just sketched. And such seemingly vicious circles are today a chief theoretical ground (no doubt the more influential factors are emotional) for the insistence by some of our contemporaries that we must recognize transcendental —or at least transempirical—factors as presupposed by all serious explanation, and also for the conviction of

Meaning

31

some others that whatever it may be that really exists is quite unknowable and inexplicable in any ordinary sense of terms like "knowledge" and "explanation." Perhaps the most basic dilemmas that face all serious philosophical work, naturalistic or other, are reflected in the question whether we can go far enough, in the way of analyzing the factors involved in explanation and evaluation, to secure results that are interesting and helpful, and yet stop short of the vicious circles which critics warn us stultify a large part of philosophical discussion. And if there are reasonable stopping places —and just where is it reasonable to stop in answering a child's insistently regressive "Whys"?—if there are reasonable compromises, are they simply in fact the compromises usually made by average users of whatever languages we may be at home in? Or is it possible to advance our understanding of those compromises, or even to devise better compromises, without pretending to lift ourselves out of the whole range of such activities as we are examining and thus to take our stand in a vacuum where there is actually nothing to to stand on? Although these questions, or reasonable facsimiles of them (unless by definition we exclude them—as I think we should not do—from the class named "questions"), occur from time to time to most reflective persons, very often to some philosophers, and seem continually to torment a few of our ablest colleagues, I do not think we can do much either to appreciate them or to mitigate them by way of a general frontal

)2

Meaning

attack. T h e more promising approach is to see how one sort of philosophical interpretation leads us, or is alleged to lead us, into various much more limited and specific dilemmas, and to make out whether and how the kind of philosophy in question can cope with those specific dilemmas—by removing them or by some kind of compromise—or whether it falls before them; and, if it falls, whether there are grounds for believing that other types of philosophical interpretation can do a more satisfactory job. When we try to interpret the statements which men employ in explaining what goes on in the world and in their own careers, and in judging some things and some enterprises to be good and others evil, we typically (if we are simple-minded naturalists) distinguish (a) some locutions by which we express beliefs about the occurrence and qualities and relations of events, from (b) others by which we intimate (as in all statements we may illustrate) some of the customary or stipulated relations between certain kinds of symbols that we use in expressing beliefs, and from (c) still others by which we invite, command, or promise ourselves or others to follow certain rules, and (d) others by which we express approval, commendation, delight or their opposites. Additional uses, and nuances of uses, of locutions are, of course, inimitably numerous. This is a threadbare story. I will extend it only to suggest that no formal criterion will determine satisfactorily whether a set of noises, shapes, gestures or

Meaning whatever expresses anything whatever, and if anything, then whether it expresses some one of the sorts of things I have just named. Aristotle's dictum that expressions mean what they are used to mean—mean what those who use them intend to express by them—although now unfashionable, seems to me to be bedrock. I cannot see a way to reject the dictum in spite of all the warnings against psychologism delivered by the philosophers of ordinary language, some of whom invoke Frege's authority when they emphasize that we should concern ourselves with what sentences objectively mean, and not with the various things that you or I or any other persons may mean by them. As usual, the analysts of verbal usage have something to teach us. W e are reminded of Plato's apothegm that thinking is the conversation the psyche has with itself. We cannot say anything (or even think, if thinking is the entertaining of beliefs, true or false) except by using language, that is, by using some sets of things (images, feelings, sounds, shapes, whatever) so that they function as symbols—that is, in such a way that members of the sets refer to things other than themselves, indeed, in most instances to members of sets other than those sets of which the symbols are themselves members. One remembers Neurath's comparison of the predicament of critical intelligence with the predicament of sailors who have to reconstruct their ship while they are at sea and have nothing but the ship to keep them afloat. And some have added to the simile the harrowing

Meaning suggestion that while we stand on some timbers in order to repair others, our weight is likely to break the very timbers we stand on! Now it is generally true that no individual can, by laboring to make words mean what he wishes them to, change their recognized meanings very much. And any attempt to develop, or to present to others, a completely private language would drive one to madness. But these are not reasons for surrendering to a mystique of language. For what is the whole of language but millions of interacting persons using and altering the uses of words—and sometimes intentionally? T o protest so much that one is dealing with what words and sentences mean, apart from any intentions of one's own, and apart from any careful and fairly extensive empirical study of actual usage, arouses a certain amount of suspicion, as do most claims to uncommon purity, objectivity, and the like. We read Professor Ryle's assurances that, unless debauched by philosophy, we do not say of meritorious actions that they are done voluntarily or involuntarily: we may well ask whether a boy voluntarily broke the window or voluntarily injured the cat, but not whether he voluntarily or involuntarily did his arithmetic assignment correctly. "In this ordinary use, then, it is absurd to discuss whether satisfactory, correct, or admirable performances are voluntary or involuntary." 1 But Professor Austin, in "A Plea for Excuses," writes that "we 1

Gilbert Ryle, The Concept

'949). P· 7°·

of Mind (New York, Barnes and Noble,

Meaning may join the army or make a gift voluntarily. . . . "

2

O n e might well add the instance of the man proposed for a medal of honor for smothering a hand grenade with his body, thus saving the rest of his platoon. W o u l d it be a violation of the ordinary use of "voluntarily" to ask: did he accidentally stumble and fall on the grenade, or was his act voluntary self-sacrifice? Was he commanded to deal with the thing by his sergeant, or did he do it voluntarily? N o w R y l e and Austin each claims to be discussing, or illustrating, not the way he uses "voluntarily" and "involuntarily", but the way these adverbs are used in ordinary English. T h e i r discussions sharpen our attention to differences that are sometimes intended, and sometimes not, between the uses of "involuntarily,"

"unintentionally,"

"inadvert-

ently," and many other adverbs. B u t however much we may regret uses of these terms that do not distinguish them, where the terms are in fact (we may think unfortunately) used as synonyms they are synonyms, unless ordinary languages are conceived to have a transcendental life of their own. Must not R y l e or Austin or both be dealing with their own uses of some adverbs, or else with the uses of various minorities or majorities within the community of speakers of English? W h a t can be said for the conflicting claims of each to be illustrating ordinary

English usage?

T h e beauty of Neurath's simile is that it does justice to the enormous extent to which in all discourse we a J . L. Austin, " A Plea for Excuses," Proceedings Society (1956-57), p. 24.

of the

Aristotelian

$6

Meaning

have to depend upon custom, yet recognizes that no custom is sacrosanct—is de facto or de jure either universal or unalterable. It leaves room for the recognition that few empirically useful terms can be defined without allowing for openness of texture; and the recognition that such openness is itself highly variable but that there is no way to establish any general rule that, in specific instances, it may not be desirable to reduce the openness, or to extend it. So I remain on this issue an unregenerate Aristotelian: expressions mean what they are used to mean. And we all know perfectly well that sentences that are indicative in linguistic form may be, and often are, used to express commands, approval, delight, and much else besides descriptions and predictions. "You will sign as Assistant Director of the Laboratory," I heard a general in the Engineer Corps say some fifteen years ago. He used the future indicative, but that fact conveyed to me no slightest notion that he was making a prediction. And so of the grammatical indicatives by which we may assert the flowery lawn in Botticelli's "Primavera" to be delicious, Dr. Walter Reed's exposure of himself to yellow fever in order to test his hypotheses about its spread, to have been nobly altruistic; and the Grillers* playing of Beethoven's Second Rasoumofsky Quartet to have been the most interesting music that was to be heard in Berkeley last week. Some of these locutions could, of course, have been used simply as lyric cries; but in most cases I believe that they and others like them are used, if not exclusively as descriptive or pre-

Meaning

_J7

dictive of states of affairs, then as partly descriptive— as identifying (roughly or precisely) the sort of thing that is being commanded, approved, commended, delighted in, disapproved, or hated, and often also as intimating grounds (or the direction in which to look for grounds) that may justify the attitudes expressed. Of course, all sorts of transactions in the world besides human locutions and gestures are said to mean, and to mean in all sorts of ways. "Smoke," we say, "means fire," "Drinking the third cup of coffee means a sleepless night," "Tom's red face means a day's gardening in wind and sun," "the meaning of the array of pigments on a Renoir canvas is not their weight or temperature, but the joy of life expressed," and so on and on. There is no copyright on the word "meaning," although when we do say of anything that it means the causes or effects of its occurrence, or means the values that it embodies, we shall often avoid being misunderstood (by ourselves, as well as by others) if we will use the more explicit language of causes, effects, and evaluation. Nevertheless there are times, I think, when all of us are tempted to say that the whole meaning of indicative sentences is constituted by the observable practical effects produced by the utterance of them— utterance that may be audible, legible, or sotto voce. But the next minute we catch ourselves up: wasn't I aware of intending something by my statement regardless of the influence its utterance might have upon further events in the world? And is there anything I can say about the effects of utterances except by what

Meaning would be expressed through further sentences whose meanings are the complexes of events they are about, the complexes of events they describe and assert? T h e i r meanings, in other words, are not ordinarily the effects they may themselves produce. W e could, of course, in interpreting statements, try to talk exclusively in terms of what some have called the pragmatic dimension of meaning. B u t to render such an interpretation

itself

intelligible I think we would have to introduce as a sub-distinction, perhaps under other names, the very distinction between the effects of utterances on the one hand, and their sense and reference

on the

other,

which our pragmatic terminology would suggest we had discarded. Partly in the hope of avoiding such genetic and presuppositional fallacies as I discussed last week, many of us have argued that when a statement asserts anything not merely truistic " a b o u t the world," or when it is a kind of propositional function joined with an invitation (perhaps tacit) to give values to its variables so as to construct statements " a b o u t the world," it asserts (or else invites the assertion) of the occurrence

of

stretches of events with certain kinds of qualities and relations. Now such statements cannot be made true or false by anything usefully called "logic", or by any account of the histories that may have prompted m e n to make the statements (except in those special cases where the statements are about such histories), nor yet by appeals to controlling grounds, orders,

purposes,

categorial systems, distinct from the facts which

the

Meaning

jg

statements assert. "Snow is white" is true, if and only if snow is white. T h e r e seem to be excellent reasons for giving a certain priority to the kind of meaning expressed by such descriptive statements, because we employ sentences with such meanings when our purpose is to convey (as contrasted with producing) meanings in the sense of instances of cause-effect relations; and when our purpose is to describe and identify the sorts of objects approved and commended in value judgments; and also when our purpose is to specify the rules, or the kinds of enterprises, we seek to impose, or to encourage, by commands. Am I relying here on the so-called "verification notion of the meaning of statements" about which there was recently so much dispute? If we take verification in the literal etymological sense of "making true," then is it not a mere truism to say that what a statement asserts, if it asserts anything, is precisely that, the occurrence of which (or the being of which), qualitied and related as the statement asserts it to be, is what would make the statement true? "Snow is white" (the sentence), if it is not a partial definition of the word "snow", asserts that the complexes of events that constitute the occurrence of instances of snow include its being white, and if the events which it thus describes do so occur, then the sentence is true. But if, with some, we should take the verification of a sentence to mean those operations—like traveling to New Hampshire and looking at the ski slopes, or setting u p spectroscopes and other instruments by the functioning of which you

jfo

Meaning

and I might satisfy ourselves that snow is in fact mainly white—then it is a rather odd use of language, and on the whole a misleading one, to say that the methods of verifying synthetic indicative sentences (that is, the methods of satisfying ourselves of their truth or probability or falsity), constitute what the sentences mean. T h e statement "the first atomic-fission bomb exploded in New Mexico in July, 1945," may well be taken to mean that a gold-shuttered gadget was then and there detonated, and induced the very rapid chain-fission of a small quantity of a uranium isotope. If the statement is so taken, then what makes it true or false is precisely the occurrence or nonoccurrence of such events in the relations described. By contrast, the method of verifying (in the sense of satisfying us today of the truth of) the sentence would comprise searching and comparing records (laboratory and other), and testimony, old and new; cross-questioning witnesses; examining some of the fused sands at the alleged site of the explosion and measuring persistent, elevated radioactivity; and so on and on. But none of these kinds of investigation is likely to be what a man refers to when he utters the statement about the first explosion of an atomic-fission bomb. If one does mean to refer to such investigations, one would do better to say so. And if one intends to refer to "the meaning" not of the statement but (in another sense of "meaning") of the events which the statement asserts—such as the hopes, fears, anxieties, national policies, international tensions, etc. causally affected by the explosion—again, one had better say so.

Meaning

41

For most purposes, what we are able to learn about the truth or probability of a statement in the time we may have at our disposal may be much more important to us than the statement's actual truth. But we are likely to blur our judgment of the degree to which we have achieved confirmation of a belief if we confuse the notion of confirmation with the notion of truth, and if we confuse the two references of verification—that which makes a belief true, and that which may persuade us to accept a belief. It is, of course, quite obvious that declarative sentences are often uttered mainly with the purpose of instigating practical actions—"the snow in New Hampshire is deep, fine, and dry" may be uttered primarily with the purpose of prompting a man's friends to join him in a skiing excursion. But in order to discuss such purposes, and similarly in order to discuss the importance of various kinds of things men may mean by "meaning" and by "truth," we need to use sentences which assert that, the occurrence of which would make them true (or often more crucially and more simply, the nonoccurrence of any one of which would make them false), and not merely sentences that describe the methods by which we may go about satisfying ourselves of the truth or falsity of beliefs about the occurrence and relations of certain sorts of events. It is not necessary to emphasize here the peculiar importance of falsification, inasmuch as most logicians since the time of Aristotle have recognized that any general synthetic statement would require for its complete confirmation the truth of an

tf 2

Meaning

infinite

number

of

derived

particular

statements,

whereas it would be rendered false by the falsity of any one particular statement derived f r o m it. T h e lesson to be learned from such considerations is, I think, that no criterion of meaning, nor yet the application of any criterion, can justify us in saying that a set of sounds or shapes has a cognitive meaning, unless the application of the criterion amounts simply to the discovery that members of the set of sounds or shapes are in fact used by somebody

to name something,

or, m u c h more importantly, to assert something. Is anything significant added by the adverb "empirically" if we restrict synthetic indicative statements to empirically

verifiable statements, but still use verify in

the sense of " m a k e true" and not in the sense of "persuade us, or somebody else or everybody, of the truth of . . ."? If we have not read H u m e , or have not given the question much attention, we may think that the adverb "empirically" institutes a very drastic restriction—namely that it restricts synthetic indicative statements to meaning the sorts of qualitied and related occurrences of which, according to the best physiology and psychology available to us, we believe we are likely to become aware by means of our sense organs. B u t since anything accepted as serious physiology of the senses must itself be based on findings to date, we can never legitimately or even intelligibly regard it as r u l i n g out the possibility of anything whatsoever being noticed, and as thereby restricting the meaning of the phrase "empirically observable." Probably very few of

Meaning us are able to follow Spinoza so far as to argue, in any but a truistic sense, that all of God's infinite modifications under each of His infinite attributes must be immediately and intuitively cognized—must in fact fall under the attribute of thought. But how could any of us say of any mode, of any existent, that it could not be immediately noted? Only, I think by rigging our description of it in such a way that the report of its being noted would be (or would imply) a self-contradictory statement—as, for example, we might try to ask whether the whole of existence could be cognized, if the act of cognizing it is by definition not included in the totality of existents, and yet itself occurs and thus exists. Or we might surreptitiously identify "being observed" with "being observed by me," and then ask whether most throbs of pain can be observed since, by definition, most of them, if I experienced them, could not be other people's pains—that is, could not be confined to strands of experience other than my own. But why do we say that self-contradictory sentences are meaningless? By virtue of the application of some criterion? Or only by virtue of the fact, if it is a fact, that they simply do not assert anything? In order that we may understand a composite statement to be selfcontradictory, it would appear that its constituent sentences and the logical connectives that join them would all have to be meaningful—the sentences as asserting something, the connectives perhaps as inviting the performance of operations in conformity with rules. Is it then by virtue of anything that could usefully be called

44

Meaning

an empiricist (or a verificationist) criterion that we judge self-contradictory composites to be meaningless? Is it, for example, because they assert something that could not be noticed? Or is it because, for all their usefulness as lemmas in many sorts of proofs, they assert nothing if, and so far as, they are actually self-contradictory—if, that is, they are in fact used to retract precisely what they assert, and are used to do these things "simultaneously" in a relevant sense of that adverb? If a locution is in fact used to assert nothing, then it is not by reference to some criterion (empiricist, verificatory, or other) that it lacks indicative meaning. It lacks such meaning simply because in fact, and only if in fact, it does lack it. And adding the adjective "empirical" does not restrict the meaning of synthetic sentences, for there is no self-contradiction in saying of anything that it is cognizable, that it could be present to attention—as there is no self-contradiction in asserting of anything that it is in fact present to awareness, although, of course, this assertion may be false. We do well, of course, to base serious judgments of the probabilities as to what sorts of things will be cognized upon what we can learn of the present state of relevant scientific thought, always remembering what the past fifty years of fine-scale mechanics have taught us, if the ancient Pyrrhonists or David Hume had not already done the job—namely, that established probabilities foreclose no possibilities. Before leaving self-contradiction I believe I ought to enter a demurrer against interpreting the operator

Meaning

45

"not" to mean what is meant by "is false" when "not" is placed over the whole of such composites as "p and not-p", if that sort of composite is taken to assert and retract the same statement. The two kinds of occurrences of "not" do not seem to be fully synonymous— to mean the same or "to work the same way" (if we prefer that way of speaking). Such a composite to the extent that it retracts what it asserts—and only to that extent is it self-contradictory—seems to assert nothing and hence to be quite as incapable of being false as it is of being true. Therefore "not (p and not-p)" might better be taken as advice to reject as statements self-contradictory composites and \vhatever combinations of statements may be found to entail them, rather than as indicating that such composites are false. Taken in this sense, I do not see how we can talk intelligibly of rejecting the so-called Law of Contradiction—even, as Quine suggests we might, as a last desperate measure. On many interpretations of "not" the so-called Law of Excluded Middle is co-implicative, if not synonymous, with what are called the Laws of Contradiction and Identity and the rejection of one amounts to the rejection of all: "not both ρ and not-p" is taken to be equivalent to "at least one, not-p or p", and that equivalent to "p implies p" construed to mean "either not-p or else p." Now, as everyone knows, there appear to be an unlimited number of ways (or perhaps one way, if we define all of them by their purpose) to argue for the rejection of Excluded Middle and whatever may be co-implicative with it, and consequently the elimi-

46

Meaning

nation of apagogic demonstration and also of "falsifiability" as a factor in the cognitive meaning of nonanalytic statements. Following some mathematicians, one may, for example, mean by calling a statement true within a system that it has been logically derived or is logically derivable from the system's primitive propositions, and one may mean by calling a statement false that its negation has been so derived. And then, of course, we can distinguish a third class of statements, recognized (perhaps intuitively) as germane to the system, but not thus logically proved-or-disproved, and hence not to be called either true or false. It may be that at least one member of this third class (and if there is one, we can probably construct as many such members as we might wish) will not only not be proved true or false, but will not be provable to be what one has here chosen to call true or to call false either. If we proceed thus and have shown that the negative of some statement in the system is false, then not merely one alternative but at least two possibilities remain open. Some conclude that Excluded Middle must therefore be discarded, since the statement whose negative has been disproved may either be true (in the sense of logically derivable), or it may belong in the third class of statements that are neither true nor false in the defined senses of "true" and "false". People have, of course, constructed not only a considerable variety of three-valued systems but may construct logistics in which statements may have any set of 2 -f- η values. But whenever in any logistic system statements may

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fall into one of three classes, or into one of 2 -(- η classes, then it always seems perfectly sensible to contrast one class (say, that of statements to be called true) with the complex class of statements consisting, say, of the classes of false and of merely probable statements, or consisting of the class of disproved statements plus the class of undecided or undecidable statements, and hence within such systems Excluded Middle and all its equivalents would seem still to carry reasonable interpretations and to hold; for if a statement does not fall into one (which we might naively call "the simpler") class, then it will fall into the class that includes the various kinds that are "the rest" of the statements germane to the system. Some of the ablest of our contemporaries have shown us that many problems, generally called philosophical, are generated by the indefensible dogma that we must either affirm or deny any predicate of any substantive — f o r example, we must say of all that men do that it must be either intentional or unintentional, and so on. But what about breathing or digestion or the circulation of the blood? And if we find it unacceptable either to affirm or to deny intentionality of these transactions, some of the foes of Excluded Middle claim another victory for their cause. Others claim that what is wrong is rather a mixing of terms of different logical types— as, say, in both the assertion that the sunset is not virtuous and the denial that it is therefore vicious (if "vicious" means what is meant by "not virtuous"). But we cannot defend any general prohibition against mix-

Meaning ing in our statements terms of different logical types. For even the very advice not to mix terms like "sunsets" with terms like "virtuous" and "vicious" requires us to mix (in a useful way) terms of different type in order to express this advice itself. Sentences containing "good mixtures" of logical types (and all sentences must employ terms of diverse types) differ from those containing bad mixtures in that the first express, and the second fail to express identifiable theoretical meaning. And if we say " T h e sunset is neither virtuous nor yet not virtuous," it is not because we have discarded (or need to discard) Excluded Middle, but because we recognize that neither the assertion nor the denial says anything that is cognitively meaningful. Of course, just as sentences declarative in form are commonly used to express much that is other than description, report, and prediction, so sentences that are self-contradictory in form may be used to express assertions or attitudes that are quite free from any factor we would want to call contradiction. If I should say "Today is Monday but it is not Monday," I might thereby express such assertions as that the line at the top of today's newspaper carries the word "Monday," but also that Monday is the day on which I meet a seminar in Berkeley, but I am not doing that today. Not long ago a young man assured me that self-contradictory statements were by no means lacking in significance. He had, he said, been trying for a long time to convince a young woman that he recognized and appreciated her qualities, but without success until he began asserting that

Meaning she was really all women and yet not all women, but only one! The dilemma we seem to face with respect to meaning is this: is it at all satisfactory to talk about locutions as having cognitive meaning if we have not formulated a criterion of sentence-meaningfulness? And have we even approached the formulation of such a criterion when we have done no more than to say of various instances of what look like synthetic declarative sentences that each has cognitive meaning if and only if in fact it is used to assert some relations of qualitied events, such that the occurrence of such events in such relations would make the assertion true, and the nonoccurrence of any one (or all) of them would make the assertion false? We are often tempted to extricate ourselves from this predicament by restricting our consideration to a limited area, and saying of any locution that it is theoretically significant within an artificial language-system, L a , if and only if we can translate the locution into a well-formed sentence in that language. Or again, we may be tempted to say that an utterance is theoretically significant if and only if we can translate it into a well-understood indicative sentence in ordinary English or French or whatever "natural language" we mainly use. But must we not know that the locution asserts something, and what it is that it asserts, before we can thus translate it? And if that is the case, then it is a theoretically significant sentence whether we do, or even can, translate it into an acceptable sentence in L A

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(our artificial language), or in English, or in French. If it is a sentence, itself significant, that we are translating into another significant sentence synonymous with it, then how could we accept such translatability (or constructibility) as the determining criterion of significance? Is it satisfactory, for example, to say that sentences in the subjunctive mood are theoretically significant only if we can translate them into indicative sentences? Many regard that as the chief problem involved in interpreting counterfactual conditionals. What are we to say of the sentence " A specified unenclosed 10 cc. sample of water, W, at sea level pressure, would (contrary to fact) have the characteristics of steam, if (contrary to fact) it had been for five minutes and were now at a temperature of 105° C."? Can we translate this into indicatives? Yes, if we are willing to construe the counterfactual statement as an extrapolation from various causal laws, and as asserting that "If 'W is a 10 cc. portion of water unenclosed' (which is true or false), and if 'it has been and now is at a temperature of 105° C.' (which is true or false), then 'W has the characteristics of steam' (a statement that is true or false)." Similarly, if we should be willing to construe it as expressing predictions, similar in content to the extrapolation just formulated but future in tense. But notice that we can make these translations legitimately, if and only if, the original locution, although not indicative in form, was used to express precisely what

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these indicative sentences express, and hence the original locution was actually not counterfactual at all, not used as subjunctive but as indicative. Some advise us that we can avoid the alleged puzzles about counterfactual conditionals by construing them as actually predictions with respect to our expectings and findings—by construing the above statement, for example, as " I shall expect every instance of water unenclosed, at sea level and at a temperature of 105° C., to exhibit the characteristics of steam." But this would be to change the subject of discussion (which had not been my future doings, but the ways of water), as well as to assume that utterances subjunctive in form were actually being used to express indicative sentences. No, it is not as technically naturalistic or as empiricist, but as intelligent, that philosophical interpretation must avoid the fallacies that rise out of pretending that one thing can ever be reduced to, or be identical with, another. I despair of anyone's making sense of interpreting assertions of the form "If it were (though it is not) . . . then it would be (though it is not)" as equivalent to any sort of structure of true or false indicatives, and furthermore I cannot see why we should want so to interpret them any more than we should want to interpret prayers, commands, approvals, commendations as equivalent to true or false indicatives. If it is the case, as I suppose it is, that such locutions do in fact mean more and other than indicative sentences, then they do. Of course if we should wish (as I

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can't see why we should) to define the phrase "meaningful statement" as the name for a class of statements each of which either asserts (truly or falsely) the occurrence and relations of states of affairs, or else is analytically true or false by virtue of accepted definitions, then subjunctive and counterfactual conditionals, as well as the other sorts of locution just mentioned, would not be called "meaningful statements." Some recommend "saving the appearances" by saying that subjunctive utterances are in some respects like propositional functions—not statements themselves but indications of patterns that may be used to construct statements, and perhaps generally uttered as invitations so to use them. What we may learn from these considerations is, I think, a lesson whose application is very much wider than merely to the puzzles we have discussed. If anyone does choose to define the term "statement" or the phrase "meaningful statement," in such a way that only synthetic indicative sentences plus analytic sentences qualify as statements, or as meaningful statements, what is thus accomplished can be no more than his stipulation for the use of the defined terms. Consequently, subjunctive statements (including counterfactual conditionals) will resemble, and will differ from, what one has thus chosen to call "meaningful statements" not one whit more nor one whit less than they would if one had chosen, by definition, to include them in the class called "meaningful statements," but in doing so had avoided smuggling in any sort of denial of their differ-

Meaning ences from synthetic indicatives and from analytic sentences. This lesson applies, I believe, to a very wide range of theoretical conflicts. Where, for example, scientists (natural or social) or philosophers employ different conceptions of probability and different conceptions of evidence-relations, if each will make clear what he means by these notions, then it will be true for all that, in relation to any agreed set of data, one set of probability-statements will be justified on one set of conceptions of probability and of evidence, and others on others. But which set of conceptions should we adopt? If our purposes are serious, those the application of which, so far as our records go, have led to predictions most frequently confirmed—but always with a weather eye open to new evidence, and to new proportions of hits and misses in our predictions. All this depends, of course, on the proponents of different conceptions of probability and of evidence-relations agreeing upon sets of data; but if they cannot do this it will be impossible for them to say meaningfully even that they differ on any material issue, for it will be quite possible that they are simply talking about different things altogether. Diverse conceptions of probability and of evidencerelations may each of them, of course, be parts of much more extensive theoretical structures. But if we go beyond appreciating these structures aesthetically for their various sorts of logical elegance and simplicity and try to judge their truth or probability, have we any

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serious alternative except to test them as wholes (and nearly always this will have to be done part by part) by their consonance with further observation? Metaphysical conflicts appear to yield to the same solvent, if opposed metaphysics are opposed worldhypotheses. Any metaphysician can, of course, render his position invulnerable (although unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, empty) if he chooses to mean by his fundamental categories whatever there is. One remembers Santayana's writing that by "matter" he meant whatever exists! But if opposed metaphysicians mean different sorts of things by their basic categories, and if each will make usably clear what he thus means, then questions about the distribution, the causal efficacy, and so on of what each thus means by such categories will be seriously determined by exploring nature, and not by his, or by his opponents', choice of basic categories. If "mechanical balance" and "organic wholeness" are phrases used to mean sorts of things that differ, and if we know how they differ then instances of the first can be described and interpreted in terms of their similarities to and differences from instances of the second, or instances of the second can be described and interpreted in terms of their resemblances to, or differences from instances of the first, with equivalence of meaning although in different terminologies. y—V

For every aRb we can construct a synonymous bRa such that whatever justice one of these does to the evidence, and whatever explanatory power one of these has, the other also does, and has. If we don't know in

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what respects the fundamental categories of allegedly opposed metaphysical systems differ in meaning, then we don't know that the metaphysical systems differ or how they differ. And if one metaphysician claims, by virtue of his choice of categories or by virtue of his genius, to have access to evidence not accessible to others —as is the claim of various currently fashionable infallibilisms, whose proponents pity, and dismiss, their critics as cut off, poor things, from the relevant experience, as blind—if one metaphysician claims access to evidence inaccessible to others, then the disputants can not, in this respect, know each what the others are talking about, or what actual differences of belief or of interpretation, if any, divide them.

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When we try to determine the acceptability o£ an explanatory system, what is the significance for our purpose of the system's logical structure? What is the role of experiential confirmation? And what is the role of what have lately been called "extra-theoretical" factors? It is partly in the hope of understanding such factors in their relations to one another, but without confusing one with another or pretending to reduce one to another, that many philosophers rely heavily upon the distinction between, on the one hand, statements called synthetic, or contingent, or empirical, or material (but, of course, not therefore materialistic!), and, on the other hand, statements called analytic. Hegel and his followers, both of the right and of the left, have tried to soften or to eliminate the contrast between the empirical and the logical factors in discourse, between synthetic and analytic statements, by construing the differences between them as differences of degree. By their efforts they have undoubtedly taught us a good

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deal about the interplay of various factors; but the question whether such interplay involves the fusion of the factors in question or requires their distinction, is a question to which Leibniz and Hume and Kant, in their diverse idioms, gave one sort of answer; Hegel and his followers another. Philosophical naturalists are likely to rely on the distinction in their efforts to interpret satisfactorily, and to use, mathematical and logical statements, and formulations of causal laws, without crowding our conception of the world—our conception of what exists—with throngs of hypostatic entities, which some say must be the objects that mathematics is about, and must be the grounds that justify acceptance of causal laws. We have struggled with a few of the dilemmas that many insist are generated by interpreting the cognitive meaning of synthetic indicative sentences as those states of affairs which the sentences are used to assert, or are used to invite us to assert, as qualitied related occurrents. But much graver dilemmas lie ahead of us. Is it the economy and symmetry and elegance of the logical structure of an explanatory system that actual scientists regard as the justification for accepting it—that is, for preferring it to other systems? Recently it has been fashionable among many philosophers of science to answer this question with an emphatic "yes." And in taking the position they do, they are undoubtedly helping to correct extravagant operationalist views—and also empiricist views, if there is anyone who holds them, to the effect that explanation is either a mere blow-by-

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blow report of events observed or a mere generalization of the patterns of events thus reported. The "logical structuralists" have also called attention to what is, I think, a well-attested psychological fact: namely, that original and effective explanatory hypotheses are seldom if ever mechanical projections of patterns discerned in data, but are far more likely to be developed as ingenious constructions to establish some sort of symmetry or completeness or continuity or simplification in a system of hitherto accepted scientific statements. In this context, I believe that Whitehead's voice should always echo in our ears, warning us to "Seek simplicity but to distrust it!" The logical structuralists have also called attention to the fact that symmetrical and economical structures of scientific statements (prized, perhaps, mainly for their elegance by the ablest scientific workers) often yield, as extrapolations, hypotheses subsequently confirmed—hypotheses that, in all probability, would not otherwise have been developed. But in interpreting this last fact as if it showed that symmetry and completeness of structure somehow determined the acceptability of explanatory systems, philosophers of science seem to me really to be admitting that confirmation by experience—and confirmation of something, nota bene, that is quite different from any hypothesis about the structural elegance of a system—is actually the crucial step in the serious assessment of the acceptability of an explanatory system, whatever its logical structure may be like. Furthermore, sentences in any such system, perhaps taken together with some of their

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neighbors, while they may resemble propositional functions rather than assertions about specific states of affairs, would not yield such assertions, even when coupled with particular extra-systemic condition-statements, unless their terms referred to kinds of things that might or might not occur, but kinds of things quite other than the activity of formulating or appreciating a type of logical structure. As for the role of so-called "extra-theoretical" factors in relation to explanation: whatever Aristotle may have meant (and it is, of course, very hard to tell just what he did mean) by saying that it is wonder that generates theories about first principles, and that man by his nature desires to know, most of us would agree that practical needs and conflicts of one sort or another have a great deal to do with inducing us to do anything we would call recognizing problems or trying to solve them, and even with inducing us to go on and ask what look like second-order questions about what it means to speak of problem solving. What we shall be able to make, or what future scientists may infer, from what biochemists now tell us about sharp differentials of electro-chemical energy levels in neighboring tissue areas of men and other animals who are struggling with what we call problems, I cannot foresee. Although my late colleague Harold Chapman Brown used to tell me that such scientific developments would prove the identity of practical adjustment with theoretic explanation, I expect myself that, if they come about, they will change a part of the content of some of our questions

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rather than eliminate them. In any case, however much the purest of intellects may be concentrated on the truth or probability of an opinion, regardless of any so-called practical use that may be made of it, most of us would say that such practical relevance is a large and legitimate part of the importance of the opinion. If all the geologists and physicists and mathematicians at Columbia should concentrate their efforts for the next ten years on developing the best estimate they could of the number of crystals of silicon carbonate in twenty cubic miles of the soil under Butler Library, most of us would object, not to the claim to truth or probability made on behalf of the estimates they might reach, but to their lack of importance, in relation to other theoretical issues, and also in relation to practical choices bearing on the improvement of man's estate. But what are we to say when we are told that theories that living organisms develop from inanimate matter should be rejected because they imply a diminution of man's dignity; that quantum mechanics should be accepted because it makes room for free acts of volition; that Platonism reflects (and would be acceptable in) a rigidly structured class society, but pragmatism, empiricism, some sorts of naturalism only in a more flexible society; or that the serious confirmation of a scientific statement consists in its being accepted "by the scientists of one's culture circle"? What must we say of such notions? Should we say that turning to statements about the effects of various kinds of social influences upon the development and the de facto accep-

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tance or rejection of beliefs, in case the beliefs themselves are about anything other than those very social influences and their effects, is simply an instance of changing the subject of discussion from the meaning, truth, or probability of the beliefs in question to another interesting subject—namely, the influence of social factors upon men's developing and accepting such beliefs, and vice versa. It is of course possible to distinguish many sorts of activity that go by the name "reason." Reason as the development of beliefs about what goes on in the world, the development of the logical implicates of such beliefs, and the empirical testing of such implicates, we might label "Reason I" or "science." Its most characteristic statements claim a generality that extends beyond the evidence that has confirmed them and such statements are therefore all quite corrigible—they are probable only, and any extrapolation from them may turn out to be mistaken; although I do not think we can make strict sense of saying that the observations by which we control them are also only probable. The activity of exhibiting logical form more explicitly, and more generally, than we do when we formulate beliefs about the world and derive some of their implicates we carry out by formulating sentences vacuous of empirical reference although related to other similar sentences—and of course the expressions of all of these are visible or audible or tangible, or all three. Of such sentences, some state what is analytically necessary but neither excludes nor entails any empirical

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or synthetic statement. We might call this kind of activity, for brevity's sake, "Reason II", or "logic and mathematics." Now reflection on the differences and the similarities between the meaning, truth, and usefulness of scientific statements and statements of logic, and the activity of developing illustrations by which we try to bring home some of these differences to ourselves and others are activities sufficiently different from either science or logic to deserve a separate designation, say "Reason I I I " ; and surely they are at least a part of the work that deserves the name "philosophy." But it remains meaningful to ask: is it "reasonable" to rely on the fallible results of science, to stake our lives and fortunes on beliefs that could be mistaken? Is it "reasonable" to avoid confusing statements that differ in logical type? Is it "reasonable" to cooperate with our fellow men towards fuller but harmonious satisfactions of the basic needs of all? Can science establish the proposition that we ought to proceed scientifically? Only for those who mean by "truth" and "probability" something like what these terms are used to mean in science, and who also delight in such truth and prefer the consequences of relying on it to those of ignoring it. No scientific refutation would have any effect on the man who might say that the truth is whatever his blood tells him and that he will stick to this position (as some men have done) though he perish and the heavens fall. Can logic establish the proposition "discourse should be logical" if this is a synthetic

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statement? Only for those who want to say something— to assert something, for example, and not thereby deny it. But can logic deduce a categorical imperative: "Say something!"? If we say, as I think we should want to, that it is reasonable to develop systems of beliefs by the procedures of science and to alter them in the face of new evidence, and to guide our conduct in the light of such systems of beliefs, are we using "reasonable" in still a fourth sense—are we engaging in evaluation and moral judgment? But will the explanation of any of these four kinds of activity itself be an instance of reason as science, aided by the insights of logic and by the ordering devices of logic and mathematics, and by whatever clarification philosophical analysis may be able to effect? And will the conviction that doing any or all of these is justified, be expressed by a moral judgment that is itself something more than probable knowledge of causes and effects, something more than recognition of logical structure, and something more than appreciation of philosophical distinctions? A familiar story. But do those of us who have relied upon it really understand it? Can we claim really to distinguish analytic from synthetic statements? Is not, for example, the statement that, in relation to certain postulates and definitions, the Pythagorean theorem is analytically necessary—that is, if ABC is a right triangle then (quite apart from any observations or operations as of measurement), if we are employing the postulates and definitions of Euclid, the square on the

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hypotenuse of ABC must be equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides—is not this complex statement really itself synthetic and fallible, as depending on now remembering and now using what we call postulates and definitions as they were in fact meant when they were set up, and so on and on? And consider the man who says that "snow is white" is a synthetic statement. Does he know what he means by the word "snow"? And if he does, isn't it likely that he includes having the property of whiteness under certain sorts of illumination as part of what he means by "snow"? Can we be sure? Can he be sure? And if not, is not his statement as likely to be analytic as the geometer's is to be synthetic? These questions are not very troublesome, since it is easy to recognize, as very likely being itself synthetic, any second-order judgment that a given sentence is analytic, or is being used analytically. But this fact does not annul the distinction between the two sorts of sentences. In fact it depends upon our using the distinction. T h e more searching question seems to be: Just what do we mean when we call some sentences "analytic" and when we call others "synthetic"? I know of no advantages that would justify answers more technical than those given by my distinguished predecessor as Woodbridge Lecturer, Professor Clarence Lewis: analytic statements he described as statements "such as can be assured, finally, on grounds which include nothing beyond our accepted definitions and the principles of logic. And statements belonging to logic are themselves

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analytic; hence capable of being certified from the definitive meanings of the constant terms constituent in them, and the syntactic relations of these which they express".1 The truth of analytic statements, he goes on to say, is "independent of any and every empirical fact," and it holds "not only of what happens to be the case in actuality, but of all things thinkable and in all conceivable circumstances." For example, "that S is Ρ or S is not Ρ . . . holds for any S and Ρ which the most untrammeled imagination could conjure up, provided only the imagining be self-consistent"; 2 so also would "All biped birds are bipeds." 3 And Lewis concludes that analytic knowledge is the only kind of a priori knowledge. Empirical statements Lewis describes as those that could be rendered true only by the occurrence of events having the characteristics they assert; and our grounds for believing them true, experiences of two sorts, one of which he calls terminating, the other non-terminating. "If I turn my head to the right, my visual field will shift to the left," is a terminating judgment because it will be confirmed (or disconfirmed) once and for all by the experience I have when I turn my head. Nonterminating judgments are those of which we can never assure ourselves by a single or by a finite number of experiences. "All gases . . . expand when heated" and even, for Lewis, "A piece of white paper is here before 1 C . I. Lewis, An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation (La Salle, III., Open Court, 1946), p. 96. 'Ibid, p. 123. 'Ibid, p. 125.

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me" are examples o£ statements that can be rendered more and more probable by experimental tests although they will always remain subject to the possibility of error and therefore of revision no matter how many experimental tests may be made. But each one of the individual tests is for Lewis terminating. Presumably by assuming (and only by assuming) that relevant events and experiences are finite in number, he says it is certain and not merely probable that the beliefs tested grow more probable as the tests increase in number and consilience. A n d Lewis regards the "hiatus . . . between immediate sense presentation and objective reality thus evidenced . . . [as] not the denial that the content of presentation may be 'numerically identical' with a part or aspect of the objective reality, but the denial that it is ever the whole of the objective reality believed in." 4 But can we satisfactorily explicate such statements as I have quoted from C. I. Lewis? Luckily, there is no need for me to try to make out the case for answering " n o , " for Professor Quine has done this in our time, and he has done it in a way that most of us probably understand better than we do the versions of Hegel or Marx or Bradley. As everyone knows, Quine has insisted that every explication of the analytic so far offered has either (1) used terms like "definition", "meaning", "synonymy", "necessity", each of which has either been left unexplained or has been explained in terms of what is allegedly meant by "analyticity", or else 'Ibid.,

p. 187.

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(2) has exhibited trivial analyticity as no more than stipulated substitutability in an artificial language, and has then recklessly pretended, by analogy, to make sense of analyticity in natural languages and in sets of scientific sentences. Luckily also, there is no need for me to point out what Mates, Grice, and Strawson have made clear—that in rejecting explications of analyticity Quine uses a norm of satisfactory explanation, not itself well explicated, but nevertheless such that he alleges that no explication of analyticity (and we must add, probably no explication of any other fundamental logical notion) would be possible. In other words it is by virtue of what he seems to mean by the phrase "an explication" that an explication of analytic is impossible, and if this interpretation of his argument is correct, then his position would seem to be itself the content of an analytic sentence. Quine seems also to rely upon the dogma that any notion, or any sort of sentence, that we cannot completely explicate (in his unexplicated sense of "explicate") we therefore do not understand—indeed, we use quite senselessly the symbols that purport to name it or to express it. If it should be true that every example we are able to find of what we would want to call "discourse" uses symbols as meaning, and if discussion of the analyticsynthetic distinction is itself carried out by using symbols as meaning (and each as meaning something other than itself), then of course that discussion (whether by Quine or his critics) will itself rely upon the analyticity

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(as described by Lewis) which it aims to deal with. Oftener than not, what prevents our recognition of this fundamental point is either the too rigid and restrictive (and hence unacceptable) definition of some of the terms used in discourse, or the "correction" of that rigidity by denying that any limits are, or can be, legitimately set to the meanings of terms used in "ordinary" languages as contrasted with the artificial constructs of logistic. We must indeed recognize the fact that few empirically useful terms can be defined without allowing for what has recently been called "openness of texture." But that such allowance must stop short of unlimited openness was, I think, sufficiently made out by Aristotle in Metaphysics Γ. T h e openness of texture of meaning of symbols in actual usage varies greatly from one symbol to another, and there is no way to rule out the possibility that in some instances great advantages may be gained by agreeing to reduce the openness of texture of the meaning of a symbol. Charles L . Stevenson's essay towards a definition of the term " p o e m " is an excellent example of how one may do justice to the need for open texture and still use a key symbol with agreed meaning. But when we come right down to it, what do we mean by a word or by a concept, as contrasted with a sentence, when we say that by virtue of its meaning, and that of some other term (or of some other terms), a sentence is analytic—for example, "If X is a Euclidean square, it is not merely probably, but is necessarily, true that its sides are equal"?

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Some answer that the notion of meaning in extension is "crystal clear": "ship" means the collection whose members are the Queen Mary, the Constitution, the Cristoforo Colombo, and so on; and "square" means the collection of specific applications of a rule or of a set of rules. But intensional meaning? Is that a mentalistic ghost? Or a Platonic hypostasis? In fact, if the classes of ships and of squares are not to be limited to some smallish collections, can we make sense of meanings-in-extension without relying on the intensional meanings of the terms "ship" and "square", as complex "properties" the possession of which, and only the possession of which, will make further particular existents, and further particular applications of rules, members of the classes named by "ship" and "square" respectively? In some cases, flying in the face of current fashions, it seems to me fair to say that we may have such properties in mind in the sense of having in conscious attention the property, or a good deal of the property, by which we determine membership in a class. Of course I have no way of determining with certainty whether Hans, when he uses the term Pferd, has anything in mind, let alone that he has in mind something approximating the complex of properties I mean by "being a horse"—or indeed whether you mean by "horse" approximately what I do. I can only ask Hans (or you) to talk about, and if possible to sort out, what I would call zebras and mules and dogs and elephants and horses and also the heads, tails, ears, and legs of what I call "horses," and see whether his uses,

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whether his observable manipulations of sets of sounds and shapes approximating Pferd, approximate what I do with sounds and shapes resembling "horse". And similarly of the question whether you mean by "horse" what I do. Now if it were merely an artificial construction to simplify explanation (and this it need by no means do), we could leave out all references to Hans's having, or my having, from time to time intended characteristics in attention—even in imagination. But felt intendings are not always such constructions. They are found in at least one man's experience. Accompanying a prolonged postponement of feeding, and preceding as well as accompanying anything I can specify as efforts to find or to prepare food, I often have experience of hunger and various images of sorts and qualities of foods and of eating, as well as experience of imgined, sotto voce, or audible talking about sorts and qualities of food. Moreover I make some use of the notions I have thus in mind when I accept bread but decline stones. And when I help plan next spring's garden, my imagining of certain shades and heights of ixias near the scillas, of certain structured shades of freesias near certain structured shades of azaleas, is involved in what I should have to include in an honest description of my agreeing (or disagreeing) with my wife's proposals. Of course much, much more than nine tenths of the iceberg of events that we suppose go on in naming, thinking, choosing, accepting, rejecting, is probably submerged under the water—is not conscious. But at critical moments (really critical moments,

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such as those at which I have to decide, or w h e n I imagine that I decide, which bulbs to plant where), I should not know what I was talking to myself (or to my wife) about if structured colored imagery (as well as words, part of whose meaning depends u p o n

the

imagery) didn't emerge into my attention. I suggest that imagery is not merely the accompaniment of meaning, or a factor sometimes psychologically "necessary" to meaning (as breathing,

for example, may be neces-

sary to living or to thinking), but that imagery may in some cases constitute a qualitied structure the like of which we mean by a class name. A n d in some cases (e.g., unicorns and griffins) it and its like may be the only instances we have. I think it is time to rehabilitate the respectability of directly noted qualitied structures and of felt intendings! W e have all been so impressed by the extravagance of Berkeley's writing and H u m e ' s writing (although on occasion each corrected himself) as if we could not talk or think intelligently unless we had

in attention an idea or impression named

by

each of the words we might use in "expressing" o u r thoughts, that we have gone off the other equally deep end and been frightened into talking as if there were something superstitious, or even disgraceful, about mentioning

immediate

felt

intendings,

sentiments,

and

imagery unless we construed all such talk as referring to the publicly observable behavior of ourselves, of other people, and of rats (who are, say, restless w h e n unfed, as well as ravenous when delayed food is presented to t h e m ) — t h e publicly observable behavior of

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people who utter sounds like "red tulips near white scillas," "rosy tulips near lavender violas and white alyssum," and finally come to rest after making such audible sounds and manipulating things taken from boxes and envelopes with various markings on them. It won't help to say that what one has in mind when one is looking for (or trying to produce) instances of specific configurations of colors or shapes or sounds— or of all of these as in an expected passage of a b a l l e t — must be construed in terms of having in mind and looking for sets of public pointer readings without reference to other conscious imagery. For such a suggestion is true only if there is something in conscious attention, and it precipitates the question how anyone expects or recognizes pointer readings except as instances of some kind of qualitied structures of contrasting hues or pitches, or clicks, or pressures on one's finger tips, and so on and on. Of course nobody can know for certain whether others do or do not at times have in attention structured images and structured rules of operation—when, for example, others assure him that they are imagining unicorns and not griffins (two classes whose extension, on one rendering, is the same) and are not merely using the words "unicorn" and "griffin" with their customary syntax; or when someone tells him that a sample of wallpaper differs in color from what he has in mind. Some say that what such statements as this last report is some kind of vague uneasiness or discomfort that is felt and that persists until, say, further sortings of

The

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7_j

samples leads to a relatively quiet equilibrium. But such discomfort, if felt, no matter how vague it may be, is itself no different in epistemological status from conscious structured imagery, and reference to the latter is quite as defensible as reference to the former. None of us can be sure that others know what he means, or that he knows what others mean, when he discusses with them questions about the content of experience. But an attempt to restrict meanings to specific, publicly observed references would offer us no escape unless every symbol as used by anybody were to be restricted in its meaning to whatever each person ostensively indicates is at the moment named by it as by a proper name. This we cannot do when we talk of griffins and unicorns; and it is doubtful that we can do it with respect to logical rules. If we rely on notions of felt intending as entering into the meanings of terms and of statements, no greater tax is put on our credulity than in the case of a man who believes that others (as well as himself) feel something like what he calls pain. T h e fact that no one can know with certainty that another feels what he means by "pain", and that the so-called inductive argument from observed similarities of physiological processes and of overt behavior would need, to give it logical cogency, at least one instance where these similarities were observed to be correlated with similar feelings in the conscious careers of two persons—these facts do not require us to say that beliefs about other peoples' feelings and conscious intendings are meaningless or are

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false. For if anybody knows, even vaguely, what he means by "pain," and if he knows even vaguely what kind of stream of rememberings and expectings, of strivings and movements, he means in part by references to himself, and if he knows ;vhat he means by the number "two," then he can make perfectly good sense of a belief that there is a second, and indeed a third and an nth instance of a flow of rememberings and expectings and movements in which experienced pains and also pleasures, images, and felt intendings are ingredients. As Hume wisely said of the existence of objects out of attention, and indeed of precisely such objects as anyone may be aware of—such existence is entirely possible, there is no way of proving or disproving it, and we naturally believe in it. T h e belief reflects what Santayana called "animal faith" as distinguished from inductive or deductive derivation. It certainly reminds us that if no one can be sure that another besides himself enjoys the images with "flash upon that inward eye that is the bliss of solitude," none of us has any grounds for denying that others do. T o suggest that by employing something like special isotopic nourishment of ourselves and others, and something like more sensitive fluoroscopes, we might observe other people's pains—experience them as they do —is on all fours with proposing that if we search the skies with better telescopes, perhaps with radiotelescopes, we may notice somewhere the Aristotelian or the Whiteheadian deity. Boundless epistemological ingenuity has been de-

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voted to the so-called problem of the reliability of immediate noting. Do things exist as we note them, or at least with a structure (if not with other qualities) like that we notice, or merely as capable of causing our perceptions. In one mood (as we have seen in the case of Bertrand Russell) a man will argue for the extreme improbability of any resemblance between perceptions that are supposedly the result of exceedingly complicated physical, physiological, and psychological processes and the occurrences, if any, that stimulated these. In another mood the same man—impressed by the fact that in spite of the great complexity of all that goes on when a man's voice is recorded on and then reproduced from a magnetic tape, he nevertheless finds a close resemblance between what he hears when he listens to his friend sing and when he listens to the taped reproduction of his friend's singing—the belief that the world out of our attention resembles what we immediately experience at least as closely as does the experience of hearing one's friend sing and hearing the record of his song. We are often tempted to resolve this dilemma by saying that "inner" and "outer" refer to contrasts within experience, and not to a contrast between experience and what may proceed independently of it—contrasts like that between the pleasure-toned experience of a picture in a context of rememberings and expectings, and the neutrally experienced hook in the wall from which the picture hangs. But few of us want to stretch the notion of experience to the point where we should have to say not merely that everything

j6

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is in principle experiencable, but also that everything is in fact experience—to the point where the notion of experience could have no negative, no opposite. And if we are at all careful in discussion of the reliability of perception, we shall certainly not interpret the variations of reported perceptions as between different observers and at different times for the same observer, as if they implied that perception is as such untrustworthy. No perception can be said to be overruled by another unless one makes the extravagant assumption that what is noted here and now must be identical with something that is noted elsewhere and at another time, or with whatever is noted anywhere else and at any other time by oneself or another person. If such variations as occur really justified us in saying that perception is untrustworthy, then we would have no grounds for accepting the perceived variations themselves, or for taking them seriously as grounds for philosophical distrust of perception. T h e time has come, I think, to take more seriously such factors as felt intendings and the immediate awareness of qualities to which David Prall and Santayana gave so much emphasis, and which some older empiricists and some introspectionist psychologists n o doubt blew u p into fantastic fictions. I think we need to take them seriously because they are found to occur— this statement may be soliloquy, but it certainly need not be—and because they may often be involved when we have in mind what we mean by a symbol, what we

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are looking for, which specific hypothesis (from a wide range of hypotheses, or from what has lately been discussed as "the whole body of science") we are aiming to confirm, what would and what would not be acceptable confirmation of it, and what certifies some statements analytically, or constitutes their being analytic. One alternative, of course, is that of Bergson (and perhaps nowadays of Quine): to construe existence, except as we categorize it by whatever contingent categories happen to be used in our culture circle, as so fluid that one statement about it is as good (or rather as bad) as any other—except, of course, that to call it fluid is itself illegitimately to categorize it and to contrast it with whatever would be meant by "non-fluid." And on that view we should never be able to know (in the categorial sense) what it meant to say that existence itself is fluid, and we should also not be able to know what it would mean to speak of categorial systems other than our own, or to assert or to deny that statements in one categorial language could be translated into another. If we think that we do make sense of the analyticsynthetic distinction and of the meanings of terms and of statements, by virtue of which some cognitive statements are analytic and others are synthetic, we may then ask ourselves what we could mean by saying that the acceptability of a belief, or a system of beliefs, is determined by its logical structure, or by saying that certain synthetic statements, if true or probable, imply or presuppose necessary truths about transempirical

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