If truth exists and is attainable by man - on language

 In recognizing that words have power to define and to compel, the semanticists are actually testifying to the philosophic quality of language which is the source of their vexation. In an attempt to get rid of that quality, they are looking for some neutral means which will be a nonconductor of the current called “emotion” and its concomitant of evaluation. They are introducing into language, in the course of their prescriptions, exactly the same atomization which we have deplored in other fields. They are trying to strip words of all meaning that shows tendency, or they are trying to isolate language from the noumenal world by ridding speech of tropes.

Let us consider an illustration from Hayakawa’s Language in Action, a work which has done much to put the new science before the public. It is easy to visualize a social situation, the author tells us, in which payment to unemployed persons will be termed by one group of citizens “relief” and by another “social insurance.” One can admit the possibility, but what lies behind the difference in terminology? The answer is: a conception of ends which evaluates the tendency of the action named. The same sort of thing is encountered when one has to decide whether the struggle of the American colonists against Great Britain should be termed a “rebellion” or a “war for independence.” In the first case, the bare existential thing, the payment of money to needy persons (and it will be noted that this translation does not purify the expression of tendency) is like anything else neutral as long as we consider it solely with reference to material and efficient causes. But, when we begin to think about what it represents in the totality, it takes on new attributes (emotional loading, these may be called) causing people to divide according to their sentiments or their metaphysical dream.

It is in such instances that the semanticists seem to react hysterically to the fear of words. Realizing that today human beings are  in disagreement as never before and that words serve to polarize the conflicting positions, they propose an ending of polarity. I have mentioned, earlier, people who are so frightened over the existence of prejudice that they are at war with simple predication. The semanticists see in every epithet a prejudice.

The point at issue is explained by a fundamental proposition of Aquinas: “Every form is accompanied by an inclination.” Now language is a system of forms, which both singly and collectively have this inclination or intention. The aim of semantics is to dissolve form and thereby destroy inclination in the belief that the result will enable a scientific manipulation. Our argument is that the removal of inclination destroys the essence of language.

Let us look more closely at the consequence of taking all tendentious meaning from speech. It is usually supposed that we would then have a scientific, objective vocabulary, which would square with the “real” world and so keep us from walking into stone walls or from fighting one another over things that have no existence. Actually the result would be to remove all teleology, for language would no no longer have nisus, and payment to the needy would be neither “relief” nor “social insurance” but something without character, which we would not know how to place in our scheme of values. (The fact that equalitarian democracy, to the extent that it makes leadership superfluous or impossible, is repudiating teleology must not be overlooked here. Teleology enjoins from above; equalitarian democracy takes its counsel without point of reference. The advantage of semantics to equalitarian democracy is pointed out by some semanticists.)

Hayakawa has said further that “arguments over intensional meaning can result only in irreconcilable conflict.” 2 With the proper qualifications, this observation is true. Since language expresses tendency, and tendency has direction, those who differ over tendency can remain at harmony only in two ways: (1) by developing a complacency which makes possible the ignoring of contradictions and (2) by referring to first principles, which will finally re move the difference at the expense of one side. If truth exists and is attainable by man, it is not to be expected that there will be unison among those who have different degrees of it. This is one of the painful conditions of existence which the bourgeoisie like to shut from their sight. I see no reason to doubt that here is the meaning of the verses in Scripture: “Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division” and “I bring not peace, but a sword.” It was the mission of the prophet to bring a metaphysical sword among men which has been dividing them ever since, with a division that affirms value. But amid this division there can be charity, and charity is more to be relied on to prevent violence than are the political neofanaticisms of which our age is signally productive. Positivism cannot grant theology’s basis of distinction, but neither can it provide a ground for charity.

When we look more narrowly at the epistemological problem raised by the semanticists, we conclude that they wish to accept patterns only from external reality. With many of them the notion seems implicit that language is an illusion or a barrier between us and what we must cope with. “Somewhere bedrock beneath words must be reached,” is a common theme. Some talk about achieving an infinite-valued orientation (this last would of course leave both certitude and the idea of the good impossible). Mr. Thurman Arnold, who seems to have assimilated most of the superficial doctrines of the day, takes a stand in the Folklore of Capitalism even against definition. He argues that every writer on social institutions “should try to choose words and illustrations which will arouse the proper mental associations with his readers. If he doesn’t succeed with them, he should try others. If he is ever led into an attempt at definition, he is lost.” On the same footing of ingenuousness is another observation in this work: “When men begin to examine philosophies and principles as they examine atoms and electrons, the road to the discovery of the means of social control is open.” The author of Political Semantics, fearful of the intervention of abstractions, suggests that the reader, too, add something to the defi nition given, a notion savoring strongly of progressive education. “Possibly the reader himself should participate in the process of building up a definition. Instead of being presented with finished summary definitions he might first be introduced to an array of examples arranged in such a way as to suggest the ‘mental picture’ in terms of which the examples were chosen.” 3 There is just enough here to suggest the Socratic method; but the true implication is that there are no real definitions; there are only the general pictures one arrives at after more or less induction. The entire process is but a climbing-down of the ladder of abstraction.

Now whether it is profitable to descend that ladder is certainly not a question to be begged. Semanticists imagine, apparently, that the descent is a way out of that falsity which universality imposes on all language. Do we know more definitely what a horse is when we are in a position to point to one than when we merely use the name “horse” in its generic significance? This concerns one of the most fundamental problems of philosophy—one on which we must take a stand; and I am ready to assert that we can never break out of the circle of language and seize the object barehanded, as it were, or without some ideational operation.

It must surely be granted that whatever is unique defies definition. Definition then must depend on some kind of analogical relationship of a thing with other things, and this can mean only that definition is ultimately circular. That is to say, if one begins defining a word with synonyms, he will, if he continues, eventually complete a circuit and arrive at the very terms with which he started. Suppose we allow Korzybski, who has been especially restive in what appears to him the imprisoning net of language, to testify from his experiments: “We begin by asking the ‘meaning’ of every word uttered, being satisfied for this purpose with the roughest definition; then we ask the ‘meaning’ of the words used in the definition, and this process is continued for no more than ten to fifteen minutes, until the victim begins to speak in circles as, for instance, defining ‘space’ by ‘length’ and ‘length’ by ‘space.’ When  this stage is reached, we have usually come to the undefined terms of the given individual. If we still press, no matter how gently, for definitions, a most interesting fact occurs. Sooner or later, signs of affective disturbance appear. Often the face reddens; there is body restlessness—symptoms quite similar to those seen in a schoolboy who has forgotten his lessons, which he ‘knows’ but cannot tell. . . . Here we have reached the bottom and the foundation of all non-elementalistic meanings, the meanings of undefined terms, which we ‘know’ somehow but cannot tell.”

Taking the experiment as Korzybski recounts it, I would wish to ask whether this schoolboy who has forgotten his lessons is not every man, whose knowledge comes by a process of recalling and who is embarrassed as by ignorance when he can no longer recall? He is here frustrated because he cannot find any further analogues to illustrate what he knows. Any person, it seems, can be driven back to that knowledge which comes to him by immediate apprehension, but the very fact of his possessing such knowledge makes him a participant in the communal mind. I do not desire to press the issue here, but I suspect that this is evidence supporting the doctrine of knowledge by recollection taught by Plato and the philosophers of the East. If we can never succeed in getting out of the circle of definition, is it not true that all conventional definitions are but reminders of what we already, in a way, possess? The thing we have never heard of is defined for us by the things we know; putting these together, we discover, or unbury, the concept which was there all the while. If, for example, a class in science is being informed that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” it is only being asked to synthesize concepts already more or less familiar. Finding the meaning of the definiendum is finding what emerges naturally if our present concepts are put together in the right relation. Even empirical investigations of the learning process bear this out. Such conclusions lead to the threshold of a significant commitment: ultimate definition is, as Aristotle affirmed, a matter of intuition. Primordial conception is somehow in us; from this we proceed as  already noted by analogy, or the process of finding resemblance to one thing in another. 4All this has bearing on our issue with semantics because words, each containing its universal, are our reminders of knowledge. For this reason it seems to me that semanticists are exactly wrong in regarding language as an obstruction or a series of pitfalls. Language, on the contrary, appears as a great storehouse of universal memory, or it may be said to serve as a net, not imprisoning us but supporting us and aiding us to get at a meaning beyond present meaning through the very fact that it embodies others’ experiences. Words, because of their common currency, acquire a significance greater than can be imparted to them by a single user and greater than can be applied to a single situation. In this way the word is evocative of ideal aspects, which by our premises are the only aspects constituting knowledge. On this point I shall call as my witnesses two men as far apart as Shelley and a contemporary psychologist. The poet writes in Prometheus Unbound:

Language is a perpetual Orphic song,

Which rules with Daedal harmony the throng 

Of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were.

Wilbur Marshall Urban declares in Language and Reality: “It is part of my general thesis that all meaning is ultimately linguistic and that although science, in the interests of purer notation and manipulation, may break through the husk of language, its nonlinguistic symbols must again be translated back into natural language if intelligibility is to be possible.” 5

The community of language gives one access to significances at which he cannot otherwise arrive. To find a word is to find a meaning; to create a word is to find a single term for a meaning partially distributed in other words. Whoever may doubt that language has this power to evoke should try the experiment of thinking without words.

It has been necessary to make these observations because our subject is the restoration of language, and semantics has appeared to some a promising departure toward scientific reconstruction. In its seeking of objective determination, however, it turns out to represent a further flight from center. It endeavors to find the truth about reality in an agglomeration of peripheral meanings, as can be seen when its proponents insist on lowering the level of abstraction. This is only an attempt to substitute things for words, and, if words stand, in fact, for ideas, here is but the broadest aspect of our entire social disintegration. Here would be a vivid example of things in the saddle riding mankind. For the sake of memory, for the sake of logic—above all, for the sake of the unsentimental sentiment without which communities do not endure—this is a trend to be reversed. Those who regard the synthesizing power of language with horror are the atomists.

From: IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES

EXPANDED EDITION

Richard M. Weaver