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VOLUME 81
MIHAILO MARKOVIC
Universities of Belgrade and Pennsylvania
DIALECTICAL THEORY
OF MEANING
DORDRECHT/BOSTON/LANCASTER
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Introduction
on. We need not all be Marxists to see the significance ofthese tasks. Karl Marx
once wrote, "language is practical consciousness", and Wittgenstein that "to
imagine a language means to imagine a form of life". But life, praxis, is prima-
ry; for Markovic, then, it is clear that meaning will not be found in form, not
even in 'a form oflife', but in the intentionality of human practice, in 'practi-
cal consciousness'.
March 1984
At the time when this book was published, in 1961, the problem of meaning
was almost entirely new to Marxist philosophers. There were two exceptions,
however. Important contributions to th~ philosophy of language were made
by the Russian philosopher and psychologist Bakhtin, but they were unknown
outside the small circle of his friends. (He published some of his works under
the name of his colleague Voloshinov.) Another Marxist philosopher who
was interested in the field and was very well acquainted with the Western
literature was Adam Schaff. While I was writing this book he was preparing
his Introduction to Semantics.
My interest in the problem of meaning was aroused by two years of study
with A. J. Ayer at University College, London, in 1953-54 and 1955 -56.
I wrote a doctoral dissertation on the concept of logic, a part of which was
a discussion of the problem of meaning. Coming back to the University of
Belgrade in September 1956 I started teaching a course in the theory of
meaning, and a few months later decided to write a book on that topic.
The writing took two years, 1957-59.
The book was well received in Yugoslavia, received a national award for
scholarship in 1962, and had two editions. Some Soviet logicians decided
to translate it into Russian, and it was accepted for publication by the
publishing house Progress. The Soviet logician Gorski wrote an extensive
introduction. In 1969, when it was already printed, its distribution was
stopped for political reasons.
Why could this work be of any interest to Anglo-American readers with a
delay of more than two decades?
First, it is very different from theories of meaning elaborated within
dominant Anglo-American philosophical currents such as logical empiricism,
philosophy of ordinary language, realism and pragmatism. It has been devel-
oped on essentially different philosophical foundations, and even within
Marxist philosophy these do not have much in common with the philosophy
of official Marxism with its uncritical, pre-Kantian materialism and vulgarized
dialectics.
Second, the analysis of meaning developed in this book was very critical
of the linguistic behaviorism that prevailed in analytical philosophy during
ix
x PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION
'"
In all existing theories of meaning the entire approach to problems of symbol-
ism, language and communication has been largely determined by the kind
of philosophy previously accepted.
Nominalism has led towards an investigation of the relations of signs
toward other signs. According to Ayer in 1947, "to say what a symbol means
is not to bring it into a relation with some objects, but to interpret it in
terms of other symbols." 1 This conception of meaning was developed by
the formalistic school of mathematical logic (Hilbert, Bernays, Ackermann)
and by the logical syntax of language approach in one phase of the develop-
ment oflogical empiricism. 2
Various forms of behaviorism and pragmatism directed the inquiry of
meaning toward the study of relations between symbols and practical actions.
One of the most important theories of meaning that emerged on that phil-
osophical ground was the late Wittgenstein's view of meaning as the use of
words in certain contexts and situations. 3 Here the search for meaning is
restricted to the narrow sphere of linguistic behavior ("language game").
For Charles Sanders Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, the meaning of a
sign is constituted by the sum of all its practical consequences. 4 Along the
same line Dewey developed his instrumentalist theory according to which
meaning is,a method of action, an instrument of practical action. 5
Empiricism, by virtue of its basic' epistemological principle that all knowl-
edge derives from sensory experience, reduced the field of meaning to the
relation of signs and certain immediate, intersubjective experiences. The
meaning of a proposition is the method of its verification. 6 The theory was
exceedingly restrictive, and it was revised and improved several times during
PREF ACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION xi
the Forties and Fifties: various possibilities of its formulation were explored
in terms of verifiability, testability, confirmation, translatability into em-
piricallanguage, etc. The basic idea of construing meaning in terms of sensory
experience was retained, and its restrictiveness only reflects the narrowness of
the starting philosophical assumption.
Transcendental idealism, the view that certain a priori forms of thought
are constitutive of all experience and all knowledge, resulted in a conception
of meaning in terms of the concept that is expressed by the term. Accord-
ing to Casssirer, existence of mind precedes the existence of symbolic forms.
In the flux of experience, mind establishes constant relations among all
the elements of a sensory sequence and creates the symbol in order to fix
those relations. Thus the creation of a symbol "does not generate meaning,
it only stabilizes it and applies it to a special case."7
Realism presupposes an objective being that is independent of conscious-
ness and prior to the symbolizing function. Meaning is, then, relation to being.
Various realist philosophers interpret being in different ways: it could be con-
stituted by particular material objects (materialists, naive realists) or by ideal
essences and values (eidos) which are valid independently of either material
things or the actual psychic life of human beings (phenomenologists); fmally,
being is conceived by objective idealists as a structure of ideas which exist
independently of the human mind and precede the existence of material
things and linguistic signs. In all realism a structural identity of being and
thought is assumed. Being is not conceived as mediated by human practice
and language. It is, thus, nothing but a projection of thought onto objective
reality. That is quite explicit in Frege, who says that the meaning (Bedeutung)
of grammatical predicates are concepts. Concepts are thus supposed to exist
in reality. "There is no sharp distinction between concepts and reality," says
Frege. "I call concepts under which an object is subsumed its properties."8
In Wittgenstein's Tractatus the relation of picturing facts constitutes the
meaning of propositions. "A thought is a logical picture of facts." To under-
stand the meaning of a proposition is to be able to conceive what it would
be like if that proposition were true. 9
In Hussed's phenomenological realism, meanings are ideal units that
allegedly have being independently of both material things and our thoughts.
Hussed's conception of meaning (at an early stage of development of his
philosophy) is obviously close to Platonism. It is different, however, insofar
as he does not speak about ideal existence but about ideal validity of mean-
ing. 10
A contemporary representative of Platonic realism is James Feibleman;
xii PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION
*
Enormous differences among these typical conceptions of meaning stem
from very different ontological commitments, different philosophical meth-
ods, and, consequently, from disparate meanings ascribed to the word
"meaning."
The ontological commitment of the formalist-syntactical theory of mean-
ing is exceedingly weak. No physical or mental reality is presupposed, not
even the existence of human beings, of their experiences or of any form
of historical activity. There are only signs and a certain logical structure
which is reduced to merely syntactical rules - rules of formation and trans-
formation. No wonder such a logically structured system of signs has been
characterized by Hilbert as a "mere game," whereas Carnap denied any
justifIcation for the choice of rules ("There is no morality in logic. Everybody
is free to lay down his own rules of formation and transformation, so long
as one states them explicitly").14 Against the background of such an ex-
tremely weak ontology the only dimension of meaning that can be taken
into account is implicit meaning of signs with respect to inner (syntactical)
structure oflanguage.
PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION xiii
Heidegger's ontology is even less critical than the realist one. Realists
project known entities onto objective reality; their basic weakness is a pre-
Kantian naivete with which they identify concepts with objects. Heid~gger
goes very much beyond this traditional metaphysical boldness: being is
immensely richer than any structure of objects that we know. It is hidden
and reveals itself only to a limited degree. As a consequence the meaning of
human existence in relation to such a concealed being cannot be logically
articulated and grasped.
*
The ontological commitments of the theory of meanin~ expounded in this
book are more critical and restrictive than realism and Heidegger's philosophy
of being; they are stronger than all the other philosophical positions discussed
so far.
The starting point of this ontology is neither being nor conceptual thOUght
nor experience - it is praxis. We are immediately and with full certainty
aware that we act, make efforts to realize certain purposes, meet resistance
from external reality and, as a result of our action, experience changes in
both objective situation and ourselves. Praxis is subjective-objective: we do
not have to cope with insurmountable difficulties of establishing the link
between subject and object, mind and matter, which have been separated
from the start. The initial category of praxis is a poorly differentiated totality
which has to be analyzed and reconstructed as a rich concrete unity of its
constituents.
A very simple initial analysis derives the subjective and the objective as
the two polar opposites in praxis. On the one hand, the very possibility of
human praxis presupposes the immediate awareness of an environment, the
existence of a purpose, of conceptual thought that articulates this purpose
and gives it a distinctly human character (which is bringing into existence
something potential, something believed to be general, structured, not yet
observable). On the other hand, for praxis to actually take place it is not
sufficient to be immediately conscious of an environment. The environment
must really be there, since by defInition praxis is interaction and in the
absence of an object with which we interact, praxis could not even start.
We know that praxis started since the practical experience that we have
during the process of interaction is essentially different from the passive,
contemplative experience that we have when we read or look at a piece of
art or dream. In contemplative experience anything goes, we may play with
PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION xv
does not take part in any practical activity. Everything that happens in the
real historical world is both subjective and objective, but we have to deter-
mine in each particular case precisely in what sense it is subjective and in
what sense it is objective. Furthermore, we can establish the distance from
either of the two poles of the continuum and determine the respective degree
of subjectivity and of objectivity. Most subjective are individual psychological
processes. But even there an experience, thought or feeling may become the
object of scrutiny and critical examination at the level of individual self
consciousness. Symbolically expressed mental contents are objectified; while
they continue to be related to specific individual subjects, they begin to exist
independently of them, to the extent to which there are other subjects who
are able to interpret them. Social ideas and norms, cultural forms, political
institutions are products of human subjects, very much determined by their
subjective experiences and the level of their spiritual development. But they
are objective in the sense that they have acquired a physical, spatial dimen-
sion of their existence as written texts, records or habits of overt behavior.
As such they are independent of any individual consciousness and continue
to exist long after the disappearance of those who participated in their
creation.
While both space and time are dimensions of objective being, existence
in space (material existence in contrast to psychological existence in time
only) secures a greater degree of objectivity. Non-recorded culture, dances,
music, oral literature, may live for centuries, transmitted from generation
to generation. If it exists only in time, in living performances, it lasts only as
long as those who know how to perform and interpret it live. It is indepen-
dent of any individual person who belongs to that culture but not indepen-
dent of the existence of that part of humanity which produced and maintained
that culture. When these people perish, all those unwritten, unrecorded
products of their culture perish too. Once these cultural products are given
spatial, material form they survive for other cultures, for humankind as a
whole, since sooner or later the codes necessary for their interpretation will
be rediscovered. Yet no matter how highly objective (in the sense of indepen-
dence of a growing number of individual minds) a cultural phenomenon is,
it is relative to human (or any other conscious) beings who are able to inter-
pret it. Outside of this relation it exists only as a stone or as a canvas covered
with paints, or a heap of printed paper. Culture has no objectivity outside
of the relation to humankind as a collective subject. Only natural phenomena
would continue to exist if all of humanity were to disappear - in that sense
they may be ascribed a maximum possible objectivity (short of being "things
xviii PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION
in themselves" since we can think and speak about them only to the extent
to which we have identified and described them in terms of our available
conceptual tools).
This kind of ontology does not only do much greater justice to the ways
we actually use the terms "subject" and "object," it also offers greater
simplicity in building a theory of meaning on its ground and allows one to
avoid some unsurmountable difficulties of those theories which assume a
dualism of subject and object.
This dualism is surprisingly evident in much of Western philosophy and
also in official Marxism. When Wittgenstein in the Tractatus divided the world
into the facts and propositions that picture them, he did something that every
dialectical materialist would have to accept on his own ontological grounds.
The world is divided into matter and mind, matter is objective, mind is sub-
jective and the latter reflects the former. On the other hand, Soviet psy-
chology has been resting for decades on Pavlovian behaviorism. Similar
behaviorism reigns in the West.
*
As a consequence of the reduction of the sphere of the objective to physical
objects and of the sphere of the subjective to intersubjectively observed
responses in language and overt behavior, two important problems turned out
to be unsolvable.
The first is: what is designated by all kinds of symbols that obviously do
not refer to physical objects? The second is: what is expressed by symbols
that makes human operations with symbols different from those of computers
or animals?
If semantics studies the relation of a sign to a designated object, we must
either be able to specify in each case what the designated object is, or to say
that some symbols do not have the semantical dimension of their meaning.
Once designata are reduced to physical objects, a number of difficult
questions arise: May the designatum be a hypothetical physical object, a
construct that refers to something existing that we poorly and vaguely
understand, for example, a "black hole"? What is the designated object of
mythological, religious or literary terms? What is signified by metaphysical
concepts? How can one think something about nothing? What do mathe-
matical and logical symbols designate, for example, those of imaginary
numbers, geometrical figures or logical constants?
A rich ontology in which different kinds of phYSical and cultural objects
PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION xix
with great delay come to expression in overt behavior or in the way that
signs have been used. New subjective meanings which precede new ways of
using signs are the products of a complex mental process which involves:
self-consciousness, awareness of limitations in past conduct, revolt against
the routine, against the boredom of many repetitions, creative mutations,
autonomous choices of new ways of acting, of different responses to the same
stimuli. All that is entirely disregarded in the behaviorist paradigm. Once
the "ghost in the machine" has been eliminated, we are reduced to automata.
Socialization resembles programming of a computer. like a computer we
follow the rules of the program, learn and correct ourselves within the boun-
daries of what was prescribed by the program. In the same way in which a
computer is reprogranuned from time to time, a Skinnerian social engineering
will reinforce or extinguish some of our habits of responding. When writers
like Huxley or Orwell described such a reified world, they did it with bitter
irony. The purpose of such negative utopias was to warn us that the price
for all the technological wonders and all those perfectly efficient social
conditions of the "brave new world" was a total loss of freedom and culture.
When some behaviorist scholars describe a very similar world of "social
engineering," they seem to offer it as the only possible paradigm of a truly
"free society." But the only difference in comparison with the "animal farm"
may be that technocrats and not political bureaucrats are those "more equal
than others."
Once we understand that in all subjective phenomena there is one element
of objectivity that can be scientifically examined, we need not resort to all
those gross behaviorist restrictions that eradicate all that is specifically human
in language and communication. A wealth of objective information may be
obviously derived from the study of various texts: documents, archives,
memoirs, autobiographies, journals, literary descriptions, newspaper accounts,
interviews. None of this need be "objective" in the sense of being disinter-
ested, impartial, value-free or well-controlled by the rules of scientific method.
Each particular item may be biased, emotional, guided by one or other practi-
cal interest. But a skilled researcher will discover in this maze of one-sided,
mutually contradictory accounts the invariant, truly objective elements. We
will never be able to establish Qualitatively identical elements in various
individual experiences and interpretations. We might be able to reconstruct
structurally identical features of both what happened and how various types
of people psychologically reacted to it, and what typical motives are likely
to guide them in their subsequent practical activity.
One could in fact distinguish among many layers of objectivity in the
PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION xxi
mental life of individuals. It is one world which we see with different eyes
and different practical interests: in spite of all inequalities, some of the
world's constraints and potentialities are the same for all, and very different
people do not fail to perceive them. The sun and water, air and earth resources
are there, but they are limited and considerably depleted; furthermore, there
is now the objective possibility of total self-destruction. People who live in
this world have similar basic capacities (to reason, to communicate in sym-
bols, to act creatively, etc.) and have similar needs under similar conditions.
They very much disagree because conditions are not similar. However, there is
little doubt that other conditions being equal, they prefer peace to war,
mutual care to egoism, creation to destruction, reason to insanity. In this one
world with one humankind, many people fmd themselves in the same situa-
tion: in the "third world," inability to overcome poverty, to accumulate
enough goods to "take off' and develop; in the "second world," inefficiency
of production, a heavy burden of armaments, progressive privatization; in
the "first world," inability to continue exponential growth and wasteful
consumption, and at the same time provide armaments and welfare. In each
of these situations large groups (classes, nations, ethnic minorities, sexes,
generations) have common interests, worries and aspirations. Even in the life
of one single individual there might be something objective: a character that
is unique with respect to all other persons but which is more or less a stable
personal structure that allows us to understand, explain and even, to some
extent, predict future acts of that individual.
Clearly, empirical data usable for scientific research must meet some
criteria of objective validity and reliability. However, empiricism laid down
a narrow, much too restrictive demand: intersubjectivity of observation. What
really counts as objective is not whether a number of researchers were able
to observe one and the same event but whether in the number of individual
empirical reports (which need not be based on observation) there are invariant
elements. It is possible that a number of observers of a behavioral pheno-
menon come up with conflicting reports and that a number of introspective
reports describing subjective reactions to this phenomenon disclose a remark-
able degree of identity. It is also important to realize that behavioral data
might be much less significant and informative than data about subjective
motives, aspirations or dispOSitions to act. Only the latter provide knowledge
about not yet observable strong psychological currents, about real degrees of
acceptance of a regime, about emergent social movements and sudden social
mutations.
All this leads to the conclusion that the realm of subjectivity in general
xxii PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION
is not only a very important but also a legitimate subject matter of scientific
study; that what gives it legitimacy is an ontological conception that dis-
closes various levels of objectivity in subjective phenomena; and that, there-
fore, study of subjective or mental meaning must be part of a sound con-
temporary theory of meaning.
*
The two decades that have passed since the publication of this book have
considerably strengthened the case against psychological and linguistic
behaviorism. To a considerable extent the revolt against the dominating
school of thought in social science and philosophy has been a part of a general
cultural crisis. The Second World War has been followed by two decades of
remarkable material growth and prosperity. When the most urgent material
needs were met, at least in the more developed countries, it became obvious
that the price for technological and economic progress was a moral and
spiritual desert in which the younger generation found itself. The bomb
changed the entire conception of time: the futUre lost its meaning. Unjust
interventions and wars of superpowers undermined confidence in govern-
ments. Kennedy and Khrushchev were the last two leaders who aroused hope,
and achieved the endorsement of the intellectual elites in their countries:
one was assassinated, the other ousted. There were still grounds for belief in
further exponential growth. However, the net result of that growth seemed to
be a mindless consumerism, a growing gap between a hedonistic and a starving
world, a threatening pollution and depletion of the natural environment.
Neither the philosophy that was dominant nor mainstream social science
offered any understanding of this crisis. This was not merely the lack of a
sense of direction and a poor choice of research programs. Mainstream
scholarship lacked the conceptual and methodological tools even to begin
to understand the nature of the malaise. It was completely geared to a
"neutral," "disinterested" study of existing trends, of the conditions of
lasting balance; it seemed to be totally conformistic and co-opted by the
system. Science was identified as one of the most important forces for pre-
serving the status quo. Therefore, with good reasons, it was held responsible
for the threat of nuclear disaster, for pollution, for its services to ideological
manipulation and the cold war, for total silence about critical issues of the
time.
The revolt of the Sixties did not change the political or economic structure
of any of the societies in which it took place - from the USA to France and
PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION xxiii
Spain, to Poland, Yugoslavia and Turkey, to Sri Lanka and Japan. But it
undermined the values of official ideology and culture and opened the gate
for a serious and sustained search for alternatives.
When the storm of anti-Vietnam War resistance was over and a cultural
revolution that did not rest on firm intellectual foundations had ended, a
mere return to old analytical philosophy and behaviorist social science
was no longer possible in the USA, in spite of all the pressure that came from
basic pillars of the intellectual establishment. An unusual interest developed
in Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Husser!, Heidegger, Sartre, Weber, Schutz, Gadamer,
Foucault, Ricoeur, Habermas and other Continental thinkers.
Many Anglo-American philosophers and social scholars have for the first
time begun to seriously consider that in addition to mainstream analytical-
empirical orientation, there are also other important theoretical orientations,
and that in addition to explanation (in terms of objective laws and rules),
there are other equally important scientific concerns, such as understanding
(in terms of subjective motives and intentions) and critique (from an ex-
plicitly stated value standpoint). The methodological orientation associated
with the concept of understanding (Verstehen) will be especially relevant
to all subsequent developments of the theory of meaning. Bridges were built
between those different orientations in Explanation and Understanding. 19
Von Wright insisted that before explaining an event, one had previously to
understand its meaning. On the other hand, in an article on hermeneutical
science Charles Taylor expressed an important observation about the re-
levancy of understanding for social critique: in the same way in which without
understanding, the mainstream "bargaining" culture cannot recognize the
possibility of human variation, a critical, revolutionary activity might be
incapable of seeing "any limits to mankind's ability to transform itself.,,20
However, theoreticians of interpretation themselves have traveled a long
way from early metaphysical and subjectivist formulations of hermeneutics
and phenomenology toward greater precision and scientific objectivity.
Where the old hermeneuticians Droyssen and Dilthey spoke of "empathy"
as a special subjective power by which one can grasp the subjective meaning
of cultural symbols and individual acts, modern hermeneutics has elaborated
sophisticated methods of "decoding texts" and "reading" the agent's "self-
defmitions." In a comparable way modern phenomenological social science
does not make much use of Husserl's multiple epoche and constitution of the
"absolute ego." The method of ideal types developed by Weber and Schutz
allows the scholar to attribute typical goals and purposes to fictitious,
"typical" individuals in everyday life. This method still requires the insight
xxiv PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION
*
Finally, an additional explanation is needed for the very title of the book.
What does it mean for a theory of meaning to be dialectical? In the Introduc-
tion dialectics is defmed as a general philosophical method characterized
by "a procedure of investigation that is maximally objective, comprehensive
dynamic and concrete."28 In 1959, when this was written, I emphasized
those features of the method that made it a powerful conceptual tool in
the struggle against arbitrary Stalinistic ideological manipulation. (A good
example of that manipulation is Stalin's comment on his theory of the
state. That the state must first be strengthened in order to wither away
looks contradictory, he says, but such "dialectical" contradictions are con-
stitutive of each development.) When presented to a Western philosophical
audience, the dialectical method has to. shift the focus of its own self-under-
standing.
In the very root of the word (dialektos - discourse, dialektike tekhne -
art of debate) there is an indication of the implicit tendency to overcome
the narrowness, partiality and one-sidedness of one particular view. The
purpose of a dialogue is not merely to refute the opponent's claim but
also to overcome the limitations of one's own ideas, and to generate a con-
ception that meets the challenges and furnishes answers to questions. An
implicit tendency toward totality is obvious in Plato when he tries to "dia-
lectically" embrace all ideas and arrange them hierarchically. In modern
German idealistic philosophy dialectics is a method of system building; for
Hegel, totality is the dialectically developed World Spirit that eventually comes
to embrace the entire conceptual structure of the world. Marx rejected the
idealistic background, but preserved a wholistic approach to investigated phe-
nomena. All incomplete results, are, therefore, half-truths. One can distinguish
xxvi PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION
*
It was obvious already at the very beginning of this preface how much in-
debted I must be to A. J. Ayer for arousing my interest in this field and for
opening the first clear-cut avenues into the jungle. He was a great teacher,
not only in offering knowledge of meaning and demanding clarity from his
students, but also in showing practically how wonderfully lucid philosophy
can be.
I am also obliged to a circle of my younger colleagues at the University
of Belgrade who have systematically discussed problems of language and
meaning in the history of philosophy and contemporary philosophy of
language during the period 1958-61. This was an almost ideal "speech
community" and a strongly supportive environment for work on such a
major project.
I should also like to express my deepest gratitude to Professor Robert
Cohen, not only for making the publication of this book in English possible
but for all that he has done for Yugoslav philosophy during the last ten years.
NOTES
use, i.e., a set of rules and conventions that regulate its use" (Weitz, 'Oxford Philosophy,'
The Philosophical Review 12 (1953),187-233).
4 C. S. Peirce, 'How to Make Our Ideas Oear,' Collected Papers, Cambridge, Mass.,
1931-35, Vol. V, 9.
5 John Dewey, Experience and Nature, Chicago and London, 1926, p. 187.
6 Following Wittgenstein's Tractatus, Friedrich Waismann stated this simple formula in
'Logische Analyse der Wahrscheinlichkeitsbegriff,' Erkenntnis, No. 2-4, p. 229.
7 Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Yale University Press, New Haven,
1953, Vol. I, p.l06.
8 Gottlob Frege, Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, eds.
Geach and Black, Oxford, 1952, pp. 49, 57.
9 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, New York, 1922, 4.024.
10 Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen 1900-1901, Vol. II, p. 125.
11 James Feibleman, The Revival of Realism, Chapel Hill, 1946, p. 260.
12 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, M. Niemeyer, Tiibingen 1949, p. 7. (Being and
Time, Harper & Row, New York and Evanston, 1926, p. 27.)
13 Martin Heidegger,ErlDuterungen zu Holderlin's Dichtung, V. Klostermann, Frankfurt
am Main, 1951, S. 35. (Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry, Regnery, Chicago, 1949,
pp.276-77.)
14 Rudolf Carnap, op. cit.
15 John DeweY,Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, 1938, p. 372.
16 Dewey,Experience and Nature, p.166.
17 Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen. (I. Die Sprache, 1923; II.
Das Mythische Denken, 1925; III. Phiinomenologie der Erkenntnis, 1929, Berlin.) The
Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Yale University Press, New Haven,1953.
18 According to Lotze, a universal concept is a rule that articulates sensory impressions
into a series. (Rudolf Lotze, Logik, Leipzig, 1880, pp. 14,29.)
19 Georg Henrik von Wright, Explanation and Understanding, Cornell University Press,
1971.
20 Charles Taylor, 'Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,' in Interpretative Social
Science: A Reader, eds. Rabinow and Sullivan, University of California Press, Berkeley,
Los Angeles and London, 1979, p. 68.
21 "Fulfillment of the postulate of logical consistency warrants the objective validity
of the thought objects constructed by the social scientist .... Compliance with the
postulate of adequacy warrants the consistency of the constructs of common-sense
experience of the social reality." (Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, Martinus Nijhoff,
The Hague 1964, Vol. I, pp. 63-64.)
22 H. L. A. Hart, 'The Ascription of Responsibility and Rights; Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society 49 (1948), 171-94.
23 Paul Ricoeur, 'The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as A Text,'
in Interpretative Social Science: A Reader, eds. Rabinow and Sullivan, University of
California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1979, p. 94.
24 Ibid.
25 John Austin, How to Do Things with Words, Harvard University Press, Cambridge,
Mass., 1962.
26 John Searle, Speech Acts, Cambridge University Press, London, 1965, p. 56.
27 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, pp. 6, 20.
28 See p. 19.
INTRODUCTION
The sort of sceptic who doubts the true development of human culture and
fmds confirmation in philosophy of his thesis of eternal variation on the same
basic topics and constant reiteration of the same motifs should be reminded
of the history of the problem of language and meaning.
In traditional philosophy, with rare exceptions, this problem by and
large did not exist. Philosophers were primarily concerned with the nature of
the world, the basic substances of which it was comprised, the general laws
prevailing, the meaning of life, whether human action was free, how truth
was to be discovered, the basic forms of thought, basic human values, etc.
Philosophy more or less lost sight of the fact, or implicitly assumed it to be
non-problematic that these questions, as well as the various possible answers,
must first and foremost be formulated in some kind of language, and that
in all the discussions and investigations through which we endeavor to reach
a solution we must first directly encounter statements and words: our own
words, through which we endeavor to express and transmit to others our
thoughts, and the words of others which we attempt to interpret. When we
become conscious of language, that medium of all our communication, to
which we are so accustomed that most often it escapes our notice, certain
fundamental problems immediately arise: what is the true social meaning of
such extremely abstract expressions as "the world," "substance," "laws,"
"meaning," "freedom," "truth," "value," etc.? How do we know how to
use these expressions in the process of social communication in such a manner
that both we and our interlocutor or reader think of the same thing? How
do we know that anything at all in reality corresponds to these expressions?
What are the criteria to judge that the questions we pose and the answers we
give have any sort of meaning for all people or at least for all the members of
a given society? What conditions must be met so that the linguistic expressions
used may have a definite social meaning and so that communication may
be maximally effective?
The greatest classical philosophers, and particularly realist and rationalist
philosophers, assumed a priori that words were inseparably linked to things,
and that in language and its general categories (universals) we encounter the
structure of reality itself. Logos is simultaneously the law of words, spirit,
1
2 INTRODUCTION
the sole alternative that remained was to consider these symbolic systems as
artificial languages. At first, logicians were chiefly occupied with the problems
of the syntactical structure oflaIlguage. In the nineteen-thirties, the problems
of the meaning of symbolic expressions became the topic of the day. A new
discipline oflogic emerged - semantics.
The investigation of meaning quickly shifted from the domain of artificial
languages to the field of natural (ordinary) language. Particularly in English
philosophy, a reaction took place with respect to the earlier harsh criticism
of ordinary language. The formerly widely accepted belief that the ambiguity
and indefmiteness of the expressions of ordinary language were the chief cause
for the lack of clarity and precision of philosophy was opposed by new
forms of realism, which held that the sole possible point of departure in
philosophy was the meaning of the terms of ordinary language. Nevertheless,
the modern attempts to re-establish confidence in ordinary language no
longer proceeded in the old manner, on the basis of an assumption of identity
between the structure of language and the structure of reality. Today it is
believed that these two structures are, at most, similar, implying the existence
of many deviations. Accordingly, any conclusions about being, on the basis
of language, entail an unacceptable logical jump. The meaning of linguistic
terms can no longer be conceived in the old comfortable manner. Many
expressions are not nouns and do not refer to anything. Furthermore, in the
case of nouns, there is the question of whether their meaning is suited to
the nature of the thing itself. What, then, is meaning? In recent years many
theories have been developed which attempt to answer this question in a
variety of ways.
The problem of meaning quickly became of interest to other philosophers
in addition to logicians. Once attention was directed to the symbolic character
of language and the entire process of learning and cognition, it was not
difficult to see that art as a whole was of a symbolic character. To interpret
a work of art meant first and foremost to understand or emotionally experi-
ence the meaning of words, colors, forms, musical tones, or the movements
of the human body. Similarly, to understand the moral value of a human
act, whether one judged it to be good or bad, meant first and foremost to
know the meaning of the symbols "good" and "bad," "right" and "wrong".
In The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 1 Ernst Cassirer comprehensively
investigated all the other symbolic forms - mythical, religious, and ritual.
Gradually the concept of meaning was considerably broadened. While once
"to understand meaning" meant to experience an idea or image of an object,
Richards and Ogden, in their classic work The Meaning of Meaning, 2 added
4 INTRODUCTION
is a sign without having a method to determine whether the sign has aroused
a mental process in the mind of the interpretor. According to these critics
the sole possible method is to study the behavior of the given subject. And if
that is the case, then the only way to defme a sign is by means of the physical
reactions which its manifestation arouses. This defmition was provided by
Morris himself, as follows:
Since not even this type of defInition is faultless for in the case of highly
advanced, conscious beings the use of signs is not accompanied by any sort
of directly observable physical reactions (for example listening to concert
music), disputes arose between the "mentalists" and "behaviorists" around
numerous questions of the theory of signs and meaning. These have not
yet been resolved in favor of either school, but have aroused great interest
in the issues among the ranks of specialistis.
and symbols of something else which is more important than the objects
themselves, insofar as we are in a position to interpret them correctly. Here
we encounter a special aspect of the humanization of nature. Man himself
subjugates nature and transforms it according to his own needs and purposes
not only by the production of new material objects but also by the production
of new meanings, and by attaching a more profound human significance
to the objects about him. In this manner all natural phenomena - clouds
and the moon in lyric poetry, fruit and vegetables in a still-life painting,
mountains and rivers in historical and political writing - all take on a symbolic
function and become material points around which thoughts and feelings of
an interpersonal nature and meaning are concentrated.
However, this tendency to humanize nature by symbolic transformation
is always accompanied by the opposing tendency to alienation of symbols
from man. The spontaneous development of the meaning of these symbols
often brought about a situation in which symbols began to exercise a function
precisely opposite to what had originally been intended. Instead of informing,
transmitting a clear message evoking a definite feeling; instead of uniting
people, symbols often misinform, divide, activate an emotive resistance,
became barriers and agents of disunity. Instead of being instruments of
freedom and of control over natural and social forces, symbols become
hostile forces controling man and preventing him from seeing clearly himself
and others. This specific aspect of man's enslavement to his own tools of
expression was noted by the great English poet, painter, and mystic, William
Blake:
"In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear." 8
The point is that language and other symbolic forms are a colossal means
of imposing dominating ideas, beliefs, moral norms, and stereotyped emo-
tional reactions on every individual in a given social community. It is true,
only owing to speech, to the use of symbols, man succeeds in creating his
society, in establishing links of communication and cooperation with other
people, in material and cultural production. Only in this way is he able to
overcome the bounds of his own individual consciousness and to become
a participant in collective psychological events variously termed 'the spirit
of the times,' 'national consciousness', 'public opinion,' etc. Unfortunately,
throughout history there have been few forms of socialization which have
INTRODUCTION 7
'education for a democratic way of life.' Countless men of honor left their
bones thousands of miles from their home countries, convinced that they
were making a noble and profoundly meaningful sacrifice to 'liberate the
tomb of Christ from the hands of the infidel,' 'for the glory of British arms,'
for 'sweet France,' for 'mother Russia,' for 'the great historic mission of the
German race,' for 'the free world' or for 'defense of socialism'.
Unfortunately, these forms of spiritual enslavement and alienation have
not been avoided by many who work or believe they are working to eliminate
enslavement and alienation in today's society. In the 30's Stalin liquidated
tens of thousands of genuine revolutionaries in the name of a struggle "against
the agents of imperialism." The real fact of an imperialist danger served as
the basis to create a word-myth whereby everything could be explained: a
myth in which millions of people believe without second thought, even when
it was applied in the most absurd circumstances. Today we are witness to
many similar myths and cliches serving propaganda purposes. For example,
"revisionism" in certain eastern countries and "communism" in some western
countries are often used as symbols for everything evil in the world, synonyms
for oppression, treachery, and immorality.
Modem philosophy of language originated, to a large degree, in the revolt
against these crude mystifications and the often clearly demagogic use of
abstractions. Semantics has pointed the fmger at one evil - and that is its
genuine merit - but has not explained that evil nor is it able to. The cause
of enormous confusion in the modem world, of irrational behavior by huge
masses of people was seen by some philosophers of language in "imperfect
language," "the tyranny of words," 9 and "the uncontrolled use of abstrac-
tions". People like Korzybski, Hayakawa, Stuart Chase, and others, have
not perceived the deeper roots of this tyranny of words, in the conflict of
interests among certain social groups. Thus some of these "semanticists"
have found a miraculous universal cure for all social evils: the perfection of
language, the acquisition of a proper semantic culture, training for under-
standing the true semantic nature of abstractions.
In discarding such expressly ideological conclusions one ought not over-
look the real problems of modem society from which they derive and which
they attempt to resolve in a completely biased manner. The root of social
pathology is in class conflicts, in relations of domination and exploitation,
in alienated labor and alienated politiCS. It is of fundamental importance to
examine how all these underlYing social patterns manifest themselves in
human communication and in the use of linguistic symbols. Rather than
discarding semantic theories together with the real humanist problems which
INTRODUCTION 9
these theories indicate, one must seriously be concerned with these problems
and attempt to fmd more profound, and sophisticated solutions to them.
Language can well serve the study of thought for the following reasons:
1. Language is materially given: the sounds produced in speech by our
larynx or the structures of ink produced by our hand in writing are physical
phenomena: the sound vibrations of air molecules, the sources of light
waves that can be perceived directly by the senses - in an intersubjective
manner. Inasmuch as in a certain social context these physical phenomena
customarily arouse specific psychological reactions, they can obviously
serve as the key for the study of these reactions. Language is actually a
distinctive form of human practice. Precisely because it is simultaneously
objective and subjective, and both physical and mental, practice is the best
INTRODUCTION 13
world as a complex of things, all of which have a past, present, and future
- they see around themselves events, each of which has its own special,
concrete mode of duration, growth, decline, creativity. Time itself does not
exist, and consequently neither do verbal tenses.
It is interesting how the morphology of the verbs of the Wintu Indians
reveals an entire metaphysics of necessity and freedom. In their language each
verb has two forms that are used in various circumstances. The first form
signifies that the subject is participating freely in the activity referred to by
the verb. The second type refers to actions and processes that are necessary
and outside his control, before which he is quite unfree and helpless. 14
Finally, sentence structure affects thought perhaps more than any other
grammatical feature. Two types of sentences prevail in the European languages
- those in which a predicate is attributed to a subject, and those that express
the activity of a particular subject. In both cases the subject is something
stable and substantial; this assumption leads toward a metaphysics of sub-
stances. It is noteworthy that this sort of 'substantialist' mode of thought
has begun to disappear only in recent times, under the influence of scientific
language, in which increasing importance has been assumed by relational
sentences (e.g. "The evaporation of water is the cause of rain.").
The type of sentence we generally fmd in the languages of primitive tribes
is suited to the description of specific events, and this differs from European
languages in two important aspects. First of all, there is no copula in them,
the subject is not reified, and the predicate is not an 'essence,' inherent in
the subject. ('Praedicatum inest subjecto'). Here then we fmd thought to be
still descriptive, direct, and concrete - situational, and still not tending to
reveal the more profound, constant, and necessary characteristics of objects.
Secondly, in the sentences that express activity, usually it is not man who
acts and causes action: movement and action are inherent in the object
itself: man is merely brought into a relation with it. This is the case, for
example, in the grammar of the Navaho, as Hoyer has reported. 15
How does this characteristic of language affect the manner of thinking?
First, it stimulates a very dynamic approach to objects - objects are not
things but a constant ebb and flow of things. This has led Henle 16 to conclude
that what we have here is a Bergsonian rather than an Aristotelian manner
of thinking (toward which the ordinary language of the European peoples
gravitates). Secondly, the fact that the grammatical structure of a language
generally excludes man as the cause of action is in accord with the general
attitude of primitive people toward nature. Man's impotence with respect
to nature is reflected in the structure of language. And conversely, for its
INTRODUCTION 15
the fruit of the mature thought of an entire life, will objectively appear to
be impotent, inarticulate mumbling.
This dilemma is not posed so sharply in science and philosophy, but it is
nevertheless still present. Every great philosopher has had to introduce an
entire new conceptual apparatus in order to express his thought to others
(and himself!). But the fact remains that various interpretations are possible,
and that certain texts remain ununderstandable (one should recall Hegel,
Whitehead, Heidegger).
This dialectical opposition between the individual's desire for completely
authentic expression and the desire to transmit his thoughts to others is
resolved in the development of language, a development in which language
nevertheless does not cease to be interpersonal and social.
We can be directly conscious of the objective fact that we think. But we
can have objective knowledge of what someone thinks and whether his
thought is true only to the extent to which this thought has assumed a
standard social form through the medium oflanguage.
facts which serve to transcend the meaning of the terms given in previous
definitions.
The division of logic in which one studies the conditions of the commu-
nicability and analyticity of propositions, the logical criteria of sense and
nonsense, and all other problems of meaning whose resolution determines the
identification of truth, may be termed the theory of meaning. It constitutes
in fact one of the three basic logical disciplines - the other two being the
theory of proof and the theory of verificaton, in which one studies the two
other groups of conditions of objective truth, proof and practical verification.
The theory of meaning is the introduction to logic in the sense that the
investigation of the meaning of a proposition precedes the application of all
other criteria for the determination of its truthfulness.
The title of this work - The Dialectical Theory of Meaning - calls for still
another explanation - i.e. what in this context is meant by dialectics. It
goes without saying that there can be no question here of setting forth a
ready-made theory of meaning as part of a Marxist or any other dialectical
philosophy, for the simple reason that no such theory has been developed
within Marxism. The question here is to attempt to formulate systematically
a theory of meaning from the standpoint of Marxist humanistic dialectics.
What is often referred to by Marxist dialectics is a kind of ontology
embodying the most general laws of the movement of being (the unity of
opposites, the transformation of quantity into quality, the negation of
negation). Furthermore dialectics is often understood as a kind of logic
applied to developmental processes, exempt from the formal logical principles
of noncontradiction and the ~xclusion of the third. Of late, recognition has
been given to an anthropological conception of dialectics as a general theory
of human practice.
All these varying interpretations of dialectics are possible in principle.
However, we shall not concern ourselves here with discussing these various
possible conceptions but rather with specifying the meaning in which the
term 'dialectics' will be applied to the theory of meaning in this work.
We shall utilize 'dialectics' to refer to a general philosophical method
characterized by a procedure of investigation that is maximally objective,
comprehensive, dynamic, and concrete, considering creative human practice
to be the key to theoretical objectivity.
20 INTRODUCTION
a greater quantity of the same. 22 On the other hand this new quality cannot
be explained fully if it is not correlated with the quality from which it
emerged and some of whose essential elements it has retained in a new form.
Moreover dialectics also directs toward investigation of the invariant
structures in variable phenomena and the discovery of laws, types, and
cycles. There is no other way of conceptualizing movement. Nevertheless for
dialecticians there is nothing absolutely stationary. All apparently permanent
forms are conditional, changing over time, disappearing, and being superseded
by other forms. From a dialectical standpoint, the only absolute is change
and development.
The causes of development, for dialecticians, are principally internal. The
dynamics of an object are determined by opposition and the processes of
mutual exclusion of their properties, dispositions, and internal tendencies.
As applied to the question of meaning, the dialectical principle of devel-
opment implies the demand for the study of the origin and development
of signs and meaning. A separate chapter will be devoted to that problem,
in which it will be necessary to take into account, on the one hand, the
history of human language and symbolic activity generally, and on the
other hand, the development of language and thinking in the individual
history of the child. 23
Finally the general character of the dialectical method, and particularly
of the principle of development, also determines to a great extent the method
of criticism. Criticism should be creative in the sense that it transcends both
the viewpoint being criticized and the critic's own viewpoint. Ever since
Hegel, to transcend has meant to eliminate and to maintain. Unless one
discovers and eliminates a limitation one cannot give shape to a particular
new quality. But conversely, unless one maintains certain values, unless one
establishes continuity and accepts the partial, if only relative truth which
the criticized viewpoint embodies, there can be no genuine progress. Thus,
in order to be dialectical, criticism should not be destructive - and above all
it should be self-critical; its own point of view evolves in the process of
criticism. In setting itself in opposition to the other viewpoint criticism
sees its own limitations and strives toward a new synthesis.
4. Dialectical concreteness is the tendency to link the universal with the
particular and individual. In the literature the meaning attached most often to
'concrete' is "that which is applied to an actual individual thing as opposed to
an abstract quality," or "the specific as opposed to the general."24 Dialectical
concreteness is taken to mean here a particular manner of interpreting the
meaning of abstract terms: meaning is not reduced solely to the common
INTRODUCTION 25
NOTES
1 Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der Symbo/ischen Formen, I 1923, II 1925, III 1929,
Berlin.
2 Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, London, 1923.
3 Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, Cambridge, Mass., 1931-1935, Vols. 1-
VI.
4 Charles Morris, Signs, Language and Behavior, New York, 1946.
5 Peirce, op. cit., Vol. V, 484.
6 Ibid., Vol. V, 564.
7 Charles Morris, Signs, Language and Behavior, New York, 1946.
8 William Blake, 'Songs of Experience,' cited in M. Cornforth, In Defence of Philosophy,
London, 150.
9 For example, Stuart Chase explains the persecution of the Jews as follows: "The long
agony of the people called the Jews to a large degree was provoked by semantic confu-
sion. (Stuart Chase, The Tyranny of Words, p. 230.)
10 Cassirer states the following fact of essential importance with respect to the relation
ship of language and thought: "In learning to name things the child does not simply
attach a list of artificial signs to his previous knowledge but rather a list of shaped
empirical objects. In fact he teaches himself to formulate concepts of these objects and
to comprehend the objective world ... Without the assistance of names each step
forward in the process of objectification would be lost the very next moment" (Ernst
Cassirer,An Essay on Man, New Haven, 1944, p. 132).
11 In one of her studies on language and perception Grace de Laguna correctly states:
"If an animal cannot express its thoughts in language, this is because it has no thoughts
to be expressed, for unformulated thoughts are a little less than thoughts" (Grace de
Laguna, 'Perception and Language,' Human Biology I (1929), 555-58).
12 In stressjng the formative role of language one should constantly bear in mind that
language itself is the result of an evolution of experience and thought. The character
and wealth of its vocabulary, and peculiarities of its grammar and syntax are completely
determined by the experiences of human practice in given natural and social circum-
stances. The fact is that once it is shaped language continues to exercise a powerful
influence upon the manner of thinking of each individual in a society and upon the
course of its cultural creativity.
INTRODUCTION 27
Theories of meaning differ from one another not only in that each is predi-
cated on different philosophical principles, but also in that each examines
different aspects or dimensions of meaning. The one factor is closely bound
up with the other. Nominalism commands us to investigate the relationship
of symbols to other symbols; various forms of pragmatism prompt us to
investigate the relationship of symbols and practice; positivism takes as
its primary interest the relationship of symbols to immediate experience;
conceptualism focuses upon the relationship of symbols to thought and
conceptual entities; and fmally the basic propositions of realistic philosophy
point to the necessity of investigating the relationship of symbols to objects
independent of human consciousness.
Each of these conceptions has some kind of empirical basis, for the extra-
ordinarily complex phenomenon of meaning truly encompasses all of these
various factors, while not being reducible to anyone of them alone. We are
thus faced with the task of proceeding from the existing one-sided theories,
filling in the gaps and resolving their difficulties, and effecting a kind of
synthesis.
This task is attainable only if at the very beginning we introduce certain
significant distinctions which encompass the contrasting moments stressed
in the various existing theories of meaning.
These contrasting moments are:
1. The difference between personal (subjective) and social (objective)
meaning.
2. The difference between implicit and explicit meaning.
3. The difference between meaning as an internal, conscious, phenomenon
and meaning as a readiness (disposition, habit, capacity) for external reaction
under certain conditions.
4. The difference between meaning as a relationship of a sign to the
conception of an object and meaning as the relationship of a symbol to a real,
specified object.
Positivists generally restrict themselves to personal meaning. Realists, in'
31
32 EPISTEMOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS
Having drawn distinctions between the various dimensions that enter into
the concept of meaning, it has to be stressed that some of them are by no
means controversial and that problems and difficulties arise only when one
overreaches them and asserts more than they allow. Thus, for example, the
existence of personal meaning poses no problem. Everyone will agree that
the meaning of a symbol may vary from one person to the next and that each
subject can arbitrarily construe a new meaning for a symbol which no one
else can understand. The question remains, however, whether these personal
meanings are of any general interest - except in the instance of works of art
- and accordingly whether they should be the subject of scholarly, and
particularly logical investigation. Along these lines it is an open question
as to which meanings can be understood by others and are thus social in
nature. Are they collective ideas, ideal essences, expressions of the national
or absolute spirit, a priori concepts identical for all persons, things in them-
selves, etc.?
Explicit meaning is also not open to question. When we already have an
entire system of signs, as for example a language, obviously we may express
the meaning of some symbols by their relationship toward other symbols.
What is open to question is what is expressed by these other symbols, which
are similarly mere physical phenomena (visual, acoustic, tactile, etc.). What
is it that they transmit and what do other people understand? In brief, the
principal problems appear in connection with implicit meaning.
Similarly there is no difficulty with the assumption that we may gather
from the manner of a subject's use of a symbol and from his overall be-
havior the meaning of that symbol for him. Behavior is accessible to the
observation of other people, and by observing the constant correlations
GENERAL LOGICAL PROBLEMS 33
between a symbol and certain types of practical actions and reactions one
may formulate strictly empirical and verifiable assumptions about the mean-
ing of a given symbol. But the opponents of behaviorism doubt whether
these exclusively external reactions say everything about meaning. lfere
again we encounter an open question. What is meaning over and above
that? Is one justified in speaking of an internal dimension of meaning, a
mental act, or disposition which is in principle inaccessible to interpersonal
observation? The one school seems to assert too little, remaining within the
confmes of empirical observation. The other seems to assert too much,
entering into a region of unverifiable hypotheses and speculation.
Finally most modern philosophers would not argue with the proposition
that meaning is a relationship to an object (objective thing, property or
relation). What is open to question is whether this object is merely immanent
in our consciousness (whether it is merely an idea, concept, or logical con-
struct) or has a transcendental character. In other words, whether this object
is merely a given in consciousness or whether it is an objective given in the
physical world. Or does the object exist as both immanent and transcendent,
existing as a certain correlation between the two?
Having cited the foregoing open questions with respect to the explanation
of meaning, it is not difficult to see that at issue are central epistemological
problems such as the relationship betweeen experience and thought, the
ontological status of concepts, the criterion of the intersubjectivity of cogni-
tion, and particularly the relationship between objects, on the one hand,
and experience and thought on the other. One can bypass some of these
questions and yet obtain a theory of meaning applicable to a certain range
of cases. For example the defmition of symbols may be given even on the
basis of the simplest of all existing theories - the syntactical (formalistic)
theory, which does not broach any of the cited epistemological problems,
remaining completely within the framework of the relationship of certain
linguistic signs to others. Simplicity means here a minimal number of assump-
tions. Other conditions being equal, one should certainly adopt the theory
which is simplest in this sense. But here 'other conditions" are by no means
equal. Explanatory power, i.e. applicability to the entire range of cases in
which the problem of meaning arises, is a methodological principle of greater
significance than the principle of simplicity. The theory that explains more,
or in this case which defmes meaning in such a way that the definition can
34 EPISTEMOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS
encompass the most diverse cases and contexts in which the term 'meaning'
is used in ordinary life, scholarship, and philosophy, is preferrable to other
theories which only partially succ~ed, even though it is stronger and involves
a larger number of assumptions. On the other hand, in analyzing the realistic
theory of meaning we came to the conclusion that it achieves its great power
of explanation and applicability by utilizing a larger number of assumptions
than is necessary (some of which are completely unacceptable, due to the
paradoxical nature of their consequences).
Accordingly a theory of meaning that corresponds to the basic principles
of dialectical humanism should be more flexible and critical than the realistic
theory.
Just as in any other defmition of concepts, here too we must fulfil the
logical demand that the concepts in terms of which the category of meaning
is defmed should themselves be defined as precisely as possible. And in doing
so we must not merely provide definitions that do nothing more than reveal
the most abstract elements of the content of a concept. Of course in order
to defme most concretely all the epistemological categories that we shall
deal with, taking into account all their basic types of application in various
contexts, one would have to devote an entire monograph to each. Here it is
necessary to define them only from the standpoint of the ultimate goal
of the investigation. And the ultimate goal is to explain the category of
meaning in all its basic cognitive dimensions, from the standpoint of four
basic questions:
1. What is meaning (how can we define it, taking into account all the
various dimensions and modes of meaning)?
2. How do the meanings of linguistic symbols arise?
3. What is the ontological status of meaning (in what sense can one say
that meanings exist)?
4. How (by what methods) can one know meaning?
Another fundamental logical demand which we must take care to fulfil
is the explicit statement of the basic assumptions of our theory. Not all
the concepts of a theory may be defmed, and not all propositions may
be proven if we wish to avoid circularity. Thus one must closely determine
one's point of departure, i.e. the concepts and propositions in terms of
which all the other concepts and propositions of a given theory are to be
GENERAL LOGICAL PROBLEMS 35
For formalists the point of departure is the existence of symbols, for posi-
tivists - sensory experience, and for conceptualists - a priori forms of
sensation and thought. In all such cases the point of departure is insufficiently
concrete and rich in order to derive all those concepts which are necessary
to explain the category of meaning.
Thus, for example, sensory experience - the point of departure for
empiricists and positivists - fails to offer sufficient grounds to explain the
origin of concepts and thought as a process of an objective, social character.
Even less can our models of material reality, to which our symbols refer,
be derived from or reduced to direct experience. Thus the sole alternative
for positivists is either solipsism or postulating material objects aside from
36 EPISTEMOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS
object and fact, may be derived from it. The same cannot be said for any
category which other philosophcial schools take as their points of departure.
There are at least two other important reasons for which practice should
be regarded as basic epistemological category. Both are related to the general
methodological principle which holds that in the formulation of a theory
indirect knowledge should be based upon direct knowledge, that it should
proceed from direct knowledge and be tested by it.
In all its elementary forms practice is given directly and is thereby acces-
sible by means of all direct methods of study. The tilling of the earth, factory
production, ftshing, mining, forestry, child-rearing, painting and sculpting,
writing, lecturing, mountain-climbing, flying, public speaking, holding meet-
ings, demonstrations and strikes, wars and revolutions - all of these are pro-
cesses which not only occur in innumerable variations around us, but which
take up the greater part of our every-day life. In effect we know nothing in
life as directly and surely as the forms of practice in which we ourselves
participate. In this respect, the idea of practice has enormous advantages
over the category of sensory experience, which empiricists and positivists
consider the sole possible reliable basis for the theory of cognition. The
sensory experience of the individual is directly accessible only to him, for
others can not see it, hear it, or touch it. In contrast, practical activity is
always a physical process, a material phenomenon that may be directly,
intersubjectively studied. Furthermore, practice encompasses sensory expe
rience, while sensory experience - as conceived by empiricists - does not
encompass practice, but is rather conceived as a receptive, purely contem-
plative process. Thus sensory experience is considered in a context in which
it actually rarely occurs. We all make observations primarily in the process
of action, rather than under conditions of absolute rest.
And here we arrive at the second of the two reasons for founding epis-
temology generally and the theory of meaning particularly on the category of
practice. Practice mediates between the subject and object. Study of practical
activity is the only way to acquire direct knowledge of the material world,
other people, society and of ourselves as we objectively are. Even if we can be
directly aware of our perceptions, conceptions and intuitions, independently
of practical activity, this is insufftcient ground for knowledge about the
world, social reality and existence of other people. This is the reason why the
logic of their doctrine has drawn all consistent adherents of empiricism into
solipsism. Direct knowledge of the existence of material objects and society is
possible solely by virtue of practice, which is fundamentally nothing other
than the transformation of objects in a process of direct cooperation and
interaction with other people.
GENERAL LOGICAL PROBLEMS 39
But this is only one component of the concept of practice. The concept
can be analysed into following six essential elements.
1. Practice is above all the transfor11llltion of the objective situation in
which man exists, i.e. the alteration, abolition, and purposeful creation of
inorganic and organic objects and the social conditions of human life. Here
belong<; material production and work in general.
2. Social cooperation is another form of practice. By this we refer to the
process by which people coordinate their activity, join their effo.ts, produce
mutual services and bring about various forms of organization and instotu-
tions.
3. Communication is that specific form of practice, which consists in
operations with signs, by means of which people come to mutual understand-
ing and stimulate one another to engage in a particular type of action.
4. Practice also includes creation of experience, i.e. the production,
selection and interpretation of observations, emotions, intuitive insights, and
motives to undertake new initiatives.
5. Another form of practice is evaluational activity, i.e. bringing about
value judgments, the selection of values that orient activity in a particular
direction and provide it with a particular purpose.
6. Practice also includes intellectual activity, i.e. the interpretation and
understanding of natural and linguistic signs, analysis of situations, and the
drawing of conclusions as a means ofidentitying the proper means to achieve
a particular goal.
The foregoing analysis furnishes the nucleus of all the epistemological cate-
gories. As we stated above it is the human effort to transform the natural and
social environment that constitutes the basis for the cognition of objects
(things, properties, relations, facts, and laws). Man arrives at knowledge of
the existence and qualities of other people, social groups, and society as a
whole through cooperation and interaction with other members of the
society to which he belong<;. Man learns the meaning of the words of his
mother tongue and the meaning of all the other symbols which are used in a
society through the process of communication with other people. It is in
practice that we acquire experience, together with all its components, such as
sensation, perception, emotion, intuition, and volition, in all their intensity
and variety. Thus practical experience is the most suitable basis to explain all
40 EPISTEMOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS
the categories of direct cognition. The origin of the concept of values (satis-
faction, moral goodness, beauty, etc.) is to be found in the selection man
makes of the available alternatives of his activity in the context of his vital
needs. Finally, all basic forms of thought, concepts, judgments, conclusions,
etc. represent, on the one hand, the concentrated practical experience of a
tremendous number of human generations, and on the other hand, rules for
practical operations, which are selected owing to their applicability in practice.
We thus arrive at six basic groups of epistemological categories, belonging
to the following areas:
1. objective reality in general,
2. society,
3. communication,
4. direct experience,
5. values,
6. thought.
It is to be immediately noted that one cannot draw a clear distinction
between the objective and subjective groups or the ontological and psycholo-
gical ones. They are all both objective and subjective in character, i.e. they
refer to phenomena and processes that exist objectively (independently of
the consciousness of any individual subject), but which are defined only in
relation to human activity and the subject who alters and acquires knowledge
of them.
All these categories are mutually interrelated and impinge upon one
another in a variety of ways. For this reason it would be extremely artificial
to arrange them in linear succession and adhere to a severe, formal order in
their presentation, explaining one concept fully before passing on to the next
in order of succession, without returning to the one preceding. For example,
it is impossible to explain completely what an object is and what our criterion
is for asserting that something objectively exists, without taking into account
conceptual thought and sensory verification; it is impossible to explain a
concept without taking into account the sensory experience on which it is
based; fmally, the very concept of experience would have to be extremely
simplified - if one did not take into account selection and interpretation
which are rooted in thought, and if one did not account for the objectivity
of experience in terms of its relation to nature and society.
All linearity (as for example that which one fmds in Hegel's classification
of judgments) would only lead to the breaking of many essential connections,
as proven by the experience of all great systems (largely built upon the prin-
ciple of linearity). Any attempt to build up a Marxist theory of cognition
GENERAL LOGICAL PROBLEMS 41
NOTES
1 Marx and Engels, 'Theses on Feuerbach' The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. by R. C. Tucker,
New York: W. W. Norton, 1972, pp. 107-110.
2 Engels, Dialectic of Nature, New York: International Publishers, 1979.
3 Lenin, Materialism and Empirocriticism, New York: International Publishers, 1970;
Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977.
4 Roger Garaudy, La tMorie materialiste de 10 connaissance, Paris, 1953.
CHAPTER II
Meanings of our symbols are objective in two respects. They are objective, first,
in that they refer to objects, and second, in that they are valid independe!ltly
of the consciousness of the individual, i.e. they are valid for a community of
people who are capable of interpreting them.
The broadest meaning of the term 'object' is: anything that exists indepen-
dently of the consciousness of a particular individual (subject). Object, here,
is taken in the broadest sense - the 'state of affairs,' - rather than object
in the narrow sense of a 'thing'. Defmed in this way, object is clearly not just
a physical entity (thing, property, relation, or fact), but also other men and
all types of social phenomena (institutions, wars, poems), social ideas, and
social-psychological states - many of those phenomena that in contrast to
physical objects are usually considered to be a subjective process. Finally, in
a certain sense and in a certain context the term 'object' may also refer to
that which takes place only in the head of a man - his illusions, dreams, and
the distinctive elements of his perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. Given the
existence of other people, all his individual psychological states are objects
with respect to the consciousness of other men, for they exist independently
of them and thus may be the object of independent study.
Thus the absolute subject does not exist, except insofar as a particular
philosophical subject claims to itself the privilege of being the sole conscious-
ness in the universe. In that case an "absolute subject" becomes a purely
expressive sign rather than a communicable symbol, i.e. it serves solely to
express the state of consciousness of a given individual, rather than to trans-
mit a message understandable to someone else. Inasmuch as a scholarly
language requires in principle that its symbols be communicable, one must
necessarily suppose that everything that is subjective in relation to an indivi-
dual becomes objective in relation to other individuals. Accordingly even if
one adopts the view point of the positivists that solipsism is logically irrefut-
43
44 EPISTEMOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS
sensory experience that should result from that practice) far from being
"absolute objects" are not real objects at all, but at best "imaginary objects",
Le. cultural objects produced by a definite social community.
And even in regard to material objects whose existence we know with
great assurance and whose existence we would not doubt in the slightest even
in the event of the destruction of mankind (e.g. earth, water, the stars), the
fact remains that we know them only in their relation to us. In order to pro-
claim them absolute objects, we would have to exclude all their properties
since each of them contains some elements of subjectivity - in their color,
hardness, extension, in their duration. And if we were to abstract all their
qualitative and structural properties, we would also eliminate all the distinc-
tions among them. We would no longer be able to say that a particular
absolute object is granite rock, the Indian Ocean, or the star Vega, but only
that it is some completely undetermined, abstract 'something.' In the fmal
analysis both 'something' and 'thing in itself are our own human symbols
and have a certain human meaning. To paraphrase Wittgenstein's famous
proposition about the mystical inexpressible 1 (form), one might say that an
'absolute object' is "something that cannot be spoken about and which one
must be silent about."2 Our conclusion is that in epistemological terms (and
it is an open question whether it can be treated otherwise), an object is just
as relative as a subject. Something can be defmed as an object only in relation
to a subject. Depending on whether the subject is individual consciousness,
the consciousness of people belonging to a fInite social group, or whether it
is social consciousness in general, we are able to distinguish various types of
objects.
But before we proceed with the classifIcation of objects, we should resolve the
basic and most difficult problem of the theory of cognition: what does it
mean that objects "exist independently of individual consiciousness," and
what are the criteria upon which we can know whether something can exist
outside the consciousness of a given subject?
The reason for the existence of this problem is that many empiricists in
the past, including certain logical positivists (phenomenalists) between the
wars, believed that there were no theoretical or experiential reasons for the
assertion that anything existed outside individual consciousness. Already
Berkeley held the well-known view that all the qualities of things - not
just the secondary qualities, as Locke believed, but also the primary ones
46 EPISTEMOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS
class of propositions in which the sign 'sensation' appears rather than the sign
'thing.' "4
Carnap believed that a conflict between the two opposing viewpoints
could be resolved with this translation to a 'formal mode of speech'. Using
this procedure it could be shown that many theoretical disputes were merely
'pseudo-disputes' in which opposing 'pseudopropositions' were advanced
about 'peudo-objects.'
This empirical linguistic purism was directed primarily against metaphysical
speculative objects such as 'absolute spirit,' 'things in themselves,' (material
or spiritual) 'substance,' 'windowless monad,' etc., But it extended to a great
number of other objects - persons, things, past events, and even the concept
of the ego as the subject of sensory experience. All these concepts - more
precisely the words in which they are expressed - were to be eliminated by
analysis and replaced with expressions in which there appear only the flnal
elements of the analysis of such 'pseudo-objects,' i.e. sense data, logico-mathe-
matical signs and symbols which signify points in a space-time continuum.
Carnap attempted to carry out this phenomenalist plan in his early work,
The Logical Construction of the World. 6 Nearly twenty years later Ayer was
to defend it tenaciously in The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge. 7
Today even the positivists have abandoned the phenomenalist program.
It has been realised that the language of sense data is too meagre and that
even its lengthy and clumsy sentences cannot adequately translate relatively
simple expressions of ordinary language. For example there is no assemblage
of sense perceptions expressed in atomic sentences which can adequately
describe the meaning of the words 'Rembrandt's Danae,' and not only because
it is impossible to encompass the numerous sensory impressions that various
people have experienced in viewing this picture, but also because a part of its
meaning assumes its existence as a real object in one of the exhibit rooms of
the Hermitage of Leningrad, which is impossible to express by means of any
description of sensory experience. This argument can also be expressed in a
purely semantic fashion: categorical propositions about objects should be
expressed with hypothethical propositions about possible experiences. But
the logical status of these two types of propositions differs signiflcantly.
While the flrst type indicates the existence of certain objects, the second
expresses what 'could be' - and thus lacks existential meaning. An adequate
translation is impossible. 8
Although it contributed somewhat to understanding the relation between
experience and the concepts about objects, one may thus term unsuccessful
the logico-empirical manner of eliminating the problem of the existence of
48 EPISTEMOLOGICAL FOUND A nONS
The alternative which is open to empiricists and which they themselves in-
creasingly utilized in the Forties was to identify the conditions under which
our concept of material things arises from sensory experience.
Thus, for example, Ayer lists the following four conditions: 1. Relations
of similarity between individual sense-data; 2. A relative stability of context
in which these similar sense-data appear; 3. The fact that such sense-data
appear systematically, and 4. The dependence of such repetition upon the
movement of the observer."9
O'Connor believes that the following five major conditions determine our
use of the expressions 'material thing,' 'physical object,' 'substance,' etc. In
other words these are conditions which groups of sense-data must satisfy in
order to deserve the title 'material substance': 1. Qualities should be manifest
in close spatial-temporal proximity; 2. Members of such a group of qualities
should be linked in the course of a rather minimal period of time; 3. Mem-
bers of such a group should change together and in coordination.... Move-
ment should preserve the relative positions of the parts of the objects (local
movement). Of course there must exist certain proper connections between
the movement of visual and tactile sense-data.... If the change is qualitative
in form, the changes should be concomitant (agree with one another). 4. Phy-
sical objects should be public and neutral. They must be equally accessible
to all observers. S. Such groups of sense-data must have both visual and tactile
components. lO
The very fact that various empiricists have advanced different lists of condi-
tions that sets of sense-data are to fulfd in order to be termed material objects
(e.g. the great differences between Ayer's and O'Connor's criteria) indicates
their inadequacy and partial arbitrariness. It would not be difficult to cite
examples of words which every empiricist would agree to term "material
objects" and which nevertheless are not utilized in accordance with the
specified conditions. For example the sensory perceptions associated with
the symbol 'the planet Saturn' do not satisfy many of Ayer's or O'Connor's
conditions, or else the conditions are formulated so loosely that opposing
CATEGORIES OF OBJECTIVE REALITY 49
As the result of all the difficulties in the empirical explanation of the concept
of 'material' or 'physical' objects, today many empiricists and positivists, as
well as philosophers of various other schools, no longer attempt to reduce
them to experience, but, rather explain the existence of material objects by
means of pragmatic reasoning. They say that we usually postulate concepts
such as 'material objects' in order to obtain a more appropriate and simplified
conceptual apparatus.
In the case of Bertrand Russell, who was never a 'pure' empiricist to the
complete exclusion of realism and pragmatism, this fashion of justifying con-
cepts for material objects - by appeal to the principle of greater simplicity -
appeared four decades ago in his book The Problems of Philosophy. Let us
cite an excerpt from it:
It is easy to see what is won in simplicity when one assumes that material objects exist.
If a cat appears at some time in one part of a room and at a different time in another
part, it is natural to assume that it moved from one part to the other, passing through
a series of intermediate positions. But if this was only a collection of sense-data, it could
not have been anywhere where I saw it; thus we would have to assume that it never did
exist until I saw it, but rather suddenly began to exist at a new place .... Thus the prin-
ciple of simplicity demands that we accept the natural point of view, according to which
there truly are objects, in addition to our self and sense-data, that exist without regard
to whether we perceive them. 12
In a similar vein, Willard Quine, in his well-known article 'On What There Is,'
acknowledges that "physicalistic conceptual schemes," which claim to speak
CATEGORIES OF OBJECTIVE REALITY 51
about external objects but not about the subjective experiences of the indivi-
dual, "offer great advantages in simplifYing our communications, and are
more fundamental in a sense than phenomenonalistic conceptual schemes." 13
Thus he says:
"The physical conceptual scheme simplifies our communications about
experience because of the manner in which a myriad of scattered sensory
events are linked with so-called individual objects." Moreover he acknowl-
edges that "there is little likelihood that each sentence about physical objects
can genuinely be translated into phenomenalistic language, no matter how
complex and roundabout." Finally he provides the following definition of
physical objects: "Physical objects are postulated entities that round out and
simplify our picture of the stream of experience, just as the introduction of
irrational numbers simplifies the laws of arithmetic."14
Quine replied succinctly to the question of the criterion for something
being or not being a physical object. For him the "existence of objects" was
strongly linked to a particular language or system of concepts ('conceptual
scheme') which we are prepared to accept. If the language we have adopted
contains symbols that claim to identify certain entities, then these entities
exist to that extent. The difficulty which Quine attempts to resolve consists
in the fact that there appear in ordinary language ostensible 'names' which
do not appear to refer to any particular entities or any entities at all, such as
the word 'Pegasus.' There have always been philosophers who have believed
that something had to exist to which the word 'Pegasus' referred, for other-
wise we would not speak about Pegasus, or when we did, we would not be
speaking about anything (and that is nonsense). In order to avoid speaking in
a language whose 'ontological basis' is a world crowded with innumerable
such possible, problematic objective entities, Quine replaces names with
descriptions that contain nothing but predicates into which the problematic
entities may be resolved. IS In his opinion, everything that we say in the form
of names can be said in a language that completely excludes names. 16 If it is
assumed that this is a language of predicate calculus from symbolic logic, then
existential assertions will be expressed in the symbols of variable predicates
which are quantified, or preceded by existential operators. Such quantified
variables are called "bound variables:"
Accordingly the ontological assumptions of a theory are precisely dermed
by the selection of a range of variables that may be quantified. In a given
language, one may take as real objects all those - and only those - entities
.
whose signs may be substituted by bound variables as their values, so that the
expressions obtained are true. Quine expressed this in a sentence which has
52 EPISTEMOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS
Now we have a more explicit criterion by which to decide what ontology is assumed by
a given theory or form of speech: a theory assumes those, and only those, entities which
the bound variables of a given theory must be able to signify in order for the statements
of the theory to be true. 1S
Leaving the details aSide, the essence of Quine's conclusion is that a real
object is anything which is signified by certain symbols which are the constit-
uents of the true propositions of a freely chosen suitable language.
Rudolph Carnap tried to resolve this problem in a similar manner in his
noted article 'Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology.' He drew a distinction
between two types of questions about existence and reality (the categories
'existence' and 'reality' differ somewhat in meaning, but Carnap treats them
as synonyms). The first type of question, which he termed internal, concerns
the existence of entities signified by particular symbols in the context of a
language. The second, or external type of question concerns the reality of the
entire world of objects to which the given language refers as a whole. Thus,
for example, ordinary language refers to the spatially and temporally ordered
world of things and events that may be observed. Here the internal questions
are: "Is there a white piece of paper on my table?", "Did King Arthur really
live?", and "Are unicorns and centaurs real or just imaginary?" Such ques-
tions arise in both ordinary life and in science and answers may be given to
them through empirical research. An example of an external question is: "Is
the world of things, as a whole, real?" This sort of question is encountered
in philosophy, particularly in traditional metaphysics ("where it provoked
centuries of fruitless disputes between realists and subjective idealists"). One
cannot reply scientifically to it, for it is not a theoretical, but rather a purely
practical question about the appropriateness of accepting a certain form of
language.
Thus, according to Carnap there are two meanings of the term 'reality.'
The meaning encountered in internal questions is scientific and empirical,
which Carnap defines as follows: "To acknowledge something as a real thing
or event is to succeed in including it in a system of things in particular spatial
and temporal position so that it agrees with other things recognized as real
according to the rules ofthe system." 19 In short: "To be real in the scientific
sense means to be an element ofa system."20
The philosophical concept of reality that is encountered in 'external'
CATEGORIES OF OBJECTIVE REALITY S3
Each of the three philosophers we have mentioned (and not those alone)
seems to agree that the existence of real objects can be neither directly
known nor logically proven. And in fact if direct knowledge is taken to mean
only that knowledge which is acquired by passive sensory experience, and if
proof is taken to be strictly exact proof in the sense of modern formal logic,
these assumptions are correct. Hume's great contribution is that he resolved
this question for modern philosophy, if only by arriving at a negative result.
Since Russell, Quine, and Carnap are convinced that the use of symbols
that assume the existence of external objects cannot be avoided, they attempt
to justify it by means of such pragmatic arguments as effectiveness, fruitful-
ness, simplicity, etc. In any case positivism and empiricism have had numerous
points of contact with pragmatism. (James characterized pragmatism as
<radical empiricism,' and the pragmatic criterion of convenience has always
been acceptable to positivists.) Of late there have been more elements of pra-
gmatism in the doctrines of the leading empiricists and positivists than ever,
S4 EPISTEMOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS
The results of analysis of the cited attempts to defme the concept 'object'
by the empirical and pragmatic schools of philosophy may be summarized
as follows:
1. The failure to formulate an adequate phenomenalistic language demon-
strates a need in both ordinary and scientific language to utilize symbols that
refer to objects external to human consciousness, in addition to symbols
describing our experiences.
2. It is impossible to formulate a purely empirical criterion of objectivity
or, in other words, it is impossible to identify a set of general empirical
characteristics, E, so that whenever we have a symbol S which is believed to
refer to a material object, the expression "s is a material object" should be
understood as abbreviation for the more complex expression "s is an ensemble
of sense-data which have the characteristics E." A purely empirical system of
objectivity does not encompass objects of which we have no direct experience
and which we know primarily by means of abstract thought. On the other
hand, it is too weak to explain ou~ apodictic conviction in the existence of
material objects. It fails to justify the logical jump from sensations and per-
ceptions to objects.
3. The postulating of objects as the elements of effective, simple ~d
suitable conceptual schemes first of all avoids rather than confronts ontolo-
gical problems. It leads to relativism and subjectivism. But this relativism and
CATEGORIES OF OBJECTIVE REALITY 59
This nevertheless remains a scandal for philosophy ... that the existence of objects exter-
nal to ourselves... must simply be accepted on faith, and that insofar as anyone doubts
their existence we are incapable of opposing his doubt with any satisfactory evidence. 39
Moore's proof40 begins by his presenting a hand, which he waves, and this is
accompanied by the assertion of his first premise:
"This is a human hand."
He perfonns the same operation with his other hand, and then we obtain
the second premise:
"Here is another human hand."
Moore arrives at the following conclusion from these two premises:
"Two human hands exist."
Having arrived at an existential proposition, it is not difficult for Moore to
assert the analyticity of the propositions "All human hands are physical
objects," and to derive from the proposition "two human hands exist" the
generalization "two physical objects exist."
between them internal. The content of perception has in fact been projected
by him into reality to be the object. In order to be found in perception, the
object must have been taken from it.
And so at least with respect to the so-called inspective (Moore), prehensive
(Whitehead) or existential realism (perry, Holt, Marvin, Spaulding, Pitkin,
Montague), the positivists (Carnap, Frank, Ayer) were partially right in saying
that phenomenalism and realism are fundamentally two alternative languages
for the description of the same empirical experience. Each of them is faced
by the problem of how to differentiate material objects from sensory illusions.
This problem can be resolved only by establishing a criterion for differentia-
tion. When this is done, realists can assert that we always directly observe
things whenever the conditions laid down by this criterion are present. Other-
wise we are faced by sensory illusions. On the other hand, positivists can
assert that we are always directly conscious only of our senses, and under
the conditions envisioned by the given criterion we can draw conclusions
from our senses about the existence of objects.
In any case, even if. we overlook all the other shortcomings of realism, the
fact remains that it cannot lay the theoretical foundations for its basic thesis
of the actual existence of objects external to human consciousness. Every
attempt of this type (as, for example, Moore's "proof' of the existence of
the external world) entails a vicious circle, for it assumes what is to be ex-
plained, i.e. our direct knowledge of material objects.
(a) We remember perception 0 1 from the past or, in other words, experi-
ence an image which is pinpointed by the objective symbol S 1
(b) We remember the decision to modify 0 1 in such a way as to obtain O2 ,
This decision is symbolized in our consciousness by the symbolic expression
S1-+ S2.
(c) We know directly or remember that we have carried out the operation
symbolized by means of an operator-+.
(d) We directly experience the observation O2 ,
Or, to return to our example, successful practical experience involves
my knowing, along side with the direct observation of Laland's Philosophical
Dictionary in my hands, that I saw that book on the shelf a few moments
earlier, that I decided to take it from there and for that reason approached
the shelf, drew over a chair, climbed upon it, and took the book.
What is then, a directly known object? A directly known object is what
I am directly aware of in the course of a successful practical experience. Or in
other words (assuming that we know the meaning of the term "symbol" and
the term "signify"): a directly known object is that which is signified by an
objective symbol in the process of a successful practical experience.
The question immediately arises as to what we have actually gained by
introducing the concept of practical experience. In what way is our definition
of the directly known object better than the one realists provide when they
say that an object is something I am directly aware of in extrospective obser-
vation? The answer is that by introducing the concept of practical experience
we can successfully eliminate all common sensory illusions, hallucinations,
and dreams. In passive, purely receptive sensory observation we are aware
of a certain succession of impressions but we are unable to be sure whether
these impressions have any sort of objective basis, i.e. whether the mechanism
of their successive appearance has an external cause - physical objects -
or an internal one - the physiological condition of my organism, a mental
disorder or psychological disturbance.
In dynamic, creative, practical experience, we purposefully introduce a
modification by our action, by exerting effort and using energy, and all these
phenomerta are directly observable. The essential thing is that we attempt to
modify our experience on the assumption that it is also determined by exter-
nal factors, rather than on the assumption that it is merely the expression of
certain immanent, inner regularity. In order to take the book in my hands I
approach and touch the shelf. I do not exert effort to awake from sleep only
to slumber once more, or to replace one hallucination with another.
The next significant factor is that we do not always succeed in bringing
66 EPISTEMOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS
but rather because we have sufficiently good reasons. One can oppose each
generally accepted theory with another that similarly succeeds in organizing
all the experiential data and that skilfully succeeds in integrating each new
datum by means of additional hypotheses and modifications. By this very
fact it cannot be completely rejected. But nevertheless scientists will not give
it serious consideration precisely since its power to explain new phenomena
is so insignificant that it constantly requires the addition of supplementary
hypotheses. It is for precisely such reasons that anti-Copernican and anti-
Darwinian theories were unable to maintain their influence over time.
In the field of epistemology the crucial test for an evaluation of particular
doctrines - phenomenalism, imrnanentism, and other forms of idealism, on
the one hand, and materialism on the other - is successful practical activity
(precisely because there is such a thing as unsuccessful practical activity).
When one carefully analyzes practical experience, one necessarily comes to
the conclusion that under certain conditions we directly apprehend material
objects themselves, and not merely our sensations and perceptions.
One can never make a leap from mere sensations and perceptions to
objects. But it is possible to make the transition from practical experience to
objects, for the very reason that the practice upon which we have proceeded
is both objective and subjective. Practice is precisely the interaction of the
subject with something external, something existing independently of it. When
the subject becomes aware of this interaction, when his consciousness has
become so analytic that it has polarized into consciousness of itself and con-
sciousness of whatever is offering it resistance, threatens it, and which it must
overcome and model purposefully, at that point we say that it has become
capable of direct cognition of objects. Here, then, there is no unjustified
logical leap from subjective mental states to assumptions of objective entities;
what we have, rather is a breaking down of original, concrete, diffuse con-
sciousness, in which elements of subjectivity and objectivity are intertwined,
into direct consciousness of objects, on the one hand, and perceptions, ideas,
images of imagination, on the other.
It stands to reason that this separation of the two components cannot be
carried out fully. There are always subjective elements in our cognition of
objects. The objects of our cognition correspond only relatively well to the
objects that are fully independent of our consciousness. But we have already
stated that objects in the latter sense cannot be subjected to scholarly or
philosophical investigation. One cannot even talk about them without modi-
fying them and projecting them into the symbolic form of our language.
In addition to the distinction of 'object in itself and 'object of cognition,'
CATEGORIES OF OBJECTIVE REALITY 69
it is important to note one more distinction, i.e. the difference between the
'directly known object' and the 'indirectly known object.' Until the present
we have spoken only about the former, for cognition of these objects does
not assume a highly developed apparatus of discursive thought. We become
directly conscious of them in the process of practical activity.
We shall return to the latter only after an explanation of the basic cate-
gories of thought. Direct cognition of an object is the conception of the
object which we hold in everyday life. TIris is not a concept in the true sense
of the word, for it contains individual elements that vary from man to man
depending upon their apperceptions and concrete conditions of practice.
Indirect cognition of an object represents generalization and correction of
individual and variable conceptions. Here and only here do we begin to deal
with the true, scientific concept of the object. But nevertheless, without the
former we wouldn't have the latter. The entire edifice of our knowledge of
the objective world is founded upon our direct practical knowledge of earth,
water, fire, stone, animals, plants, and other people.
We previously pointed out that all objects may be classified in several groups
with respect to their level of objectivity, i.e. the extension of their relation
to the subject (a relation which must always be included in the concept of
object).
Thus physical objects have the greatest level of objectivity - and here
we are referring to inorganic objects, astronomical, physical, and chemical
processes, organic bein~, and life phenomena in general. In brief, this classifi-
cation includes all objects and phenomena studied by the natural sciences.
Physical objects are defined in relation to consciousness of society in general,
by which we mean the totality of human communities in historical space
and time. Thus physical objects are not practically definable and knowable
solely for the members of a particular social group and in a limited time span.
Of all objects they are the most constant and most reliably known. In com-
parison with other objects they tend to undergo more practical testing of a
greater variety, under different historical conditions, during relatively long
intervals oftime.
In the category with a somewhat lesser degree of objectivity are spatial
social objects - other people and their actions, social institutions and all
those social events that have a physical behavioral aspect. There are among
70 EPISTEMOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS
Objects
The criterion of the level of objectivity we used to classify the four groups
was the level of reliable, verifiable knowledge about a given type of object
or phenomenon. We have seen that this capacity is increased by the following
factors:
1. The existence of the objects in space as a rule offers the possibility
of direct intersubjective cognition, while objects that exist in time only offer
at best the possibility of indirect cognition (Their structure may be grasped
through introspection and communication.)
2. The longer the duration of an object in time the more it can be known
by people belonging to various generations with differing practical needs,
perceptions, and methods of investigation, which means, as a rule, the possi-
bility of a broader and more comprehensive verification.
3. Constant and recurrent objects, i.e. those objects that have relatively
costant structures, offer significantly greater possibilities of reliable knowledge
than variable individual objects.
The criterion for dividing all objects into material and mental objects was the
characteristic of existence in space, which applies to the first two groups only.
Let us offer some explanation concerning this fundamental distinction:
1. As mentioned above, it is fallacious to equate the material with the
objective and the mental with the subjective. In view of this one must con-
sider as imprecise the definition of matter as "objective reality that exiats
independently of individual consciousness." Not only is this so broad that
CATEGORIES OF OBJECTIVE REALITY 73
(c) The third essential difference lies in a very specific way in which
nonmaterial objects develop. They tend, namely, to have their content and
structure correspond as close as possible to the qualitative and structural
qualities of material objects. This is a higly complex process which sometimes
takes place by means of the construction of ideal objects that have only a
remote possibility of corresponding to the structure of the material world.
On the other hand while as a rule material objects tend to change indepen-
dently of human mental life, an essential feature of practice is that material
objects that enter human history are compelled by human being:; to change
in accordance with objective social ideas and with consciously formulated
objectives.
4. The need arises here to define and delimit the terms 'matter,' 'exis-
tence,' 'reality,' and 'being.'
We have already seen that 'matter' refers to all objects that exist in space
and time. The meaning of the term 'matter' generally corresponds to the
expression utilized by many philosophers - 'external world' or 'physical
world.' As far as we are concerned, the 'physical world' has a more narrow
meaning; it refers properly to all physical objects and is a synonym for
the term 'nature.'
'Existence' is a broader term than 'matter,' inasmuch as it also encom-
passes all mental processes. It is not just rocks and houses that can be said
to exist, but also observations, conceptions, fantastic images, desires, inten-
tions, etc. But in a temporal sense it is a much narrower concept than matter.
It encompasses all material and mental processes to be found in a limited
interval of time. Existence differs in each new point in time. A man who has
just died ceases to exist, but he continues to be a material object. Precisely
because of its temporal qualities existence has not just a general meaning
but also an individual one. Conversely, matter is impersonal and is invariant
in all the transformations of individual material objects.
'Reality' is a broader concept than 'matter,' as is evident in the fact that
it is often accompanied by the predicate 'material.' This implies that there
is a reality that is not material, but conversely one never says 'real matter,~
for the opposite category implied by this expression - 'unreal matter' - is
absurd. Thus everything that is material is real. But the converse is not true.
All mental processes are real, regardless of whether they are treated as an
CATEGORIES OF OBJECTIVE REALITY 75
the other. Even if all the houses on earth were destroyed in a catastrophe the
concept of a house would not disappear. People would in fact rely upon it
to reconstruct their homes. It wbuld only disappear if the people disappeared
along with their houses. But as long as there exist intelligent beings who
retain in their minds the concept of a house, this is real, even if at a particular
point in time it is not actually given in anyone's consciousness. Once again
we are concerned with a symbol, i.e. a specific material object which is
associated with an objectively existing disposition to experience an idea under
particular conditions.
The concept is obviously an object for it is independent of the conscious-
ness of any individual subject. However, not only is it not strictly localized
in space, unlike all material objects, but neither is it specified in time in the
same way as ideas and perceptions. This is not to say that it is outside space
and time or iliat it has an ideal being, such as the Husserlian logicists assert, in
opposition to the psychologists. Even concepts have spatial and temporal
parameters of a type, although they are completely different from those
encountered with all other objects. All forms of thought are determined in
space and time in an indirect manner - by means of the forms of thought of
the members of a particular historical society which exists in historical space
and time. In this sense our concepts have a down-to-earth character and are
related to a particular epoch in the development of human thought. The con-
cept "a7retpov" is related to Ionian philosophy in the fifth century B. C. The
concept of "Bolshevik" is related to twentieth-century Russia. Concepts
arise, develop, and disappear like all other objects, and consequently it is
inappropriate to speak of them having an ideal existence or validity. Con-
cepts are quite real, but are not always actually existent.
UNREAL OBJECTS
Thus far it appears that reality is the most comprehensive category whose
meaning can be expressed as the totality of all objects and subjects. But a
difficulty arises here. Thus far we have taken account of perceptions and
representations merely as mental operations, and concepts and judgments
only as mental forms, i.e. as dispositions related to particular symbols. Now
the question arises of whether one may also speak of the objects of percep-
tions, representations, concepts, and judgments as objects that are always and
invariably real. A large number of the objects of experience and thought are
certainly real. But we have established that the level of objectivity of the
objects of our experience and thought varies and declines to the extent that
78 EPISTEMOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS
one utilizes less exact modes of thought, that practical verification is less cer-
tain and conclusive and to the extent that objects are more variable and given
only in time and not also in space. This decrease of the level of objectivity
is continuous, but nevertheless there exists a kind of threshold of reality,
beyond which we encounter unreal, imaginary, and fantastic objects, which
- we are certain -lack any correlate in material reality.
For example, while such objects as the Elbe River, beryllium, the Old
Vic, and the Antarctic ice cap are real, one may be sure of the unreality of
the imaginary characters and objects of mythology and literature, such as
Antigone, Dante's hell, Soames Forsythe, as well as the presumptive objects
of unverified scientific and quasi-scientific theories, such as the heavenly
spheres, the elixir of life, flogiston, ether, vital spirit, etc. Here belong also
the supposed correlates of inapplicable logical and metaphysical categories
such as a second order predicate calculus whose completeness and consistency
has been proved, the Absolute Idea, the First Cause, and monads. Finally,
beings supposed to correspond to religious notions of God, the devil, immortal
souls and the angels are typical examples of fantastic objects.
In all such cases we are dealing with symbols related to completely real
dispositions of imagining certain objects - in other words these concepts
themselves are completely real. But the things to which these concepts refer,
which they signify, do not exist in reality. This of course does not mean that
they are absolutely unreal: like all other oppositions, the opposition between
the real and unreal is a relative one. The relativity of the opposition means
that, even with the most fantastic of concepts, we are dealing with certain
thoughts comprised of elements of ideas of real objects. All religious concepts
are projections of certain human ideals,46 and these ideals are merely modifi-
cations of certain real tendencies and phenomena that are too undeveloped to
satisfy human needs. In all religions God is created in the human image; He is
a kind of supreme ruler whose attributes are obtained by magnifying, extra-
polating, and modifying human characteristics.
Various transitional cases are to be found between these extremely fantas-
tic and real objects of thought. Thus for example so-called ideal objects are
in fact the supposed correlates of abstract concepts as results of rational
exploration of possibilities. One method of such exploration is analysis and
separation of a single element from the context in which it is given in reality
(e.g. mathematical objects - points, lines, planes; ideal physical objects -
the mathematical pendulum, inertia, free fall. Another such method is extra-
polation of the central tendency of a real process and assuming an ideal
boundary toward which the process tends (e.g. absolute truth, the all-round
CATEGORIES OF OBJECTIVE REALITY 79
Following the above discussion we can see more clearly the distinctions
between the terms 'state of affairs,' 'object,' 'reality,' and 'being.'
Here the term 'state of affairs' is taken in the broadest sense as anything
that a subject can experience or imagine. In this sense even the contents of
individual acts of hallucination or visions may be states of affairs. 'Objects'
are those contents of thought that have an intersubjective, social character,
i.e. those which exist independently of any individual subject.
The distinction between the categories 'reality' and 'being' is that being
is a much broader concept, in that it also encompasses unreal objects. One
might say that reality is the totality of all objects and subjects47 which
actually or potentially exist in time and space or at least in time.
The term 'objective reality' is narrower than reality per se in that it ex
cludes the subject to which all objects and other subjects are related. (An
analogue is a system of reference abstracted from the observer.) Thus while
reality includes myself and all other people, objective reality includes all
other people without my consciousness.
One can draw a similar distinction with the term 'being.' We have estab
lished that in addition to everything that comprises the meaning of the term
'reality,' the term 'being' also includes all those contents of thought and
experience lacking correlates either in the world of things or in mental life.
Thus 'objective being' would encompass the totality of all subjects and
objects - both real and fantastic - except for my own self and the quite
CATEGORIES OF OBJECTIVE REALITY 81
Alternatively, a class constitues (2) a set of things sharing at least one com-
mon property or relation. (We are assuming here of course that a 'set' may
contain just a single element.)
We cannot univocally derme the category process by means of its linguistic
correlates. Processes are sometimes expressed by means of names (e.g. 'light-
ning,' 'football match,' 'growth'), sometimes by means of description (e.g.
'the evaporation of water at temperatures above 40 Centigrade,' 'natural
selection by means of the survival of the fittest,' 'socialist revolution through
armed struggle against the invader'), and sometimes by means of sentences
(e.g. 'It is thundering'. 'Bears are dying out in our country'. 'The water level
of the Danube is rising rapidly.) Processes are distinguished by their dynamic
character. Things are usually stable and relatively constant, and in the case
of facts we direct our attention merely to whether something objectively is
or is not, leaving aside the primarily static or dynamic character of whatever
there is. In the case of processes we are concerned with something that is
taking place and changing in time. Of course even things are processes in
a sense - they are only relatively constant, and the larger the time interval
we take into account the more obvious are their changes, both quantitative
and qualitative. But we draw a distinction between the meaning of words
such as 'pencil,' 'stove,' 'wood,' etc. and words such as 'lightning,' 'rain,'
and 'football match.' In the first case the stress is upon spatial givenness
and the permanence of a certain entire structure of properties, while in the
second case the accent is upon activity in time and variability.
We are thus left with three fundamental categories: 'thing,' 'property,'
and 'relation,' and like anything else that is fundamental, these are the
most difficult to explain.
A thing is anything signified by an adequate name (in a symbolic language
- by an individual constant) and exists relatively permanently in space
and time. Here the term 'thing' obviously has a technical meaning that is
broader than the meaning of the word 'thing' in ordinary language (though
less broad than the meaning of the term 'res' in Descartes' phrases 'res extensa'
and 'res cogitans,' where it functions as a synonym for substance). As an
epistemological category 'thing' encompasses not only dead things but also
living beings, and even people (when they are reified, "reduced to bodies
that behave in a regular, predictable way", devoid of innovative, creative
acts).
Each thing is a concrete, individual totality of characteristics, which -
given all the nonessential modifications - represents a relatively permanent
unity. As opposed to certain properties and relations, a thing is actually
CATEGORIES OF OBJECTIVE REALITY 83
existent and localized in both space and time. It can also have certain poten-
tial characteristics, or it can exist potentially in certain relations that are
not presently existent, but at each point in time it is independent of them,
i.e. it would be a thing even without them. If these potential characteristics
and relations fail to manifest themselves, the given thing does not become
either more or less of a thing than it was previously, it simply undergoes
certain modifications, i.e. it becomes a somewhat different thing. Its indi-
viduality can change, although it does not have to.
Property refers to everything signified by an adequate predicate in ordinary
language, i.e. a one-term predicate in symbolic language. 48 In contrast to a
thing, a property is not an object that can exist independently in the material
world. Colors, forms, magnitudes, and other qualities exist only as the con-
stituent elements of things. Thus properties are not concrete wholes, but
only abstract factors of objects. Abstracted in this way, properties can be
imagined, conceived, and one may speak about them separately, but they
do not exist as isolated properties in the material world. Thus they can be
localized in space and time only in terms of the things of which they are
factors. At times this sort of localization can be carried out easily. When
we say that a man is swarthy, we are referring to both his hair and eye color.
But when we say that he is honest, we are most defmitely not referring to
any of his parts. Moreover when we observe a person in a particular time
interval it may be that we fmd nothing that would permit us to attribute to
him such a particular property, even though on the basis of past experience
we are sure that he has that property. But if we extend the interval of obser-
vation and vary the conditions in which a particular person is to be found,
it may be that at a particular moment, under certain specific conditions,
the person may behave in a manner which we term honest. Of course if this
does not take place, we will say that the property has probably disappeared,
that the man has changed, or that our initial evaluation was probably faulty.
Here we are confronted by properties that need not be actually existent,
given in a particular point in time and localized with respect to a particular
part of the given thing. Here we are referring to a thing's possibility or dis-
position, under specific conditions, to react in a particular manner. This
manner may be strictly specified and singular, or it may encompass several
various types of behavior, all of which share a common characteristic. In any
case we are confronted here with so-called 'dispositional properties,' which
may be specific or general. So-called 'essences' are usually dispositional
properties: philosophers term them 'essences' because of their constancy
and necessary manifestation whenever the appropriate conditions are met;
84 EPISTEMOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS
In modem philosophy there have been attempts to derive all other cate-
gories of objective reality from the category of events, as fundamental. This
idea derives from Whitehead, who gave the following meaning to 'event':
''The basic fact for sensory consciousness is an event." 49
"What we perceive is the specific characteristic of a place in the course
of a period of time. This what is meant by 'event.' "50
"We perceive an individual factor in nature and that factor is that which
occurs then and there ... This individual factor ... is the primary concrete
factor that may be distinguished in nature. These primary factors are what
are understood as events." SI
Bertrand Russell accepted Whitehead's thesis of events as the primary
elements of the world, although he criticized the meaning which Whitehead
attributed to the term 'event.'52 Russell concisely set forth his own defmition
of events in The Analysis ofMatter:
"Science concerns itself with groups of 'events' rather than 'things,' which
have changing 'states.' "
"Thus I shall assume that the physical world should be constructed of
'events,' by which I mean, in effect, entities or structures that take up a
field of space-time which is small in all four dimensions. 'Events' may have
a structure, but it is convenient to use the word 'event' in the strict sense
as the meaning of something which, if it has any structure, is not a space-
time structure, i.e. it has no parts that are external to each other in space-
time."
With both Whitehead and Russell the concept of 'event' differs from the
customary common-sense understanding of the term (as an actually existent,
dynamic object). In other words it is a technical term, and should be much
more precise than it is. Techni~al terms, by means of which the new meanings
of terms are introduced into language, are meaningful only to the extent to
which they are significantly clearer and more precise than customary com-
mon-sense terms - otherwise they would only serve to increase the existing
confusion in ordinary language. The defmitions which Whitehead and Russell
provide are not such as to permit us in individual cases to distinguish an
'event' from something which it is not. Descriptions such as "the character-
istic of a place in the course of a period of time" or "that which occurs then
and there" are extremely indefinite for all material objects take place in some
then and there, at some place or in some time. "A small field of space-time in
all four dimensions" is a highly relative concept. In a sense a 'small' field is
the flame of a match, and in another sense the flames of a bombed city, and
in cosmic terms, the explosion of an entire planet, etc.
CATEGORIES OF OBJECTIVE REALITY 87
But the basic objection to the conception of events as the ultimate con-
stituents of reality (or nature) is that the concept 'ultimate constituents'
is logically untenable. If events lack their own structure, they can not be
qualitatively distinguished, and one can not explain the diversity of the
things that are constructed of them. If events have a structure, as Russell
acknowledges, then further analysis must reveal the even simpler elements -
that which is structured.
By all accounts, no attempt to take a single category of material objects
as fundamental has any chance of lasting success - whether this be done with
events, with things, as Tadeus Kotarbinski attempted with his 'reism,' or
with relations (relationism).
*
After a general discussion of objects, which is an essential basis for the
resolution of any theoretical-cognitive problem, we need to concern ourselves
in more detail with three special types of objects for an explanation of the
category of meaning. These are symbols, objective experiences, and concepts.
NOTES
SYMBOLS
At the very beginning we saw that symbols play a dominant role in our
entire life. Above all we cannot even think without language, and words
and other linguistic expressions are symbols par excellence. At the present
level of development of science, and particularly the most advanced sciences,
we barely come into direct contact with the phenomena which we study.
The facts upon which scientists build today in most cases are statistical
data, photographs, diagrams, and indices in various instruments - or in other
words a variety of symbols which must be interpreted. For the philosopher
facts are the propositions of specialized scientists - in other words, symbols.
Art is also symbolic in character. Every work of art is a complex of symbols
- words, colors and forms, musical tones, or movements of the human
body. In order for us to enjoy art, we must be capable of interpreting these
symbols. In addition, religion is completely symbolic in character, from the
movements in religious rites and ceremonies to the words from the pulpit
or from a theological discourse. A particular religious emotional and intel-
lectual mood may be generated only in those who are prepared to interpret
these symbols. Even in ordinary life most of our actions are symbolic in
nature - whether we are dealing with societal, group, or personal symbols.
Customs are typical symbols. Moreover each established formality in behavior
is a symbol - greeting, assigning honours, adhering to certain rules of the
game in flirting, wearing black as a Sign of mourning.
A question arises: what is common in all these various objects that would
permit us to group them nevertheless in a single category and call them all
symbols? What are the common characteristics of linguistic signs, numerals,
photographs, diagrams, material phenomena such as the wavering of the
pointer on the marks of the scale of a measuring device, paintings, songs,
novels, symphonies, architecture, ballets, the bowing of a Moslem priest,
the drumming of an aboriginal, the wearing of rings by husbands and wives?
Every symbol is first and foremost a material object - which is often trivial
in itself. For some natives of Polynesia the greatest literary and scientific
91
92 EPISTEMOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS
works are strange dabs of black ink on white paper. The pictures of modern
art do not by any means impress one with their beauty. All the objects in the
pictures of Bernard Buffet are two-dimensional, ugly, and deformed; the
people are elongated, sad, thin, ,grey and black. The man in the street, not
knowing their artistic and monetary value, would not wish to hang them in
his apartment. Various customs and rituals appear meaningless in and of them-
selves, and in view of the fact that they usually do not have any practical
purpose, they appear to the observer who does not understand them to be
completely useless waste of time and energy. By the same token the five-
pointed star on a cap or a swastika are apparently meaningless signs, like the
many others that are worn in an atavistic desire for self-adornment. But
nevertheless, from 1941 to 1945 for many Yugoslavs an encounter with a
man with one symbol or the other on his hat meant life or death.
Even such symbols as Bach's monumental Passions, Handel's and Haydn's
oratorios, Beethoven's and Bruckner's symphonies, and Wagner's operas mean
little in and of themselves, as mere auditory phenomena, apart from the
spiritual atmosphere in which they were created and in which they may be
interpreted. If there are conscious beings that have a sensory apparatus diffe-
rent from our own, they would be capable of registering only a portion of
the sound waves that are emitted from the orchestra and the voices of the
soloists and choruses in the performance of these works. For them, the object
in question would be something quite different from what it is for us; one
may be sure that they would find nothing in the works that inspires us so.
Finally, in order to reach this conclusion, we do not need to resort to such
hypotheses. By far the great majority of people in the world would consider
it a punishment to have to attend a concert of serious music; most would
surely prefer to listen to the singing of birds and the rippling of a stream.
The fact that symbols - in spite of being largely trivial as material objects
per se - nevertheless play such an enormous role in our life, may be explained
only when one takes into account the relations they assume with respect to
the subject and other objects.
In order for a material object - a thing, word, picture, tone, or movement
- to be a symbol, it must exist in a specific relation toward a subject. We
have already seen that every object per se exists in a relationship toward a
subject who is in some manner aware of it - by means of observation, imagi-
nation, thinking, projecting, etc. But in addition to these general cognitive
relations of the subject toward a symbol as a material object, the subject
must also be in a specific relation toward the material object as a symbol. He
must be able to interpret it, to understand its meaning. In other words, he
SYMBOLS 93
must have the mental disposition upon observation of the object to imagine
or experience another (more significant) object to which the former object
refers.
An analysis of this specific relation of a symbol to the subject who inter-
prets it reveals two additional relations that are of special significance.
The first of these is the relation of a symbol toward what the given subject
or interpreter associated (imagined, felt, discovered) with the observed
symbol.
The second is the relation of the symbol toward the other object which it
represents. Further analysis would allow us to make additional important
distinctions. Thus, on the one hand, a symbol is an individual, existent
material object, strictly located in space and time. On the other hand, it be-
longs to a particular type of symbol. In this sense one may distinguish the
individual numeral 5 which I just mentioned from the numeral 5 in general.
Consequently one may draw a distinction between the relation which the
interpretor has toward a concretely given individual symbol and toward that
type of symbol in general. There may be a very significant difference between
the two. One may be enthralled by Mozart's "Magic Flute," but be completely
unmoved when one hears a particular performance of it. Or the very reverse
may be true.
Similarly one may draw a distinction between the experiences which a
symbol arouses in an individual subject, in an entire group of subjects at a
particular period of time, and the mental process which it tends to arouse
in various periods of time in all human subjects who are prepared to under-
stand it.
Nevertheless these distinctions among various types of symbols can be
disregarded when we define a symbol in general. What is of essential impor-
tance is; first, a more precise description of the type of mental experience
which is logically related to symbol, and second, a more precise defmition
of the character of the object which the symbol stands for. In these two
respects there is an important difference between a sign in general and a
symbol as a special type of sign.
of imagining the set of essential characteristics of the man who bears the
name and by means of which he is distinguished from all other people. And
this is why even if a dog had (as he does not) a vocal mechanism, he would
not be able to speak.
Finally to defme a symbol as a higher-order sign, as a sign of signs, is
highly imprecise. Many symbols, in mathematics and logic for example, are
in fact signs that stand for other signs - the words of ordinary language. But
this is not the basic reason for which we consider them symbols. This is
evident from the fact that among natural phenomena there are numerous
cases in which one can function as a sign for another, which itself is a sign for
a third one, while the first phenomenon is still not considered a symbol. For
example clouds are a sign of rain, and rain may be a sign that the harvest will
be good. But nevertheless clouds are by no means a symbol.
Really, the essential characteristic of a symbol is that it always refers to
what is general and constant - to a form of thought, perception, or feeling
on the one hand, and to a form of the object which is thought of, perceived,
or felt, on the other. This is the basic difference between those types of signs
which we consider symbols and all other signs. Most signs indicate an existen-
tial thing or event and evoke reactions in us similar to those which would be
evoked by the thing itself. When I hear the sound of the doorbell which indi-
cates that someone wants to enter the house, I rise and start to open the
door, just as if I could see through the door the very person who was standing
there. Thus it does not matter here whether the sign has a one-to-one relation-
ship with the object indicated (which Susan Langer insists upon).8 The
relation may be one-to-many (for example, a constant headache is a sign or
symptom of a number of illnesses) or many-to-one (there are usually many
signs or symptoms that one is ill). What is essential is that signs stand for or
indicate actual existential objects which can be localized in time and space.
For this reason that which is experienced by a subject who interprets a sign
will be, at best, merely a representation (Le. a more or less vivid consciousness
of something concrete and existing) which is permanently associated with the
perception of the sign. In response to a bell it is normal for me to experience
only the impression that someone wishes to enter. That someone exists in
the here and now, before my door - nothing else concerns me. Whatever his
character and other qualities or his personality, such associations do not
normally occur in this situation.
But the sound of a bell may also be a symbol. For example in the 1912
Overture by Tschaikowsky one hears, quite clearly, the sound of church bells
in the swelling sound of the orchestra in the fmale. Here this sound has quite
96 EPISTEMOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS
ways lacking any connection with art and by no means leading to the creation
of symbols.
On the other hand, the emphasizing of general forms of feeling and nondis-
cursive thought as the objects signified by musical symbols must not lead
to the idealism encountered, for example, in the famous text of Richard
Wagner:
"What music expresses is eternal, endless and ideal: it does not express
the passion, love, or craving of such and such an individual in such and such
a situation, but rather love or longing in itself and it does so in the endless
diversity of motifs which is the exclusive and distinctive characteristic of
music, and foreign and inexpressible for any other language." 11
The forms of the objects signified by arts lack an "eternal, timeless and ideal
character." If objects in general are given only in relation to the subject, to
man, than this is even clearer with respect to such objects as forms of thought
and feeling. Most artistic symbols are the general structures of the emotional
and mental life of men in a particular epoch. This is the sole means of
explaining the fact that certain works of art that had enormous, tumultuous
success with contemporary audiences are later completely forgotten or are
remembered for some mere details. The only works that survive the centuries
and ages are those whose symbols have universal meaning, for in expressing
the thoughts and feelings of the authors and their classes and nations, these
symbols simultaneously signified certain universal forms of mental and
emotional content. Examples of this are the symbol of sacrifice for others in
Bach's St. Mattew's Passion, the symbol of struggle with fate in Beethoven's
Fifth Symphony, the symbol of solitude in Schubert's song The Old Organ-
grinder from the Winte"eise cycle, the symbol of motherly love toward the
child in the Madonna's of various great painters, the symbol of loyalty in
the character of Solveig in Ibsen's Peer Gynt, the symbol of the passage of
time in the skull which Hamlet holds during his famous monologue, etc.
The term "general forms of feeling" of an object is sufficiently clear if
one takes into account the fact that form always means a set of elements
which remains invariant throughout all alterations of conditions, situations,
and contexts.
But we must explain what is meant by nondiscursive thinking as opposed
to discursive thinking.
poetry with science. In Do/ap, the famous work by the Yugoslav poet Rakic,
the poet expresses the idea of the purposelessness of life, the futility of all
effort, and the empty rat race of life leading to the grave as the essenc~ of
human existence. But although he uses words, he does not express discursively
this universal thought that may be found at the heart of a general structure
of feeling. He constructs an image that has a deeper meaning and which
accordingly is a symbol, although an artistically nondiscursive one. The
image is that of a horse that time and again moves in a circle and draws an
irrigation wheel.
Philosophers and essayists have set forth their meditations on the same
theme, in more or less logical form, on innumerable occasions. For example:
life inevitably ends in death; man treads an eternal circle, driven by forces
greater than himself, and bears his burden from the day he emerged from
the void to the day he returns to it and no effort can spare him from his
fate. Accordingly every effort is in vain.
In both cases we utilize symbols to signify the position of man in the
world, a situation which is objective and experienced in an identical way by
such a large number of people, independently of any individual subject.
In both cases we utilize words. But in the first case, the poem, we tend to
conceive the entirety of the situation simultaneously, without breaking it
down into its individual components, utilizing a metaphor and calling upon
our powers of direct, intuitive understanding and imagination.
In the latter case we have still retained certain metaphors. For example,
instead of saying that "Man bears his burden from the day he emerged from
the void to the day he returns to it," which still represents an artistic symbol,
one might say: "Man does his duty, as imposed upon him from birth to
death," which is a discursive, scientific symbol. But even so the second
text taken as a whole is discursive. Here the situation is analyzed into its
constituent elements. There is an obvious tendency to avoid images and
to utilize words in such a way as to express concepts that are linked into
judgments which lead to a particular conclusion. Symbols such as these
do not address our intuition and feelings, but rather logical thought.
A particularly important characteristic of discursive thought is to break
down objects into constant, structural elements that have independent mean-
ing, and then to line up the symbols that refer to each element, one after
the other, until one arrives at the conceptual whole that is adequate to the
given object.
What characterises discursive symbols, then, is that the form of the sub-
jective experience that they arouse is always a concept, and that the object
SYMBOLS 99
they signify is always something general and constant, i.e. an abstract general,
constant property, relation, or structure of a certain class of things.
relation among concepts, but may also include a sensory image - that of a
right-angle triangle above each of whose sides a square has been constructed.
The interpretation of the symbol 'atom' also may include both elements
- the conceptualization of the essential characteristics of a type of material
particle and the experience of the sensory image (model) which represents
pictorially the structure of this type of particle. One might say that the ideal
of scientific knowledge is associating the general with the specific, and the
understanding of the general as the concrete, which calls for the association
of concepts with images incorporating the greatest abundance of details.
Furthermore there can be no question that the interpretation of scientific
symbols, and particularly of complex symbols - sentences and sets of sen-
tences constituting a theory - can be accompanied by intense emotional
reactions. The theories of Copernicus and Galileo in the fifteenth, sixteenth,
and seventeenth centuries, and those of Darwin and Marx in the nineteenth
aroused such a storm of sentiment and such vehement reactions that one
can hardly think of any work of art to compare with them.
On the other hand a work of art always has an expressive character. By
observing or listening to it we have, above all, a visual or acoustic experi-
ence of the symbols themselves - letters, tones, movements, shapes, or
colors. This is still not interpretation since when a person goes no further
than passively perceiving the symbols without troubling himself with their
meaning, we say that he has failed to understand the work. Interpretation
begins only with a visual or acoustical image of what the symbol means,
i.e. with experiencing a more or less powerful emotion which the symbol
expresses. But even so we have not yet arrived at what is deepest and most
essential in the meaning of the symbol - the object which is designated.
As we have seen, the object referred to by the symbol is usually the concept
of something general (essential or typical). This is often called an 'idea,'
which is, to be precise, always a constant structure of human reflective and
affective life. This structure, designated by a symbol, can only be understood
in intellectual terms - ,although at issue here is so-called nondiscursive think-
ing, a direct, nonconceptual, simultaneous understanding of the whole. Thus,
Urban 13 cites the example of one of Ibsen's symbols in Peer Gynt in order
to demonstrate the great cognitive value this nondiscursive understanding
may havet When Peer peels the onion to reveal the hidden, inner essence,
but winds up with nothing after removing all the layers, there arises in him
the painful knowledge that he, Peer, is like that, and this symbol (according
to Urban better than any intellectual exposition) points to the social nature
of our ego. After we remove all the layers of social ties and relations with
102 EPISTEMOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS
other people, nothing remains except emptiness. People who are incapable
of forming a firm social bond become as empty as Peer Gynt. One may
interpret in this way Engels' famous statement that one may learn more
from Balzac's novels about social conditions in France in the early nineteenth
century than from all the tomes of the historians, statisticians, and economists
of the time. 14
Thus non discursive symbols do much more than merely express and evoke
feelings: they also have a cognitive meaning, designating objects which we
comprehend by means of nondiscursive thinking.
Accordingly it is in the nature of all symbols - and not just those en-
countered in science and philosophy - to have a dual relation: toward the
objects which they designate and toward the forms of mental life which they
express.
Urban termed this dual relation "bi-representation," 15 which is not the
most felicitous term, for different relations are here at issue. The relation
of the word 'Mars' to the concept of Mars differs significantly from the
relation of that word to the fourth planet with respect to distance from
the Sun. Accordingly it is inappropriate to utilize the same word - 'repre-
sentation.' In fact the term is not appropriate to refer to either of the two
relations. Even with a symbol such as a landscape, still life, or portrait we
could speak of representation only if we took an individual natural scene,
a particular person, or group of apples, carrots, or fish literally as the object
deSignated by the symbol. In fact the object of a symbol is always something
general and constant, a form, which is not represented pictorially but referred
to or designated. It is even less suitable to say that a symbol 'represents'
the corresponding form of mental life. It is not clear how the word 'father,'
'pere,' 'Vater,' 'padre,' and 'otac' all represent the same concept. Thus it
is much more correct to say that they all express that concept.
LINGUISTIC SYMBOLS
Having thus determined what a symbol is, it remains for us to inquire into
the specific features of linguistic symbols. Ernst Cassirer has shown in great
detail that symbols are not utilized solely in the field of the exact sciences,
but that language generally, as well as mythology and religion are completely
symbolic in character. 16 Of course we are primarily interested in the theory
of logical meaning, and accordingly we shall dwell primarily upon the symbols
encountered in science and common speech, while touching upon other types
of symbols chiefly in contrast to them.
SYMBOLS 103
The signs encountered in mathematics, logic, and the exact sciences are
in fact symbols in the strict sense of the word. In philosophy the concept
of the symbol has long had this narrow range; it is for this reason that the
logic which utilizes such symbols to express its forms has adopted the title
'symbolic logic' (as if all of logic and science were not symbolic). Languages
comprised of such signs, artificial languages as opposed to ordinary, natural
languages, are still termed "symbolic" languages (as if all languages were not
symbolic in character). It is characteristic of this type of symbol to refer to
very generalized structures of objects and to express very abstract concepts.
The connection of such signs with material reality is indirect. They usually
express only the form of ordinary language, replacing entire sets of words.
But since the words of ordinary language refer directly to material things and
processes, it follows that mathematical and logical symbols indirectly refer to
the forms of the material world. For example the expression (x)fx :> (3x)fx
stands for a multitude of expressions of ordinary language in the following
form: "If each thing of a type has a property, then there exist some things
of that type that have that property." If all the concrete propositions which
may be substituted for the symbolic expression are true, then we can say
that the given symbol refers to a general structure of the material world.
Otherwise we say that the symbol refers to an unreal object. Many such
symbols typically do not refer to real objects, but may be utilized in cognitive
operations so that the final results are symbols whose references are real.
Thus, for example, the objective structure of human thought is not such
that most people, when faced by a complex hypothetical proposition would
conclude that the proposition as a whole is true - merely because its ante-
cedent is false. It follows then that the symbol for implication P) does not
refer to any sort of real object. But nevertheless when we use it, the final
result will be symbols which express true propositions.
A second characteristic of mathematical and logical symbols is closely
related to the foregoing one: these symbols are far more creative and, one
might say more conventional in character than others. In other words, it
does not occur, as with ordinary language, that we first have objects before us
and then build the symbols. The reverse is true: before we know whether a
structure exists in the material world we construct the symbols that designate
it and lay down the rules for their use. Of course we do not do so arbitrarily,
as the conventionalists assume. These symbols must be applicable to the
symbols of ordinary language: their function must be one of the conditions
for knowing objective truth.
It is interesting that Cassirer, after justifiably arguing against reducing all
104 EPISTEMOLOGICAL FOUND A TIONS
symbols to those of the exact sciences, went to the other extreme and con-
cluded that these mathematical-logical signs are not true symbols. This
paradoxical point of view is explained by his argument that in all genuine
symbolic relations there must exist a similarity between the reference and
the symbol, while this similarity is nonexistant in this caseY Urban agrees
with this, arguing that with genuine symbols there must exist an intuitive
relation between them and the objects which they stand for. Thus these con-
ventional, substitutional signs are allegedly merely operational signs rather
than true symbols. 1s
Many symbols are truly similar to their designated objects. There may
be a similarity of shape, color, perspective, projection (as with sculpture,
pictures, drawings) or, most commonly, there is a similarity of structure (as
with diagrams, maps, and illustrations. But the argument as to the necessary
similarity of symbols and designated objects will hardly hold up even in
the case of applied art. It is difficult to say in what sense musical symbols
are similar to the emotional and reflexive structures they refer to. Such a
similarity may be found in programmatic music, but it is difficult to fInd
it in so-called absolute music. The interrelationships are too complex to
be characterized merely as similarity.
As to discursive symbols one may state with certainty that there is no
similarity at all. Onomatopoeiac words play too small a role in any developed
language to justify devoting serious attention to the similarity between signs
and objects. Most words bear no similarity to their designated objects.19
What similarity is there between the word 'square' and the rectangle with
equal sides and right angles, or the word 'cat' and the variety of affectionate,
cunning animals one fInds about the house? Thus mathematical and logical
symbols are by no means in a special position with respect to all other lin-
guistic expressions. They are all chosen to designate their objects not because
they bear any similarity to them, but because of a convention or a custom
or a specific, internal law of development of the symbolism itself. (Linguistics
determines such laws for language.)
Moreover there is a principle of the effective construction of linguistic
symbols according to which the most suitable expressions for use as symbols
are those which are quite trivial and lack any intuitive meaning - in other
words those expressions that are not associated with any objects similar to
themselves. In this way a language will have the necessary generality and
elasticity, its words will be able to enter into the largest number of combi-
nations, without being restricted by narrow boundaries, without being
applicable only to similar objects. When a sign develops into a symbol, for
SYMBOLS lOS
itself, and also about a language that discusses another language, etc. This
means that language can encompass a highly complex hierarchy of linguistic
levels, which increases to an ext!aordinary degree its expressive power (par-
ticularly for the purposes of abstract thought). This sort of structuring is
lacking in other symbolic systems. For example one may paint a picture of
an interior scene which includes a picture in its decor. For amusement one
might include a picture with that picture. But the possibilities along these
lines run out very quickly, for more than technical reasons. Moreover there
is no justifiable reason for such an act - it is pointless. This is not at all the
case with language, where with the construction of various linguistic levels
one easily arrives at an articulation that is invaluable for the purposes of
scientific research and logical accuracy.
NOTES
simplest type of meaning, for pictures look like what they mean, while words as a rule
do not."
20 Susan Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, New York, 1955, p. 65.
CHAPTER IV
OBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE
How does one learn the word 'or'? One cannot show a child examples of 'or' in the
sensory world ... But nevertheless 'or' has a certain relationship to experience, pertain-
ing to the experience of choice ... 2 A disjunction is a verbal expression of indecision
or, if a question has been posed, the desire to make a decision. 3
t -2. This experience is preceded by the forms of the interval t -3, etc. Here
we are faced with only an apparent regression ad infinitum. In modern
anthropology it is believed that in his initial phase of development man did
not think discursively and in abstract concepts. Various nondiscursive mental
structures - instincts, customs, conditioned reflexes, and symbolic mythical
forms functioned to select and organize primitive raw experience. Thus with
the increasing enrichment of language, man accumulated enormous practical
experience, which formed the basis for the transformation of habits and
conditioned reflexes into concepts.
Accordingly while at a higher, discursive level of human intellectual
development mental forms and experience are interlinked and precede one
another in alternation, in a genetic sense experience is ultimately primary
and mental forms are secondary.
According to the first of its two senses objectivity of experience means its
intersubjective, social character. The experience of the individual subject is
viewed in the relationship of the simultaneous givenness toward the experi-
ence of other subjects belonging to the same social group under given condi-
tions and in a given period of time. Then it can be established that some
invariant elements exist in the experiences of all the subjects of the group.
We call the totality of such elements objective experience, as it is independent
of the existence and of the consciousness of any individual subject. For
example the hunger of a concentration camp prisoner did not cease to exist
with the death of any of the individual prisoners; the aesthetic enjoyment
of the visitors to Modigliani's commemorative exhibition did not cease merely
because one visitor was offended by the overly elongated, angular shape of
his pointed faces.
In the second of its two meanings objectivity means the objective ground-
ing and correspondence of experience as a subjective process to certain mate-
rial or mental objects. The more adequate a perception in the sense that its
elements correspond to actual features of the object, the more objective it is.
For example objective experience is the perception of an object as red when
it genuinely reflects light waves of 687 millimicrons in length. The experience
of a daltonist to whom t~e same object appears to be gray is subjective.
The difference between these two meanings of objectivity is best seen in
the next example. The perception of a group of travellers standing on a
platform looking at an approaching train is objective, first of all, in the sense
that it is the perception of the entire group of subjects, and is objective,
secondly, in the sense that it is relatively adequate to an actual object - an
approaching train.
What in experience can be objective? Is it not true what Schlick and so many
others say: if all subjects differ from one another in terms of culture, previous
experience, desires, etc., how can one and the same experiential element be
the same with even two subjects in the same situation at the same time?
In fact one may concede that all the experiential elements of two subjects,
taken in their full concrete givenness, are qualitatively different. There is no
criterion to evaluate the qualitative identity of two experiences in all their
individual details. One must acknowledge that truly no one can enter into
another's consciousness to see what is actually taking place there. But in
order to explain the origin of a language which is objective and social in
116 EPISTEMOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS
One must dwell for a moment on the basic fact that is incompatible with the
subjectivistic conception of experience. This is the fact that by means of
language people successfully communicate with one another. How do we
conclude that their communication is successful, i.e. that some people
genuinely understand the spoken or written signs of others? Is it not possible
that in fact no one understands anyone else, and that in fact this is merely
not noticed at all times because the mental processes of various people pro-
ceed along parallel lines? Is it not possible that we are so accustomed to
misunderstanding other people that we no longer even take note of it (like
the air we breathe)? We merely are surprised when the misunderstandings
exceed certain proportions and so express our disappointment in our wives,
friends or relatives, or in the ideas and ideals in which we once believed.
Cannot many human misfortunes - meaningless marriages, quarrels with
people around us who are probably no worse than we, and in the final analysis
wars and revolutions (as one semanticist once discovered) - be explained by
misunderstandings and the lack of a correct interpretation of symbols?
Misunderstandings unquestionably play an important and often tragic role
in our life. In relationships between individuals belonging to the same social
group misunderstandings are determined by the subjective elements of mean-
ing that vary from man to man. In relationships between groups and entire
societies the causes of misunderstanding are the distinctive group elements
of meaning that vary from group to group.
OBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE 117
But nevertheless the fact that in spite of all, people generally understand
one another is proven primarily by the phenomenon of practical cooperation
between individuals, groups, and entire nations. We use certain symbols:
words, gestures, facial expressions, and others react to them in the manner
we expect or in the same way we react when they use the same symbols.
In the many bakeries of the world there exist various types of bread, various
prices, various types of packaging (or none at all), but universally the same
thing happens: if one pronounces one of a number of words such as 'bread,'
'Brot,' 'du pain,' 'hleb,' one will obtain the required product, and the fact
that one is permitted to leave without complaint shows that one has correctly
understood how much to pay.
I can never know with certainty whether someone viewing burning wood
along with me is experiencing the event in absolutely the same way or in
more or less different way. There is no way of carrying out the qualitative
comparison of experience. One cannot have direct experience of the experi-
ence of others. But one can nevertheless know something about it indirectly.
First of all in the presence of a wood fire others behave as we do. They
are careful not to approach too closely, and if they accidentally touch it,
we are able to conclude - by their haste to terminate the contact, by their
facial expression, and perhaps by their outcry - that they are experiencing
the same level of pain we would feel in the same situation. At a certain
distance from fire others behave as I would: if it is cold, by various gestures
they express their sentiments of pleasure. If it is hot, they try to get as far
away as possible, or if they must remain, they begin to get red, sweat, loosen
their clothes, and in a variety of ways try to cool themselves. The verbal
behavior of others is a particularly reliable key to the world of others' experi-
ences (although this can be extremely deceptive, as anyone knows who has
dealt with insincere people). When two men point their fingers at a stove
and both say 'fire,' merely on the basis of agreement in this single case one
cannot yet know whether the same experience is referred to by the same
word. Perhaps to one of them the word refers to the stove or the stove
opening or the color of the fire, the burning wood, the movement of the
rising air, etc. But the use of the word in various situations and contexts
progressively eliminates the possibility of various misunderstandings. If
both use the same word for a conflagration (when there is no stove and
when neither wood nor coal is burning) and for the burning of alcohol
(which burns blue rather than red), as well as for the flaming of a match
(which is too weak to cause visible air movement around it), one may draw
the irrefutable conclusion that their experiences - regardless of qualitative
118 EPISTEMOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS
justifiably call such a Platonic conception speculative, departing too far from
sense data, and thus subject solely to pure faith. But the arguments of the
skeptics against the conception of objective experience outlined here (iden-
tical structural elements in the framework of individual experience) do not
carry much weight. Thus, for example, everything that follows from the quite
proper objection that man can never enter someone else's head in order to
see what happens, to compare his own experience with that of others and
to identify common elements - is that objective experience is not directly
perceptible (and this was admitted at the outset). If in his argumentation the
skeptic goes beyond this to affirm that we can speak of constant properties
only for things that are directly observable and which can be compared
directly, this methodological demand would lead to the rejection of many
valuable scientific propositions that have been verified in practice (particularly
in modern science), and consequently it must be considered fallacious.
We are not in a position to observe electrons directly. But if we are able to
conclude something about the general, constant properties of electrons from
observations of the configuration of minute droplets of steam in a Wilson
chamber, then we are similarly able to propose an explanatory hypothesis
about the general and constant properties of human experience on the basis
of observation of human communication and cooperation. In all such cases
whether the hypotheSis is to be confirmed or refuted depends upon further
observation and testing.
In fact all of scientific knowledge has an indirect character. Even in
the case of directly knowable phenomena the only way to profound and
concrete knowledge is by way of other phenomena that are more easily
controlled and which occupy a constant, lawful relation to the former. This
holds true for nearly all quantitative study, and provides the basis for the
use of jnstruments.
Thus, for example, we perceive temperature directly as a quality. But in
view of the fact that qualities assume only a few relationships to one another
- equal to, more than, less than - we are unable to get far with direct,
qualitative study of this phenomena. But in measuring it we utilize indirect
methods of cognition. We observe a constant relationship between variations
of temperature and changes in the height of a column of mercury and estab-
lish a one-to-one correlation between levels of intensity of temperature and
units of height of the mercury column in the thermometer. Similarly when
the engineer looks at a pressure gauge, what he is fact sees is the position
of a needle on a scale, but he can justifiably be assured that he knows the
pressure of the steam in the boilder at that moment.
120 EPISTEMOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS
skewed by the subjective wishes and interests, they may yield certain objec-
tive elements. Nevertheless the practice of people at the time of the event
under investigation will be most reliable in indicating how it was truly experi-
enced. Regardless of what opponents of the revolution later state about their
feelings and sympathies for the revolutionary cause, it is quite likely that
they experienced it as a repulsive, harmful, dangerous, chaotic, and reckless
event and that their general attitude affected their selection of observations:
they took note of what accorded with their attitude and failed to note
whatever was opposed to it.
Of course such studies are specialized in character (belonging to the field
of social psychology), and it is not necessary here to discuss details. All
that is necessary is to establish that these studies are possible and that their
results in principle should have as much scientific validity as the fmdings of
any other investigation of other objectively existing phenomena. One can
only classify them as more or less likely hypotheses, but all empirical gen-
eralizations fall into that category. Like any other hypotheses these are tested
by continued observation of the behavior of the researched subjects to see
whether this behaviour agrees with what may be deduced from the hypothesis
of the general structure of their experience over the past.
It goes without saying that social-psychological studies of this type are
much more complex- than any others, and the possibility of error due to
the involvement of such a large number of factors is much greater. But the
difference is one of degree rather than one of quality.
the smallest, until one encountered the experiential elements which are com-
pletely personal in character and which could not be encountered in any
other man.
This analysis leads to the natural assumption that the first elements are
the most objective (that this is the maximum possible objectivity), and that
the transition to smaller groups entails more and more relatively subjective
elements until one ultimately arrives at the completely subjective elements
of the experience of the individual - those completely individual to him. This
would constitute a kind of natural state prevailing while consciousness deve-
loped spontaneously, before the division of labor into physical and intellec-
tual. Prior to this differentiation no one could observe and think more objec-
tively than another: each individual can be treated as a unit and the level of
objectivity can be dermed by quantitative measures - the counting of heads.
The larger the number of people who observe or think alike, the more objec-
tive the result of their conscious effort. But the dividion of labor has given
some individuals and groups a privileged status over others. Now (with the
advance of the division of labor) a few professionals dealing solely with
cognition are presumably in possession of more objective knowledge than
most of the society. Thus qualitative measures of objectivity appear in addi-
tion to quantitative ones. Now one must say that only when conditions are
otherwise equal does the number of people who have undergone the same
experience or drawn the same conclusion playa role in assessing the objec-
tivity of this conscious function. Otherwise, qualitative factors - knowledge
and particularly the capacity to make accurate observations or form conclu-
sions excluding emotions, desires, or personal, familial, national, or class-
interests - come to playa significantly greater role. An individual can be
more objective than all the rest of mankind once he transcends his own per-
sonal limitations and the limitations of the collective human subject. For
example, Aristarchus asserted that the Earth revolves around the Sun dis-
regarding all the leading thinkers of the time, most notably Aristotle, who
subscribed to the notion that the home of man was the center of the world.
Of course it is often difficult to assess these qualitative factors. The true
extent of a thinker's intellectual power, knowledge, ability to disassociate
himself from personal and collective desires, interests, and emotional needs
is something that is seen only after the fact - for the unfortunate Aristarchus,
only after two thousand years. It is only subsequent testing that can establish
the objectivity of someone's knowledge. Yet in many cases we can distin-
guish qualitative differences in objectivity on the basis of prior experience.
For example an already tested level of objectivity in the past history of an
OBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE 125
is able to identify immediately the difference between two plants which may
seem identical to a layman even on close insection. A musicologist can iden-
tify differences between Furtwangler's and Toscanini's interpretations of
Beethoven's symphonies that completely escape the ear of a nonprofessional
listener.
Thus there are significant discrepancies between the two meanings of the
objectivity of experience. In order to avoid the confusion that can arise from
such a situation, it is a logical imperative to introduce two terms in place of
the present one. The term 'objective experience,' is of fundamental signifi-
cance to explain the origin and the possibility of the existence of an inter-
subjective language. This term will refer to the existence of structurally
identical elements of experience within a particular social group independent
of the consciousness of the individual subjects. For the second meaning of the
term 'objective experience,' in the sense of a relatively high cognitive value
and independence of those subjective factors that lead to experiential errors,
we shall utilize the term 'adequacy to the object,' or just 'adequacy'.l1 Thus
we shall distinguish 'objective experience,' which is the condition for the
existence of language and communication and, on the other hand, 'experience
adequate to the object' ('adequate experience'), which is the condition for
the effective application of language in the process of human practice.
Accordingly we shall distinguish the level of the objectivity of experience
from the level of the adequacy of experience to the object (Le. the level of its
cognitive value).
The criteria of the level of objectivity will be primarily quantitative. We
shall state that a structure of experience is the more objective the more valid
it is for a larger number of subjects, under a greater number of conditions
(taken disjunctively), and for a longer period of time.
The quantitative increase of each of these factors (and the increase in the
'field' of each of these basic relations) increases the independence of a parti-
cular experiential structure from given individual subjects. The experience
of the bombing of Belgrade on April 6, 1941 is more objective than the ex-
perience of two lovers on a picnic.
It could be objected that it is impossible to make comparisons. Can one
thing be just as objective as another? Does the latter 'exist more' than the
former? This argument is convincing when one talks about objectivity in the
ontological sense. Yet one can only speculate about ontological questions in
the style of good old traditional metaphysics. The concepts of object and
objectivity must be understood epistemologically if one is to remain in the
domain of science. In that case A is more objective than B when one knows
OBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE 127
about the existence of A with more assurance and with greater support than
about the existence of B. In our example many more factors are available to
identify the general structure of the experience of a quarter of a million
Belgradians than there are to identify the experience of two lovers. The pro-
bability of conclusions concerning a phenomenon is a far greater if that
phenomenon does not vary with varying conditions and can be studied over
a long period of time than if we carry out our investigation under a particular
set of conditions and over only a brief period of time.
NOTES
1 See Louis Rougier, Traite de 1a connaissance, Paris, 1955, pp. 67-8. Georges Bou-
ligand, Les aspects intuitifs de 1a rnathernatique, Gallimard, 1944.
2 Russell, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, London, 1940, p. 73.
3 Ibid., p. 85.
4 See Moritz Schlick, Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre, 2nd edition, Berlin, 1925, pp. 207-
209.
5 Ibid., p. 208.
6 Louis Rougier, Traite de la connaissance, Paris, 1955, p. 182.
7 Moritz Schlick, Enonces scientijiques et realite du monde exterieur, A.S.J. no. 152,
(1934),30.
8 Moritz Schlick, Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung. Der Wiener Kreis, Vienna, 1929,
p.20.
9 For example John Wisdom, Other Minds, Blackwell, Oxford, 1952.
10 By 'general' was meant what is common to the species as a whole, without regard
to individual deviations.
11 Experience cannot be said to be true or false. Something is true if it is not just
empirically verified but also conceptually, theoretically grounded.
CHAPTER V
who has lost property during a revolution or who may lose it in the future
will usually be predisposed to find innumerable reasons to find fault with
ideas of radical social change.
There is a continuous transition between experience and thought, with
an undifferentiated, diffuse, direct consciousness at one pole, and a highly
structured system of abstract, invariant elements of thought at the other pole.
nation of night and day, the succession of the seasons, the eclipse of the sun
and moon, etc. But in a broader field of experience this assumption reveals
itself to be untenable. Thus for example in order to explain the revolution
of the planets and sun around the earth our predecessors had to assume the
existence of invisible, rotating crystal spheres to which they were affixed.
But this assumption was contrary to experience: there is nothing to be
observed in any way similar to such spheres, while the phenomenon of
gravitation, by which Newton explained the revolution of the heavenly
bodies and of the earth itself around the sun, is to be observed every day, at
least in its empirical manifestation of weight. Moreover Ptolemy's hypothesis
implied that a pendulum should oscillate continuously in the same plane.
But Foucault demonstrated that the plane of oscillation shifted slowly -
the magnitude of which could be predicted faithfully on the basis of the
Copernican hypothesis.
In contrast to the first group of elements of objective experience, which
quickly proved to be based upon sensory illusions and accordingly were not
used as elements for the formulation of concepts, the second group encom-
passed cases that in a restricted field of experience were able to serve as
practical instructions for action, and were for a time included in the body of
utilized concepts. But at a later level in the development of cognition these
were found to be incongruent with new sense-data (and inconsistent with
respect to other concepts). Then they were eliminated from our repertory
of concepts. (They were sometimes said to be an 'appearance,' while the
'essence' was quite different.)
Accordingly the abstractions with which one deals in thought are the
elements of objective experience that are not only invariant for a society
but also effective instruments for predicting our practical experience.
Moreover even the most primitive types of organisms are capable of learning,
i.e. able to acquire habits associated with certain, specific external conditions
(conditioned reflexes).
In 1912 the Russian physiologist Metelnikov published a number of essays
which revealed that paramecia were capable of developing conditioned
reflexes. Ordinarily a paramecium is unable to distinguish nutrients from
particles of coal, sulpher, or paint - it absorbs them all: after ten or twenty
minutes it simply ejects all indigestible matter. Metelnikov combined the
lipstick he offered with an additional stimulus - a 1% solution of alcohol was
added to the environment. The protozoa gradually took less and less lipstick.
Biologists termed this form of 'learning' without any mental capacity 'biologi-
cal memory.' The protozoa is capable of 'remembering' the connection with
alcohol (or any other stimulus, as for example light rays of a particular color)
for a number of days.
In conditioned reflexes of this kind we find the prototype of all the com-
plex and differentiated habits of higher forms of life. In all such cases the
central fact is the establishment of a constant, triple connection between an
organism, a practical objective, and a condition for the attainment of that
objective. In the cited example with the paramecium the objective practical
goal was to avoid the absorption of harmful matter and to separate food from
the matter that was not food (this of course does not imply that the para-
mecium is aware of the objective in the sense of the consciousness of higher
forms of animal life or man). The organism itself is not capable of carrying
out this selection, but the fact that harmful matter always appeared together
with alcohol permitted it to make the selection. In Pavlov's famous experi-
ments with dogs the practical goal of the dog is to take food. Realizing the
constant connection between the giving of food and a certain, specific stim-
ulus, e.g. the ringing of a bell, permits the dog to make predictions: it expects
to obtain food even though it does not see it, and accordingly secretes saliva
and stomach acids.
Human habits have a similar structure. Certain practical objectives exist,
as well as a condition by means of which to attain the objective. When I
come home at night, I customarily turn a switch (condition) in order to get
the light (objective). When I pass through my home town, where everything
is familiar, I customarily, without thinking, cross streets in the center only
at particular places (condition) in order to avoid being run down by a vehicle
or being fined (objective).
Parallel to the conditioned reflexes of animals and of those fields of human
activity that are performed more or less automatically and unconsciously.
CONCEPTS AND OTHER CATEGORIES OF THOUGHT 135
the cabin in order not to suffer from the effects of invisible light rays (ultra-
violet rays). If one has a concept of music one knows the value of a per-
formance regardless of place, time, or the nationality or reputation of the
performer. If one has a concept of literature one is able to assess the artistic
value of a work regardless of whether it is written in a realistic, modernistic,
or any other style. Finally, anyone who has a concept of philosophy will be
capable of grasping the philosophical importance of a work regardless of the
philosophical leanings of the author.
In all these cases we are dealing with reactions that differ substantially
from the reflexes of animals, primitives, and mentally ill persons. In the case
of animals associations between stimuli and reactions are automatic, coerced,
simplistic, uncritical, and contain an element of unconditionality. For a
rational man whose activity is regulated by conceptual thought these asso-
ciations are extremely flexible, variable, and diversified, are accompanied by
a critical consciousness, and are conditioned 2 in a much more complex way.
There is a particularly great difference in the level (order) of conditioning.
With animals no more than two or three factors can mediate the connections
between the original stimulus and the reaction (e.g. between food and the
release of secretions). For example the sound of a bell can lead to the same
reaction as the direct observation of food - this is a conditioned reflex of the
first order. Then the sound of a bell can be related to a heretofore neutral
stimulus, as for example the sound of a whistle, so that a new relation is
born: whistle - bell - food, thus constituting a second-order reflex. It has
been found in the case of animals - at least with respect to alimentary reac-
tions - that they cannot establish reflexes of more than the second order. It
is only with defense reactions that it is possible for animals to create reflexes
of the third order, but that is the absolute limit.
Neurologically speaking one of the fundamental differences between the
thinking of man and the conditioned reflexes of animals is that a man is
capable of reactions of a very high, practically unlimited order. In other
words man forms associations with a multitude of intermediate terms; by
the same token there is an unlimited number of phenomena that can mean
something to him indirectly and signal the most minute changes in external
conditions. This is precisely the reason why man is incomparably better
equipped to adapt to his surroundings and alter his behavior in accordance
with given conditions. 3 Finally this is the basis of man's capacity for abstrac-
tion and utilization of symbols.
In the case of the conditioned reflexes we encounter with animals and
primitive people (whose reflexes are of a lower order), the stimulus is in fact
138 EPISTEMOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS
We mentioned- above that concepts and other forms of thought arise in the
process of our becoming aware of our useful habits, and that each mental
form is an element in a tripartite practical relationship (organism - means -
objective). Now we can make this more concrete by adding that a concept
is a means for the attainment of a practical objective in the sense that it
involves consciousness of how to act in various specific conditions in order
to attain the given objective_
But if this practical purposefulness in the most diverse conditions is what
makes concepts the superstructure of useful habits, and which constitutes
an element of continuity among them, one may gather from the cited exam-
ples that concepts are in a certain sense the negation of habit. To be more
precise they are the negation of the bias, short-sightedness, stereotypism,
blindness, routinism, conservatism, and narrow pragmatism of behavior based
upon habit. Habits are biologically indispensable but they are highly useful
only to the extent that our interaction with the external environment is
carried out under relatively stable conditions. It is only when new conditions
manifest themselves that we appear so fettered and even paralyzed by our
habits. Concepts are the conditions of our gradual Iiberation. Because of their
general nature and because they contain elements that are constant even in
the midst of extreme transformations, they allow us to integrate within them
new elements of experience and to orient ourselves quickly and easily in new
situations. Anyone who has a notion of a certain type of opening in chess is
not likely to be caught unaware by any move of his opponent, and will also
know what to do to turn any move to his own advantage.
As usUally happens whenever distinctions are drawn, in distinguishing
between habitual behavior and rational behavior we have drawn the lines too
sharply, and there is the danger that the concepts may be understood in a
static and idealized manner. It should be emphasized that the process of
building concepts as a whole is a negation of the biases and restrictions that
CONCEPTS AND OTHER CATEGORIES OF THOUGHT 139
critical stance, without sufficient justification. They reject not only Descartes'
assumption of the "spirit in the machine,"4 but also the very existence of
thought as an essential quality of consciousness. Accordingly they do not
acknowledge what is analogous to perceptions and sensations - concepts, or
something analogous to association - conceptual power and conceptual
activity. However, the generality of concepts, and the fact that they imply
experience which was never actually lived cannot be explained in any other
way but by assuming that at a certain high level of its development conscious-
ness begins to proceed according to its own laws, relatively independently of
the laws that prevail in the material world. Its activity consists in the execu-
tion of certain operations with experiential contents whose result are certain
thoughts which contain not just given elements but hypothetical ones as well.
The assumption of certain mental capacities (conceptual powers) that are
manifest in the performance of certain intellectual actions (abstraction, gen-
eralization, analysis, synthesis, etc.) is by no means a speculative assumption,
as the empiricists assert. As a matter of fact this alone is capable of explaining
those forms of successful communication and cooperation among people
which cannot be explained by the thesis of the structural similarity of their
experience.
For example general agreement reigns in psychiatry today as to the psy-
choanalytic explanation of the cause of hysteria: virtually all professionals
in the field agree that hysteria is caused by the suppression of an unconscious
desire, usually sexual in character, which is regarded as immoral or unnatural.
Guided by this explanation psychoanalists utilize the therapy of free associa-
tion in order to help the patient uncover unconscious feelings and work
them through, usually with good results. But what is the experiential basis
upon which this theory is based? All that can be observed are certain symp-
toms of illness and certain facts to be seen in the treatment of the patient
- manifestations of a powerful emotional attachment to the therapist ('trans-
fer'), a tendency toward resistance during discussion of events in the patient's
past, and cessation of the symptoms after the therapist helps the patient to
come up with certain explanations. In themselves these experiential facts
explain little as to why psychologists and psychiatrists agree on the existence
of unconscious desires, censure of consciousness, repression, etc., and how
they understand one another when they utilize the appropriate terms. Simi-
larly experience is quite insufficient to justify their agreement in therapeutic
practice. Accordingly we have two orders of facts: (1) the direct experience
of individual scientists and (2) mutual understanding and successful coopera-
tion. This agreement of behavior cannot be explained merely by constant
CONCEPTS AND OTHER CATEGORIES OF THOUGHT 143
account are certainly correct, but one may argue whether it is worthwhile to
construct the concepts of classes on the basis of the characteristics he has
used (instead of others such as: share in the distribution of society's surplus
product, property rights with respect to means of production, decision-making
power, the degree of alienation of labor, etc.). One justifies a specific class
identification by applying the resulting concept in order to classify social
strata in various societies. We may notice that the empirical facts (about
people's behavior, joint activities, contact, marriage, mutual conflicts) point
to a classification of people different from the classification resulting from
the concepts we are utilizing in the given case. This would mean that in con-
centrating upon one characteristic we have lost sight of essential differences
with respect to other characteristics as if we were to classify fish and whales
in the same group because they both swim, birds and bats together because
they both fly, and men and gorillas in the same category because they walk
upright. There are greater differences and contrasts in the various forms of
behavior between the lower orders of white-collar employees (administrative
workers, teachers) and the big technical bureaucracy or the heights of the
state apparatus, then there are between the former and workers and the latter
and capitalists. The hypothetical element in the concept 'white collar emplo-
yees' is the assumption'that the people referred to by the term form a homo-
genous social grouping (class) because they possess certain identical proper-
ties. A revision of the concept does not challenge the empirical facts, but
eliminates the adopted criterion of classification.
There are even more hypothetical elements in our synthetic concepts -
such as the various physical models that serve to illustrate the results of
abstract, mathematical thinking. When Rutherford and Bohr derived the first
models of the atom, they were unable to explain certain experiential data
obtained by spectral analysis of the radiation of certain chemical elements
except by analogy with the structure of the solar system. Their models were
the result of synthesis, and the hypothetical factor in them - the flight of
thought into the unknown in order to explain a known given of experience -
was the conception of electrons as a sort of tiny balls revolving around nuclei
in orbits, comparable to those of the planets.
The conceptual constancy under various specific conditions is attained by
a kind of extrapolation of regularities observed in a series of successive states.
When we consider the identical items we have abstracted from previous
experiences we assume that they will continue to repeat in the future, with-
out regard to transformations of medium and given conditions. Thus, for
example, the history of capitalism from the July Revolution of 1848 to World
CONCEPTS AND OTHER CATEGORIES OF THOUGHT 145
War II shows that in most societies workers have had to resort to force in
order to free themselves from exploitation and implement a classless society.
Furthermore, the entire history of class society has shown that never in
history have the exploiters voluntarily renounced their privileges. Proceeding
from that experience the mind naturally engages in extrapolation. The con-
cept of socialist revolution as exclusively violent and armed is formulated. It
is assumed that even under changed conditions in capitalism it would not be
realistic to expect capitalists ever to voluntarily renounce their power and
profits. This hypothesis was justified with respect to available evidence at the
time when it was formulated. But new developments bring about experiences
which indicate the lack of the absolute validity of previous extrapolations.
Technological development and various economic and political difficulties
(depressions and wars) lead to an increasing concentration of power in the
hands of a new social stratum - the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy manifests
itself as a partial regulator of the conflicts that previously could be resolved
only by resort to force. Under the pressure of the working class it makes
economic and political concessions that capitalists themselves probably would
never have made. A significant portion of the surplus profit that in previous
conditions would probably have gone to the bourgeoisie now passes (in the
form of increased wages, social insurance, reduced unemployment, etc.) into
the hands of the class that created it. The working class also obtains greater
political rights, so that in some advanced countries there is the prospect of
an evolutionary transformation of capitalist SOciety.
New experience calls for the revision of the hypothetical elements in the
previous concept of socialist revolution. What remains essential in it is the
qualitative transformation of capitalism toward the construction of classless
society.
Such modifications and revisions of the content of concepts are unexplain-
able if a concept is empirically reduced to mere experience (for new experi-
ence did not deny old experience)_ This is similarly the case if a concept is
understood as a mere reflection, for again the negation of a concept does not
mean the negation of those elements of it that were truly a reflection of reality.
** *
One may conclude the following on the basis of the foregoing discussion of
concepts:
1. Every concept contains certain constant elements of objective, social
experience.
146 EPISTEMOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS
cation in which our goal is to inform others of something and not merely to
evoke feelings in them or to stimulate certain impulses of volition.
On the other hand, anyone who has a concept of a square knows that
one cannot use the word carelessly in sentences that remain simply an
accumulated series of symbols each of which individually perhaps informs
us of something but which all together say nothing or remain completely
incommunicable (which does not exclude their use for literary purposes).
For example:
"The squares in his pictures are always slightly asymmetric and this is
extremely exciting."
"What color of squares do you like best?" "Oh I love white ones." 5
"The square is the essence of the cosmos."
"In order to dispel the monotony, one should allow at least one side of
the square to be shorter or longer than the others."
"The most brilliant mathematician of all times is he who constructs a
square of crooked lines." Etc., etc.
All knowledge that permits us to utilize the given symbol in some cases
and forbids us to do so in others may be summed up in the form of certain
general rules. To acquaint oneself with the content and the scope of a con-
cept is to learn all the rules that regulate the use of the corresponding symbol.
In natural languages these rules are by no means arbitrary. We learn them
on the basis of our own experience and from the enormous concentration
of social experience which the older generation transmits to us.
The basis of these rules is constituted by those elements of objective
experience that are invariant throughout transformations of conditions and
that serve permanently as an instrument for effective, practical activity.
Proceeding upon this basis we introduce new symbols and construct new
rules that are not by any means based directly upon experience but which
must regulate the use of the corresponding abstract symbols in a manner such
as not to contradict the rules applying to the use of descriptive symbols.
Thus, for example, if 'square' is an abstract symbol and 'forest,' 'picture,'
'table,' 'sheet of paper,' etc. are descriptive symbols that represent fields of
application for it (in the sense that one can always join them to the term
'square' as their predicate), rules for the use of both types of symbols must
be mutually compatible. The former must not permit what the latter forbids
or forbid what the latter permits.
Because of the fact that these rules, even when they pertain to the use
of concrete, descriptive symbols, are based solely on invariant elements
of experience, independent of the changes in the particular conditions in
CONCEPTS AND OTHER CATEGORIES OF THOUGHT 149
We have thus implicitly already posed the question of the relation between
concepts and objects. Our direct practical cognition of objects encompasses
many elements that do not enter the content of concepts since they are
variable and dependent, on the one hand, on the psycho-physical constitution
of the subject, and on the other, upon the objective situation, at a certain time
and place.
It is commonly stated that concepts are an expression of the essential
properties and relations of one or more objects. How is this to be understood?
In the process of effective practical activity we know material objects directly
for in the process of attaining our goals we encounter resistance and must
exert effort to overcome it. But in the process we have no direct contact
with essences or, more precisely, with structural properties. I come to know
water directly as something fluid, fresh, more or less cold, offering a degree
of resistance to passage (e.g. as in swimming or rowing), and which keeps
some things afloat but permits others to sink. On the other hand I cannot
come to know by direct experience that each molecule of water is comprised
of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen, although, this is precisely
what is considered the 'essence' of water.
For this reason many empirically oriented philosophers refuse to speak
about the essence of things as something knowable and, accordingly, as
objectively existing (for if we cannot know something we cannot say that it
objectively exists, even though it may actually exist). They acknowledge only
the existence of individual things that can be directly observed. Each such
thing is referred to by one ( or more) symbols naming it, while a concept
is merely a set of rules for the use of symbols.
When the ontological basis of the theory of meaning is constricted so
severely, the result is that abstract symbols and the rules for their use have
no correlates in reality and are to be understood either as arbitrary conven-
tions to be used to create order and structure in our language or as useful
instruments corresponding to nothing in reality.
To draw such strict distinctions in the existential status of individual things
and general properties and relationships is justified only if there is truth in the
empiricist assumption that observation is the sole source of knowledge of the
physical world. But that assumption is a false one. Purely receptive obser-
vation is such a narrow basis for cognition that solely on the basis of it we
cannot know anything even about the existence of individual objects.
As soon as we reject this fundamental empiricist thesis, all foundation
CONCEPTS AND OTHER CATEGORIES OF THOUGHT 151
and material objects. There are concepts with respect to which we hesitate
to engage in any sort of existential assumptions, and there are concepts for
which we resolutely reject any objective correlate (nymphs, satyrs, centaurs,
etc.).
But nevertheless such a situation would not justify drawing sharp demarca-
tion lines between singular concepts pertaining to individual things and
persons and general concepts (of attributes and relations) which - it is said
- do not refer to anything existent. The place where the demarcation line
should be drawn depends upon our entire knowledge in a given field. We can
be more certain of the existence of a quantum of energy, of gravitation, or
of inheritance than of the existence, for example, of the Greek philosopher
Leucippus.
Thus far we have dealt with the relationship between concepts and material
objects. But in reviewing the classification of objects we have seen that, in
addition to material objects, there are also various other types of objects.
(Concepts themselves and other forms of thought constitute a type of
objects.) It goes without saying that the relationship of concepts toward
various types of objects varies.
In the relationship between concepts and material objects we saw that
the former were able to reflect the latter with relative adequacy. In addition
to this passive, receptive element concepts also involve an active, creative
one. Each concept is a plan of action. Thus a concept may be an instrument
for the creation of a material object that did not previously exist. Or, in
other words, a concept is not just a reflection, but also a project.
Concepts that have arisen directly upon an experiential basis - by means
of selection, abstraction, and generalization of elements of objective experi-
ence, (and these are the bulk of concepts in everyday life) are primarily
-reflections, and only a few of them are projects. But that they are also projects
may. be seen in the fact that at the lowest theoretical level they permit
not only adaptation to nature and imitation of it but also the creation of
humanized natural objects (e.g. regulation of rivers, reforestation of hills, the
building of artificial lakes, domesticated animals, cultivated fruits, etc.).
The more developed the culture and civilization and the more man is
liberated from natural and social necessity, the more concepts are projects
rather than reflections. There are more and more objects that man, guided
by his concepts, has deliberately created without having found them ready-
made. For example such concepts as airplanes, hydroelectric power stations,
computers, the opera, the parliament, were fust projects for action, and only
later reflections.
156 EPISTEMOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS
PROPOSITION
context the word 'state' may be meaningful for a group such as bourgeois
liberals, it may be meaningless to a Marxist. In general a proposition that
is meaningful in one language may be meaningless and incommunicable in
another. It is meaningless, for example, when it is said in the context of a
Marxist system of concepts that "the Soviet state is leading the Soviet peoples
to the shinning heights of Communism." If a state is the "instrument of
coercion of one class over another," it follows that the state cannot lead
people to a classless society; on the contrary it must wither away in order
for such a society to be possible.
Inasmuch as we have defmed a proposition to be any communicable
link of concepts, it may be a question, doubt, order, expressed hope, fear,
belief, etc. In the case of each of these mental formations or sentences
expressing them, the question of truth or falseness does not appear. A ques-
tion may be correct or incorrect, precise or confusing, clear or unclear,
clever or stupid, but it cannot be true or false. Only an answer, insofar as
it asserts anything can be true or false. It goes without saying that assertions
need not be apodictic: they may have various forms of modality. One may
assert something as possible, more or less probable, necessary or impossible;
in an assertion concepts are linked in such a way that the linkage may be
true or false. Judgments are such a type of proposition.
Thus a judgment is a communicable linkage of concepts that is a means
of assertion and that may be true or false.
INFERENCE,THEORY, SYSTEM
Once we know what concepts and judgments are, it is not difficult to defme
an inference. An inference is a series of propositions whose property is that
a conclusion logically follows as the last member of a series of premises that
precede it.
What we wish to defme here is the necessity with which a conclusion follows
from its premises. All logicians agree that this necessity is based upon certain
rules of drawing conclusions. A conclusion thus necessarily follows from the
premises because the rules of thought requre it. But just what are these rules
of thought?
Having once assumed that at a higher level of development consciousness
(which may then be considered spirit) is able not only to react to external
stimuli, but also by means of various operations to link certain empirical
elements with others, it may certainly be assumed that as the result of this
162 EPISTEMOLOGICAL FOUND A TIONS
field (e.g. mathematics, the natural sciences, the social sciences, etc.) to the
specific, unwritten assumptions of particular scientific disciplines and theories.
For example in psychology we assume that at a later moment an individual
is the same person as at the present moment. This is not something to be
proven, and of course there is no certainty that it can be proven at all.
When we wish to eliminate all such shortcomings and attain the highest
possible precision, we build a deductive system. In such a system everything
implicitly assumed must be set forth explicitly. Accordingly it must contain
the following elements:
1. It must specify all necessary undefined terms (proper nouns, the sym-
bols of classes, predicates, relations and connections between sentences, etc.).
All other terms of the system are defined with reference to them.
2. The system should contain all the rules of meaning. They determine
which combinations of such symbols shall be considered the meaningful
propositions of the given system. All other combinations of such rules shall
be excluded as meaningless.
3. The number of propositions from which all others may be derived in
accordance with the rules of reasoning of the given system should be reduced
to a minimum. These propositions are usually termed axioms, postulates, or
basic principles.
4. The rules of inference of the system must be explicitly formulated.
5. The most important consequences must be deduced from the basic
propositions (principles, axiom), i.e. the propositions that may be applied
in science and in everyday, common practice.
When all these elements are known, the structure i.e. the form of a theory
is known. Accordingly to convert a theory into a precise deductive system is
considered its formalization. From a dialectical standpoint, there is no reason
not to consider the successful formalization of a theory (in the sense of the
explici t specification of the basic elements of its structure) to be useful. It
unquestionably helps us think more clearly, precisely, and exactly and avoid
numerous errors. But the formalization of a theory creates the danger of
completely forgetting the empirical basis from which the theory stems, and
of developing further the theory in a completely automatic way, like the
shuffling of symbols, with no attempt to reestablish connection with experi-
ence and to consider scientifically significant only those consequences that
are practically applicable in principle.
In science and ordinary life it is not necessary for a proposition to be
derived within the framework of a deductive system in order to be accepted.
In any case this is almost never possible. Only the most advanced sciences -
166 EPISTEMOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS
NOTES
1 Thus for example a philosopher who has broad experience in one field naturally tends
to make generalizations solely on the basis of such experience - giving rise to mechanic-
ism, biologism, sociologism, and psychologism in philosophy.
CONCEPTS AND OTHER CATEGORIES OF THOUGHT 167
2 See A. Korzybski, Science and SIlnity, New York, 1950, 3rd ed., p. 331.
3 In the case of the degeneration of the higher mental activities, such as one encounters
in mental illness, symbols tend to become signals, reactions lose their flexibility, vari-
ability, conditionality, polyvalence, and degenerate into reactions of a lower order. This
is particularly evident in the case of phobias, coerced actions, manifestations of panic,
confusion of the order of abstractions, etc.
4 See Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, Oxford, 1949.
5 On the other hand, the Yugoslav author Milivoje Perovie was able to entitle one of his
novels The White Squares because the aforementioned criterion applies only approxi-
mately to the type of communication existing in art. In that field symbols are not
related to concepts but rather to images.
6 Carnap defmed veriflllbility in the following manner: "A predicate 'P' is called verifi-
able if 'P' can be reduced to a class of perceivable objects." (Testability and Meaning,
New Haven, 1950, p. 457.)
7 Here applicability corresponds to realizability in Carnap's terminology. A predicate
'P' of a language is termed 'realizable' by N, if for a suitable argument, e.g. 'b', N is able
under suitable circumstances to make the full sentence, 'P(b)' true, i.e. to produce the
property P at the point b. (Op. cit., p. 456.)
PART TWO
ANALYSIS OF MEANING
CHAPTER VI
Confronted with the task of defining the meaning of the very term 'meaning'
our first impression is that we have embarked upon a circular path and that
in the end we must arrive at contradictions similar to Russell's antimonies
with classes which are an element of themselves or with predicates that them-
selves have the property they designate.
But even if we are not headed for contradictions, does not the entire
procedure we have used thus far prove to be a vicious circle? First we defmed
the meaning of a number of symbols, the terms 'object,' 'symbol,' 'objective
experience,' and 'concept,' by means of which we are to explain the category
of 'meaning' itself. In explaining all these terms, have we not assumed that
which we are supposed to derive, namely the particular content of the cate-
gory of meaning? Is this not defmition idem per idem?
In his Elements of Analytical Philosophy Arthur Pap attempted to resolve
this difficulty by explaining that the expression 'meaning of meaning' does
not lead to antimonies for the term 'meaning' is not used in the same sense
each time. In the first instance it is taken to mean 'connotation' (a set of
properties necessarily possessed by each object to which the given symbol
correctly applies), and in the second instance it means 'denotation,' (individ-
ual instances of objects to which the symbol may refer). In the parlance of
traditional logic, defining the meaning of 'meaning' should be interpreted as
defining the connotation (intension, content) of a concept whose denotation
(extension) is known.
Of course one might object that we cannot know denotation until we
know connotation. Accordingly even if we had succeeded in avoiding anti-
monies of a purely formal character by means of Pap's argument, it would
still hold true that we have assumed the concept which we have later defmed.
This sort of difficulty can be solved only by pointing to the two different
theoretical levels at which the category of meaning appears. We begin every
investigation of basic philosophical categories with two types of concepts. The
fIrst type is precisely defmed in the course of preceding inquiry, and the second
171
172 ANALYSIS OF MEANING
use of signs where to completely ignore one or both other elements proves
a serious shortcoming.
Finally the interpretant usually includes another element, in fact a relation
between two subjects, one of which uses the sign and intends an object, and
the other interprets the sign and succeeds in understanding that the sign
refers to the intended object. In extraordinary cases, when a sign has a
completely personal meaning only for one conscious being, this social relation
disappears. But personal meanings are superstructures of the social ones;
only someone who has learned a language in a social context can construct
for himself a fully personal, subjective language.
Accordingly meaning is in fact a six-part relation. In this structure some
relations are direct and some indirect, some are fundamental and some are
derived, some may be reduced to others for reasons of simplicity and greater
understandability and may implicitly be assumed in others, but in a strictly
scientific investigation none of them should be ignored. Sociability is implicit
in our language, mental activity and in all practical behavior; also models
of objects are invariably intersubjective. All meaning is social: that is why
social meaning will not be studied as a separate dimension of meening but
as an implicit structural element in all those dimensions.
NOTES
1 For example, on the assumption that gravitation had ceased to apply, consider the
imagined fact that a man accelerating his speed of movement at a rate of 9.81 meters
a second in a direction opposite to the earth's gravitation has the same weight as if at
rest in the earth's gravitational field. This was a sign for Einstein that uniformly rapid
movement and a state of rest in the corresponding gravitational field are physically
equivalent.
2 By 'implication' here and below we refer to the disposition of the subject to react
according to the formula, "If experience A, then idea B."
3 Along these lines Broad wrote in 1914: "Strictly speaking a thing has meaning when
direct acquaintance with it or knowledge of it permits us to infer or by association to
think of something else". (Broad, Perception, Physics and Reality, 1914, p. 97.)
4 Cf. Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, London, 1923, Appendix C,
pp.435-6.
S Russell, Preface to the Second Edition of The Principles of Mathematics, London,
1938, p. 47.
6 Russell, The Problems of Philosophy , London, 1912, p. 91.
7 Russell, 'The Meaning of Meaning,' Mind, 1920, p. 401.
8 John Laird, A Story of Realism, p. 27.
9 Gilbert Ryle, 'The Theory of Meaning,' British Philosophy in the Mid-Century, Lon-
don, 1957, p. 245.
178 ANALYSIS OF MEANING
MENTAL MEANING
experiential and mental meanings but also stimulate others to take a certain
position and to act, this volitional element truly enters into the structure of
meaning. But care should be taken in that case to avoid three misunder-
standings that arise due to the exaggeration of the volitional aspect or to its
subjectivistic or objectivistic understanding.
1. In Stevenson's ethical theory one sees an example of the exaggeration
of the significance of the prescriptive function of ethical statements. Steven-
son considers it important for ethical judgments that we attempt by means
of them to alter the positions of other people and instigate them to action. s
The kernel of truth in this thesis is undoubted. But inasmuch as it neglects
other elements and treats 'good' as a synonym for 'what can be (or should
be) desired' and insists upon the connection of the morally good with a
"favorable interest," it is not difficult to note the bias of this viewpoint.
2. Subjectivism manifests itself here in the form of the psychologistic
reduction of meaning to individual, actual volitional acts. If 'sign A means
x' is identical to 'subject S, by means of A, intended (wanted, wished) to
draw attention to x,' then meaning becomes the completely private, sub-
jective matter of whoever utilizes signs. It stands to reason that for the
psychological investigation of a concrete process of communication it can be
of major importance what subject S wished to state. But beyond individual
psychology, from a general logical standpoint, the question arises of what
certain spoken, written, etc. signs objectively mean in the language the
given society uses, aside from the intention of whoever used them.
Accordingly in all instances where meaning contains a volitional element,
this can be understood logically solely as an objective disposition (habit,
constant readiness) on the part of all members of a social group to use a
certain sign when something is wanted or to feel a certain impulse of volition
when a certain sign is presented. For example, logically speaking the pre-
scriptive meaning of the whistle of a traffic policeman who wants to halt a
speeding car or a pedestrian crossing outside the zebra lines does not lie in
the personal desire of the policeman to give notice that the person in question
should stop but in the constant, objective relation between the sound of the
whistle and the corresponding impulse to act on the part of anyone in such
a situation that the sign might apply to him.
3. We find the diametrically opposite extreme, the objectivistic hypos-
tatizing of the will as a factor of meaning, in certain traditional metaphysical
theories. From the standpoint of Schopenhauer's voluntarism, the essence
of world events is not to be located in ideas, as was the case with Hegel, but
in irrational tendencies of the Will. Accordingly the genuine meaning of
MENT AL MEANING 183
Emotions and dispositions of will lack this characteristic, but for their
own part they are connected to various objects in a number of other ways
(being caused by them or directed toward them in a purposeful manner).
On the basis of this fundamental difference many philosophers have
drawn a distinction between designation and expression, and accordingly
between designative and expressive (or motivational) signs.6 Others have
distinguished three types of signs: 'designators,' 'appraisors,' and 'prescrip-
tors,' 7 although in the spirit of positivistic axiology appraising was assumed
to be equivalent to the expression of feelings.
The classification of signs based on differences in function and, ultimately,
various characteristics of the mental dispositions with which they are asso-
ciated is highly relative in character. As is generally the case with most
classifications, it should not be assumed that every sign is firmly located in
one particular category with no possibility of passing to another one.
As we shall see later in greater detail, meaning depends upon context,
so that in various contexts one and the same sign can perform quite different
functions. Thus, for example, the word "silence" is associated with various
mental dispositions in the following three contexts:
1. "Eyes that call like a voice of silence."
,2. "'Silence!' thundered the father's voice."
3. "Complete silence reigned in the classroom."
In the first context the word 'silence' expressed and evoked feelings; in
the second it performed the function of a prescriptor; in the third it simply
informed us about the objective state of affairs, acting as a designator.
Moreover in many cases, particularly in ordinary speech, one sign in the
same context and at the same time performs the functions of designation,
expression, and prescripion. One may take as an example the title of a news-
paper report about tennis matches at Wimbledon: "Contest of Robots!" 8 The
sentence suggests the image of combat between robots and thus designates
an actually possible event, thus performing the function of designation. But
the sentence also has a metaphorical meaning. Comparing a monotonous,
extremely simplified tennis game in which strength and the machine-like
preciSion ,of serve and volley are decisive, with a contest of robots, the author
has expressed his feelings as an onlooker, The sentence we have analyzed
tends to evoke in the reader a similar feeling of dissatisfaction and indignation
over the way in which today's tennis stars play. Finally, this formulation of
the sentence expresses the desire of the writer and tends to stimulate others
to take a similar position - to act, to play tennis differently, with greater
variety and imagination.
MENTAL MEANING 185
NOTES
OBJECTIVE MEANING
rYpesofDengnation
Having seen that signs and designated objects need not be interconnected in
a direct and necessary manner, it remains to study the character of the con-
nection between them.
OBJECTIVE MEANING 191
need to explain the world and life which science cannot explain either tem-
porarily (because of underdevelopment) or permanently (because of the very
nature of the questions). To an even greater extent they satisfy emotional
needs for security, comfort, for hope and the avoidance of death, and for a
justification of suffering and sacrifice.4
Finally various ritual symbols - saluting the flag, rising when one hears the
national anthem, wearing special clothes on particular occasions, kissing the
cross, ceremonies to mark important social occasions, 'designate' in the sense
that they project ideas of an objective character that satisfy the need for
social cohesion and for including the individual in society as a whole. (Ideas
of this sort are 'the fatherland,' 'national honor,' the 'honor of the army,'
'redeeming Christ's sacrifice on the cross,' etc.)
Why do we say that the word 'wood' when spoken or written is a symbol of trees.
The word itself and trees themselves enter into our experience on equal terms; looking
at this question in the abstract it would make just as much sense for trees to symbolize
the word 'wood' as for the word to symbolize trees.
This is certainly true and human nature behaves accordingly. For example if one is
a poet and wishes to compose a lyrical poem about trees, one goes out into the forest
in order for the trees to suggest the right words. Thus for a poet in his ecstasy - or
perhaps agony - the actual trees are symbols and the words are the meaning. The
poet concentrates on the trees in order to arrive at the words. 12
symmetric this occurs very rarely and only in the marginal area of literature.
In scientific language the relation of symbol and desigated object is almost
always asymmetrical.
These propositions provided much of the basis for the modern theory
of meaning. But inasmuch as these modern views were intertwined with
traditional ones (Mill left them to contradict one another), and since Mill's
theory was handicapped by a completely irrelevant and obsolete sensualistic
and associationalistic psychology, it eventually fell into oblivion, although
the theory of denotation survived. Mill's followers accepted that meaning
was equivalent to denotation and that every word that meant something was
a name standing for an object. It is well known what difficulties realistically
oriented philosophers of language had at the end of the nineteenth and
beginning of the twentieth centuries, notably Meinong, Frege, Russell and
others, all of whom worked on the basis of these principles. Russell wrote:
"Being is a general attribute of everything and to mention what anything
means is to indicate that it is." 15 The question then arose, what was to be
the being named by the expression, "A circular square is impossible." What
is a circular square? Obviously nothing existing, because it is impossible.
But this is not really nothing, for we nevertheless are saying that something
is impossible, and we cannot leave a blank instead of the words 'round
square.' Are we saying then that the idea we have in our head, the idea
of the circular square, is impossible. The answer is certainly no, for we cannot
say that any idea is impossible. In what sense then is the 'circular square'
the name of a being?16
Russell found a way out of these difficulties by completely rejecting his
original platonism with the assumption that many symbols merely describe
the characteristics of certain possible or impossible objects, but themselves
do not refer to any objects. For example the expression "The King of France
is bald" obviously describes the property of a logically possible person,
but since that person does not exist in reality, the sentence is lacking in
denotation.
In order to avoid the rapid multiplication of ontological entities that do
not exist in reality Russell proposed a method of philosophical analysis
whereby, by means of suitable translation into other expressions, one would
eliminate from language all nouns and descriptive phrases that create the
illusion of the existence of impossible or problematic entities. The language
in which such a translation would be realized would still be sufficiently rich
to say what had to be said, but would be far clearer, more precise, and critical.
This was Russell's famous theory of description, one of his greatest successes
in philosophy. By adopting it the foregoing phrase about the French King
would be transformed in such a way as to obtain the sentence: "There is
something which is the French King and he is bald, and there is only one
OBJECTIVE MEANING 199
such being." When explicitly formulated in this logical form, such a sentence
does not create problems. How one could state anything about something
when that 'something' has no sort of being. This sentence merely states that
there is a French King and that he is bald - but since he does not exist, the
sentence is false. 17
Although the advantages of this method are not so clear-cut as they
appeared to Russell's contemporaries, Russell and the logical atomists,
and later the logical positivists, undertook the enormous task of funda-
mentally recon~tructing language so as to t'lirninate from it all expressions
that appeared to be the names of objects, but in fact were not. This applied
chiefly to metaphysical expressions, and also to all other abstractions except-
ing the most essential logical apparatus. But it is very important and worth-
while to ask whether this move was nevertheless founded upon the traditional
principle of 'unum nomen unum nominatum.'
All analyses and reconstructions of language were aimed at eliminating from
the categories of names those expressions that could not be said to refer to
objects and retaining in language only genuine names to which this principle
applied (aside from logical terms which in time were deemed to be conven-
tional in nature). Everything that was to be said had to be stated exclusively
in terms of such names (regardless of how clumsy, awkward, and divergent
from ordinary language this appeared structurally). When this principle was
linked to the principle of empiricism, which held that one could consider an
object (something that could be named) o~ly that which could be experienced
directly and that all other objects were quasi-objects that had to be reduced
to the former, a program was created at which scholars worked collectively
for decades, but which fmally came to nothing. After defmite and indefmite
descriptions these scholars eliminated from the class of genuine names expres-
sions such as 'everything,' 'nothing,' 'something,' then numbers, classes, points
in space and time, then physical objects, then universal propositions, and
fmally proper nouns, which were long held to be the best examples of names.
Thus Russell discovered that the name 'Socrates' was in fact a disguised
description equivalent to the expression 'Plato's teacher' or the 'philosopher
who drank,hemlock.' Then ultimately recognition as genuine names was
accorded solely to demonstrative pronouns such as 'this' and 'that.' Thus in
complete contrast to the original Platonism this school of thought arrived at a
design for a language containing (aside from logical terms) only expressions
naming the momentary personal experiences of an individual subject. This
language was not understandable by anyone else or even by the individual
himself, as soon as the content of his personal experience altered.
200 ANALYSIS OF MEANING
and cause us to make predictions that may not be fulfIlled later. But this
would only mean that these symbols are inadequate, not that they are lacking
in denotation and meaning. In the sphere of thought symbols without deno-
tation are those which describe objects whose real existence may not be
verified under any conditions. Although sentences in which symbols appear
with inadequate denotation are false, those whose constituent symbols
lack denotation fail to communicate anything about the real world and are
cognitively meaningless. 23
This last alternative is more acceptable than all the others. It can be consis-
tently argued that all linguistic expressions that have objective meaning have
both denotation and connotation, but all expressions lacking one of these two
poles of objective meaning lack the other and in fact lack objective meaning
in general. This is a defensible position, for what is the connotation of the
word 'or' if it lacks denotation? What set of characteristics does it describe,
when there are no objects with characteristics to describe. Analogously one
might argue with good reason that symbols without connotation in fact have
no denotation either. If we do not know of a single defining property or
relation of the named object, how do we know what object is in question?
Nevertheless we must also reject this alternative inasmuch as it introduces
an untenable dualism between symbols that have objective meaning and
those that do not. Where should one draw the boundary between these two
types of symbols? Probably certain logical and mathematical symbols would
remain on one side of the boundary and all others on the other side. But
is this difference actually so sharp?
Let us compare the symbols 'heavy,' 'gravitation,' and 'or.' The denotation
of the first is not controversial: that all material things have greater or lesser
weight may be experientially tested. But the problem of the word 'gravitation'
is more difficult. Whether all things attract one another with a certian force
cannot be tested directly. Nevertheless, this is an assumption that succeeds
in explaining' many of our experiences and on the basis of which many others
may be correctly predicted. Therefore, we believe that 'gravitation' has
denotation - in this case a very general objective relation among things.
The difficulty with 'or' consists in the fact that this symbol apparently fails
to refer to a relation among things but designates a relation among symbols
themselves, a relation among concepts. This is more or less the case. The
relation of alternation or disjunction is chiefly a relation between symbols
and the concepts expressed by them. But the question then arises as to how
it is possible for a sentence as a whole to denote an objective state of facts
and for the terms to denote the constituents of that state of facts while words
like 'or' denote nothing, at least directly. The answer very well may be that
the same fact, for example that Maxim Gorky wrote the novel Klim Samgin,
may be deSignated by the sentence "Gorky wrote Klim Samgin" as well
as by the sentence "Gorky or Tolstoy wrote Klim Samgin." Both sentences
are true, although in the second sentence the word 'or' contributes nothing
to the truth and has no denotative function.
But this is not always the case. Aside from propositions in which the
word 'or' signifies our doubt or ignorance, there are those in which it directly
OBJECTIVE MEANING 205
(a) We have the proposition "x or y is 1/1" where x, y, and 1/1 are abstract
terms.
(b) Let us replace the descriptive expressions x, y and 1/1 with a, b, and f.
Thereby we obtain the empirical proposition "a or b is I."
(c) If we create the conditions in which we can experience that a has
property I, we shall not be able to experience anything about phenomenon
b or we shall ascertain that b has characteristics other than and excluding f.
(d) But if we create the conditions in which we can experience that b
has the characteristic I we see that in those conditions a does not have char-
acteristic I ang we cannot have any experience of it.
(e) Then we arrive at the conclusion that objects a and b exclude one
another with respect to possession of characteristic f.
(0 When we arrive at similar conclusions after substituting other descrip-
tive terms for variables x, y and 1/1 we have good reason to believe that the
symbol 'or' has an indirect denotation, i.e. that it designates a very general
objective relation which we may term mutual exclusion.
It is not necessary here to engage in a detailed analysis of what sort of
objective general relation such words as 'and' 'not' etc. indirectly denote.
We have not exhausted our analysis even for the word 'or' for it appears
that it has a triple objective meaning in ordinary language. First, it can
designate mutual exclusion as in the expression 'war or peace'; secondly, it
sometimes designates the ordinary alternation of objects that are mutually
indifferent (they can be independent and they can supplement one another)
as in the proposition "the collision was caused by the driver's carelessness
or faulty brakes"; and, thirdly, jt sometimes designates the relation of com-
plementarity of various objects, as for example in the proposition "animals
are vertebrates or invertebrates." What is important is to have shown what
we meant by the thesis that even abstract expression can have at least an
indirect denotation. We have seen that, in contrast to the realistic point
of view, we do not postulate the denoted objective relations but we acknowl-
edge them only if practice shows that there are the appropriate specific
relations among concrete objects.
Therefore, the difference between the possibility of experiential verifica-
tion of t1).e objective meaning of the word 'apple' and the possibility of the
application of the objective meaning of the word 'or' is not to be conceived
as the difference between incomplete symbols and complete symbols, between
symbols with meaning and without meaning, symbols with and without
denotation, symbols with or without objective meaning. What we claim is
that the former has direct denotation and the latter has indirect denotation.
OBJECTIVE MEANING 207
from the former two. What we today call sugar necessarily contains carbon
as an element of its chemical makeup. If you remove the carbon you no
longer have sugar. Of course people might adopt the convention of calling
what they now call sugar (or 'sucre,' 'Zucker,' 'sahar,' etc.) by some other
name and using the word 'sugar' from some other chemical compound which
does not contain the element carbon. Until this occurs the expression 'sugar
without carbon' is a meaningless one, not just because it does not refer to
any actually existing thing but also because we cannot even imagine the
possibility of actual existence of such an object. Similarly we cannot even
imagine the possibility of the actual existence of circular squares, and so we
cannot even understand what the expression 'circular square' might stand
for. Such expressions can assume an emotional meaning in a literary context,
but otherwise they lack any sort of cognitive meaning.
Thus far we have implicitly resolved the question of the objective meaning
of expressions that (quast) designate logically possible objects. All objects
in the past, present, or future whose existence is not excluded by the entire
sum of factual knowledge are really possible; on the other hand, the term
'logically possible' may be applied to all objects that can be imagined and
are not contradicted by the rules of logic and the established mental meanings
the words already have. For example if one compares the expressions:
1. 'The man who performed a high jump of 2.4 meters';
2. 'The man who jumped over the house he lives in';
3. The man who jumped up to the sun! ;
we come to the conclusion that the object referred to by the first expression
is really possible, the second is logically possible, while the third is impossible.
Although to date no one has performed a high jump (unaided by a pole or
other instrument) more than 2.34 meters, man's anatomic and physiological
conditions do not exclude the possibility that one day a talented high jumper,
with the necessary training, will jump higher than 2.4 meters. In the second
case there is no actual possibility. Given the existing strength of human
muscles and gravitation it is unlikely that anyone will ever jump more than
the minimum four-to-five-meter height of the average house. But there is
nothing in the concept of a house that would prevent one from imagining
such a low house, that a man might jump over it. In other words such a
feat is logically possible. Finally in the third case the object is logically
impossible for the concept of jumping excludes the possibility of freedom
from gravitation and flying in space.
Although the expressions which refer to logically impossible objects have
OBJECTIVE MEANING 209
imagined without contradicting the laws of logic and the meanings of the
words that are used in interpretation. The question of the possibility of
empirical verification of the existence of these objects remains undetermined
for either objective or subjective reasons. In this case we are dealing -with
logically possible objects.
The further course of investigation will lead to a situation in which
logically possible objects will turn out to be factually possible or even actually
existing, while the others will be excluded from the realm of logical possibility
owing to the discovery of new facts and the corresponding alteration of the
meanings of terms. We then say that the symbols they refer to lack denotation
or even cognitive meaning, although thanks to the rules of semantics we
can understand what they refer to. Consequently the distinction between the
symbols that have denotation and those that do not Gust like the distinction
between various types of denotation) is neither hard nor fast. There is a
region of uncertainty on the border between them because at a particular
moment we may not know whether an abstract theory is applicable or
not. The advance of cognition steadily eliminates some uncertainties but
introduces others.
but to others it does not. On the other hand, 'God' is meaningful and denota-
tive in the language of believers, 'Santa Claus' in the language of children,
etc. In other words every expression has denotation in some language - one
could not take a critical position on any of them or deny them an objective
meaning.
But things do not look so bad if one takes account of a third meaning of
the relativity of denotation, the relation toward the type of language. There
is an unquestioned difference between scientific language, metaphysical
language, artistic language, the language of myth and religion, the language of
morals, the language of everyday routine, etc. Each of these has a different
purpose. The purpose of scientific language is the cognition and communi-
cation of objective truth. The purpose of metaphysical language is the crea-
tion of a rational (albeit anti-empirical) vision of the world and the place of
man in it. The purpose of artistic language is the evocation of emotion and
thought conducive to aesthetic enjoyment. The purpose of mythical language
is the evocation of beliefs that provide a deeper meaning to the totality of life
experiences, in the absence of a rational view of the world, and at the same
time increase social cohesion. From the standpoint of scientific language the
expressions of mythical, artistic, and other languages lack both denotation
and objective meaning .. But in the appropriate context outside scientific
language expressions such as 'Absolute Spirit,' 'Zeus,' 'Moses,' and 'Sir John
Falstaff are denotative: we know pretty well to what objects they refer and
to what sphere of being these objects belong.
Obviously, scientific language and the scientific meaning of denotation
may be taken as the criterion of critical analysis. Then we shall arrive at the
conclusion that only those expressions that satisfy the criteria of scientific
objectivity (communicability, theoretical justification, experiential verifica-
tion and practical application) have denotation. All other expressions cannot
be said to refer to any real objects and do not have objective meaning in the
scientific sense even though they may have it in the metaphysical, artistic, or
mythical sense. In this way we succeed in avoiding the relativism referred to
above.
*
The entire preceding analysis points to the following conclusion. The modem
tendency to distinguish sharply between naming and meaning and to reduce
the former to denotation and the latter to connotation is unjustified. Names
are regularly associated with at least some elements of connotation. And,
OBJECTIVE MEANING 213
3. ATOMISM OR FUNCTIONALISM
Ashby describes the new situation and explains the reasons that led to it in
the following way.
It has become common practice among philosophers not to speak about the idea or con-
cept that c6rresponds to a given word or about the meaning of the word, but rather
about its use. The advantage cited of this manner of investigation is that it does not
tempt us to assume that each word in a language must have a metaphysical, psychologi-
cal, or empirical correlative. And this should free us from a considerable amount of
philosophical rubish, like mental and material substance, subsistent entities, abstract
214 ANALYSIS OF MEANING
ideas, thoughts without images and un-natural qualities. The claim may be made that a
similar advantage is gained if one does not speak of the proposition expressed by a
sentence or the meaning of the sentence but rather about the way in which it is used in
a particular context. 2S
The initiator of this new conception was Wittgenstein, and in his Philosophi-
cal Investigations he harshly criticized the old realistic atomism and pro-
claimed the motto: "Don't ask for the meaning, ask for the use."
The functionalism of Wittgenstein and his followers represents genuine
progress over atomism. For example it quite effectively frees philosophy of
certain old metaphysical prejudices (for example the belief that the meaning
of a word is the essence of an object and that the meaning of a sentence is
the set of meanings of the individual words). Also it provides an incompara-
bly better methodological basis for empirical research of linguists and lexico-
graphers. None of them actually searches for the hidden essences of the
designated objects; what they in fact do is investigate various instances of
the use of a word in various contexts.
But with its sidestepping of the problem of meaning and above all the
problem of the relationship of symbol and designated object, functionalism
went to the opposite extreme. The functionalists rejected the atomistic con-
ception of designated object but failed to replace it with one of their own.
Instead they satisfied themselves with the linguistic and practical dimension
of meaning. But it is impossible to construct a satisfactory theory of meaning
without a satisfactory conception of the designated object. The assumption
of the designated object is essential in order to explain the very possibility of
interpersonal communication, the very possibility of the fact that people with
completely different cultural backgrounds, different amounts of knowledge
and experience, nevertheless do understand one another. Certainly there is no
need to understand 'designated object' in the old atomistic and realistic man-
ner. By all means it is necessary to have maximal elasticity, comprehensive-
ness, and agreement with many of the elements the functionalists called
attention to.
When one studies Wittgenstein's critique of the classical (realistic-atomistic)
theory of meaning one sees clearly what he attacks and truly succeeds in
refuting and also that the weaknesses he criticizes can be avoided without
resort to the very extreme views he and his followers adopted.
The theory Wittgenstein criticizes has the following major points:
1. Every word has a meaning ... Meaning is the object a word stands for.
Meanings exist independently of the use of language. They are particular
objects and their order must be extremely simple.
OBJECTIVE MEANING 215
2. In comparison with the precision and purity of meanings the actual use
oflanguage is crude.
3. In order to eliminate this crudity a philosopher should discover by
analysis the essence of the designated object and express it in the form of a
definition; then, from knowledge of the essence of the designated object
comes knowledge of how one should use the corresponding word. Resolving
the problem in this manner permits the creation of an ideal language. Witt-
genstein took this position himself in the period of his Tractatus wgico-
Philosophicus.
4. The correctness of the foregoing analysis may be checked by the pre-
sence of mental pictures. Understanding the essence of the designated object
or the meaning of the designating expression means having a mental idea (a
picture) of that object. In other words understanding and thought are mental
processes.
S. It follows that learning a language consists of giving names to objects.
*
Wittgenstein concentrates his criticism on point (4) of the realistic theory. He
demonstrates that no method exists by which one may know the essence of
the designated object. When one takes a word such as 'reading,' one discovers
that it does not stand for an individual object but rather designates many
differing manifestations of reading which overlap but which lack any com-
mon element which may be termed the 'essence' of reading. Wittgenstein
attempts to show that this applies just as much to material objects as to men-
tal processes. He then draws the conclusion that there exists no criterion by
which one might decide the truth of a statement of the form" 'a' stands for
a" or "sentence 'p' designates proposition p." In Wittgenstein's view it thus
follows that one must also abandon points (l), (2), and (3) of the realistic
theory and formulate an instrumentalist theory. According to this theory the
meaning of a descriptive sentence consists in the role it plays in given situa-
tions in a given cultural context. 26 Just as understanding chess requires fol-
lowing the rules of the game, regardless of the presence of a mental process in
the heads of the players, so too "if someone says a sentence and understands
its meaning, he performs the operations of a symbolic game (calculus) in
accordance with defmite rules."27 Thus in the analysis of meaning, under-
standing, and thought one eventually arrives at the concept of perfonning
certain operations (for example using a symbol) in accordance with a rule.
At first glance it is obvious that Wittgenstein's criticism could not refer to
the dialectical theory of meaning set forth in this work.
216 ANALYSIS OF MEANING
about objective meaning and that the sole possible alternative is to reduce
meaning to use.
3. A theory of meaning that insists that all meaningful symbols refer to
(very flexibly and broadly conceived) objects does not need to assert the
existence of any principled differences in the degree of clarity, or perfection
between (objective) meaning and use.
One would have to be a Platonist to argue that meanings, in the realistic
sense are perfectly clear and precise ("of the purest crystal," in Wittgenstein's
words 31) while the actual use of signs is muddled; one would have to believe
in the existence of certain spheres of pure ideas that constitute the world
of meanings, independent of man and his knowledge. When one rejects all
traces of Platonism what remains is that designated objects are always objects
of our cognition and they are only as clear, precise, and unambiguous as our
use of the corresponding signs in the given circumstances. When a defmition
or description has provided a sufficiently accurate and defmite account of
the object designated by the defined symbol, then our use of the symbol
will be orderly and precise, and we will know the contexts in which we may
and may not use it. And conversely, if we cannot explicitly identity the
designated object of a symbol (if we cannot provide a defmition), the mode
of use (defmiteness and consistency in following rules) will make evident
the clarity and definiteness of the object designated by the symbol and
whether there is just one object or a number of them.
4. Accordingly the task of the philosopher is not to investigate Platonic
essences in order to construct his defmitions of concepts and then to derive
from them rules for use. The philosopher's procedure may be the reverse.
One may also take Wittgenstein's path (and when one deals with a language
already in use this is the way one must go): first investigate the use of a
symbol in various contexts and then on the basis of the ordered and classified
data of these investigations provide defmitions and then (a step Wittgenstein
did not wish to take), explain that the meaning of a word is not reducible
to its relation to other words (as in a definition); that, rather, the words of
the definiens in fact describe the object designated by the definiendum.
The object may be material or mental; it may be possible or it may even
be unreal. But in no case is this an object in itself nor a Platonic or Husserlian
essence.
In constructing a new artificial language, when one wishes to enrich an exist-
ing language or to make it more precise by eliminating existing ambiguities
in it, one may take the opposite procedure (Wittgenstein has no reason to
be ashamed of the sins of youth in the Tractatus). The new meaning may
218 ANALYSIS OF MEANING
Before saying anything about the objective meaning of the various types
of symbols it must first be said that we shall refer here to symbols that
successfully perform their symbolic function. In other words, we take into
account only socially recognized, communicable symbols that genuinely
designate something. For example we shall deal with the objective meaning
of meaningful and true sentences of various types. Or, with respect to emo-
tive symbols, we take account only of those symbols that genuinely express
or evoke feelings.
In the discussion of the various dimensions of mental meaning we stated
that classifications of signs should not be construed in a very rigid way. In
various contexts signs may perform various functions. When we refer to
cognitive, emotive, and prescriptive symbols (a division that corresponds to
OBJECTIVE MEANING 223
or events) or they may be highly complex sets of things and events named by
a single term. Moreover, since certain predicates are descriptive in character,
such as 'white,' 'heavy,' 'in the middle,' and 'precede in time,' the objective
meaning of such expressions are all properties and relations capable of being
directly observed. Finally, entire sentences can be descriptive, such as 'Wagner
was born in 1813,' 'The Balkan mountain range is located east of the Dinaric
Mountains,' and 'The ruby is red and very hard.'
2. There are no hard-and-fast distinctions between explanatory and
descriptive symbols. Just as with all other classifications, here too one should
take into account the function performed in a given context. Thus one can
hardly fmd a descriptive symbol that in a particular context cannot perform
the function of explaining a description of a phenomenon perceptible to the
senses, so that as opposed to instrumental symbols both may be treated as
descriptive in the broader sense of the word. Conversely one may say that
even explanatory symbols describe certain general properties and relations.
Taking into account a broad area of indeterminancy between these two
groups of symbols, one may say that explanatory symbols are distinguished
from descriptive ones with respect to their objective meaning in the following
ways:
(a) The designated objects of explanatory symbols, although real, are
not directly perceptible; they are only in a certain constant and necessary
connection with directly perceptible objects. In this manner their existence
may be indirectly verified. For example gravitation explains weight, free
fall, the ballistic trajectories of various projectiles, and the shifting of certain
points of light seen on the sky through a telescope. And conversely gravita-
tion is verified through experience of all these phenomena. The behavior
of people suffering from hysteria is explained by the existence of certain
suppressed, unconscious desires. The latter is verified by the former.
(b) Explanatory symbols refer also to potential objects such as natural
laws and mental dispositions. Such objects are manifest through actually
existing, directly observable phenomena. These objects are usually what
is invariant and universal in such phenomena - only insofar as they actually
exist. Thus (particularly in the natural sciences) the symbol that expresses
them usually takes the form of a function containing at least one variable
and which is converted into a descriptive sentence when descriptive symbols
take the place of the variables. Characteristically objects designated by
explanatory symbols are real even if at the given point in time none of the
phenomena by which they manifest themselves actually exists. They are
nevertheless real in the sense that they will necessarily manifest themselves
OBJECTIVE MEANING 227
real, partly ideal object. It is real to the extent that it already exists as a
tendency in the thinking of some people. It is ideal to the extent that it
represents a boundary toward which the further development of social
cognition ought to aspire ('ought' with respect to a particular goal, in this
case cognition of objective truth).
A similar situation prevails in both ethics and aesthetics. If description and
explanation of positive morality and of the prevailing conception of art belong
in the fields of ethics and aesthetics, then accordingly we encounter only
descriptive and explanatory symbols. However, the basic function of ethical
and aesthetic symbols is instrumental and consists in defming the criteria
for assessing moral and artistic values. As in logic (but in another field), the
task of ethics and aesthetics is to precisely defme and theoretically justify
norms and to put them into practice. Since precise de fmition , theoretical
justification and practical application of norms may become the subject
matter of a higher level inquiry: here too - as in logic - there may be a need
for a more abstract, meta-theoretical discipline (meta-aesthetics, and meta-
ethics). Here symbols play an even more clearly instrumental role, i.e. they
are to an even greater degree a means rather than an objective in themselves.
The ultimate end of all these fundamental, theoretical investigations are
results in the experiential field.
4. This is what separates the foregoing groups of symbols from the expres-
sions we encounter in metaphysical philosophy and from the mythical-
religious symbols that have a primarily rational rather than emotive character.
Anaximander's 'apeiron,' Parmenides' 'unique unmoving being,' Plato's "ideas,'
Aristotle's 'entelechy,' Aquinas's 'trinity,' 'Descartes' 'res cogitans,' Spinoza's
'Deus sive natura,' Leibniz's 'monads,' Hegel's 'Absolute Spirit,' Whitehead's
'eternal object,' Brightman's 'personalities' and Scheler's 'supreme holy
values' claim to explain something to us, but they are unrelated to experience.
Thus the propositions in which these symbols play a role escape application
of the basic criteria of objective truth. They address our intellectual capacities
of cognition in order to inform us about objects which we cannot know:
at very best we can intuit them or believe in them on other rational grounds,
but at worst we may be convinced that such symbols are meaningless.
We are faced, then, with these alternatives:
(a) As with scientific hypotheses, the objective meaning of a metaphysical
symbol is an imaginary object whose existence is still undetermined but
plausible. This plausibility has no empirical basis (and thus such a meta-
physical proposition differs from scientific hypothesis), but may rest upon
certain purely rational considerations (for example similarity with certain
230 ANALYSIS OF MEANING
All cognitive symbols are divided according to semantic category into (1)
words, (2) descriptions, (3) sentences, and (4) functions.
From a semantic standpoint sentences are particularly important. It is
only to sentences that one may attribute truth (as well as meaning). Only
they may be used to assert something that may be confirmed or refuted
by experience. All other semantic categories of symbols obtain a specific
objective meaning that is mediated by sentences - words and descriptions
as constituents of sentences and functions as abstract schemas which yield
sentences with the substitution of variables. This is why many traditional
logicians considered judgments rather than concepts the basic form of logic.
In this connection it is no accident that the propositional (sentential) calculus
has played such a fundamental role in mathematical logic. For this reason
one should dispense with an order of increasing complexity and begin im-
mediately with sentences.
between facts and laws. Facts would be the designated objects of descriptive
sentences and laws the referents of explanatory sentences. But in a more
general philosophical sense even laws are (general and necessary) facts: to
that extent one may say that even explanation is a description of facts.
The objective meaning of false descriptive sentences is the imaginary
relation of objects tested by experience not to correspond to a real relation.
In the case of hypotheses there is a probability of the adequacy of imaginary
relations to real ones.
As we have seen, metaphysical sentences claim to refer to the rela-
tions of objects whose existence or nonexistence it is impossible to decide
upon.
The objective meanings of mathematical sentences (as in arithmetic and
descriptive geometry) are the relations of ideal objects.
Finally logical, aesthetic, and ethical rules refer to certain objective norms,
i.e. the ideal boundaries toward which these rules tend to direct the develop-
ment of scientific discovery, morals, and art.
sentences with the same objective meaning as the object designated by the
negative sentences. This is the situation when we have identified one of a set
of possibilities but do not know what the other possibilities are nor how
many there are of them. (An example would be to draw from a hat a slip
of paper with a number without knowing what other numbers are to be
found on the remaining slips.) In such a situation to say 'It's not a six' would
not permit us to describe the implied object with a set of positive sentences.
It would remain totally undefined for us, although in itself it is fully deter-
mined. It is precisely via a series of negations, and oppositions to something
else which is not objectively given in the given situation, that it is progressively
delimited and defined.
narrower meaning than is usually the case, as for example with Tarski 37
and other modern logicians. Here we are using a broader meaning than
Russell's and a narrower one than Tarski's. On the one hand, we have in
mind also words that designate abstract scientific objects, the ideal objects
of mathematics, and even unreal objects. And on the other hand, we have
restricted ourselves only to cognitive indicative sentences which are usually
primary in logical investigations.
Under those assumptions we might divide all object-words into two
groups:
1. Words referring to an object about which a statement is made in
the sentences. In ordinary language these are usually nouns serving as the
subject of the sentences, and in artificial languages these are arguments of
quantified functions.
2. Predicates, i.e. words which express what is stated about the given
subjects.
3. Words that provide qualitative or quantitative specifications about
the thing referred to. These are called 'attributes' in ordinary language, and
'operators'in artificial languages.
4. Expressions of negation which transform assertions into denials.
5. Words that connect simple sentences into complex ones. These are
conjunctions or logical constants.
6. Modal words that more closely defme the character of the connections
between subject and predicate.
(1) Words that perform the function of the subject of a statement are
usually treated by Aristotelian logicians as the subject of the statement made
in the given sentences. This view is outdated today for it leads to a false
concept of the structure of the statement. For example in the statement,
'A molecule of ozone consists of three atoms of oxygen,' ozone is not the
only subject of the statement (as in the classical schema'S is P), for both
ozone and oxygen are said to stand in a particular relation to one another.
The classical schema can be said to hold true only in a (syntactically and
semantically) modified form - if one grants that S can be a set of things
(connected to one another by a particular relation) and if one excludes
the copula 'is' which lacks a universal meaning, for instead of identifying
and including classes in the statement, numerous other relations which are
not expressed by 'is' may be expressed. Thus we would obtain the formula
'Sop,' which is merely another way of expressing the formulas 'f{x),' or
'{(a)' (here J would be P and 'x' or 'a' would be S). One might even write
P{S). This formula would have the advantage that S would have the necessary
OBJECTIVE MEANING 239
(e) The first type has a structure that can be expressed by the formula
'a equals b.' The objective meaning of the predicate here is identifying the
individual object in question with a different individual object.
(t) The structure of type two may be expressed by the formula,'a B.'
The predicate here signifies that the given individual object is a member of
a class of objects.
(g) Finally, the structure of the third type is best expressed by the formula
A C B. The subject discussed is a class which is a part of another broader
class of objects.
These are all the basic logical types of sentences in which the predicate
refers to a single object and which can be encompassed by the traditional
structural schema of predicative judgment. The incompleteness and lack of
clarity of the schema was evident in the foregoing analysis, which indicates
clearly that the symbol 'is P covers a number of different, unspecified
relations.
Thus far we have examined primarily simple sentences with a one-place
predicate. In many such sentences the function of predicate (or subject)
is not performed by individual words but by sets of words which as a whole
designate an object. These are descriptions, which we will examine separately
later.
We still must discuss the group of sentences with multi-place predicates
taking the form 'R (A, B ... ),' as for example: "Entry into a denser environ-
ment is the cause of the refraction of a light wave'; 'Point A is located between
points B and C'; etc. The predicate of these sentences ('is the cause,' 'is
located between,' etc.) always signifies an objective relation between two
or more objects. There are various types of relations, depending upon the
different properties taken as a criterion of classification:
(a) According to the number of objects they link, there are dyadic, triadic,
tetradic, pentadic, etc. relations.
(b) According to the quantitative defmition of the linked objects we
can distinguish such relations as 'many-one,' 'many-many,' 'one-many'
and 'one-one.'
(c) Finally according to its logical properties relations may be classified
as transitive or intransitive; symmetric, asymmetric, and nonsymmetric;
reflexive and nonreflexive.
(3) More precise specifications of the subject of a statement may be
provided in a wide variety of ways. For example if we are speaking about
Belgrade we may speak about ancient Belgrade (attribute), Belgrade as the
capital of Yugoslavia (apposition), Belgrade under German occupation
OBJECTIVE MEANING 241
of words expressing the general (universals), while realists have often con-
ceived of the objectivity of the general in an idealistic manner, as something
independent of individual real objects and even taking primacy over them
(ante res). Some contemporary formal logicians have eliminated the problem
of universals as a philosophical problem from the agenda. They have replaced
the intensional language of universal and particular as qualities with the
extensional language of universality and particularity as quantitative cate-
gories of classes. For them the formula '(x) {X' states that all the objects of
class x have property t, while '(3x) {X' states that some of the objects of
class x possessing property t do exist. In many cases such an interpretation
may be accepted, with one reservation: universality in the true sense is
very rare. In actual life we encounter classes whose boundaries are poorly
separated from other classes and are in fact bounded by areas of vagueness,
whose objects have some properties which do place them in that class, and
some other properties which do not, or properties which exist in certain
conditions and do not in others.
In the function, 'Every man is x,' there is a very limited number of words
that may be used in place of 'x,' so that the resulting sentence is true. This
is the case with most sentences that begin with 'every' and 'all.' Accordingly
one must decide whether such sentences, with their claims to universality,
are false and do not refer to their intended objects adequately, or whether
an elastic objective meaning should be attributed to the parameters of
generality: they would refer to classes of objects taken in their entirety
with the inevitable exceptions of those members which, although in other
essential dimensions belong to the particular class, do not belong to it in the
given dimensions (with respect to the given property or relation). In other
words, in most cases, particularly in descriptive sentences, the universe of
objects to which a predicate is attributed in a general manner is not strongly
fIXed. This the first essential characteristic of a dialectical conception of the
general. The second was suggested by Hegel with his conception of the
'concrete universal.' This means that the universal is not an independent
object beside the particular ones, but rather a property or set of properties
or relations which in various specific ways is possessed by individual objects.
When we say, 'all people are conscious beings,' the universality indicated by
th word 'all' implies that individual people are conscious in various particular
ways.
The establishment of the objective meaning of the words which signify
particularity ('some,' 'type x,' 'group of cases x,' 'there are some x's which
... ') does not constitute a particular problem once we resolve the problem
OBJECTIVE MEANING 243
of the words which signify universality. The reason is that the particular is
always general in relation to the individual, and specific with reference to
the more general. This type of word serves to designate a part of a set of
individual objects which differ from the other parts of a given set by the
possession of a certain property or relation (which is refered to in the predi-
cate). Here once again the boundaries between the parts of a set are not
necessarily sharp, and the property in question manifests itself in various
ways in the individual members of a given part of a set. For example when
we say that some people are engaged in philosophy it should be understood,
first, that there are no sharp boundaries between those who engage in philos-
ophy and those who are engaged in literature, science, theology, or politics,
and, second, that everyone who is engaged in philosophy does so somewhat
differently.
(4) In our discussion of sentences we said that the objective meaning
of negative sentences (when true 39) is an objective contradiction between
an explicitly mentioned object, - which in the given situation or connection
is not really given - and the implied real, given object which remains more
or less indeterminate.
A negative word itself (in the context of a true sentence) signifies a rela-
tion of real contradiction in the above sense. When do we say that a relation
is a relation of objective contradiction? Speaking in these terms, are we not
dangerously close to metaphysical speculation? Every explanation should
begin from negation in the context of true descriptive sentences. When
we say, 'Oxygen is not flammable,' while using the words 'oxygen' and
'flammable' in the customary meaning, the words 'is not' indicate that if in
the presence of oxygen we carry out operations necessary to yield the experi-
mental effects we express with the word 'flammable,' we will experience
other effects, but not those. For example if we open a pipe in which oxygen
has been gathered during the electrolysis of water and if we apply a lighted
match, a strong flame will burst forth, but it will not penetrate the inside of
the pipe, as would be the case if the gas would begin to burn.
In sum, if during the practical testing of a negative sentence we experience
something other than or the very opposite from what we would expect if
the sentence were positive rather than negative, we have the right to say
that in this case the word 'is not' signifies an objective, actually existing
contradiction. This all applies also to explicative and instrumental negative
sentences, with the distinction that one may speak about the objective
contradiction as objective meaning of their negative words to the extent
that they are applicable to descriptive negative sentences.
244 ANALYSIS OF MEANING
(5) The basic words of ordinary language joining simple sentences into
compound ones are 'and,' 'or,' 'if ... then,' 'since,' 'as soon as,' 'although,'
etc.
In the generally accepted artificial languages a primary role is assumed
by words whose meaning corresponds at least partially to the words 'and'
('v'), 'or' ('A'), 'if ... then' (':)'). These are the 'logical constants.'
The question of the objective meaning of logical constants is so complex,
much debated, and controversial, that an entire monograph could be devoted
to it.
Many logicians have resolutely asserted that such linguistic expressions
lack any objective correlate in reality or that their correlates exist in certain
'ideal,' 'logical' objects independent of the real world.
Thus, for example, in abandoning his original realistic viewpoint,40 Russell
sharpened his criticism of realism precisely on the question of the existence
of logical constants. He held that there are no constituents of reality which
correspond to logical constants. Thus on the subject of the meaning of the
word 'or' he said, "Not even the most vehement Platonist would assume that
a perfect 'or' is placed in heaven and that the 'ors' here on earth are imperfect
copies of the heavenly formula." 41
Russell proceeded from a negation of the Platonic standpoint to the
opposite extreme of nominalism: "Logical constants, if we can say anything
definite about them, must be treated as a part of language, and not as a part
of what the language speaks about."42
In criticizing Russell's position the American realist James Feibleman
noted that the area of being does not encompass just actual things: it also
encompasses unactualized possibilities.43 In his view, "the relation 'or'
is a relation of altemativity, which is a logical possibility, an unchanging
relation which actual things can have (but need not have) and which is
(since it can exist) regardless of whether or not it exists at any special time
or place."44 On the basis of that his reply to Russell is as follows: ''The
logical constant 'or' is a symbol which appears in some statements. When it
appears in true statements and sometimes when it appears in partially true
statements, 'or' has one objective core1ate, the relation of altemativity."45
Feibleman calls his point of view 'modified realism.' This form of realism
is more flexible than the naive realism of Meinong, but it is not without
Platonic elements. For Feibleman altemativity is a logical possibility and
accordingly he attributes it with being independently of any specific spatial
and temporal determination. But the relation of altemativity could not have
the character of a logical relation if it were not based on certain real relations
OBJECTIVE MEANING 245
among things that exist in space and time. In other words the word 'or' (and
the corresponding symbol for disjunction) can exercise its logical function
only if in the actual application of a given logical system it manifests itself
as the constituent of at least some factually true statements. And this means
that it signifies certain really possible relations. When one asks which relations
these are it is necessary to note certain distinctions within the meaning of
the conjunction 'or' and in the corresponding symbol for disjunction.
In ordinary speech the word 'or' is used in a threefold sense (and not
in a twofold sense, as is ordinarily considered):
1. Alternation, which means that at least one of the constituents of
a compound statement is true:
'He did it out of ignorance or carelessness.'
'The instance of sensory aphasia was caused either by the rupture of
a blood vessel or by thrombosis.'
2. Complementarity, which means that all the constituents are true:
'Vertebrates are mammals or birds, or reptiles, or amphibians, or fish.'
3. Mutual exclusion, which means that if one of the constituents is true,
the others must be false, e.g.: 'The patient will live with a damaged brain
or die.' (Statements such as these are governed by the law of excluded middle
and the law of noncontradiction.)
The first two meanings are usually treated jointly as the inclusive meaning
of disjunction and the last as the exclusive meaning.
To what objective constituents of the structure of material reality do
alternation, complementarity, and mutual exclusion correspond?
1. In the first of the cited meanings, disjunction expresses the set of real
possibilities that merely differ among themselves and at least one element
of the set is actualized. Thus in the above example at issue is a disease which
maybe caused by one of two causes or by both and it is irrelevant whether
both are given; one by itself would be enough to cause the disease. They
are in a relation of indifferent variability. Aside from this causal meaning
alternation also has a dynamic meaning when it is used to express a relation
of different possibilities of the further development of a process, only one
of which will become reality. For example:
'Her son is very talented - he will certainly become a writer, musician,
or philosopher.'
On the condition that at least one of these possibilities is real, the state-
ment is correct - alternation here does not preclude the realization of all
listed possibilities.
2. In ordinary speech the objective basis of complementarity of consti-
246 ANALYSIS OF MEANING
*
In symbolic logic two different symbols are used where in ordinary language
we would use the word 'or.' One of them stands for disjunction (V) and the
other for incompatibility {Schaeffer's constant ('I'. A complex disjunctive
statement ('p V q') is true whether both elementary constituents 'p' and 'q'
are true or whether either of them is true. On the other hand one compound
statement in which the symbol for alternative negation ('p/q') figures as a
logical constant is considered true only if one elementary statement is true
an the other is false or the reverse.
The question arises as to how one can say anything here about the objec-
tive meaning of the symbol V and'/, when instead of the variables 'p' and
'q' we can place instead any arbitrarily chosen statements such as; 'Belgrade
is the capital of Yugoslavia,' and 'Kangaroos have begun to take up philoso-
phy.' In many possible interpretations of a symbolic formula we derive false
or meaningless statements in which the conjunction 'or' has no actual objec-
tive meaning. But there must exist at least some interpretations that can lead
to factually true statements. In generally accepted systems of symbolic
logic one encounters formulas that result in factually true statements (Le.
logical laws) in every interpretation of their variables. If this were not the
case there would be no reason to consider a system of symbols a logical
system. Accordingly even logical constants have an objective meaning, even
if of an extremely general and abstract character. To the extent that variables
linked with them represent a general form of a multitude of differing possible
sentences, logical constants as well represent a general form of possible 46
general relations among facts. Some of these relations are real, actually given
relations of alternation, complementarity, mutual exclusion of opposites,
etc. What is important in this case is that the general forms mentioned here
OBJECTIVE MEANING 247
are objectively given in the structure of reality itself, regardless of the con-
sciousness of any individual subject.
The same is the case with the objective meaning of other logical constants.
Conjunction, which is expressed in ordinary language by the word 'and'
and in symbolic language by the symbol 'f\' signifies the unity of opposites,
such as in the statement, 'Human individuals are working and rational beings.'
The manner in which unity differs from the complementarity of opposites
is evident when we compare this statement with the statement, 'Human
individuals are either male or female.' Not every person is both male and
female but some people are male and some others are females. But every
person is both a working and a rational being. These two characteristics
come in indivisible unity. Human action differs from that of animals in that
it is consciously guided and rationally based. Human rationality differs from
animal rationality in that it has creative practice as its content and produces
ever new goals and means of human activity.
The conditional words, 'if ... then' and the corresponding symbols for
implication express a possible conditioning of opposites. In ordinary speech
we try to use 'if ... then' in order to build meaningful statements only; when
in addition these statements are true it is not difficult to see that they express
a real causal relationship, as for example:
'If we bombard the nucleus of the atom with fast neutrons then the result
is the splitting of the atom.'
In symbolic logic implication is expressed by the symbol ':)', the use
of which is governed by a highly abstract rule: the complex expression p :) q
is true if the antecedens (P) is false or the consequens (q) is true - or, in
other words, of four possible cases it is false only in the case that p is true
and q is false. Here we note a divergence from ordinary language, where
in most cases compound implicative (hypothetical) statements are untrue
if the antecedens is false. But in both science and ordinary language we
encounter statements in which the ante cedens is false or both the antecedens
and consequens are false, but the statement as a whole is logically correct,
as for example:
'If there exist absolute space and time we can draw a distinction between
genuine and illusory movement.'
'If ether exists, then absolute space and time also exist.'
In order that such logically correct statements not be proclaimed a priori
false, the logical rule that explains the meaning of the symbol for implication
is highly elastic and permits a multitude of meaningless interpretations of
implicative formulas. But the objective meaning of implication does not
248 ANALYSIS OF MEANING
There is just one world, the real world: Shakespeare's imagination is part of it, and the'
thoughts he had while writing Hamlet are real. The thoughts we have when reading
the play also are real. But it is precisely the essence of literature that the thoughts,
feelings, etc. are real only in Shakespeare and his readers, and a more objective Hamlet
does not exist as a supplement to them. 50
OBJECTIVE MEANING 251
Both refer to relations - the former the relationship of the weight of the
helium atom to the weight of an oxygen atom, and the second the spatial
relation with respect to the place where the two cited pictures are located.
What typically characterizes deSCriptions is that they are able to refer
to entire structures of objects - sets and systems of individual things and
events, and relations among properties and relations.
One might further analyze descriptions into individual words and examine
particularly the objective meaning of various types of nouns, adjectives,
pronouns, verbs, conjunctions, prepositions, adverbs, articles {in most lan-
guages other than SerboCroatian they playa highly important role in logiC).51
But for the purposes of logic one need not go that far. Moreover there is a
question of whether this is at all appropriate. It is increasingly difficult to
talk about the objective meaning of symbols the more they are removed
from context and viewed in atomistic rather than functional terms.
use to describe it. In any case the further development of our practice can
eliminate the (relative) indeterminacy of many objects known to us. For
example we may discover methods for deriving facts about electrons without
their present interaction with photons of light. We may discover the cause of
cancer. We may discover new data about events of the past. We may create
such precise networks of concepts that many objects now located in areas of
vagueness between two classes may become determinate, etc.
Until this occurs some objects of cognition remain relatively indeterminate,
and when they cease to be so, newly discovered objects will take their place.
Moreover in the exact sciences there is a progressively greater use of the type
of symbol referring to indeterminate objects - abstract symbols referring to
real objects of a very universal character and ideal objects. For example the
algebraic 'x' is any number, the 'm' of physics is any mass, the 'N of chemis-
try is any atom of nitrogen, in political economy Kc is any constant and Kv
any variable capital, etc. The interpretation which is (via definition or a se-
mantic rule in the appropriate metalanguage) provided to these symbols
partially restricts the field of their indeterminacy, but to that extent, also
of their applicability. They obtain even closer determination by the context
in which they are used. Sometimes they are implicitly fully defmed by con-
text.
In the functions of the language of logic, variables have a greater degree
of indeterminacy than any other variables. Thus 'x,' 'y.' 'z' refer to all the
objects to which one attributes a property (which appear as arguments of a
function). Symbol 'x' refers to any class; 'I,' 'g,' and 'h' are symbols for
predicates - referring to properties and relations. Such symbols as 'p,' 'q,'
and 'r' express statements and refer to any facts. But once again we see that
in their indeterminacy designated objects are nevertheless partially determi-
nate: at least the most general category to which they belong is specified.
And also the use of every such symbol of a variable in a function relates it
to other symbols and thus determines it more precisely.
The least determined objects are those designated by the most abstract
philosophical categories such as 'object,' 'subject,' 'being,' 'reality,' and
'consciousness,' but even these are determined by reference to one another
and by contrast. And if they are not determined in this manner, they are
determined by use. The most abstract of all terms which philosophers have
succeeded in formulating - entity - still has a minute element of determi-
nation by the very negation of everything that is determinate.
But, conversely, there are no symbols which refer to objects so determined
that they do not include any elements of indeterminacy. This applies least
OBJECTIVE MEANING 257
NOTES
6 One should allow for the fact that the conventional character of a linguistic sign does
not imply the conventional character of the concept or proposition it expresses.
7 Wittgenstein does say at other points that the relation of copying is a similarity of
structure embodying the existence of a rule whereby if we have the one we can construct
or reconstruct the other. But similarity of structure entails much more than the mere
existence of such a rule. Here we have in effect two explanations that do not agree with
one another.
8 John Wisdom, 'Logical Constructions,' Mind, 1931, p. 202.
9 Gilbert Ryle, 'Systematically Misleading Expressions,' Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, 1931.
10 Alfred J. Ayer, 'Verification and Experience,' Ibid., 1936-7, also Foundations of
Empirical Knowledge, London, 1947, p.106.
11 The designative relation is often a deep and many-layered one. First of all we have
the object directly referred to, but in addition there may be a number of objects indirec-
tly referred to. A portrait refers directly to the person who has posed, but ultimately and,
indirectly it refers to an objective reflective-affective structure. Thus the meaning of a
picture never consists in what it directly represents. This is why it is difficult to under-
stand the full meaning of a work of art without a significant cultural background and a
special emotional and intellectual predisposition.
12 Alfred North Whitehead, Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect, An Anthology,
Northrop and Gross, (eds.), Cambridge, 1953, p. 538.
13 John Stuart Mill,A System of Logic, B. I, Ch. II, Section 5, London, 1865, VI ed.
14 In noting this factor Frege drew his famous distinction between 'Sinn' and 'Bedeu-
tung.' 'Bedeutung' corresponds to denotation, and 'Sinn' to connotation.
15 Russell, The Principles of Mathematics, Cambridge, 1903, Section 427.
16 See Urmson, Philosophical Analysis, Oxford, 1956, pp. 22-3.
17 Bertrand Russell, 'On Denoting,' Mind, 1905.
18 Gilbert Ryle, 'The Theory of Meaning,' British Philosophy in the Mid-Century,
London, 1957,pp. 247-8.
19 Quine, From a Logical Point of View, Cambridge, Mass., 1953.
20 Ibid.,p.9.
21 Ibid., p. 130.
22 It should not be concluded that in principle cognition of continuity is primary. The
process of .cognition develops in an analytic - synthetic manner. This means that if the
basic task of investigation at moment tl was to eliminate unjustiilably harsh distinctions
and to identify certain continuous connections, at moment t2 analysis will again take
primacy and lead to the posing of new distinctions and to the reappearance of the dis-
continuities in the previously established continuity. Thereby we attain a higher theore-
tical level where the demand for synthesis once again prevails, etc.
23 Here we refer to meaninglessness in the sense of absence of cognitive meaning. But
cognitive criteria of meaning are not universal. In the context of a literary work a cogni-
tively meaningless statement may have an artistic meaning.
24 Gilbert Ryle, 'The Theory of Meaning,' British Philosophy in the Mid-Century,
London,1957,pp.248-9.
25 R. W. Ashby, 'Use and Verification,' Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society VIII
(1956), 140.
26 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Oxford, 1953, Sections 199,206,241.
OBJECTIVE MEANING 259
LINGUISTIC MEANING
We can begin to understand the nature of signs and their meaning only by
establishing a direct connection between signs and corresponding objects,
i.e. corresponding experiences and thoughts. This is how we learn the mean-
ing of some signs during the first years of our life. Later, we rely more and
more on these signs in order to indirectly learn meanings of a multitude
of new signs. Undoubtedly, we are here dealing with a new dimension of
meaning, different from the two discussed previously. This can be con-
firmed by comparing how the following individuals interpret the word
"Paris" .
(a) A man who has never seen Paris and cannot remember what he has
read or heard about that city, but who always associates the word "Paris"
with an idea, an imaginary picture.
(b) A man who lives in Paris and has a detailed first-hand knowledge of
the city, but has not thought a lot about Paris, and perhaps would not be
the right person to give someone a verbal description of the city.
(c) A man who only knows that "Paris is the capital of France and the
cultural center of the world", a sentence he memorized after reading it
somewhere.
None of these three people could be described as someone who doesn't
know at least one semantic dimension of the word ''Paris''. To be sure, these
dimensions are usually interwoven, not separated the way they are presented
in our examples. The process of imagining an object is usually stimulated
either by direct perception or by reading or listening. Before we realize that
an object is the objective meaning of a word, what we usually do is either
become familiar with its image or get its description or verbal defmition. Thus,
all of these three dimensions are actually closely interconnected. However,
this should not prevent us from distinguishing them and constructing ideal
situations in which these distinctions will be made evident.
Thus, linguistic meaning is the relation of one linguistic sign to other
signs in one linguistic system. Analogous definitions could be formulated
for non-linguistic signs. Furthermore, in order to explicitly express their
meaning, we can relate linguistic signs to non-linguistic ones (photographs,
schemata, diagrams). Although closely related to linguistic meaning, this
261
262 ANALYSIS OF MEANING
once this choice has been made, we cannot arbitrarily establish relations
between linguistic expressions; these relations have to be in accordance
with the factual structuring of thought, and, indirectly, of objects.
3. Rules concerning word use and the defmitions constituting the linguistic
meaning of a symbol are an invaluable instrument of communication. These
rules enable us to understand, albeit in a quite abstract way, what general
elements in other people's thinking are expressed by an unknown symbol, and
what objects it pertains to. This is a necessary condition for the participation
in the praxis of others (be it cooperation or conflict).
Few things play such an important role in our life as language; yet we are
not quite aware of it.
When we report our impressions to others, we tell them about our thoughts
and emotions, and are usually unaware of the fact that what reaches our
interlocutors is nothing but words. Our interlocutors interpret these words
in accordance with their own experiences, and are convinced that they know
what objects, thoughts, and emotions we are talking about. What they forget
is that they have, in fact, only heard our words, and that everything else
is a more or less appropriate superstructure.
And this is not all. We observe, say, the sea, and contemplate its color,
its clean and transparent water, the pleasant sound of its waves. Silently
we enjoy it, and although we know that this is a definite experience, we are
completely unaware of the role of language in the forming of this experience.
For this huge mass murmuring in front of us is infmitely variegated - every
moment there is at least a slight change in the way it reflects the sun's
photons, a difference in the configuration of its waves, a variation in the
manner in which water particles collide with pebbles and cause the vibration
of air molecules. In fact, although we always experience different color
shades, di.fferent sounds, different feelings of pleasantness and beauty, we
always form our unspoken words in the same way: "blue", "transparent",
"murmur", "pleasant", "beautiful", etc. When we, at a given moment,
attempt to analyze our experience, what we first fmd in it are definite ele-
ments - colors, sounds, odors, movements, forms, desires, emotions. We
can express them with words, convey them to others, objectivize them;
264 ANLA YSIS OF MEANING
this is when we often discover that the experience of those who have been
in a situation similar to ours shares certain elements with our experience.
There is only one way we can attain this defmiteness and objectivity: by
establishing a correlation of some constant elements of our experience and
the appropriate words. Some elements of experience cannot be brought into
such a correlation - there are no words to fit or encompass them. This part
of experience has a purely subjective character, but it is also undefined,
diffuse, elusive - no analysis can approach it and we are unable to remember
it. We are usually unaware of the fact that on the richness of our language
depends how determined our perceptions, thoughts, and feelings are. We
are even less aware of the fact that objects for us are the way they are because
of the characteristics of the language we use when we think or talk about
them. 2
It is interesting to note that man started pondering the problems of
language and communication at a rather late date. In his book on operational
philosophy, Rapoport correctly points out that ancient myths, fairy-tales,
and proverbs anticipate almost all the problems of modern man - except those
pertaining to language and communication. 3 The eternal motif of man's
struggle for self-preservation in an inimical nature is the basis of myths about
evil gods and demons. Stories about flying carpets and seven league boots
are dreams realized by modern technology. The problem of predicting the
future is the basis of all stories about prophets and prophecies, and some
social problems are anticipated in stories about evil kings. However, nothing
in ancient folklore and mythology indicates an awareness of the numerous
problems stemming from the fact that between man and man, man and
reality, even between man and his inner life there is language - sometimes
a potent mediator, sometimes an awesome, insurmountable barrier.
All rationalists after Descartes, especially Leibniz, worked toward the reali-
zation of this ideal. Even in our time, when the imperfection of ordinary
language and the differences between its grammatical structure and the
logical structure of thOUght are a truism, we encounter the old realist idea
in a new guise. According to this new realism, ordinary language should be
replaced by an ideal, artificial language whose syntax will express not only
all the characteristics of a universal logical structure of thought, but the
absolute structure of reality as well. This was the conviction of the young
Bertrand Russell when constructing the language of his Principia Mathematica.
However, Russell merely shifted the application of traditional Platonic
realism from ordinary language to an artificial one.
There were several renewals of Greek scepticism: first in the philosophy
266 ANALYSIS OF MEANING
diametrically opposed to the idealist view. Only the external physical dimen-
sion of language was taken into .consideration. As language was understood
only as a form of objective, physical human behavior, unsurmountable diffi-
culties pertaining to the problem of meaning cropped up. Unable to talk
about the act of imagining, about conscious intentions, and all the other
mental processes which, although inseparable from language, do not fall into
the realm of objective, empirically perceptible behavior, all the behaviorists
could do was approach the problems of meaning with an impoverished
theoretical apparatus, suitable only for the study of mechanisms of stimulus
and response and applicable to rather undeveloped and primitive languages. In
fact, the behaviorists were trapped by an old misconception. By eliminating
any relative independence of mental processes, and by completely reducing
them to overt verbal behavior, they postulated, once again, the identity of
language and thought, thereby overlooking all the problems stemming from
the fact that language and thought are inextricably connected but not identi-
cal. And that is not all. Wishing to remain within the domain of perceptible
natural phenomena, the behaviorists started talking about material reality in
terms of natural environment, thus denying it any structure or form. Accord-
ing to them, there is no other general structure than that of verbal behavior.
What we have here is a monism of language and linguistic practice - as
opposed to the early monism of the substance and the later monism of the
mind.
In contradistinction to all of these types of conceptions of language,
derived from traditional rationalism and empiricism, transcendentalism, and
behaviorism, humanist dialectics relies on a very flexible conceptual apparatus
which enables it to determine the relations between language, the human
psyche, and material reality. The general form by which we could, on a rather
abstract level, represent these relations is the concept of the unity of oppo-
sites, or the concept of the relative identity of three different classes of
phenomena. Of course, these assertions would not tell us anything if we did
not analyze these relations.
First we will discuss the relation between language and man's mental life.
The first thing that can be said about this relation is that language parti-
cipates, as an instrument, in the objective social expression of our subjective
thoughts, feelings, desires, etc. The upshot of this fact is that verbal behavior
LINGUISTIC MEANING 269
is one of the most important objective empirical sources for the study of a
subject's mental processes.
However, these facts about language do not mean that aU possible objec-
tive knowledge about the mental processes of a subject is derived from his
verbal utterances. There are forms of non-verbal behavior that are also accessi-
ble to the methods of empirical study. Forms of non-verbal behavior can
serve as a basis for objective conclusions - with a high probability of accu-
racy - about a subject's mental processes. In some cases gestures, physiolo-
gical reactions, actions can be more valuable than verbal utterances as indi-
cators of the processes of our conscious and subconscious mind. For instance,
Aglaya Yepanchina's actions, in Dostoyevski's The Idiot, tell us more than
her words about her love toward Prince Mishkin.
However, one sort of mental process is more closely tied to language
than aU others, and verbal behavior is the most reliable key to its understand-
ing. What we have in mind are thought processes. By observing someone's eye
and mouth expressions, grimaces, gestures, body movements, etc. we can
learn about his emotions - his anger or jealousy, for instance, but we get
minimal information about the content of his thoughts. By measuring the
strength and the frequ~ncy of the bio-electric waves in the cortex, which
probably constitute the physiological basis of thought, we could learn some-
thing about the effort behind thinking, its intensity, and the excitement
involved in thinking, Such measuring devices could serve as lie-detectors,
although there are several reasons why they would be unreliable. For example,
if something excites one very much because it is rare and unusual, it is not
unlikely that one might react very emotionally to a true statement during the
test. The inverse could be true as well. At any rate, direct, external manifesta-
tions of thought and its accompanying processes tell us far too little about its
content, its qualitative aspect.
We can learn more about thought from practical actions - when man's
thinking is followed by attempts to solve problems emerging in his relation
with nature and with other men. There is a great deal of truth in Dewey's
thesis that every thought represents a plan of action. The character of an
action can tell us what kind of thought planned it. Thus practical meaning is
a dimension of meaning. Yet this way of uncovering the content of thought
processes can be very arduous and complicated. There can be a considerable
time difference between a thought and the corresponding action. The realiza-
tion of an action can, owing to various factors, differ from the plan. What we
have to do, instead of looking at an isolated action which can include signifi-
cant departures from the plan, is to take into consideration the entire physical
270 ANALYSIS OF MEANING
praxis of the given subject. But again, highly abstract thought may be isolated
from physical praxis. Anyway, we can base our judgments about thought
on praxis only if we follow a special kind of reasoning by analogy - which
has a limited cognitive value.
Language is by far the most reliable indicator of thought. In fact, language
presents the dialectical unity of two sorts of processes. Language permanently
associates strictly determined material processes (sound production by the
larynx, the creation of particular ink or printing color patterns) with particular
thought processes. These two sorts of processes are structurally similar. What
this means is that there are invariant types and relations in the multitude of
varying linguistic signs. On the other hand, our highly varied mental life
contains invariant dispositions of imagining certain objects, of recognizing
them when we see them, and of correctly using the terms which denote
them. There is such functional connection between the two that the appear-
ance of the sign normally provokes a corresponding disposition and, conver-
sely, the manifestation of a mental disposition (directly provoked by other
physical or mental events) tends to reproduce the sign or at least to evoke an
idea of it. One fact about language is essential: both types of relations -
those included in signs and those included in the structure of mental disposi-
tions - have a social character. They are invariant elements of thought and
of language of all members of society, and not only of isolated individuals. In
this sense language is a medium connecting different individual thought pro-
cesses, and also it is the expression of both individual and social thought.
Because of its external physical aspect, language is an objective phe-
nomenon which can be subject to scientific investigation like any other
natural phenomenon. Because the external realm of meaning and the
realm of thought are connected in a regular and constant way, language
can serve as an outstanding tool for the study of thought. In this respect
language has a significant advantage over other forms of praxis because
of the rellltive fIXedness of its subjective and objective elements and because
of its c01l3iderable invariance, simplicity and regularity. When, for instance,
a person decides that a dogmatic interpretation of Marxism discredits it,
and that one should therefore fight against dogmatism, in praxis the thought
can be expressed in many ways. In many cases we would not even know
how to interpret the behavior of this person, not being informed of his
decision. However, if this person decides to verbalize his thoughts, all he
needs is one sentence. Although we cannot tell from one sentence whether
the person uttering it sincerely believes in what he is saying, in most cases
there can hardly be any doubt about the thought that he wished to express.
LINGUISTIC MEANING 271
their sleep, infants. The behaviorist conceptual apparatus is far too limited to
make those distinctions. There is such a chasm between a parrot's gibberish
and a scientist's silent meditation that it is quite unjustified to equate both
phenomena with speechY If we wish to refute the idealist thesis about the
dominant role and the independent existence of the mind and of mental
processes, we needn't go as far as reducing thought to speech - or inner
speech. What really contributes to the refutation of mentalism is the mere
fact that linguistic signs, or, at least, their representation, are a constitutive
element of every articulate and defined thought process.
We shall apply the term "speech" only to those cases where physical signs
are actually being operated with. Because linguistic signs are by defmition
material objects, speech is always a material process. (In our terminology,
the expression "inner speech", is paradoxical). On the other hand, thought
as an eminently mental process would not be possible without the represen-
tations of linguistic signs and their structuring and organizing role. There is
no doubt that movements of the larynx do occur during thought processes;
they accompany the representation of the signs that would be actually
spoken if the person engaged in thought opened his mouth and allowed
the air to flow through his speech organs. The aim of this discussion is to
dissociate our position from both behaviorism and idealistic mentalism
and transcendentalism. The representation of signs is an inner mental process
which can be reduced neither to any external physical process nor to a
material operation with signs as objects. On the other hand, the thesis that
organized, articulate thought requires linguistic signs (or, at least, the repre-
sentation of signs) convincingly invalidates the transcendentalist view of
language as a secondary expression of the mind which is superordinant to,
and independent of, language. Historically speaking, inner (silent) thought
could have emerged only as a superstructure to previously developed thought
which had already been expressed verbally. Only when man acquired the
habit of thinking aloud and in the context of social communication could
he have started to, so to speak, suspend his speech mechanism and substitute
the spoken and written word by word representation. These are the main
phases of this development.
1. The pre-symbolic phase of language. The aim of speech is not providing
information about objects, but securing the satisfaction of biological needs.
Examples of pre-symbolic language are cries by which early man expressed his
feelings (the expressive function of language is already developed), suggested
certain attitudes and practical operations (the directive function), achieved
social cohesion (in rituals or simple exchanges of words - whose meaning was
LINGUISTIC MEANING 273
of the second definition, we shall opt for the first. Thus our defmition
includes the social aspect as one of the necessary elements of language.
Therefore our example of the discord between language and thought should
be described as a case in which thought of individuals transcends the limits
oflanguage.
Even if the individual does not use any specific personal symbols and
remains within the limits of social (generally accepted) language, thought
contains its own experiental associations, and therefore cannot be totally
reduced to language. Even when we establish, beyond doubt, that language
is a form of thought - a form of its constitution and also of its practical
expression, the fact remains that language, like every other form, is invari-
ability within variability, and identity in a large number of individual cases
that differ from person to person, from moment to moment.
There is always something unique in the thought of an individual. When
different persons think about Father, Mother, Country, Philosophy, Friend-
ship, their respective thoughts are at least a shade different: invariant elements
of meaning, defmed by identical terms, are abstracted from different experi-
ences and cannot be completely separated from these experiences. We all
have different parents, we have read different books, participated in different
conversations; we have different friends and have experienced friendship under
different circumstances. Finally, the thought of an individual in different
periods of his life distills his life experience, is concretized by different per-
ceptions, colored by different emotional tones, and influenced by different
desires and practical purposes.
Language glosses over many of these differences, and executes so to
speak, a cruel but useful unification. This has unfortunate consequences for
poetry. In its desire to express the fullness of individual existence, poetry
incessantly struggles with the poverty of language. There are thousands of
ways to hate or love, yet just a few puny words to express these feelings.
Something unique, unrepeatable has to be expressed by old, repeatable
words. This is why poets seek new metaphors, forge new words, add new
shades of meaning to old words, create new, seemingly meaningless, word
combinations. And poets do all this, using their specific methods, in order
to convey a specific content to a small group of people with a particular
psychological constitution. This is how poetic language gradually ceases to
be clear and universally intelligible.
The situation is different in science. Science, especially in the phase of
theoretical investigation (and to a lesser degree in the phase of practical
application) seeks general facts and structures. The language of science,
LINGUISTIC MEANING 275
There are two diametrically opposed views about the relation between
language and material reality. According to the first, there is a necessary
connection between language and material reality. This view is characteristic
of primitive man's mythological thought and of common sense. But it is also
present in the speculative methods of traditional realism, rationalism, and
objective idealism in philosophy. According to this view, language mirrors
the structure of reality; in other words, language and reality are identical.
The second view, which comes later and as an exaggerated reaction to the
naive realism, claims that language is a system of freely selected and purely
conventional signs. From this point of view the very question about the
relation between language and external reality is meaningless.
Here is a third humanist-dialectical alternative: Two facts indicate that
language and material reality are neither two aspects of one logos, nor that
language simply mirrors reality in such a way that its elements bi-univocally
correspond to material objects. First, there is not a single symbol in language
which could not be substituted by some other symbol, or whose meaning
could not be changed. Second, there is no language which could be ideal
for all aspects of human communication and praxis. In other words, there
has to be at least one sphere of phenomena for which a given language would
be deemed less adequate than some other language with a more or less dif-
fereut vocabulary and syntactic structure.
The upshot of the first assertion is that the relation of actual and potential
linguistic signs toward corresponding deSignated objects is many-to-one (and
not one-to-one), and that our choice (which is nevertheless limited by the
278 ANALYSIS OF MEANING
will largely depend on the strength and timbre of the speaker's voice, the
repetitions in his speech, its rhythm and duration. The cognitive function
of language depends much less on the physical aspects of signs, although there
are certain words which are constructed to resemble, as much as possible,
the object they denote - such are onomatopaeic words.
2. There are causal relations between operations with linguistic expressions
and material reality, and these are often not mediated by thought. Namely,
in many cases long practice can make a person react verbally to a material
object in a direct, automatic way. This phenomenon has been remarkably
elucidated by the empiricists (Russell, Wittgenstein, Ryle, Ayer, and others)
in their effort to destroy the Cartesian "ghost in the machine" myth, i.e.
the old idealist assumption that the mind is a primary entity independent
of language. Thus, for instance, in his well-known Inquiry into Meaning and
Truth Russell writes:
c...) In like manner, a black object may cause you to say "this is black" as a result of
a mere mechanism, without any realization of the meaning of your words. Indeed
what is said in this thoughtless way is perhaps more likely to be true than what is said
deliberately; for if you know English there is a causal connection between a black object
and the word "black" which there is not between the same object and the name of a
different colour.
Words may result from the environment just as directly as the sound "ow" when I am
hurt. C .. ) The difference between a cry of pain and the word "black" is that the former
is an unconditioned reflex, which the latter is not; (... )
People who have learnt a certain language have acquired an impulse to use certain words
on certain occasions, and this impulse is analogous to the impulse to cry when hurt. IS
simply looked at the sky and said "Stars", whereupon I concluded that stars
were tiny, bright, shimmering spots one sees on a clear night. But I could
attain such a high level of interpretive skill only if someone had taught me,
by pointing and simultaneously pronouncing the appropriate words, what
"tiny", "bright", "shimmering", etc. meant. I could learn the meaning of the
word "star" in a different way - by guessing from the context of the repeated
word. However, the thought at a specific moment tn had to be preceded by
verbal praxis at moments tl> t 2 t 3 , etc. which established various kinds of
relations between the linguistic expression of the given thought and other
linguistic expressions. Of course, a thought can, as we have seen, transcend
the limits of previous linguistic combinations. It can contain purely subjective
elements, or be associated with a quite specific representation, imaginary
image, or emotion. However, what constitutes its kernel, the crystallizing
point of all of these experiences, is a combination of words, a general descrip-
tion of these experiences. This very disposition toward a particular thought at
the appearance of a particular sign is probably nothing else but an extremely
complex conditioned reflex 16 , which can be voluntarily arrested (this explains
why it is possible to talk about a conscious choice during the thought pro-
cess). This reflex consists in this process: under given conditions one sign
triggers the representation of a whole group of signs around which all other
subjective elements are crystallized. Therefore, linguistic meaning constitutes
the implicit form of mental meaning. When that form is explicitly expressed
we get linguistic meaning as a material phenomenon. This explicit expression
can constitute a definition of a given term.
What we termed a denoted object as a cognitive category (insofar as it
is an object for us) in many cases is nothing but a coherent set of SOCially
invariant elements in the thoughts and the experiences of individuals. If the
object in question is a known material object, the set of SOcially invariant
elements is not only communicable and coherent, but also practically verified
and believed to correspond, in a relatively accurate way, to some constituent
of reality in itself. Thus the denoted object exists directly for our conscious-
ness as a unique structure of symbols, usually linguistic symbols. When we
expliCitly express this structure we get an adequate definition of a given
sign, i.e. not any possible or arbitrarily selected definition, but a definition
that is - especially if we are using scientific language - socially accepted
and has cognitive value.
Thus, an awareness of the role of language in the constitution of mental
and objective meaning naturally leads to the central problem of the linguistic
analysis of meaning - the problem of definition.
LINGUISTIC MEANING 283
2. DEFINITION
With the exception of the theory of inference, no area of logic has been
studied so thoroughly in the last two and a half millenia as the problem of
defmition. Therefore, we should not be surprised by the great number of
views - including defmitions - of defmition. For Aristotle a defmition
explains the essence of things 17, Cicero sees it as the explanation of the
qualities of a thing,18 and, according to Spinoza, a true definition expresses
the nature of a thing. 19 For Locke, defmition is "nothing but making another
understand by words what idea the term defmed stands for."20 In Kant's
view "a defmition is a sufficiently distinct and delimited (precise) concept"
or a "logically perfect concept."21 Most defmitions are merely "expositions"
of given concepts. According to John Stuart Mill, a defmition is a proposition
declaring the meaning of a word, either the generally accepted meaning, or
the one used by the author for his own purposes. According to Russell and
Whitehead, a defmition is a declaration that a newly introduced symbol
has the same meaning as a combination of symbols whose meaning is
already known. Wit~genstein sees defmitions as rules for translating from one
language into another. 22 In Carnap's view, "a defmition is a rule for mutual
transformation of the words in the same language."23 According to Robin
son's book Definition, defmition is an intellectual activity of explaining the
structure of an elementary symbol.24
One thing is obvious from this summary of definitions - there is no
consensus even about the fundamental question: What do we define, the
concept, the word or the thing? According to the Greeks, one defined a thing,
res, and the purpose of definition was getting at the essence of things. In
contradistinction to this realist conception of real defmition, nominalists
(especially Locke and Mill) held that defmition should elucidate the meaning
of a word. Finally, for Kant, Rickert,25 and some other German philosophers,
defmitions elucidate a specific type of entity - concepts. However, the
prevalent view in recent logical literature and in scientific practice has been
that defmitions define linguistic symbols. Only this conception allows us
to make a clear distinction between defmitions and all other assertions, a
distinction implicitly acknowledged by every student of the problem of
defmition. Saying that a defmition defmes the "essence" or the "nature"
of things does not provide us with a criterion for differentiating it from
other assertions - it is not sufficiently clear what a thing is, and we can be
284 ANALYSIS OF MEANING
even less certain about notions such as "essence" or "nature". Thus it is not
surprising that Santayana considered his entire book The Sense of Beauty
a defmition of beauty.
Therefore, a definition is a statement about the meaning of a linguistic
symbol. It is distinguished from other assertions by its external form. Namely,
we put the defmed symbol (definiendum) in parentheses to indicate that
we are talking about the term itself, and not the object it denotes. What
the content of definitions directly indicates are linguistic habits, and they
can be actually given, possible, or recommendable. A definition can only
indirectly inform us about extra-linguistic facts. It follows from the con-
ception presented here that defmition has a wider sphere of use than that
prescribed by nominalist and conceptualist philosophers. We propose a wider
use of defmition because we maintain that thinking about the connection
between symbols and objects does not necessarily lead to metaphysics. In
addition, we include praxis in the process of defmition. On the other hand,
our range of application of "defmition" is significantly restricted compared
to traditional realism. When, for instance, Aristotle says that "movement
is the actualization of the potential", that "time is the number of movements
in relation to the terms 'before' and 'again''', that "happiness is the activity
of the soul", these assertions should not be understood as definitions because,
judging by their form and by the author's intention (which is made evident
by the context) their goal is not saying something about the meaning of the
words "movement", "time", "happiness", etc. but determining more closely
the objects denoted by these terms.
Robinson - to take an example from recent philosophical literature -
offers a very broad interpretation of the concept of definition when he
defmes defmition as: "( ...) any process, whether verbal or otherwise, by
which any individual, whether God or angel or man or beast, brings any
individual, whether himself or another, to know the meaning of any ele-
mentary symbol, whether verbal or other, and if a verbal symbol, whether
a noun or an adjective or a preposition or any other sort of word." 26
Robinson admits that "few people have ever used the word 'defmition'
in so broad a sense as this", however, he carefully analyzes the existing
limitations of the concept of definition and gives arguments for their abolish-
ment. Some of Robinson's demands for expanding the sphere of use of
definition are appropriate, well argumented, and have in fact been accepted
by many contemporary logicians. Thus, for instance, it is almost universally
accepted that words other than nouns can be defmed. Furthermore, very
few contemporary logicians think that defmition necessarily requires an
LINGUISTIC MEANING 285
1. Symbol - symbol.
2. Symbol - disposition for a psychic experience (in most cases a concept,
but it can also be a perception - as in the example above) - an emotion,
etc. 28
3. Symbol - object.
4. Symbol - the effect of a set of practical operations. 29
The term "is" denotes a different semantic relation in each of these cases.
In the first case, it is the relation of synonymity between two expressions in
the same language, or that of translatability between expressions in different
languages. In the second case "is" means "expresses", and in the third it refers
to the relation of "denoting". Finally, in the fourth case the term "is" implies
a causal relation: the term defmed refers to an effect of human praxis.
In order to name these four types of defmition, it would be best to use
new names since all of the current ones (except for the fourth, "operational"
type) have a different meaning. If, nevertheless, we decide to respect a century
long tradition and keep the old names, we have to indicate the changes in
meaning.
1. Nominal definition - is limited only to the relation of equivalence
between expressions, which is formally emphasized by the convention that
both the definiendum and the definiens should be placed in parentheses.
2. Conceptual definition. First, it should be pointed out that what is
defmed is the word, not the concept. The way the definiens is formulated
indicates that it refers to a mental form (in most cases a concept). However,
this mental form should be understood neither as a substance - an entity
somehow permanently persisting in our consciousness, nor as a transcendental
function which is an a priori constituent of consciousness, but as a disposi-
tion, conditioned by experience, of an organism to react in a specific way to
a given situation.
3. Real definition - here, too, the definiendum is a symbol, not a thing.
The definiens should not be interpreted by vague categories such as "essence",
"nature", etc. The defmiens is a collection of words describing an object
(thing, quality, rule, etc.) by its constant and necessary qualities.
4. Operational definition - here we can accept, in general terms, Bridg-
man's (and that of other operationalists) interpretation of the term. However,
we should not fall prey to their misconception that this is the only legitimate
definition in science.
LINGUISTIC MEANING 289
oversights. Eventually one can conclude that the author's approach to his
sources was one-sided, and superficial, and his interpretation wrong. The
second approach is different: it is a discussion about what should in the future
be accepted as the meaning of a given term. The following alternatives are
open: accepting the polysemy of a term; accepting one of the meanings given
in an original source; adopting a new, reconstructed meaning, proposed by a
contemporary author. In this case, the decision, authorities notwithstanding,
should be based on the theoretical implications of each possible solution.
Obviously, there is no logical contradiction between the empirical statements
about the actual use of some term and the theoretical norms about its most
rational use in the future. The two refer to different times and different
modalities.
different senses of the definiendum. One way of verifying the results obtained
by this method is translating the analyzed term into another language (for
example, from English into German) and comparing the results.
Two general philosophical questions concerning defmition have been much
discussed in the past: Can we talk about true and false defmitions? Can all
the terms of a language be defmed?
How these two questions will be answered depends on whether we are
talking about empirical or normative defmitions.
Empirical defmitions should have a trl!th value because they refer to the
actual state of things. If they adequately describe the meaning of a word in
a given language, they are true; otherwise they are false. However, these
judgments cannot be always that sharp; one finds many transitional cases.
Further, if language is understood primarily as a social phenomenon (a
means of communication) then every one of its terms can have an empirical
definition. Obviously, this conclusion follows analytically from the concep-
tion of language as a social phenomenon: in order to be able to use a sign in
social communication (and, consequently, understand it as an element of
a given language) we have to to able to explain its meaning by other signs.
To be sure, we can accept this in principle and still maintain that some
terms in language remain indefinable. We could argue that we learn the
meaning of those terms ostensively - by pointing to the corresponding
object, and by practical use. And further the argument goes: if we attempt
to define all terms by other terms, we will inevitably make a circle: we will
define word A by word B and vice versa. However, although we do not
question the fact that some words are learned through practical and others
though verbal definitions, there is no specific group of words which exclu-
sively require learning through practice. In other words, no concrete word
is indefmable. Furthermore,' circularity is a logical fallacy only in special
cases, for example in a strictly deductive system or with an insufficient
number of terms mediating between two terms which define each other.
This is why Lewis, in contradistinction to earlier views on this question,
wrote: "( ...) all definition is eventually circular ( ...). The difference between
a good aod a bad definition, on this point, is only, so to speak, in the diameter
of the circle." 30
The circle's diameter can be increased by various methods of definition
- which will be discussed later. Thus, some categories can be defmed through
others - by the classical analytic method. The meaning of these other cate-
gories can be defined by exemplification or by using them or giving explicit
rules for their use.
292 ANALYSIS OF MEANING
Normative Definitions
Normative defmitions, unlike empirical ones, do not state but prescribe
the use of a term. Regardless of the meaning of a term up to now, a nor-
mative defmition establishes what it should mean from now on. Russell and
Whitehead obviously had this sort of definition in mind when they gave the
following explanation: "A defmition is a declaration that a certain newly in-
troduced symbol or combination of symbols is to mean the same as a certain
other combination of symbols of which the meaning is already known.'>32
What Russell and Whitehead had in mind here were exclusively defmitions in
an artificial language (logical or mathematical) in which all symbols, with the
exception of a few undefined ones, are newly introduced. When symbols in a
natural language are defined in this way, one or more meanings can be recon-
structed or even simply adopted with the exclusion of the rest. In any case,
what constitutes the significant distinction between normative and empirical
definition is a moment of conscious and intentional creativity. Instead of
merely registering what are often random products of general social linguistic
practice we, by using normative defmitions, intervene and select particular
meanings and word uses. These selections are justified insofar as they ensure
a greater clarity and precision of language and thus lead to more effective
communication and the expansion of the sphere of meaning in general.
LINGUISTIC MEANING 293
One can recognize empirical and normative deflnitions by the way they
are formulated. For example, here is an obviously empirical defmition of the
term "dialectics": "For many philosophers the term 'dialectics' means a
method of reaching truth through discussion and the struggle of opinions.
In contempoary Marxist philosophy 'dialectics' means: 1) the study of the
most general laws of movement and development; 2) a philosophical method
which views everything through its development; 3) the most general laws
of reality itself; 4) the logic of substantive thought ... etc."
But the following defmition is obviously normative: "In order to avoid
the current terminological confusion, 'dialectics' should be understood as
the most general philosophical theory and method based on the principles
of objectivity, development, concreteness, etc."
Sometimes it is impossible to classify a defmition on the basis of its form,
e.g.: "Dialectics is a theory about the most general laws of development."
We can often determine the character of such a defmition by revealing its
purpose and the conditions under which it was formulated. If this is impos-
Sible, we will classify it as a transitional case containing elements of both sorts
of deflnitions (empirical and normative).
Normative and empirical defmitions have a different approach to the
question of truth-value. It should be pointed out, before we proceed, that
what characterizes normative defmitions is that they are limited to a speciflc
type of communication (a speciflc symbolic system), most frequently a
technical language. This means that the number of the terms in such a system
is more or less limited and represents only part of the sum of expressions
that are understandable to us. If we tried to deflne all of these terms one by
another, we would get a circle, a vicious circle (circulus vitiosus) this time,
or, to use Lewis's expression, a circle with a small diameter. We would be
unable to get a clear understanding of the term because it would be uncon-
nected to vast areas of knowledge and experience. Therefore, when building
any formalized system of logic or of mathematics, we must flrst explicitly
state which terms are undefmed. Undefined, of course, does not mean
indefinable; it merely mans that these terms are not defmed by any normative
defmitions within the system. However, this leads to the somewhat para-
doxical situation in which symbols declared ''undefmed'', or, as Hilbert
would say, "meaningless blots of printing-ink", function as the source of all
meaning and the condition of communicability.
Normative definitions, as opposed to empirical ones, have no truth-value:
they are merely used to prescribe or propose that a particular element of
reality be denoted by a particular symbol. Robinson rightly remarks that
294 ANALYSIS OF MEANING
Methods of Definition
The belief that the only correct method of definition is per genus proximum
et per differentiam specificam (by closest genus and by specific difference)
has long been abandoned in logic.
Robinson gives us the most exhaustive description of the methods of
definition. He distinguishes the following seven methods: 1) synonymic,
2) analytic, 3) synthetic, 4) implicative, 5) denotative, 6) ostensive, 7)
prescriptive.
All of these methods are used both in science and in everyday life to
explain a certain meaning to someone.
296 ANALYSIS OF MEANING
1. The synonymic method equates the defmed word with familiar words
with an identical meaning. For instance, ''viola alba" means "white violet",
"polyvalent" means "something with many values", "Mensch" is "man".
Definitions obtained by this method have a word-word semantic structure,
i.e. they are nominal.
One could object that synonyms, strictly speaking, do not exist, and that
there are always at least minimal semantic differences between synonyms.
However, this objection could be used against practically all defmitions,
empirical and normative alike. Whether it registers a current practice or
prescribes and organizes a future one, every defmition has this deficiency:
what definitions express is only the abstract structure of a particular meaning,
the totality of which can only be grasped by studying a variety of contexts.
We could argue that this limitation especially affects this particular method
yet other methods are affected as well. It is only a question of degree. The
most important thing is that this method can teach us the meaning of a word
and thus enable us to understand how it is used. It should be mentioned that
we rely heavily on this method when we learn a foreign language.
The great advantage of the synthetic method over all others is that it is
always possible. If a term has a specific meaning and designates some object,
then it is related to other objects and consequently is defmable through
them. Thus the so-called "indefmable" terms in traditional logic (categories
and singular terms) can be defined by the synthetic method. For instance,
"'Matter' is objective reality which exists in space and time independently
of human consciousness."
Here we define matter by relating it to human consciousness and not by
analyzing its constitutive elements. We should not, however, forget that a
defmition of human consciousness based on the term "matter" would be a
vicious circle. We can define consciousness by listing all the psychic processes
we consider conscious.
Another example: "Jablanica is the place where the People's Liberation
Army of Yugoslavia broke through the enemy's encirclement in the Fourth
German offensive."
The difficulty with synthetic defmitions is that they are often misinter-
preted. Instead of understanding that object A is in a certain relation with
object B, one equates them. If, following the synthetic method, we define
color as the perception of a specific wave-length, we should not conclude that
color is nothing else but a specific electro-magnetic wave-length.
It has also been objected to synthetic definitions that they do not deter-
mine what a word really means but merely report that it is some x which
satisfies certain conditions. For example, the definition of Jablanica does
not say anything about its size, location, history, etc. The definition only
establishes a relation between Jablanica and an event that took place in its
vicinity.
Robinson accepts this objection, and there is some truth in it. 39 Knowing
an
the essential inner qualities of object denoted by a symbol gives us a better
grasp of it than just knowing about its external relations. However, the
difference between these two types of knowledge is not absolute. If an object
can be completely defmed only by an exhaustive scrutiny of its qualities
and relations, then our knowledge of its internal qualities and constitutive
elements"attained through analytic definition, also covers only a fraction of
its total meaning. According to Robinson, analytic defmition acquaints us
with a new object, and synthetic defmition informs us merely about a new
use. However, there is no sharp boundary between these two aspects. If we
know how to use a new term, then we certainly have indirect knowledge of
the object designated by it.
LINGUISTIC MEANING 299
Some authors have termed this method "exempli fica tory" because it
actually gives examples of the objects to which the defmed word can be
applied.
There are various and contradictory opinions about the value of this
method. According to Dubbs, for example, all terms can be defined quite
accurately by this method if it is necessary. According to Hayakawa, defmi-
tions are useless that defme a term by other terms on the same or higher
level of abstraction because they allegedly do not convey any information.
But, ( ... ) "If, on the other hand, we habitually go down the abstraction
ladder to lower levels of abstraction when we are asked the meaning of a
word, we are less likely to get lost in verbal mazes; we will tend to 'have our
feet on the ground' and know what we are talking about." 40
However, there have been opposite views. Thus, for instance, Lewis thinks
that no collection of cases is large enough to clearly define the denotation
of a term. In addition, whoever interprets a given defmition would have to
perform an analysis of the example used and, so to speak, derive the meaning
of the term from it. This is why, in Lewis's opinion, the method of exemplifi-
cation can transmit the meaning of a term only if the corresponding concept
(connotation) is already known.41
Robinson is right when he resolves this dispute by rejecting both extreme
views.
On the other hand, the denotative method cannot give us anything more
than a hypothesis about one dimension of meaning - denotation. 42 The
connotative dimension remains unknown even after the object has been
defmed by the denotative method. This, of course, is a serious shortcoming
- especially when we have a divergence of denotation and connotation, Le.
when we apply a symbol to an object which lacks a certain quality included
in the connotation, and, inversely, when we fail to apply that symbol to an
object which includes the quality in question. 43 In principle, there can
always be a certain discrepancy between an abstract assertion (which is what
connotation is) and its concrete practical application (which constitutes
denotation). This is why it is necessary to know both.
Another difficulty of the denotative method is that it is sometimes impos-
sible to apply it. For instance, it cannot be used to defme symbols which
denote classes composed of large numbers of identical elements, Le. quanti-
tative symbols like "billion". Generally speaking, the denotative method
cannot be applied to mathematics, and that is a serious shortcoming.
On the other hand, the denotative method is sometimes instrumental
in avoiding "vicious circles". Thus it is often used for building rigorous
LINGUISTIC MEANING 301
theories. For instance, Tarski in his well known work on the problem of truth
in formalized languages dermes several key concepts by enumerating the
individual cases which they include. likewise, Camap in his Introduction to
Semantics dermes the fundamental concepts "descriptive sign" and "logical
sign" by giving exhaustive lists of signs to which these concepts can be applied.
Finally, it is an established empirical fact that most people use the deno-
tative method to learn a good deal of the vocabulary of their language. For
an ordinary person to enumerate facts is far easier (and more accessible)
than analysis, which requires a relatively high level of abstract thinking. In
any case, if we assume that the comprehension of the meaning of a symbol
is a process, the phase when the subject clearly knows only that the symbol
is associated with a collection of objects - while only beginning to vaguely
grasp the general qualities which make these objects members of one class,
is undoubtedly followed, at a later point, by the ability to explicitly describe
these general qualities.
6. The regulative method of definition. Most words are names, i.e. linguistic
symbols which constantly designate specific objects or groups of things or
qualities. For example, "Bach", "neutron", "hereditary", etc. However,
there are words which are not names, for instance, "hers", "now", "here",
"toward", "because", etc. We cannot differentiate between these two sorts
of words by saying that only names designate objects while other words
represent the part of our linguistic apparatus used when we talk about objects,
and in which words assume their meaning depending on the kind of function
they perform. A word not designating anything objectively given is not a
symbol and does not mean anything in social communication. However,
these two sorts of words can be differentiated in the following way: While
names are permanently attached to specific objects, other words are applied
to a variety of objects under specific conditions. For instance, the word
"Belgrader" is a name because it denotes all the people living in Belgrade.
But the word "we" can refer to any group of people provided the person
using it is a member of that group. Therefore, although in a specific situation
both sorts of words can refer to the same object (for example, "We Belgraders
usually stay home on Sunday"), the difference lies in the fact that the name
"Belgrader" stays attached to the same object even under different circum-
stances, whereas the pronoun "we" can refer to any object as long the above
mentioned condition is satisfied. By the same token, the expression "March
16th, 1959" is a name associated with a specific day, whereas the word
"now" can be applied to any day, provided it is used that very day.
302 ANALYSIS OF MEANING
can be learned by perceiving the way others use them. Subsequently, one
acquires the habit of using them correctly without any awareness of any
rules. A definition explicitly expressing such rules would have a purely
theoretical character.
The most significant role these defmitions play is in postulating the
meanings of the basic terms of a formalized symbolic system. For example,
we frequently defme the basic logical constants by giving rules for their use.
3. CONTEXT
Moreover, a defmition does not take into account the wealth of relations
that a word has with other words. A defmition should be short because in
conversations and scholarly debates our purpose is not talking extensively
about the meaning of words but establishing the meaning so we can discuss
the objects of our primary interest. This is why Aristotle thought that a
definition should be short, and Cicero listed brevity as a requirement defini-
tions should satisfy. This concision, which is very helpful for our task of
understanding the most essential core of meaning needed for the interpreta-
tion of a given text, becomes a limitation when definition is used to interpret
other texts, especially when it is applied practically under different conditions.
These are the general deficiencies of definitions - even successful ones.
We can also mention the deficiencies resulting from various errors in the
process of defmition (technical, logical errors) or from some general philoso-
phical misconception. An example of such a misconception - and this
particular one was present in logic for centuries - is Aristotle's defmition of
defmition as "assertion about the essence of a thing."47 As "essence" is
normally used in opposition to "phenomenon", such a conception of defmi-
tion led philosophers to talk about essence in an abstract way, and since what
they were saying could not in any way be related to sensory experience, their
talk had an obscure and metaphysical ring. When, for instance, Schlegel
defines language as "the handmaiden of reason given to us by God" or when
Novalis describes it as "the means whereby the mind attains self-conscious-
ness", or when Hegel defines it as "the actuality of culture", they create
problems instead of solving them. Most opponents of defmition base their
criticism more on their disappointment with existing defmitions than on a
theoretical analysis of definition as a logical form. For example, this is what
Hayakawa, whose opposition to definition has been mentioned, says: "People
often believe, having defmed a word, that some kind of understanding has
been established, ignoring the fact that the words in the defmition often con-
ceal even more serious confusions and ambiguities than the word defined ... '.'
Hayakawa quotes this discussion as an example:
"What do you mean by democracy?"
"Democracy means the preservation of human rights."
"What do you mean by rights?"
"By rights I mean those privileges God grants to all of us - I mean man's
inherent privileges."
"Such as?"
"Liberty, for example."
''What do you mean by liberty?"
LINGUISTIC MEANING 309
There is no doubt that a child learns its first words by observing how the
parents use them in various practical situations. For instance, a child fre-
quently hears the parent say: You should be "good"; or: You haven't been
"good". Gradually, the child realizes that the word "good" is invariably
associated with "obeying", "eating well", "not playing with forbidden
things", "not crying at bed-time", "not screaming in the house", "not beating
the little brother or sister", "greeting a guest", "thanking someone for a
gift", "not breaking things", "not using bad words", etc. The child gradually
grasps the meaning of the word "good" on the basis of these and many other
associations, and learns when and under what circumstances it can be used.
In fact, what we have here, the word "good", is one of the most abstract
concepts: very few adults would be able to formulate even an imperfect
definition of it. It is well known that Moore in his Principia Ethica puts forth
the view (which, however, is untenable) that the term "good" is in principle
indefmable.
The described method of meaning acquisition in children is valid for adults
310 ANALYSIS OF MEANING
too: this is how we master the vocabulary of a foreign language. In our read-
ing and conversation we constantly encounter new words which we usually
look up in a dictionary and thus find their equivalents in our language (the
synonymic method). However, this method can be too strenuous, and, be-
sides, we do not always have a dictionary handy. After seeing a word several
times we finally get an idea of its meaning: we grasp it in a concrete as op-
posed to a "bookish" way.
According to some logicians, every statement which contains a symbol
revealing some essential element of its meaning can be considered a defmi-
tion. Gergonne termed this sort of defmition implicit. 49 Formal logicians
(e.g. Russell) have used the term "definition in use" for a method whereby
basic symbols, which are not explicitly defmed, are given specific meanings
in axioms. Robinson calls this method implicative because it produces sen-
tences implying that a word has such and such a meaning. As an alternative,
Robinson suggested contextual method because it places a word in a context
which determines its sense. so As an example, he gives us this sentence: "A
square has two diagonals, and each of them divides the square into two right-
angled isosceles triangles." There is no doubt that one can learn the meaning
of the word "diagonal" from this sentence if one knows the meaning of the
other words.
However, this method of describing meaning should not be considered
definition; otherwise we would be unable to defme precisely the concept of
definition and distinguish it from the general concept of statement. 51 What
Gergonne calls "implicit defmition" cannot in any way be differentiated from
any other statement. According to our conception, the essential difference
between defmition and statement is that in a definition a word is mentioned
(that is why it is written with quotation marks), whereas in all other asser-
tions it is used. In other words, a defmition tells us about a symbol (and only
indirectly, by explaining its meaning, it informs us also about an object)
whereas any other statement tells us directly about the object.
And yet insofar as "implicit defmition" is expressed by one sentence, it
could be taken to represent a transitional case - between the method of
explaining meaning by defmition and the method of explaining meaning
through practical use in a given context.
we use definitions provided by the author himself. A word has very many
functions and they cannot all be encompassed by a definition. Thus it often
happens that an author continues, by force of habit, unconsciously or spon-
taneously, to use a word without respecting the narrow framework of meaning
he himself prescribed.
Because it is a part of a sentence, a word stops being an entity for itself
and becomes an element of a meaningful whole. Its spontaneously formed
and multidimensional meaning becomes part of man's linguistic habits. But
man does not only express a ready made meaning, he develops it through
semantic shifts and ramifications, through differentiation and emotive color-
ing. Thus, for instance, from the old term "realism" (denoting the Platonic
doctrine that ideas are more real than individual material beings) we derive
expressions like "naively realistic understanding of perception", "realistic
appraisal of the political situation", "socialist-realist artistic procedure",
"neo-realist defense of common sense", "realist conservatism in literature",
"realistic attitude toward love", "Platonic realism", "critical realism", etc.
Sometimes it is possible to arrive at the concrete meaning of a word
merely by looking at its relationship with other words in a sentence. How-
ever, that often is not enough. A sentence can function in various ways:
these functions are generally indicated by its relation to other sentences.
Sometimes the speaker's intonation is a clue. According to Wittgenstein, there
are innumerable ways of using words in sentences, for instance:
"Giving orders and obeying them -
Describing the appearance of an object, or giving its measurements -
Constructing an object from a description (a drawing) -
Reporting an event -
Speculating about an event -
Forming and testing a hypothesis -
Presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams -
Making up a story; and reading it -
Play-acting -
Singing catches -
Guessing riddles -
Making a joke; telling it -
Solving a problem in practical arithmetic -
Translating from one language into another -
Asking, thinking, cursing, greeting, praying." 52
Suppose we took a sentence like "our people know how to tell friends
from foes" from a newspaper article, out of context - we could not know
312 ANALYSIS OF MEANING
whether this was a factual statement, a putative statement about the future,
a wish, a suggestion aiming to provoke action, a phrase from a literary work,
an ironical statement implying the contrary, a personal attack, etc.
In addition to modality, other factors should be known if the interpre-
tation is to be correct; we would need information about the author, the
place and time of the situation. Of course, other essential facts about the
situation should be known as well. Depending on these facts, the meaning of
the entire sentence, and especially of words like "our people", "friend",
'foe" can differ in many ways. What "people" is the article talking about
- the French, British, Russian, Egyptian, or some other? Does the author
mean "nation" when he says "people" - in that case the friends or foes
would be other nations. Or is he referring to ordinary working people - in
that case words like "friends" or "foes" would refer to the representatives
of certain social classes and political parties. Is the author a liberal or a social
democrat? In that case the word "foes" would refer to extreme reactionaries
and the supporters of totalitarianism. If the author is a fascist, the enemies
of the people are plutocrats, Jews, Masons, and especially communists. If
the author is a communist, the enemies of the people are capitalists, land-
owners, fascists, etc. Further, the meaning of the statement can depend on
the particular author, and it also makes a difference when and where the
article was published. In Yugoslavia in 1941 the phrase "enemies of the
people" referred to the invaders and their collaborators regardless of class
and political affIliation. A peasant would by no means be considered an
enemy only because he was rich. However, that was not the case in the
Soviet Union in 1930, at the height of the struggle against the "kulaks". In
contemporary Yugoslavia the bureaucracy, due to its tendencies toward
exploiting other social groups, would be considered the enemy by many,
and even in some official documents. In some other "socialist" countries,
if there is talk about bureaucracy at all, the term is assigned a different
meaning - and it certainly does not refer to a separate social group which
took the control over the means of production and the decision-making
power and gave itself various economic and political privileges. In those
countries, the word "bureaucrat" refers to a rigid person who looks down
upon th~ people and fails to see life in its concreteness from his ivory tower
of paper and paragraphs. Certainly, many petty officials are bureaucrats in
this sense. If we had read this article in the Eastern-European press in, say,
1959, there would have been no doubt in our mind that it referred to the
"revisionists". There are nuances in the interpretation of that term. For some
people, a revisionist is certainly a revolutionary, but he has some shortcomings:
LINGUISTIC MEANING 313
NOTES
1 "(. . . ) language, in short, can be about language. This is a fundamental way in which
human noise-making systems differ from the cries of animals." S. I. Hayakawa, Language
in Thought and Action, Harcourt, Brace & World, New York, 1949, pp. 14-15.
316 ANALYSIS OF MEANING
2 Anthropology and linguistics in the past twenty years have done a lot to undermine
the belief that thought can be separated from language. Comparative studies of primitive
languages and cultures have shown that the individual's entire mode of thought depends
on the vocabulary and the grammatical structure of his language. Edward Sapir pointed
this fact out as early as 1931 in his significant article on the conceptual categories of
primitive languages: "The relation between language and experience is often misunder-
stood. Language is not merely a more or less systematic inventory of the various items
of experience which seem relevant to the individual, as is often naively assumed, but is
also a self-contained, creative symbolic organization, which not only refers to experience
largely acquired without its help but actually defmes experience for us by reason of
its formal completeness and because of our unconscious projection of its implicit expec-
tations into the field of experience." (Edward Sapir, Conceptual Categories of Primitive
Languages, in Language in Culture and Society, Dell Hymes, Harper & Row, New York,
1964, p. 128.)
3 Anatol Rapoport, Operational Philosophy, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1953.
4 C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, Harcourt, Brace & World,
New York, 1923, Appendix C, p. 267.
5 W. M. Urban, Language and Reality, 1939, Macmillan, New York, p. 26.
6 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Clarendon, Oxford, 1894,
Book III, chapter IX, section 21 (vol. II, pp. 118-119).
7 Humboldt's letter to Wolf, 1805, in Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic
Forms, translated by Ralph Manheim, vol. I, Yale University Press, New Haven & Lon-
don, 1955, p. 115.
8 This view can be found even in literature. In Anatole France's The Revolt of the
Angels, Arcade, one of the main characters, says: "And what is human language but
the cry of the beasts of the forests or the mountains, complicated and corrupted by
arrogant anthropoids." Anatole France, The Revolt of the Angels, The Modern Library,
New York, 1928, p. 311.
9 A. 1. Ayer, Thinking and Meaning (Inaugural lecture), London, 1947, pp. 7-8.
10 Op. cit., p. 8.
11 Op. cit., p. 9.
12 The following criterion of justifiability is applied here: If a distinction is accepted
in ordinary language usage (which is why we do not equate a man's thinking to inner
speech), it should not be blurred in a technical language. This is precisely what the
behaviorists have done by broadening the term "speech".
13 See Urban, op. cit., p. 54.
14 The Marx-Engels Reader, R. C. Tucker, ed., Norton, New York, 1972, pp. 77 and
122.
15 B. Russell, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, Norton, New York, 1940, pp.
72-73.
16 Charles Osgood substitutes the term "disposition" by "representational mediational
process" - representational, because it is part of the entire behavior provoked by the
denoted object, and mediational, because it in turn provokes a behavior adjusted to
these objects. He uses these terms to defme psychological meaning. Osgood, Suci, and
Tannenbaum, The Measurement of Meaning, The University of Illinois Press, Urbana,
1957, pp. 6, 318.
17 Aristotle, Topics I 5.
LINGUISTIC MEANING 317
PRACTICAL MEANING
Each of the dimensions of meaning discussed thus far has a practical, opera-
tional aspect.
Objects referred to by signs are known to us, and contribute to the forma-
tion of meaning only to the extent to which they are created by practice and
have a practical purpose. The fact that signs are the result of certain specific
practical operations and are the point of departure for new operations is an
essential part of their defmition. These two elements can be separated only
temporarily in a theoretical analysis and examined separately, but in the
subsequent synthesis they must necessarily be conceived as a unity.
Perceptions, thoughts, feelings, images, and impulses are not mere given
events and processes as the automatic result of external and internal stimuli.
They are also operations - perceiving, thinking, stimulating or restraining
feelings, desires, etc. The more man advances, develops, throws off his primi-
tiveness and animality, and becomes a social being, the more pronounced
the creative element in even the most elementary forms of mental life. A
developed, cultured, social man transforms his senses I: he creates an eye
capable of noticing beauty, an eye which in a special field of phenomena is
able to perceive details that usually remain completely unnoticed. He creates
an ear able to listen to music, or to hear the words of foreign languages.
(For anyone whose maternal language is not English, a great deal of time is
required to develop an ear capable of hearing Shakespeare in the original. This
is true even if one knows the language well enough to read and understand
the plays - and this applies in general to listening to speech in a foreign
language). If a man is able to create his senses, he is even more capable of
developing his ability to interpret sense data: in viewing lightning an educated
man sees an electric spark in the sky; the primitive sees a divine act. Repre-
sentation, thought, judgment, and inference are unquestionably forms of
conscious actiVity. Thus far we have defined a concept chiefly as a disposition
(aSSOCiated with a particular symbol) to think of an object under particular
conditions. A second possible interpretation of a concept, one put forth by
the behaviorists, stresses the practical character of a concept: a concept is
a set of rules for operating a symbol. In the case of feelings there seem to be
the fewest elements characteristic of practice, such as: freedom, conscious
319
320 ANALYSIS OF MEANING
choice, effort to overcome barriers. One might say that feelings arise spon-
taneously - they overcome us more than we freely create them. But this
is only partially correct. While our emotional life is partly determined by
anatomical, physiological, and social factors, a developed man does not
assume a completely passive stance toward his feelings. He exerts effort to
control them - stimulating them, repressing them, sublimating or trans-
forming them from one type to another. Moreover he creates in himself a
personality whose elemental emotional reactions are different from those
of primitives. Sensibility is not a mere given: it is created.
As to language, it may also be conceived as a structure of objects or a
system of relations among signs. In speaking about linguistic meaning, it is
this side that we have kept uppermost in mind. But language is above all
the activity of speaking and writing, i.e. a system of operations with signs.
In this sense linguistic practice is an integral ~omponent of almost every
practical process. This holds true even for individual practice, to the extent
that it is purposeful, planned, and organized. It is possible, of course, to
act impulsively and instinctively, but activity in this sense is not characteristic
of man. Man thinks about his activity, sets goals, chooses means, makes
assumptions about possible problems and difficulties, and calculates conse-
quences. Such thinking is not possible without language - as a form of
thought, language is an integral component of planning activity, and thereby
an element of the character of the practical operations to be undertaken on
the basis of planning. Language plays an even greater role in social practice:
here it is not just a factor which exerts an indirect influence, as a factor of
planning, but serves directly in organizing the activity of individuals into an
integral whole, either in cooperation or in other forms of social interaction.
When one conceives of practice in these broad terms it is understandable
that, in addition to other dimensions of meaning, every sign has a practical
meaning and that anything, apart from other conditions, that fails to meet
this necessary condition cannot be considered a sign (or, accordingly, a
symbol). What would follow from the statement that a sign has no practical
meaning but that it possesses other dimensions of meaning? Absence of
practical meaning implies the following:
1. No practical operations are relevant to the object designated by the
sign. We do not know how to produce the object or what to do with it. Nor
do we know what practical experience may test statements about it. In this
case one must conclude that we do not really know the designated object
and that we do not have any good reason to assert that it exists at all.
2. A concept expressed with the sign should be conceived in the traditional
PRACTICAL MEANING 321
(5) the relation of a sign toward the community of subjects whose inter-
action it affects.
These two elements are closely connected and should not be separated
in an analysis of meaning, for from the very outset we have conceived of
meaning as a social phenomenon, and only operations of a social character
are relevant to it.
Accordingly in this chapter we will discuss practical meaning as social
practical meaning, with the following defmition:
distinguish the following six types of operations: (l) the production, des-
truction, or transformation of objects; (2) the establishment or elimination
of social cohesion; (3) written or oral operation with signs (speech); (4)
the creation and interpretation of experience; (5) evaluation; and (6) thinking
(2) To say that an operation is social means that there is a community
of subjects who participate in carrying it out and exercise influence upon
others. A social operation is reciprocal if the component parts carried out
by some individuals play a mutually stimulating role upon the activity of
other individuals in the community. If this is not the case an operation is
nonreciprocal. For example a telephone conversation is a reciprocal operation
as two collocutors in alternation stimulate verbal reactions by the other.
But speech via radio is not primarily a reciprocal operation (although in
some cases an audience may reply to a speaker by writing letters, voicing
criticism, etc.).
Charles Morris distinguished three types of reciprocal behavior: coopera-
tive, competitive, and symbiotic, according to whether the behavior of the
individual organisms aided or prevented others in attaining a common goal,
or merely stimulated others to activity in the absence of a common goal.
(Morris cited the example of an animal which draws the attention of another
to the presence of food in sufficient quantities to satisfy the hunger of
both.)2
Morris' classification may be adopted, and accordingly we may distinguish
cooperative, competitive, and symbiotic operations.
(3) When we say that sign A implies a set of practical operations B or that
a set of practical operations B is relevant to sign A, we are expressing one of
the following relations between A and B.
First of all B may be a set of physical operations by which one produces,
modifies, or eliminates a set of real objects. If thereby a social need is met,
sooner or later society will create a sign (A) by which to refer to a given type
of real objects, implying the practical operations (B) necessary to create or
modify them. For example to a primitive the word 'fire' meant an object
that could be produced only by long and agonizing activity - rubbing two
sticks of wood together - and thus had to be kept constantly lit so as not
to go out. To twentieth-century man the word refers to an object which
can be produced in a twinkling by striking a match. What we have termed
the objective and practical meanings of reality are inseparable: the very con-
ception of an object encompasses the appropriate practical activity.
But this activity is not always that of creating or modifying an object. It
may also be separation from it (if it is dangerous), taking action to neutralize
324 ANALYSIS OF MEANING
its effect, utilizing its useful effects, measuring it, testing its properties, etc.
The practical component of meaning is variable and depends significantly
on the situation and the intention of whoever uses the sign (the intention is
manifest through a gesture, emphasis, facial expression, the linguistic context,
etc.).
In spite of all these variables, in all instances of this kind practical meaning
is constituted by the physical operations we perform in one of the various
possible practical relations toward real objects; thereby we react to the
external situation, and alter it in accordance with our needs.
Mental operations constitute another component of practical meaning:
these are operations we perform in order to comprehend the meaning of a
sign and in order to know that object it refers to. These operations are,
first and foremost, conceiving an object and testing its existence with the
organs of sensation, or in other words relating conceptions of the designated
object to practical experience.
For example we would not have any word in our language designating
infinite objects if meaning were always constituted only by physical opera-
tions. All physical operations lead us into particular relations solely with
fmite objects. We arrive at the concept of infmity only by imagining the
unlimited extension of physical operations, by adding new units, dividing
parts into their component parts, by continuing decrease without ever
reaching zero.
We see, then, that not even all real objects (the infmite is real) can be
defmed practically by physical operations alone. This applies particularly
to ideal and imaginary objects (absolutely empty space, the mathematical
pendulum, the first man on Mars). All these objects are constructed by our
mental operations; they are not given in reality (although elements of real
objects have entered into these mental constructions). Of course the question
arises of how far we can go in our mental constructions without crossing
the boundary of comprehension. What in fact is the criterion of compre-
hensibility of the meaningofa sign?
The traditional viewpoint is: the meaning of a sign is comprehensible
if one can form a representation of it (an image or idea in the Lockian sense).
Of course in that case it would be necessary for the designated object to
be actually constructed by a limited number of mental operations. In modern
science this traditional view is held by those who recognize meaning in an
abstract theory only if one can build an appropriate model, as for example
a model of the atom, a model of the relativity of space and time, etc. In
theoretical methamatics a similar view was advanced by the intuitionist
PRACTICAL MEANING 325
of practical meaning does not imply the necessary existence of the appropriate
conscious processes: when we program the rlies for the use of a sign, a
machine is capable of using it correctly even though it does not understand
the programmed rules or the meaning of the signs.
Secondly, one sholid know what kind of mental and empirical operations
can be carried out with a concept (or proposition), so that one can under-
stand it, explain it to others and discover whether it is adequate or applicable.
Comprehension includes consciousness of a possible object, the ability to
explain some of its essential properties and relations, but not necessarily
a belief in its actual existence. This is what cognition entails. But nevertheless
one can comprehend and know, i.e. be capable of explaining the properties
of an object and citing the physical operations that serve to verify it, without
knowing most of its practical purposes. It is one thing to know how to
achieve a chemical synthesis, and something else to know how it may be
used.
Finally the full practical meaning of a sign is known only by one who
knows all the variety of uses of the object designated by it and all the variety
of human needs it can satisfy. Here we can, once again, distinguish scientific,
theoretical knowledge of various practical applications and knowledge which
grows out of one's own practical experience, accompanied by a capacity to
actually perform all the necessary physical operations.
Ideal knowledge of the meaning of a sign entails all three elements; it
is of particular importance that the ability to use a sign properly and the
ability to explain its meaning be coupled with the ability to put the designated
object to practical use. Only in this manner can the indispensable harmony
of theory and practice be achieved.
NOTES
lOne can find extraordinary ideas about the creation of the senses in Marx's Economic
and Philosophiwl Manuscripts.
2 Charles Morris, Signs, Language and Behavior, New York, 1946, pp. 32-3.
3 Whorf, for example, asserts that the Eskimos have numerous words in their language
for the various types of snow. On the other hand the Aztecs had no separate word for
it, but used the same word to refer to cold, ice, and snow. Sapir cited a mass of data to
prove the thesis that the vocabulary of a society clearly reflected the physical and social
environment surrounding it. Also, the Nootka of the northwest coast of America have a
highly develoepd vocabulary for all aquatic fauna, while desert tribes have numerous
terms for various edible nuts and berries. (Language, Thought and Culture, ed. Henle,
Ann Arbor, 1958, p. 5.)
PART THREE
The origin and development of signs and meaning may be explained only with
reference to social practice. One of the greatest misunderstandings of tradi-
tional philosophy, at least until Marx and the various forms of evolutionism,
pragmatism, and behaviorism in modern Western philosophy, was the con-
ception of man primarily as an intellectual being who observed passively and
meditated in isolation from all material activity. This misunderstanding was
caused by a sharp separation of human work into mental and physical. It was
accompanied by another fundamental methodological weakness of classical
philosophy - a nondynamic, static approach to all problems, including the
problem of language and thought. Man was not conceived as a being who had
evolved from other forms of the nrganic world, and accordingly the question
was not raised as to the origin of his language and capacity for thought. For
Descartes reason was better distributed among men than anything else in
the world: if one was human, one had an equal measure of it. For Kant
categories were not symbols that had developed from a particular practical
experience, but rather the unchanging a priori constitutive form of the human
mind. The assumption was always of a homo universalis, homo sapiens, cap-
able of speech and thought from the time of Adam right up to the present.
Marxism brought about a fundamental transformation in the conception
of man as an essentially practical being, particularly by virtue of its dynamic,
historical approach to problems. In the Theses on Feuerbach Marx proclaimed
a new materialistic activism: people were not the mere product of their sur-
roundings, but in fact altered their surroundings: the problem was no longer
just to explain the world, but to change it: things were no longer the object
of pure contemplation, but of sensory practice. 1 Engels explained that work
created man, and that work was primary with respect to language and
thought. 2 He likewise stressed that the foundations of cognition were not ob-
jects as such but our alteration of objects. 3 In reading Hegel in a materialistic
way Lenin provided a number of valuable aphorisms about this problem, such
as an explanation of the origin of categories as the billion times repeated
human practice;4 the thesis that the viewpoint of practice always figured in
the definition of an object, and that it was only from the standpoint of
practice that one could assess what was essential and what was not. 5
331
332 MEANING AND COMMUNICATION
A further step in the development of signs occurs with all organisms living
in communities and whose practice is social in nature (bees, ants, groups of
mammals, primary human groups). Here social objectives manifest themselves
- gathering food for the entire community, hunting, the construction of
structures of communal importance such as beehives, anthills, the wooden
dams of beavers, etc. Signs attain a collective character, for they become
instruments for the attainment of social objectives. Thereby they become
muitisituational, i.e. they are of significance in diverse situations of a similar
type rather than just in one.
Two major achievements in this phase are: (1) the development of artifi-
cial signs produced by the organisms themselves, and (2) the emergence of
joint, community meanings.
With bees we encounter self-produced, social signs. Karl von Frisch,
in his pioneering work on bees,6 has described two types of signs these
THE GENESIS OF SIGNS AND MEANING 335
organisms use when they wish to inform other bees from the same hive
that they have found a source of food. They carry out special movements
that resemble dance. These take two forms. When the food is very close
the bee makes small circles, but if the distance is greater, the bee moves in
a figure-eight configuration. In doing so it spins its tail at a speed that de-
pends upon the distance from the food, and the figure its movement describes
has a central line that is angled from the vertical in the same way in which
the direction of the food is angled with respect to the sun. In its dancing
the bee attracts the attention of other bees that approach and smell and
taste the pollen and nectar that it carries, and then leave to fmd for them-
selves the food source of which they have been informed.
There can be no doubt that social practice is of decisive importance
for the origin of artificially produced signs. Animal life that does not exist in
social groupings similarly gives off various cries and performs movements
that in suitable conditions might become gestures. But it is only in social
groupings that certain voices and movements can become significant for
others. It is only in groupings which have certain practical goals of general
significance that there arises the need for coordinated action, for the trans-
mittal of information, for mutual assistance, and for competition. There
is a natural selection among the great number of anatomically and phy-
siologically possible -voices and movements. Only some of these begin to
mean something for others and thus begin to take on social significance.
These are those, first and foremost, which are placed in natural causal re-
lationships (such as part and whole or in any other constant relationship)
with respect to an object of vital significance to the community. This transi-
tion from the natural signal for the individual to the artificial signal for the
community may be expressed logically in terms of the following schema:
(I) First the individual organism 0 observes the constant repetition of
a relationship (e.g. temporal succession) between two natural objects A
and D, one of which (D) satisfies a significant need of the organism. In this
instance A will become a sign for organism 0 signifying D.
(2) Let us -assume that instead of one organism there are several (0 1 ,
O2 On) that have common goal D. Natural object A precedingD becomes
a sign with collective significance.
(3) Let us now introduce a modification. Let us assume that A is not a
natural object but a cry or gesture of a member of a community. But let
us assume that it is just like the aforementioned natural signal in its objective
constant relationship to D - in this case a phenomenon that precedes it in
a temporal sense. For example if a particular sound used to be a sign that
336 MEANING AND COMMUNICATION
it had for B when A produced a similar sound; once this is achieved, the sound has the
same meaning when produced by A as when produced by B. The sound then has the
same meaning for A and B regardless of whether it is produced by A or B .. ..8
This analysis shows how signs that have a primarily expressive function
can attain a social meaning. When an organism in pain howls, the sounds
it makes first have individual meaning for itself alone. At this primitive
level of development of signs someone who has never felt pain is not in a
position to understand the meaning of these expressions of suffering. But
eventually it, too, will experience pain and feel compelled to express itself
in like manner. Then (assuming it utilizes its memory and has a developed
capacity for association) it will understand what others feel when they howl
and thus these expressions of pain will attain social meaning.
In Mead's analysis of the origin of significant symbols, and these are to
Morris all signs with social meaning ('comsigns') he assigns extreme impor-
tance to 'taking the role of the other':
We must identify for ourselves not only the object but also a readiness to respond
to it in a particular way, and this identification must be done in the position or in the
role of another individual to whom the object has been shown or may be shown. If
this is not the case, the symbol lacks the common property which is included in
meaning. A symbol becomes significant thanks to our capacity to be others at the
same time that we are ourselves. 9
This identification with the other, the inference by analogy about the
meanings which certain signs have for another based on consciousness of the
meanings that they have for us, is certainly a necessary condition for the
formation of social meanings.
The other necessary conditions are, as we have seen:
(I) A capacity to identify constant relations under variable conditions
(without which one never can understand the connection between a sign
and a designated object).
(2) Joint participation in a practical activity which daily permits innumer-
able repetitions of the observed connection between the individual gestures
and sounds that other members of a community make and certain events
of vital importance in the natural environment.
(3) The capacity to produce similar signs under particular external cir-
cumstances (otherwise artificial collective signs would never appear). This
capacity must be anatomically and physiologically determined: it develops
further in certain social circumstances, primarily through the imitation of
adults and reinforcement.
THE GENESIS OF SIGNS AND MEANING 339
Language and all other symbolic systems did not begin to appear in human
society until a relatively advanced level of development.
The decisive preconditions for the origin of language were, on the one
hand, the assumption of an upright position, the free use of the hands, and
the increase in brain size, and on the other hand, the first use of artificial
tools and the purposeful direction of work.lO It goes without saying that
all these changes were closely interconnected. The assumption of an upright
position and the free use of the hands permitted the use of tools and work.
And conversely, work and the adaptation to more and more new activities
laid the conditions for the development of the muscles, tendons, and bones
of the human hand which permitted the performance of precise operations,
including the writing of signs.
The organisms which, through accidental mutations, were born with
larger skulls and increased brain size now had the opportunity to register
vastly increased experience and to develop new conditioned reflexes that
permitted them to adapt more successfully to new conditions, and thus
to compete more readily in the battle for survival. The resulting selection
permitted the broader use of tools and permitted more planning in practical
activity. If some rudimentary forms of practice - of the alteration of the en-
vironment in order to attain certain vital goals - are encountered throughout
340 MEANING AND COMMUNICATION
Many researchers who have taken up the problem of the genesis oflanguage
and compared human speech with the fonns of communication one en-
counters among the more advanced mammals, particularly monkeys, have
stressed that the chief difference lies in the fact that even in earliest child-
hood men manifest an instinctive tendency toward a lively and variable use
of the vocal organs and the production of the most varied sounds, only
some of which are preserved in adult speech. Thus Susanne Langer asserts:
"Unquestionably one of the reasons for the lack of speech among monkeys
is the absence of any tendency to COO."12 The Kellogs raised their little
chimpanzee Gia just as they raised their own children. They noted that
THE GENESIS OF SIGNS AND MEANING 341
unlike their child, who played with sounds from the earliest months of life,
Gia never attempted to utilize her lips, tongue, teeth, or oral cavity to produce
any new, accidental, spontaneous sound. She made sounds only when a partic-
ular stimulus existed, and these were primarily of an emotive character. 13
Through great effort and patience Furness succeeded in teaching an
orangutan two English words: 'papa' and 'cup.' But nevertheless he achieved
that result only thanks to the fact that he mo~ed the monkey's lips with
his own hands. The monkey never manifested any tendency spontaneously
to utilize its own lips and tongue or to imitate human mouth movements.
It succeeded in understanding the meaning of these words, but itself alone
would never have succeeded in pronouncing the necessary syllables. 14
Drawing upon these facts researchers have concluded that the origin
of language may be explained by the existence among small children of
a particular instinct for the production of language. Horatio Hale states
that by nature man is capable of producing language and that even outside
society children would be able, by the force of their linguistic instinct,
to create language spontaneously. IS
The unquestionable fact upon which the theory rests is the instinctive
need of children to coo, babble, and produce a wide variety of sounds and
combinations in the earliest months of life. What is unexplained is the origin
of this need and the conditions under which it developed. The other out-
standing weakness of the theory lies in the fact that certain data point to
the conclusion that a child raised outside society would not be capable to
develop the capacity of speech.
The increased and more varied use of man's vocal mechanisms is ana-
tomically and physiologically made possible by his upright stance. As
opposed to monkeys and other four-legged animals, man's oral cavity is
held at right angles to the windpipe, thus increasing the length of the path
that air must travel from the lungs and creating better conditions for diverse
utilization of the airstream in exhaling. Man has ceased breathing only
through his nose, like other animals: instead of the sense of smell, the sense
of sight becomes of primary importance. In connection with this the evolution
of the glottis and soft palate is instructive. With animals their function is
to prevent exhaling air from the lungs through the mouth. The glottis and
soft palate of man-like apes (primates) begin to lose this function, to become
smaller, and to that extent the sense of smell tends to weaken. In man they
assume a new function as an organs of speech, and become markedly larger.
The increased use of the modified organs of speech unquestionably is
connected with work. The emergence of purposeful organized social activity
342 MEANING AND COMMUNICATION
the frequent and essential occasions for intensive vocal activity by early
man. But these rituals were closely bound up with work, often preceding,
following, or accompanying it. Today there is wide support for the view
that the purpose of ritual is the expression and reinforcement of the collective
spirit in a community. But work is, above all, that which creates the need
for the coming together into community and the reinforcement of collective
spirit. The precondition for the origin of linguistic symbols is only that
future signs - in this case sounds - do not have a utilitarian function. The
situation is quite the opposite with designated objects. It is precisely their
great biological utility that makes it necessary for them to be designated by
suitable signs.
In any case there is almost universal agreement among specialists that
the original linguistic signs were not articulated sounds but rather multi-
sound cries and screams that had the meaning of entire messages. Soviet
researchers Nikolski and Iakovlev have advanced the thesis that today's
languages contain the rudiments of such original unarticulated complexes
of sounds, such as 'pst' (Hush!'). 'sss' ((Hey!), 'm-hm' (approval), 'nn-nn'
(denial), 'tsk-tsk' (sympathy), and 'whoa!' (telling a horse to stop). TIlere
are many such sounds in the language adults use to address children and
animals. The great age of such sounds is indicated by the fact that they are
international and are encountered among nearly all nations.
A long process of evolution and selection was necessary for these multi-
sound, more or less unarticulated cries to separate into a relatively small
number of constant sound units or phonemes, whose combination yields
all the words in modem languages.
We observe an analogous evolution in the development of the speech
of children. In the first two months a child is capable only of emitting cries
that are reflex reactions in which we encounter sounds similar to the vowels
and (some of) the consonants to come later, with the gutteral and labial
sounds coming first and the dental and sibilant sounds last. In the third
month the child begins to coo and to play, making many new, free sounds.
This is a period of a universal, spontanious exploration and mastery of the
speech organs, preparing an enormous amount of phonetic material from
which speech will later issue. Only some of these sounds will later take
shape as' phonemes, or be reinforced by the reactions of adults. Without
the socially conditioned selection of sounds, a child would never learn to
speak: this is a confirmed fact which refutes the theory of the origin of
speech as instinct.
Horatio Hale has stated that the influence of society is limited to imposing
344 MEANING AND COMMUNICATION
on the child a particular mother tongue, but that children who have succeeded
in surviving and growing up in the wild (thanks to particularly favorable
conditions - a warm climate and abundant, available food) would also
develop speech. In point of fact a number of such cases have been observed:
Peter, the feral child found in the fields near Hanover in 1723, Victor "the
wild child of Averone," found in 1799, and two little girls, Amela and
Kamela, found near Midnapur, India in 1920. 22 But none of these children
was able to speak in any language: obviously instinct itself was inadequate. It
is only by hearing the speech of adults that the infant's instinctive tendency
to babble is transformed into a dominant, permanent, and socially acquired
habit. The potential phonemes that do not encounter appropriate reinforce-
ment on the part of adults are forgotten, and so any child who in the forma-
tive period is isolated from a normal social environment must later overcome
enormous difficulties in order to make even small progress in lcmguage
learning. One of the first great discoveries a child makes, representing perhaps
the first, still unclear generalization In his conscious life, is identifying the
sounds adults make with some of the sounds he himself makes. Of course
the selection of phonemes that the child makes on the basis of this identifica-
tion is not made so much on the basis of the child's understanding as upon
the same basis that all other conditioned reflexes are made: the use of the
right sounds leads to the satisfaction of the child's elementary needs and
desires. Conversely, babbling sounds lacking any similarity with adult speech
fail to be reinforced, for the adult does not understand them. Thus many
potential phonemes that fail to obtain a favorable adult response are com-
pletely lost and cannot later be pronounced.
on the problem of the genesis of names. In one of his studies Undner suggests
that after the fifth month the infant is capable of establishing a constant
relationship between a sound and an object. A child who looked at a clock
while someone repeated the words 'tick tock' later sought out the clock
when the same words were pronounced. The establishment of the connection
may be attributed to a conditioned reflex, but conditioned reflexes are
precisely the mechanisms that historically had to precede the conscious
naming of things.
At the end of the first year and the beginning of the second the child
is able not only to engage in sound-play but also make combinations that
have meaning and 'name' things ('mommy,' 'daddy,' etc.). The child certainly
does not yd \Inderstand the principle of denotation and symbolism, but
when stimulated by the enthusiastic reception he gets when he first 'speaks,'
he continues to make the sounds that imitate adult speech. If adults are
persistent in associating things and articulated sounds in front of the child
and to stimulate the child's imitation of their speech, by the middle of the
second year the child is able to grasp that everything has a name and insist-
ently inquires about them in the immediate environment. Stern maintains
that the child thus "makes the greatest discovery in his life," and that this
is "the child's first true general thought."
Helen Keller, in her autobiography, describes the famous moment when
she first grasped the essence of language - the power of words to designate.
Before then she had used signs and formed associations, but as she admits
she long failed to understand the existence and nature of words. Her teacher
had her touch various objects and then wrote the letters in her hand. Helen
merely imitated her and thus learned to use many words without any under-
standing. It was only after many weeks of preparation that Helen, sitting
beside a pump and feeling the touch of water while her teacher wrote letters
in her hand, fmally grasped the relation of denotation between the two
phenomena,27 and surmised that everything had a name. Her description
agrees completely with that of her teacher, Miss Sullivan. Immediately
after the discovery Helen began to ask eagerly as to the names of everything
about her.
She squatted, touched the ground with her hands and asked its name, and then pointed
also to sand and a drain. Then she turned and asked my name. During our return she
was for the whole time exceptionally excited and asked the name of everything she
touched, and in a few hours learned thirty words.
Of course with most children one does not observe such a sudden leap in
348 MEANING AND COMMUNICATlON
He comes to know that by means of words he can indicate something, draw the atten-
tion of adults to it, and obtain it. . .. The child begins to utilize the relationship of
words to the objects designated by them, without understanding the relationship in
theory. 28
This is what Malinowski means when he says that for a child words are much
more a means of action rather than merely the expression of ideas. The
pronounciation of words has the power to cause the needed persons and
things to materialize. Words are active forces, which produce what they
mean as their effect. 29
In the speech of children we encounter the same characteristics of names
that we fmd with primitives. First names are concrete and refer only to things
in the immediate environment, usually pertaining to a particular situation; in
order to be understood in the proper manner, the names often must be
accompanied by gestures and mimicry. Later the connection between names
and things is understood ontologically: both are part of an objective whole
and are inseparable from one another. The child simply cannot understand
that 'daddy' could be named 'mommy' and vice versa.
Finally it is highly characteristic of children's speech that by a process
of association names are transferred to other objects, while the characteristics
by which they are associated may be totally unimportant and superficial,
although interesting from the child's point of view. Cases have been noted,
for example, in which a child called any shining object a 'key,' and Darwin's
grandson used 'quack' to refer to a duck, the water it swam in, various
birds, and a number of different kinds of liquids. In his Logic Minto cited
the example of a child who used the word 'rna' to refer to its wetnurse,
her sewing maching, a harmonica, and its rubber monkey. These and other
similar associations obviously are not always based on similarities (even
superficial ones), but probably are based on simultaneous observation at
the same place.
The further development of speech in the child is carried out by the
gradual attachment of names to objects of the same type and the formation
of the first, still completely empirically based, concepts.
THE GENESIS OF SIGNS AND MEANING 349
the same name too often exhibited a fundamentally different behavior and
that predictions proved correct for only a small number of these objects.
The development of practice required that things be compared and classified
according to criteria that differed from the initial ones, with a different
practical purpose in view. In consequence it was discovered that many objects
with the same name were far more different than they were similar. This
led to the revision of one system of names and its gradual replacement
with another, in which generalizations of meaning and the transfer of names
were attempted on other criteria. By a process of trial and error gradually
essential characteristics were separated from unessential ones and increasingly
things with the same name referred to things that really were similar in some
important respect.
Inference in the beginning was carried out solely in a manner which
Stem called transduction and described as the transition by analogy from
individual case to individual case, without the general case as the middle
term. Higher forms eventually emerged: induction and deduction. The first
induction was inference from the individual and particular to the general
through simple enumeration. The general was first understood extensively
as the totality of a group of things or events within the limits of sense per-
ception. 30 For instance the general term 'cow' now existed, but it did nol,
yet mean the set of essential (constant and necessary) properties of various'
individual cows but the sum of them all. In other words the range of concepts
(denotation of meaning) had been formed, but content (connotation) was
still not at the level of a concept: it was still constituted mostly by descrip-
tive, pictorial, nonessential features.
The transitional phase in the process of the creation of conceptual
meanings is often manifested linguistically by attaching to personal names
the function of universal no~ns. A word which originally referred to an in-
dividual object begins to be used also as a name for all objects of the same
type. As long as the individual and the general are named the same, one
cannot speak of the existence of concepts in the true sense of the word. It is
only when two different signs are created, with one for the individual case
and one for the general, that one may say that one of the important condi-
tions is met for the formation of conceptual meaning.
The second important condition is acquaintance with the constant and
necessary properties and relations of a certain group of objects. This condi-
tion may be satisfied only with reference to objects that are tested in practice,
which man has already mastered to the extent that he is able of making
correct predictions in relation to them. Such objects pertain to the immediate
THE GENESIS OF SIGNS AND MEANING 351
environment and are accessible to the senses; above all such objects are those
which man comes into contact with constantly in the process of his work.
Thus the ftrst concepts are still completely empirical in character - man
established what was the general of the speciftc, but not yet what was the
general of the general. Concepts of concepts do not yet exist, nor symbols
of symbols. At this level of abstraction thought may be termed empirical,
as opposed to theoretical thought that operates with higher-order abstractions.
It is typical of symbols of conceptual meaning in this phase of the develop-
ment of thought that one may use them more or less properly in various
contexts, without the ability to provide a valid defmition. All attempts at
deftnition wind up as descriptions in which accidental and variabJe char-
acteristics of objects are confused with necessary and invariant ones. Thus
meanings are known implicitly and in practical terms, but it appears im-
possible to formulate them explicitly. The continued use of concepts sig-
nificantly precedes the capacity to explain and defme them, thus bearing out
those philosophers who are sceptical about defmitions and believe that the
true meaning of a symbol is testified to by its use rather than by a verbal
defmition. It is a typical characteristic of the mental regression that appears
in aphasia that the patient is incapable of explaining the meaning of a term
but continues to use it in various practical contexts. It follows that the
practical mastery of the meaning of a symbol is genetically prior to its in-
tellectual understanding.
All these phases in the development of a concept are also to be found
in the development of the child's thought and speech. This provides another
indication that these really took place in this way in the distant past. The
first generalizations of children also begin with unimportant, superficial,
emotionally interesting properties of things; as we have seen the child fre-
quently resorts to the transfer of names and' makes a wide variety of asso-
ciations. In his efforts to understand the general, both characteristic
phenomena may be seen: the use of personal names as generic nouns and a
conception of the general as a collection of objects. 31
The child has a particularly difficult time understanding relations. Various
ostensibly meaningless name transfers are usually a consequence of the
confusion of the relationship of part and whole and the particular and uni-
versal. Piaget has even suggested that until the age of eleven or twelve the
child is completely incapable of understanding relationships. He maintains
that the child takes things absolutely, without any relation to other things.
According to Piaget the child believes that the family comprises people living
together, not people related to one another. Similarly the child understands
352 MEANING AND COMMUNICATION
what foreigners are to us, but not that we are foreigners to others. He under-
stands that a country is to the north of others, but not that it also is to the
south of still others. Thus he is not capable of understanding the relational
meaning of the signs of the comers of the earth. And notably in answer to
the question of the causes of particular phenomena - wind, the movement
of the stars, etc., the child usually provides answers that are 'mythological'
in nature. Nevertheless recent investigation shows that children are capable
of seeing relations - and even causal relations - when these hold among
things and phenomena in the immediate environment of the child, where
he has had the chance to acquire practical experience about them.
It is only in the process of systematic instruction that the child succeeds
in differentiating things and relations, understanding things in terms of
relationships, in separating the essential from the accidental, in a word in
mastering a number of concepts. But as a matter of fact both for the adult
in his individual life history and for human cognition in general, the com-
prehension of objects in terms of their relations remains an enduring
difficulty. Man in general tends to understand everything in an absolutized,
oversimplified manner. For example it was not until the twentieth century,
and then only in an exclusive circle of intellectuals, that man was able to
understand that motion is always relative with respect to a system of co-
ordinates; that time and mass are relative with respect to the speed of
movement, etc.
A second lasting difficulty is the definition of concepts. A preschool child
is not capable of defining a single word he or she uses. When asked the
meaning of 'mommy' or 'daddy,' the child can only point to those persons.
Later the child is able to describe, in a more of less arbitrary manner, the
designated object or to explain the practical purpose it fulfills. It is only
later in the process of organized instruction that he or she learns to provide
a logical defmition of the basic concepts which he/she uses quite adequately
now. The lag between definition and use is enduring, even for scholars. One
need only recall the difficulties arising with the defmition of the concept
of numbers (although everyone knows what a number is) or with beauty
in art (although with classical works, at least, there exists near universal
agreement as to what is beautiful); the same situation exists with what is
'good' (although for a number of human actions there is no doubt as to what
may be called good).
THE GENESIS OF SIGNS AND MEANING 353
linguists and ethnologists have largely endorsed the view that the original
linguistic signs were sets of sounds that had the meaning of entire sentences.
The problem is how conglomerations of such atomistic signs gave rise to the
complex structures to be found even among the most primitive native tribes.
A mere collection of symbols, even if it had a developed conceptual meaning,
would not constitute a language. A language is a system whose individual
symbols occupy particular constant relations to one another; it is a system
with its own logic.
The manner in which this process was carried out may only be guessed
today. But here, once again, a study of the development of children's speech
can make it easier at least to suggest a hypothesis of the basic phases by
which the process was carried out.
By the end of the second year a child is able to use a number of articulated
words in series. But for the most part this is not a sentence but a set of
several of them. Accordingly it appears that the first step in overcoming the
syncretism of the early phase is the ability to break down a complex situation
into elements whose relations are still not comprehended. linguistically
this is manifested in the simple ordering of unconnected words and sen-
tences.
The next step in the structuring of speech is setting names. The appearance
of names means that a significant step has been taken in comprehending the
structure of reality and human experience - the distinguishing of objects and
forming ideas as stable complexes of sense data. Now, once names exist, it is
possible to advance to a comprehension of relations. It is at this point,
when an object is signified by a symbol, that it is possible to retain it in
memory in spite of the appearance of new experience. Instead of a new
perception covering over and clouding a previous once, causing it to fade so
that the connection between the two is impossible to comprehend, now
there coexists in consciousness the perception of an object and the memory
of other objects which is fixed by the appropriate symbols - names. It is
only for this reason that one may observe the relationship among them.
Susanne Langer is correct in saying:'
Without language relations are either assumed in action, - as for example with a dog
who looks with great hope at a bowl of scraps, or hides from punishment under the
couch - or they simply cannot be understood. A monkey simply knows nothing about
the relationship between a stick and fruit when their c~resence is not visible. 32
354 MEANING AND COMMUNICATION
in a given natural and social setting. Thus Malinowski was correct when he
called for enlarging the concept of context to include not only the charac-
teristics of the immediate situation in which one is speaking, but also all
the assumptions (intellectual, emotional, and practical) that are implicitly
assumed in a cultural setting, and without which it is sometimes impossible
to interpret a statement adequately. This applies particularly to the speech
of primitive people whose cultures are totally different from our own.
Language as we have thus far discussed it has been first and foremost, an
instrument for expressing empirical thought and for such communication
among people which is directly related to the attainment of certain practical
goals. That language has been relatively concrete and practical - its symbols
have deSignated, at best, general characteristics or relationships among
directly perceivable and practically accessible objects. It is firmly related
to reality as perceived by the senses. Its structure involved explicit stating of
the assumptions of the context only to the extent which was necessary to
permit elementary understanding and cooperation among people living and
acting in a social environment.
In addition to the relatively low level of generalization and abstraction
of symbols, this type of language is characterized by its spontaneous creation,
in a very long process of repeated attempts at separation, differentiation,
generalization, false association, correction of misunderstandings and modi-
fications to avoid them, the abandonment of early speech habits, and the
creation of new ones; etc.
But the division of labor quickly led to the creation of social groups
that did not engage directly in physical labor but rather in various forms
of mental activity (priests, military chiefs, politicians, poets, philosophers,
scientists). Through generalization, the expression of various emotions, and
the creation of images of nonexistent beings, they increasingly stepped
beyond the boundaries of empirical, immediately practical thought, and for
their purposes had to creata a suitable language.
From times immemorial man has created, together with language, various
other symbols - mythological, ritualistic, and artistic - in order to express
his emotional needs, his dreams, the play of his imagination. Whenever
we meet traces of human life we encounter fetishes, symbols of life and
death, sculptures and drawings, ritual masks, etc. Language itself has always
retained its expressive function; in the early rhythmic chanting of harshly
THE GENESIS OF SIGNS AND MEANING 357
tion and generalization. They are constructed primarily for the purposes of
explanation and introducing continuity, order and structure in a poorly
connected, discontinuous network of empirical concepts. While the concepts
'bear' and 'cow' and the like have been necessary in order to permit man
to know how to relate to various types of animals, now the concept of sub-
stance is necessary in order for man to see that even as everything changes,
it still remains the same in some respect, that there is a primary ground upon
which all the differences in the world have arisen. Of course in time even the
most abstract symbols are confronted, if only indirectly, with actual day-to-
day practice, and are eliminated if they poorly or inadequately organize the
network of empirical concepts. But their distinguishing feature is that at the
moment of their creation their sole practical reason for corning into existence
is the need to resolve theoretical problems; this is also a form of practice but
only in the broadest sense of the word.
In contrast to empirical thought, theoretical thought is always more
or less formalized: it is carried out consciously according to particular rules,
following particular principles of either general philosophical method or
special scientific method.
It is true that even ordinary empirical thought, and even situational
thought in terms of sensory schemas and ideas, is carried out according to
certain forms, and we have seen analogously that speech along with the
first capacity for analysis of the syncretic units of experience and the use of
sentences comprised of more than one word, takes on a particular structure.
The qualitative leap separating theoretical from empirical thinking is
that the very forms of language and thought become the object of study.
Concepts of concepts and symbols of symbols emerge. People began to
talk about speech and to think about thought, to carry out mathematical
operations with symbols that signify numbers. In linguistics one was now
able to learn that our speech is comprised of sentences, that sentences are
made up of words, and words of sounds. In logic we become aware of the
fact that we think in terms of concepts, judgments and inferences. Mathe-
matics teaches us that the symbols we use in counting and measuring are
positive and negative whole numbers, fractions, triangles, rectangles, etc.
Special symbols for talking about symbols are constructed. In brief, special
higher-order languages are created to speak about the languages one uses
in speaking about various types of objects. Expressed in modem tenninology,
a hierarchy of languages is created - object languages, meta-languages, and
meta-meta-Ianguages in which one uses a language of a higher order of ab-
straction to study the formal (structural) properties of the corresponding
360 MEANING AND COMMUNICATION
NOTES
13 W. N. Kellog and L. A. Kellog, The Ape and the Child, New York, 1933, p. 281.
14 Furness, Observations on the Mentality of Chimpanzees and Orangutans, pp. 281-
284.
15 Horatio Hale, 'The Origin of Languages and the Antiquity of Speaking Man,' Pro-
ceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, XXXV (1887),
279-323 (S. Langer, Op. cit., p. 86).
16 Engels said that it was only in the work process that the need arose for early man to
say something to another (Op. cit.).
17 In his day Mar advanced the theory that the lust speech was in the form of hand
movements and movements of other parts of the body (Kinetic speech). Man allegedly
began to communicate with sound later, when he began to fashion tools. This theory is
congruent with Hekel's concept of 'mute man' (homo alalus), who allegedly represents
one of the transitional links in the line of development from the ape to homo sapiens.
The Dutch thinker van Geineken recently developed a theory influenced by Mar.
According to this theory, as well as Mar's later, revised views gestures played a primary
role in early speech, but people soon began to add sounds to them. The following
arguments of Lomonosov apply to all theories of this type: "It is true that thoughts can
be expressed not only verbally but also by various movements of the eye, arms, and
other parts of the body, just like pantomime in the theatre, but in this fashion without
illumination it would be impossible to speak, and other human actions, particularly
work with our hands, would seriously interfere with conversation" (cited in Nikolski,
Yakovlev, How People Learned to Speak, SerboCroatian edition, Sarajevo, 1949, p. 25).
18 Noire states that the latter gave rise to the fust words in language, and these became
the fust names for actions - verbs.
19 The view has been widely held that in human history speech developed from singing.
Rousseau and Herder both believed this. Von Humboldt asserted that even the most
barbaric nomadic tribe had songs and that "man (is) a type of creature that sings" (Die
sprachphilosophischen Werke Wilhelm von Humbolt, Berlin, 1884, p. 289). Jesperson has
advanced this same proposition in recent times: "All the data and considerations point
to the same conclusion, that at one time all speech was song, or to be more exact that
the two activities were still undifferentiated ... " (Jesperson, Language, Its Nature,
Development and Origin, Henry Holt, 1922, p. 420).
But for us here it is not important whether the lust vocal activity had the character of
speech or song, but rather the conditions in which it arose and what factors stimulated it.
20 I. Donovan, 'The Festal Origin of Human Speech," Mind I (1891-2),499.
21 Ibid., p. 115.
22 See S. Langer,op. cit., p. 87.
23 Rubinstein, Osnovy obshchei psihologii (Foundations of General Psychology),
Moscow, 1946.
24 "The creation of ideas, the impressions of consciousness, is originally directly in-
cluded in material activity and the material relations of people - the language of real
life" (Marx-Engels, The German Ideology, p. 16).
25 Accordingly some authors, notably Levy-Bruhl, have characterized such thought as
'prelogical' and 'mystical.' But if there exists a qualitative distinction between sensory
and situational thought on the one hand, and conceptual thought on the other, it is
wrong to deny the continuities between them. The rudiments of logic must exist in
the lust forms of thought; otherwise it would not succeed in performing the practical
function that was intended.
362 MEANING AND COMMUNICATION
Relying upon what we have said thus far, a general definition of meaning may
be expressed in the following variations.
(A) When a group of conscious beings, witnessing the appearance of a
material object, is disposed to think of an object (or experience any other
mental state whose external correlate is an object), and that thought (experi-
ence) may be expressed objectively using some means which all the mem-
bers of the given social group can understand and use, we may say in that case
that the given material object is a sign and that it has a defmite meaning.
(B) Meaning is a complex of relations of a sign toward
(a) the mental state it expresses,
(b) the object it designates,
(c) other signs of the given system, and
(d) practical operations necessary to the creation, alteration, or iden-
tification of the designated object.
(C) The meaning of a sign is a function of the mental state of a subject,
other signs by which that state may be described, the object designated by
them, and the practical operations by which the object is created, altered or
defined.
(0) Definition (C) may be expressed symbolically in the following man-
ner:
Me (Si) =fW, S, P, 0),
where Me (Si) =meaning of a sign,
M =the mental state of one or more subjects,
=
S a set of signs or symbols,
P = a set of relevant practical operations, and
o =the designated object.
Aside from the last two defmitions (in which only the vocabulary has been
changed), these defmitions are not identical to one another. The differences
arise from the fact that our detailed analysis of the dimensions of meaning
has not been accompanied by an analysis of their interrelationships, allowing
us to enumerate them in varying order and to place varying emphasis upon
different aspects of their mutual determination.
The problem of defining the interrelationships of the various elements of
meaning may be divided into the follOwing three questions:
363
364 MEANING AND COMMUNICATION
1. Regarding the first question, mental meaning may vary in two basic ways:
(a) according to the degree of social involvement, and (b) according to the
type of mental experience.
(a) With respect to the degree of social involvement, mental meaning may
vary from the purely subjective to the highest possible interpersonal level -
universal meaning. In the former case mental meaning cannot be described
in terms of the signs of any existing social language. linguistic meaning exists
here only to the extent that the given subject has constructed a personal
language in which the given sign occupies particular relationships with respect
to other signs. Such a language cannot be translated (otherwise it is not
completely personal and the mental states associated with its signs are not
completely subjective).
In this case one m~y speak about objective meaning only to the extent
that the designated object is independent of the consciousness of the given
subject at a particular point in time, although it is not independent of the
consciousness of the given subject generally. Let us say, for example, that
I have imagined, experienced, and described in terms of personal symbolism
love among the Martians. This is an object for me to the extent that it exists
even when I am not thinking about it at a particular moment. As soon as I
turn my attention once more to my symbols I can re-experience that object.
But since my experience is unique and subjective and my symbolism is
incommunicable, with the disappearance of myself and my consciousness,
this imagined object similarly disappears. This is not an object in the sense
in which we have always defmed it: on the subjective-objective continuum
this is something that would fall in the sphere of the subjective. In this
instance practical meaning can be only a set of subjective mental operations
by means of which an imaginary entity is synthesized of elements of the
real world. If there existed even a single physical operation relevant to the
given sign that would at least imply that we are dealing with an object for
others (since an object measured, produced, or modified by the activity of
bodily organs is accessible, at least in principle, to the observation of others).
GENERAL DEFINITION OF MEANING 365
To the extent that mental meaning has intersubjective character its lin-
guistic meaning is communicable and objective meaning is constant and
independent of human consciousness. As a rule real objects are more constant
and enduring and more universal in character than ideal and imaginary
objects, although there are exceptions. The home of a Belgradian of the
nineteenth century could be the objective meaning of a symbol only for a
few decades and for a very small number of people. The imaginary per-
sonality of Zeus (and God in general) has occupied the conceptual world
of millions of people for thousands of years. Such exceptions are possible
primarily because there have existed very enduring universal spiritual and
emotional needs calling for the construction of certain unreal objects. (This
will probably always be true in art.) But in the sphere of cognition, particu-
larly with respect to scientific language, relationships are simpler: the increase
in the intersubjective nature of mental meaning is matched be a progression
of objective meaning from fictive objects to social objects and from social
objects to natural objects that are increasingly widespread, more frequently
manifest, and of longer duration.
Along with this, practical meaning, too, varies from exclusively mental
operations to increasingly simple bodily operations. Symbols such as 'air,'
'fire,' 'water,' etc. have universal mental meaning, are highly communicable,
and refer to natural objects people have encountered every day from their
birth; very simple practical operations are associated with them: air is what
one breathes, fire is what one cooks with, water is what one drinks, etc.
(b) In accordance with the type of mental experience, mental meaning may
vary from representations and concepts to feelings and desires. Accordingly
the sign that expresses such meaning may have a cognitive, emotive, or pre-
scriptive character. This sign occupies a particular relationship toward the
other signs of the system of which it is part; it may be replaced by them,
but they must be of the same character.
We have already seen that the objective meanings of cognitive symbols
are known objects. The correlates of representations are chiefly individual
objects, while concepts refer to their genreal relations and structures, and
judgments refer to real or imagined (assumed) facts. The designated object
of emotive symbols always is a structure of human feelings, whereas pre-
scriptive symbols refer to a desired type of human action.
Various types of practical operations correspond to various types of
representations and concepts. Here the following distinction is of essential
importance: all representations and concepts which successfully serve some
366 MEANING AND COMMUNICATION
practical activity in the sense that they are associated, at least indirectly,
with rules of bodily behavior that lead us successfully to the realization of
desired goals are said to have a real content and to refer to real objects.
Many commonsense ideas we utilize in everyday life have such a character.
The concepts and judgments associated (at least indirectly) with such success-
ful physical operations are said to have a scientific character. Ideas and
concepts that lack any even indirect connection with material practice
are treated like metaphysical, mythical, religious, artistic concepts and
ideas.
The connection between emotive symbols and practice is extremely
variable and often indeterminate. Someone's cry of pain may cause people
in the immediate environment to react in very different ways in different
situations, depending upon the various reasons for the pain. In other words
social, practical meaning is greatly dependent upon context. Extremely
great theoretical significance is attached to value symbols, whose meaning
is largely emotive. The practical meaning of such symbols is comprised of
ordinary operations that lead to the satisfaction of a need or the attain-
ment of an ideal that all the members of a particular community wish to
attain.
Typically the practical meaning of prescriptive symbols refers to opera-
tions which the given subject does not perform spontaneously or voluntarily,
but rather at the direction of another. It thus entails an element of coercion.
We thus have outlined the basic functional relations between the variation
of the elements of meaning, taking mental meaning as an independent vari-
able. We obtain similar correlations if we take as an independent variable
any other element of meaning.
is upon the independence of that content from the thought of any individual
subject.
But such instances occur exceptionally and only with respect to the
meanings of artificial, symbolic languages. Ordinarily the contrast between
the world of thought and mental dispositions, on the one hand, and the
world of objects, on the other, is so sharp that philosophers treat it as a basic
epistemological opposition. The human objective world is so rich, and has
expanded and concretized with such speed with the development of science
and human practice that the thought of any individual or social group can
correspond to it only approximately and transposed in accordance with
various subjective prejudices, feelings, desires, and ideals.
One component of meaning that overlaps with all the others, sometimes
identifying with them, is practical meaning. Both mental processes and
language (or any other system of signs) have their practical side. Ideas and
concepts are the results of operations of representation and conceptualization.
A linguistic structure always has a potential use in speech and writing. One
may distinguish only the act of operation from its result. What we have
termed mental meaning is, in effect, the result of certain mental operations
and the point of departure for performing new ones. Language is what is
established by speech and what will be further modified by future speech.
It is particularly difficult to distinguish object and the practical operations
by which it is created, modified and identified. We never become conscious
of an object prior to practice and independent of all practice. For precisely
that reason the notion of a thing 'in itself is a totally empty abstraction. It is
only when we attempt to speak about an object as something independent of
a particular, concrete set of practical operations, rather than as independent
of human practice generally, that we can distinguish with sufficient clarity
what was originally given from what was created in these operations. Of
course what was originally given is itself the result of certain previous
operations, by either ourselves or other people. But since we always speak
about practical meaning in relation to a particular set 0/ operations P (which
may be explicitly indicated in an operational definition), in most cases we
can distinguish it relatively clearly from objective meaning, which yields us an
integral concept of the object (which includes both the originally given and
the modifications instituted by the set of operations P).
There are two marginal instances in which the objectively given and prac-
tice merge in one so that apparently one dimension of meaning disappears.
The first is the case of fictitious "pure objects" independent of practice -
objects 'in themselves.' Here, we are only able to talk about objects without
GENERAL DEFINITION OF MEANING 369
meaning of the expression 'Look!' may range from actual looking to im-
agining this type of mental process; from a readiness to obey to feelings of
resistance and even revolt. On the. other hand the practical meaning of the
expression 'look!' ranges from the act of looking to a set of all possible
actions by which one may test whether others are actually looking. Every-
thing depends upon the situation, the type of people doing the interpreting,
and their function in the given situation.
On the other hand even if one may imagine the conditions in which the
meaning of a symbol represents an entity which cannot be broken down into
separate components, the fact remains that in most cases one can easily
distinguish various dimensions of meaning: mental, linguistic, objective,
practical.
symbols refer are always detennined by practice, and that the mental disposi-
tions in question are shaped by language); (2) correspondence between mental
dispositions and objects, and (3) the set of relations between the given symbol
and other symbols by which the given disposition is shaped and by means of
which it may be expressed.
CHAPTER XIII
Many philosophers still believe that the sole objective of their theoretical
work is to satisfy a noble human curiosity about the basic problems of
cognition and reality. The fact that they are profoundly mistaken is evident
when one notes that the genuinely valuable works of the truly great philos-
ophers have always exercised an enormous infouence upon their contem-
poraries. We could even disregard the fact that philosophers have often taken
up concrete problems of science, morals, art, and politics. They have exercised
a decisive influence through highly abstract writings in the field of ontology,
cognitive theory, methodology, and logic. Democritus's atomism (which was
presented as an ontological theory), the Platonic tradition in ontology and
mathematics, Aristotle's metaphysics (which defmed the inviolate framework
of natural science through the Middle Ages), Bacon's inductive method,
Cartesianism, Hegelian historicism, positivistic scepticism, Marxian humanistic
dialectics, Dewey's pragmatism, Hussed's phenomenology and Heidegger's
philosophy of being all represent convincing examples. The major philos-
ophical works, largely because they have expressed the universal spiritual
needs and values of an entire era, have powerfully affected the theoretical and
methodological orientation of all direct participants in social practice. Con-
sequently Marx's famed eleventh thesis on Feuerbach only expressed some-
thing that had always been true. Philosophers have always not merely ex-
plained the world, but to a greater or lesser extent, contributed to its practical
change. Nevertheless they usually did not do so with conscious intent. Besides,
this disguised practical orientation was not always consistently carried out.
The novelty of modem critical philosophy and Marxism in particular is,
first, the loss of interest in problems lacking any connection with human
practice and, second, the need for explicit formulation of the practical
implications of a theoretical analysis.
Logical investigation of the problem of meaning is most defmitely of
manifold relevance for human practice. 11rls relevance is indirect in many
directions. The results of the theory of meaning can serve as a basis for the-
oretical discussion of the various specific problems of linguistics, psychology,
the sociology of knowledge, anthropology, and other specialized sciences.
11rls theory can also have a direct practical significance in the process of
372
CONDITIONS OF EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION 373
also disagree that from that sentence it follows logically that 'in all demo-
cratic countries persons may publicly advocate any belief whether it is true
or false, socially beneficial or harmful, progressive or reactionary.' These two
persons, then do not differ merely in convictions and basic attitudes but
also in different meanings attached to the terms 'democracy' and 'freedom
of the press.' One may point to effective communication only when there
is a minimum of agreement between the speakers - if not in convictions,
then at least in linguistic conventions. I may consider as false the two cited
sentences in which the terms 'democratic' and 'freedom of the press' are used
if I attach to those terms the meanings I consider appropriate. I might believe
for example that democracy is only a means to some higher moral purpose,
that it must be sacrificed when in conflict with that purpose, and that those
have the right to freedom who do not deny that right to others. But if I
have understood what meaning different from mine has been attached to
those terms by my opponent, I may agree that proceeding from his inter-
pretation of the terms the first sentence is truly analytical and the second
is derived from it in a truly logically necessary manner. My verbal behavior
will be fundamentally different depending on whether I have understood the
meaning which the other speaker has attached to the words 'democracy'
and 'freedom of the press.' If I have not, I will passionately disagree with
him over the sentences in which these terms are used, trying to convince
him that the two sentences are simply false. If, on the other hand, I have
understood, I will not argue with him about the truthfulness of the sentences,
but will merely question his concepts of democracy and freedom of the press.
Only in the latter case am I involved in truly effective communication, where
regardless of possible enormous differences in conviction, interests and even
terminology, one speaker nevertheless fundamentally understands the langu-
age of another.
In posing the question of the conditions of effective communication, one
should make explicit the fields of use of signs to which they refer. In the
Introduction we drew a distinction between three levels of generality, each of
which requires a special theory of meaning. First of all there is the most
universal level, to which belong all types of signs - natural and artificial,
linguistic and nonlinguistic, signals and symbols. The second, more particular
level of effective communication is the area of symbols of direct relevance to
philosophy - the symbols encountered in arts, morals, and science_ The third,
most specific level is the area of abstract expressions of philosophicallangu-
ages (the language of logic, of ethics, of aesthetics, and of the history of
philosophy).
CONDITIONS OF EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION 375
* * *
FIRST RULE
when one understands that at issue here is a quite different type of language.
In symbolic logic we do not refer to facts but to the structure of logically
possible facts, i.e. the formulas of the language do not represent statements
about reality but are schemes for constructing logically possible statements
about reality.
In scientific texts a frequent source of confusion is the mixture of various
types of propositions such as: statements of perception (serving to describe
direct experiences), inferences, value statements, defmitions, and methodo-
logical rules. When we have adequately understood a fellow speaker and
understood the type of statement he has made, but still disagree with him in
substance, the discussion with him will be fundamentally different iT} each
of these cases. If the discussion revolves around a statement of perception,
it is senseless to dispute with him if we have not ourselves made relevant
observations. If we still differ and we are convinced that our statement is
correct and that his was formulated without the intent to deceive us, the only
possibility is that the other speaker has made his perception under different
conditions, that he has utilized essentially different instruments, that he has
made some mistake in observation, that under the influence of overly power-
ful prejudice made a poor interpretation of what he has seen. We must seek
the roots of our differences in quite another comer if the statement in
question is an inference. Then we shall question the premises upon which he
proceeded and the correctness of the derivation. In the case of disagreement
as to value judgments there is no possibility of conflict over which judgment
is true, for in contrast to factual statements (based on perception or inference)
these statements do not have the character of truth or falsehood, at least not
in the same sense. With them, assuming agreement on all questions of fact,
one must attempt to identify the fundamental value principles from which
they are derived. If in this investigation we do not encounter at least one
value principle we share with the other speaker, further discussion is futile.
With respect to definitions the questions which arise pertain to their precision,
their agreement with accustomed linguistic practice, and the amount of
greater or lesser clarity that arises from their use. In any case one must
clearly see that determining the meaning of a term with a defmition has
an essentially different logical status from assertions about things and their
structure. The same holds true for the formulation of rules. They do not
serve to state anything true of false, but rather merely propose a particular
mode of approach. In the event that we do not agree with what is proposed,
we may dispute their value by drawing attention to their lack of a sound basis
or poor results when put into practice.
378 MEANING AND COMMUNICATION
When we fail to note all these distinctions among the types of symbolic
functions performed by our linguistic expressions, we inevitably react in-
appropriately and the line of communication with the other speaker is
either broken or severely impaired.
The first rule may be reformulated as follows:
1.1 In interpreting a text one must take into account that it may have a
cognitive, expressive, or directive purpose. One must identify the function
at issue in each case.
1.2. Identify the type of language to which the expression belongs.
1.3. When the meaning of a statement is in question, determine whether
the statement is a perception, inference, value judgment, defmition or
methodological rule.
SECOND RULE
One should attempt to use only those symbols which have all the basic
dimensions o[ meaning.
This means that the signs we use should not only express our subjective
state of mind (idea, image, perception, concept) but also refer to objects
that may be identified or created by particular practical operations and
which may be described by another set of symbols.
Locke was early to condemn the habit of many people to resort frequently
to abstract words (e.g. wisdom, fame, mercy) which in their minds do not
correspond to any clear or distinct idea, or in fact to any idea at all. Although
today one should formulate this demand much more precisely, for scientists
successfully utilize many abstractions that are not capable of relating to any
idea in the sense of a mental picture, it still remains true that no sign should
be used automatically, stereotypically or habitually; but with a clear aware-
ness of the conditions and boundaries of its use.
Moreover many abstractions and emotionally colored words become
barriers between us and the people we communicate with, for we have
attached a completely personal meaning to them and are not capable of in-
dicating the object to which they refer. We should be aware of the danger
that in our vocabularies there may be words we use by cultural tradition or
plain fashion without considering the objects which they in fact refer to or
whether they refer to anything which others may experience as an object.
In effect the flISt and basic condition for others to understand us is to be able
to know the objects to which our linguistic expressions refer. In the case of
material objects we can always point to them or describe them; in the case
CONDITIONS OF EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION 379
THIRD RULE
be used to mean the science of being in the Aristotelian sense and at the
same time to refer to the static mode of thought in Engels' sense. The term
'dialectics' should not refer at once to the general theory of the development
of the objective world and to the concrete logic and to the philosophical
method and to the objective structure of things themselves. Confusion also
arises when 'objective' is taken to mean 'what exists independent of human
consciouseness', and 'cognition corresponding to the object;' and 'cognition
which is interpersonal (social) ~ nature' and (in the lingo of some Marxist
economists and sociologists) everything economic in social processes and
institutions, as opposed to 'superstructure'.
In all such cases, at least during one particular process of communication,
one should retain one meaning only and eliminate all others, or at least
relate them to other terms.
Thus the third rule may be broken down into the following two separate
rules:
3.1. One should not use in a single text the same word in two different
meanings. If this cannot be avoided, the difference in meanings should be
indicated either explicitly or in the context.
3.2. One should eliminate ambiguity in the same field of use: fmd a
separate, appropriate term for each meaning.
FOURTH RULE
But here too, the question of justification arises. A proposal that is not
appropriate and justified must be rejected. Criteria for evaluating the justi
fication of a normative definition are as follows: (a) whether it eliminates
points of confusion; (b) whether it is conditioned by the need to revise
meaning on the basis of the discovery of new facts; (c) whether it leads to
a compression of presentation permitting greater clarity and understanding.
Accordingly the fourth rule may be specified as follows:
4.1. One should define all those terms the correct understanding of
which is a necessary condition for an understanding of the text as a
whole.
4.2. Analytic and operational definitions have maximal informative value.
One should resort to other methods when one of these two or both
together are not possible or are not most appropriate for a particular
purpose.
4.3. In the interpretation and evaluation of a definition one should assess
whether the author intended it to be an empirical or postulative definition.
4.4. Postulative defmitions, when arbitrary, merely serve to increase the
existing confusion, and accordingly one should resort to them only when
necessary, when one expects for good reason that their use will increase
the communicability of the given term.
FIFTH RULE
SIXTH RULE
One should make allowance simultaneously for the constant change and
development of a language but despite this meaning in a given communication
process must remain maximally unaltered.
Language is a process like all other phenomena of reality. Over time both
vocabulary and grammar change. The historical development of meaning of
individual words is studied by semantics as a special linguistic discipline.
A failure to grasp the dynamic nature of language may be a source of
serious misunderstandings. It is illusory, for example, to appeal to the
authority of the great writers and lexicographers of the past with respect to
the present-day meaning of a word. Their point of view can only serve as
a certain indication of the situation in the past, as material to explain the
genesis of a concept. New experiences and new associations lead to the
modification of meaning and the emergence of one or more new meanings
beside the old one, to the transfer of meaning to a new name which was
originally solely associated with the basic name. Thus today's 'paper' has
followed a long evolution from the ancient word 'papyrus'; before the inven-
tion of printing 'book' meant any set of written leaves of paper (in Yugoslav
folk poems, for example, 'book' is a synonym for 'letter'); originally 'pen'
merely meant feathers. As Schuhard has pointed out, the French word
'trouver' and the Italian 'trovare' (find) arose as a metathesis of the Latin
'turbare ' (trouble): first 'turbare' assumed a specialized meaning in a special
group - among fishermen, where it began to mean 'stir up the water so as to
chase the fish in a particular direction and then to catch them' (this is still
the meaning of the Sardinian 'trubare'); later this specialized meaning was
generalized once more to assume its present-day abstract form. 'Adripere'
once was a nautical term meaning 'arrive by sea': the French and English
words 'arriver/arrive' mean to arrive generally. Meillet has pointed out that
386 MEANING AND COMMUNICATION
the Latin 'pater,' from which many European languages derive the word for
father (the French opere,' the German 'Vater,' etc.) had primarily a social
rather than biological meaning. In patriarchal society 'pater' refered to the
head of the family rather than the father in the biological sense, while the
words 'parens' or 'genitor' were used for the latter sense.
It is particularly easy to note shifts in the meaning of terms referring to
social institutions and relations in periods of profound social change. In
Yugoslavia, such words as 'cooperative,' 'councilman,' 'bureaucrat,' 'task.,'
'party meeting,' 'ideological,' 'council,' and 'party' received new meanings
and new emotional connotations in a brief span during the Revolution.
But although it is essential to be conscious of the dynamic nature of
language in order to be elastic and tolerant in accommodating changes in
meaning and to be free in our choice of the form of linguistic expression
for our thoughts, on the other hand we must also be strict in regard to
variations of meaning during one and the same process of communication.
Nothing can prevent the proper understanding of meaning as shifts of the
meaning of terms in the course of one and the same text. Semantic changes
that result from historical development (material and cultural progress, the
acquisition of new knowledge and experience, the mastery of new objects,
ets.) and even the semantic changes in the language of individuals resulting
from the evolution of their thinking and general culture, are fundamentally
different from variations in meaning resulting from an inability to think or
speak in a disciplined and organized manner or, even worse, resulting from
the inability to acknowledge defeat in a dispute.
One of the chief reasons why discussions and debates lead so rarely to
definite results is that the losing side is tempted to cover up defeat by simply
shifting the meaning of at least one of the key terms. One has run out of
effective arguments for the original thesis and is so cornered by the op-
ponent's arguments that there is nothing left but to acknowledge that one
was wrong. At the last moment one may wield a new weapon: one cites
arguments that were irrelevant to the original thought but which are still fully
valid provided the original linguistic expression of the thought is interpreted
differently. 1bis in effect is an alteration of position, the replacement of the
original thought by another - in fact the ignominious end of the original
argument. But it is not easy to reveal what really happened. Ostensibly one
still upholds the same linguistic statement, with apparently renewed force.
The change is difficult to see because (as is usually the case) at the beginning
the precise meanings of key terms are not stated, therefore it was not clear
from the start which were the opposite views behind the wordage of the
CONDITIONS OF EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION 387
SEVENTH RULE
EIGHTH RULE
When a misunderstanding arises in a communication process between two
participants due to the fact that they are proceeding on different systems of
thought, one should seek whatever is invariant in both of their systems.
Two concepts that are disparate for one person need not be so for some-
one else. For example in the proposition "A geodetic curve is the shortest
distance between two points," the concepts "curve" and "shortest distance
between two points" are disparate from the standpoint of Euclidian geometry
and coherent from the standpoint of Riemann's geometry. Or let us take
another proposition: 'After the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the elimina-
tion of private ownership of the means of production, the working class can
still be exploited by the state.' From the standpoint of Stalinism this proposi-
tion is nonsense, for it appears unquestionable in the conditions of the
abolition of private ownership of the means of production that the concepts
'exploitation of the working class' and 'exploitation by the state' are dis-
parate. But from the standpoint of an authentic Marxism that takes into
account the real danger of bureaucracy after the overthrow of the bourgeoisie,
these concepts are not disparate (giving rise to the demand for the withering
away of the state).
Disputes such as these are not concerned with matters of fact. The two
CONDITIONS OF EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION 391
sides may agree on all the facts, but use different linguistic and conceptual
apparatus to describe them. And to go beyond that, in such instances dif-
ferences in linguistic apparatus are ultimately rooted in differences in basic
principles of entire systems of understanding.
Somethimes the roots of such disagreements lie even deeper in differences
in the most basic logical principles. For example for most people sentences
of the form "A is B and is not B" are not merely false, they are meaningless
for they do not communicate any particular idea. But for others, whose
thought has been influenced by the tradition of the dialectics of Hegel and
Marx, under certain condition such sentences may be both meaningful and
profoundly true.
Here we seem to confront an impassible barrier. If two men differ even
on fundamental principles of logic, how can one maintain the illusion that
they can agree on anything. But even so, if we have succeeded in formulating
a correct diagnosis of the cause of their misunderstanding (and this is the
hardest thing of all), the next step is to identify something invariant in both
systems of logic and attempt to eliminate the disagreement at the meta-logical
level. Admittedly, X may disagree with the logic of Y not because he has a
different logic but because upon meta-logical investigation it appears that
he actually has no logic at all. We arrive at that conclusion if we establish
that his mode of thinking is so unorganized that it fails to meet the universal
theoretical demand of coherence (which should not be confused with the
demand for noncontradiction at the formal-logical level) and that it is in-
applicable in empirical investigation for it constantly orients us to assert
propositions that experience directly refutes. But if a system of thought
which differs from our own satisfies all these meta-logical demands, we
must arrive at the conclusion that our systeQls have a common basis (provided
they are not completely identical) and that the opposition is not so much in
meaning as in the linguistic formulation of their principles.
This assumption may be illustrated in the following examples. The pro-
positions "object A has and does not have characteristic f' and "object A
is and is not located at a given place at a given moment" are indeed meaning-
less if one assumes that our concepts are precise, unambiguous, and clearly
delineated from each other, and provided we know all the conditions under
which we state something. These are all assumptions of formal logic. This is
why it is fully applicable only to an ideally exact language, whose terms are
unambiguous, with strictly dermed denotations, and whose statements are
complete. What happens, however, if these conditions are not satisfied?
As soon as we do not know the conditions under which we are applying a
392 MEANING AND COMMUNICATION
predicate, in what sense and relation, it becomes highly likely that an object
has it (in one sense) and does not have it (in another sense). The same holds
true if the point in time is not ftxed, for in that case it remains possible that
the object once had the given property and later lost it in the process of
development.
A discussion of this type (set forth here in rudimentary form) shows
that a formal logician and a dialectician would have to agree ftnally on the
following:
The classical principles of noncontradiction and the exclusion of the third
term are valid provided the language in which they are applied satisfy the
following conditions:
(a) An exact defmition of the meaning of each term (entailing the possi-
bility to delineate sharply one designated object from another);
(b) An absence of ambiguity;
(c) Meaning (and designated objects) that do not change;
(d) Knowledge of and explicit formulation of all conditions under which
an event has taken place and of all relations under which it has been observed
(which means that all statements must be complete).
In all disputes between dialecticians and formal logicians the following
usually occurs: the former asserts that in various concrete cases of application
(particularly involving dynamic processes) the classical principles of non-
contradiction and the exclusion of the third do not apply, for in practice,
neither ordinary language, nor the language of empirical science and phil-
osophy, satisfy conditions (a) through (d). Formal logicians reply to this
that in all examples that seem to demand the application of different, dia-
lectical principles of thought one may supplement the propositions (by
formulating what was implicitly understood) in order to arrive at statements
that satisfy the c1assicallogical principles.
Thus it emerges that there is something invariant in both logical systems -
differences arise because the dialectician takes account of the conditions of
practical application, while the formal logician leaves these out and keeps
before his eyes an ideal, perfectly exact language. This distinction was made
already by Aristotle. However one should bear in mind that the dialectic of
his Topics and formal logic of his two Analytics constitute two parts of the
same system of Organon.
It is much easier to discover these invariances when there is a question of
opposition between special systems of thought without disagreements about
logic. For example in the argument concerning the meaning of the statement
about the exploitation of the working class after the accomplishment of
CONDITIONS OF EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION 393
NINTH RULE
***
Special note should be made of the foregoing rules which represent the
logical conditions of communicability, i.e. the necessary (but not sufficient)
conditions which linguistic statements should satisfy in order to be con-
sidered objectively true.
CONDITIONS OF EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION 395
Ackermann x Chase 8, n. 26
Aenesidemus 265 Church 306
Alexander n. 27 Cicero 283, 308, n. 317
Anaximander 229 Cohen xxvii
Apel x Copi n.27
Aquinas 229 Copernicus 101
Aristotle xii, 2, 112, 158, 229, 265, Creighton 285
283, 284, 296, 308, n. 316, n. 317, Cuvier 112
358,372,380,392
Ashby 213,n.258 Darwin 23,101,267,348
Austin xxiv, n. xxviii De Laguna n. 26, 332
Avenarius 113 Democritus 372
Ayer ix, x, xxvii, 47, 48, 49,62, n. 87, Descartes 2, 82, 229, 230, 265, 281,
n.258,271,279,n.316 331
Dewey x, xii, n. xxviii, 66, 269, 372
Bacon, Francis 266,372 Dilthey xxiii
Bakhtin ix Dirac 79, 326
Bergson 183,264,275,306 Donovan 342,n. 36
Berkeley 266 Driesh 183
Berlin n.87 Droyssen xxiii
Black, Max n. xxviii Dubbs 300
Blake, William 6, n. 26 DUrer 75,251
Boole 2 Durkheim 70,332
Bohr 144,326
Bolzano 71 Einstein 79, n. 89, 177
Brentano xix Emerson 332
Bridgman 285,303,304 Engels 37, n. 42, n. 90, 102, n. 106,
Broad n.l77 289,n.316,331,n.360,n.361,381
Brouwer 325 Erdmann 181,231
Burckhardt n. 27 Euclides 110, 112
Buhler n.362
Faraday 112
Carnap xiii, n. xxvii, n. xxviii, 47, 52, Feibleman xi, n. xxviii, 244, n. 259
53, 54, 56, 62, n. 87, n. 89, 99, n. Feuerbach 37
106, n. 167, 283, 287,301,306, n. Foucault xxiii
317 France, Anatole n.316
Cassirer xi, xiii, n. xxviii, 3, n. 26,102, Frank 62
103, n. 106, 192, n. 257, 266, n. Frege xi, n. xxviii, 175, 188, 198, n.
316,332 258
396
INDEX OF NAMES 397
Editors:
ROBERT S. COHEN and MARX W. WARTOFSKY
(Boston University)
1. Marx W. Wartofsky (ed.), Proceedings of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy
of Science 1961-1962.1963.
2. Robert S. Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky (eds.), In Honor of Philipp Frank. 1965.
3. Robert S. Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky (eds.), Proceedings of the Boston Collo-
quium for the Philosophy of Science 1964-1966. In Memory of Norwood Russell
Hanson. 1967.
4. Robert S. Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky (eds.), Proceedings of the Boston Collo-
quium for the Philosophy of Science 1966-1968. 1969.
5. Robert S. Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky (eds.), Proceedings of the Boston Collo-
quium for the Philosophy of Science 1966-1968. 1969.
6. Robert S. Cohen and Raymond J. Seeger (eds.), Ernst Mach: Physicist and Philos-
opher. 1970.
7. Millc Capek, Bergson and Modern Physics. 1971.
8. Roger C. Buck and Robert S. Cohen (eds.), PSA 1970. In Memory of Rudolf
Carnap. 1971.
9. A. A. Zinov'ev, Foundations of the Logical Theory of Scientific Knowledge
(Complex Logic). (Revised and enlarged English edition with an appendix by
G. A. Smirnov, E. A. Sidorenka, A. M. Fedina, and L. A. Bobrova.) 1973.
10. Ladislav Tondl, Scientific Procedures. 1973.
11. R. J. Seeger and Robert S. Cohen (eds.),Philosophical Foundations ofScience. 1974.
12. Adolf Griinbaum, Philosophical Problems of Space and Time. (Second, enlarged
edition.) 1973.
13. Robert S. Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky (eds.), Logical and Epistemological
Studies in Contemporary Physics. 1973.
14. Robert S. Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky (eds.), Methodological and Historical
Essays in the Natural and Social Sciences. Proceedings of the Boston Colloquium
for the Philosophy of Science 1969-1972. 1974.
15. Robert S. Cohen, J. J. Stachel and Marx W. WartofskY (eds.), For Dirk Struik.
Scientific, Historical and Political EsSllYs in Honor of Dirk St,.",ik. 1974.
16. Norman Geschwind, Selected Papers on Language and the Brain. 1974.
18. Peter Mittelstaedt, Philosophical Problems of Modern Physics. 1976.
19. Henry Mehlberg, Time, CauSlllity, and the Quantum Theory (2 vols.). 1980.
20. Kenneth F. Schaffner and Robert S. Cohen (eds.), Proceedings of the 1972 Biennilll
Meeting, Philosophy of Science Association. 1974.
21. R. S. Cohen and J. J. Stachel (eds.), Selected Papers of Leon Rosenfeld. 1978.
22. Milic Capek (ed.), The Concepts of Space and Time. Their Structure and Their
Development. 1976.
23. Marjorie Grene, The Understanding of Nature. EsSllYs in the Philosophy of Biology.
1974.
24. Don Ihde, Technics and Praxis. A Philosophy of Technology. 1978.
25. Jaakko Hintikka and Unto Remes, The Method of Analysis. Its Geometrical
Origin and Its General Significance. 1974.
26. John Emery Murdoch and Edith Dudley Sylla, The Cultural Context of Medieval
Learning. 1975.
27. Marjorie Grene and Everett Mendelsohn (eds.), Topics in the Philosophy of
Biology. 1976.
28. Joseph Agassi, Science in Flux. 1975.
29. Jerzy J. Wiatr (ed.), Polish Essays in the Methodology of the Social Sciences. 1979.
31. Robert S. Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky (eds.), Language, Logic, and Method.
1983.
32. R. S. Cohen, C. A. Hooker, A. C. Michalos, and J. W. van Evra (eds.), PSA 1974:
Proceedings of the 1974 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Associa
tion. 1976.
33. Gerald Holton and William Blanpied (eds.), Science and Its Public: The Changing
Relationship. 1976.
34. Mirko D. Grmek (ed.), On Scientific Discovery. 1980.
35. Stefan Amsterdamski, Between Experience and Metaphysics. Philosophical
Problems of the Evolution of Science. 1975.
36. Mihailo Markovic and Gajo Petrovic (eds.), Praxis. Yugoslav Essays in the Philoso-
phy and Methodology of the Social Sciences. 1979.
37. Hermann von Helmholtz, Epistemological Writings. The Paul Hertz/Moritz
Schlick Centenary Edition of 1921 with Notes and Commentary by the Editors.
(Newly translated by Malcolm F. Lowe. Edited, with an Introduction and Bibliog-
raphy, by Robert S. Cohen and Yehuda Elkana.) 1977.
38. R. M. Martin, Pragmatics, Truth, and Language. 1979.
39. R. S. Cohen, P. K. Feyerabend, and M. W. Wartofsky (eds.), Essays in Memory
of Imre Lakatos. 1976.
42. Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition. The
Realization of the Living. 1980.
43. A. Kasher (ed.), Language in Focus: Foundations, Methods and Systems. Essays
Dedicated to Yehoshua Bar-Hillel. 1976.
46. Peter L. Kapitza, Experiment, Theory, Practice. 1980.
47. Maria L. Dalla Chiara (ed.), Italian Studies in the Philosophy of Science. 1980.
48. Marx W. Wartofsky, Models: Representation and the Scientific Understanding.
1979.
50. Yehuda Fried and Joseph Agassi, Paranoia: A Study in Diagnosis. 1976.
51. Kurt H. Wolff, Su"ender and Catch: Experience and Inquiry Today. 1976.
52. Karel KosIk, Dialectics of the Concrete. 1976.
53. Nelson Goodman, The Structure of Appearance. (Third edition.) 1977.
54. Herbert A. Simon, Models of Discovery and Other Topics in the Methods of
Science. 1977.
55. Morris Lazerowitz, The Language of Philosophy. Freud and Wittgenstein. 1977.
56. Thomas Nicldes (ed.), Scientific Discovery, Logic, and Rationality. 1980.
57. Joseph Margolis, Persons and Minds. The Prospects of Nonreductive Materialism.
1977.
59. Gerard Radnitzky and Gunnar Andersson (eds.), The Structure and Development
of Science. 1979.
60. Thomas Nickles (ed.), Scientific Discovery: Case Studies. 1980.
61. Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Galileo and the Art of Reasoning. 1980.
62. William A. Wallace, Prelude to Galileo. 1981.
63. Friedrich Rapp, Analy tical Ph ilosophy of Tech nology. 1981.
64. Robert S. Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky (eds.), Hegel and the Sciences. 1984.
65. Joseph Agassi, Science and Society. 1981.
66. Ladislav Tondl, Problems of Semantics. 1981.
67. Joseph Agassi and Robert S. Cohen (eds.), Scientific Philosophy Today. 1982.
68. Wladystaw Krajewski (ed.), Polish Essays in the Philosophy of the Natural Sciences.
1982.
69. James H. Fetzer, Scientific Knowledge. 1981.
70. Stephen Grossberg, Studies of Mind and Brain. 1982.
71. Robert S. Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky (eds.), Epistemology, Methodology, and
the Social Sciences. 1983.
72. Karel Berka, Measurement. 1983.
73. G. L. Pandit, The Structure and Growth of Scientific Knowledge. 1983.
74. A. A. Zinov'ev, Logical Physics. 1983.
75. Gilles-Gaston Granger, Formal Thought and the Sciences of Man. 1983.
76. R. S. Cohen and L. Laudan (eds.), Physics, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis.
1983.
77. G. Bohme et aI., Finalization in Science, ed. by W. Schafer. 1983.
78. D. Shapere, Reason and the Search for Knowledge. 1983.
79. G. Andersson, Rationality in Science and Politics. 1984.
80. P. T. Durbin and F. Rapp, Philosophy and Technology. 1984.
81. M. Markovic, Dialectical Theory of Meaning. 1984.
82. R. S. Cohen and M. W. Wartofsky, Physical Sciences and History of Physics.
1984.
83. E. Meyerson, The Relativistic Deduction. 1984.
84. R. S. Cohen and M. W. Wartofsky, Methodology, Metaphysics and the History of
Sciences. 1984.