stuart chase 1938
NB he is “unreconstructed” i.e. believes women and men should fulfill different roles
p. w. bridgman
not yet read
the symbols of government
thurman w. arnold
“Principles provide standard rules for judgment and for conduct. Instead of investigating the facts of a situation, one claps a principle upon it. If the principle happens to fit the facts, it may be a useful timesaver. If it is based on facts of a bygone age, its application to new facts and new conditions may be ridiculous or disastrous. Principles often make sense at the time of their origination —although the Aryan myths which the Nazis are now formulating into principles make no sense at all. The trouble is that after adoption, people begin to regard them as eternal, good for any situation, anywhere, at any time.”
“In semantic terms, a principle is a judgment involving high-order abstractions, normally without referents, difficult to test by experiment or operation, revered for itself as such. Some principles appear to make life more tolerable; a greater number have the opposite effect. By intoning principles, and particularly by saying that the application of this great ideal hurts me more than it does you, one can perform many unkind acts with a clear conscience. When we believe in the Malthusian explanation of the slums (the “law” of population growth makes them inevitable), slums cease to trouble us. When we believe that the highest good is a balanced budget, the misery of those cut from relief rolls is a secondary matter. When we are convinced that any worthy man can get a job, unemployment can be disregarded and measures to alleviate it can be opposed.
A hypocritical person can use principles as smoke screens to further personal ends, but a sincere person often follows them blindly for their own sake, regardless of individual gains or losses. Thus some employers who are opposed to labour unions on principle are prepared to lose millions of dollars rather than sully their ideals. What they personally lose, society, they hope, will some day gain.”
“Most people are kind and humane in ordinary situations. But when a given reform becomes entangled with their principles, many of them turn cruel.”
“The late Professor E. S. Robinson, of Yale, follows along a similar path. He notes in his Psychology and the Law four kinds of explanations which people give to justify their beliefs:
In dealing with the physical world the test of fact is generally accepted as supreme. In dealing with the world of social control it is widely believed that there are other tests more to be respected —authority, internal consistency, rationalistic thinking, historic principles. To see the world as it is, says Robinson, rather than suffused with the rosy light of principles, is not an effort to get along without ideals, aims, and aspirations; “it is an effort to make these purposes real, to make them attainable in concrete terms”. High ideals can result in the Thirty Years' War between Catholic and Protestant, or they can result in the vital activities of the Red Cross. On the one side death, on the other life. With more looking outward and less looking inward we might shift our behaviour toward the Red Cross side.
Both Robinson and Arnold advance a strong case for mental fictions. They hold that without principles to guide them most men would feel as naked as they would walking down the street without their clothes. Perhaps a collection of fictions is inevitable. But I confess I look forward to the day when we shall dispense with concepts not derived from careful observation and from the necessities of survival and well-being under the conditions of this earth. Nothing else can we know surely, and nothing else should be bowed down to. Or so it seems to me.”
“Our understanding of nature is non-existent apart from our mental processes, so that strictly speaking no aspect of psychology or epistemology is without pertinence”. Thus semantics takes a front seat at the beginning of the performance.”
the meaning of meaning
ogden, richards 1923
“The heart of the Ogden and Richards analysis can be diagrammed by a triangle as given on the following image.
The triangle is not a pattern of nerve channels, but a diagram showing relations, and so a structural presentation. From the outside world, and sometimes from a pain or other stimulus inside, we receive a sign. “A sign may be any stimulus from without or process within”. This sign we proceed to interpret, to find meaning in. Interpretation, as noted earlier, depends on past experience. The sound of a match scraped upon a box leads us to expect a flame. If we had never known matches, the sign would be without meaning —though a savage might possibly misinterpret it as a devil scratching his ear. The sight of an opened oyster will cause a pleasurable interpretation if we have learned to enjoy oysters, and apathy or disgust if oysters have never been encountered. Human experience is a series of sign situations, followed by reflection and the filing of references in the brain.
The sign calls up the object —the match, the oyster, the pencil— which is labelled the “referent”. The referent is the Thingumbob to which the sign “refers. We often say, “‘chien’ means ‘dog’” when we should say that the words “chien” and “dog” both refer to the same animal. In the cortex, the files of memory are consulted and interpretation takes place. This process Ogden and Richards label “reference”, or thought. The “referent” is that to which reference is made. So far, this process applies to all higher animals. Man alone takes the next step. He verbalizes the reference with a word, phrase, or “symbol”. From sign to referent to reference to symbol —that is the order. Animals can limp around the triangle by using a few meaningful cries and gestures in place of words. The words of a parrot skip the top of the triangle altogether.
Observe that the triangle has no base. This is a matter of the first importance. There is no direct relation between referent and symbol, between thing and word, and there cannot be —except where the symbol is a “gesture, such as pointing to the oyster. Even then the reference or thinking mechanism is used. Yet human beings are constantly leaping from word to thing, identifying word with thing. “The most prolific fallacy of human intercourse is that the base of the triangle is filled in”. Try as you may, you cannot eat the word “oyster”, cannot sit on the word “chair”, cannot live on the word “money”. The confusion of the symbol “money” with things in the real world required for survival and comfort is perhaps the central economic difficulty of modern times.
The triangle gives us the key to the allied semantic problem, the misuse of abstractions. Clear communication demands referent, reference, and symbol, all three. Suppose we disregard referent, and simply think about words, using words to externalize that thinking. We cut three factors to two. We then produce great activity on the left side of the triangle —from reference to symbol and back to reference again. The great words roll round and round. The “sublime” merges into the “good” and both into the “eternal”. “Liberty” merges into “individualism” and both into “true democracy”. “National Socialism” merges into “racial purity” and both into “totalitarianism”. “Many leaders who mould popular ideas and principles perform with a singular exclusiveness on the left side of the triangle. In the next political discussion that you hear, watch for this left-handed performance, and take what amusement you can. More often it frightens me. What on earth —literally on earth— are these people talking about? They start far up the abstraction ladder with magnificent disregard for the referent. Yet unless both speaker and hearer are aware of a similar referent, minds cannot meet, agreement cannot be reached, communication is checked as effectively as when one snaps off a radio.”
“The point of every discussion is to find the referent.”
In a given context a statement may be true or false, but there is no such entity as “truth”
science and sanity: an introduction to non-aristotelian systems and general semantics
alfred korzybski 1970 9780937298015
“If one is unconscious of abstracting, he gives to words a definite, one-valued meaning —“She is a bad girl, with no ifs, ands, or buts”. He interprets another person's speech as always having that meaning. His reactions tend to be hasty and emotional, largely from the thalamus region. He jumps down your throat with “You're wrong!” He is full of ultimate truths and eternal principles. With abstractions fixed as entities rather than consciously recognized as verbal tags, we begin to worry about “worry”, and develop a fear of “fear”. A hospital for nervous diseases looms not far ahead. Belief in “belief” meanwhile leads to fanaticism and dogmatism.
Young men and women make an entity out of the abstraction “marriage”, conceiving it to be an actual state blissful beyond imagining. When they marry, the resulting shock is needlessly great. “Heaven” is less devastating, because its devotees can file no later reports —except in spook parlours. Boys in 1917 who expected war to be a horrible business suffered less from shell shock, according to Korzybski, than those suffused with “glory”, “patriotism”, and a “battle for democracy”.
Observe that in the semantic approach to abstractions there is no plea to “think things through” —the stock retort of one dogmatist to another. “Thinking things through” has heretofore largely meant more useless mental labour —from thought to word and back to thought again. Here, on the contrary, we are trying to find the object, the referent to which the thought and word refer, and after that to discover its attributes and relationships. This means a new discipline in many “fields, a tearing-down of the scaffold of what has passed for thought and building afresh.
The structure of language inherited from our primitive ancestors is such that it provides separate terms for factors which are inseparable in fact. “Matter”, “space”, “time”, constitute one such group; “body”, “mind”, constitute another. We thus try to split in our heads what is unsplittable in the real world.”