There is fresh water in the next cove.
A hostile war party is approaching.
The market for eggs in Bora Bora is very good.
These sentences are highly significant to the islander, because he is thirsty, because his island society is threatened, or because he is in the egg business. Such messages he might well call “news.”
It will be seen that the criteria of the logician and the positive scientist are of no use to the islander. They do not distinguish between those messages which are of consequence for life on the island and those messages which are not. The logician would place these two sentences
A hostile war party is approaching.
The British are coming [to Concord].
in the same pigeonhole. But to the islander they are very different. The islander lumps together synthetic and analytic, sense and nonsense (to the positivist) sentences under the group “science.” Nor is the division tidy. Some sentences do not seem to be provided for at all. The islander is fully aware of the importance of the sentence about the melting point of lead and he puts it under “science.” He is fully aware of the importance of the sentence about the hostile war party and he puts it under “news.” But where does he put the sentence about the approach of the British to Concord? He does not really care; he would be happy to put it in the “science” pigeonhole if the scientists want it. All he knows is that it is not news to him or the island.
If the islander was asked to say what was wrong with the first division of the logician and scientist, he might reply that it unconsciously assumes that this very special posture of “science” (including poetry, psychoanalysis, philosophy, etc.) is the only attitude that yields significant sentences. People who discover how to strike this attitude of “science” seem also to decide at the same time that they will only admit as significant those sentences which have been written by others who have struck the same attitude. Yet there are times when they act as if this were not the case. If a group of island logicians are busy in a seminar room sifting through the messages from the bottles and someone ran in crying, “The place is on fire!” the logicians would not be content to classify the message as a protocol sentence. They would also leave the building. The castaway will observe only that their classification does take account of the extraordinary significance which they as men have attributed to the message.
To the castaway it seems obvious that a radical classification of the sentences cannot abstract from the concrete situation in which one finds oneself. He is as interested as the scientist in arriving at a rigorous and valid classification. If the scientist should protest that one can hardly make such a classification when each sentence may have a different significance for every man who hears it, the castaway must agree with him. He must agree, that is, that you cannot classify without abstracting. But he insists that the classification be radical enough to take account of the hearer of the news, of the difference between a true piece of news which is not important and a true piece of news which is important. In order to do this, we do not have to throw away the hard-won objectivity of the scientist. We have only to take a step further back so that we may see objectively not only the sentences but the positive scientist who is examining them. After all, the objective posture of the scientist is in the world and can be studied like anything else in the world.
If the scientist protests that in taking one step back to see the scientist at work, the castaway is starting a game of upstaging which has no end — for why not take still another step back and watch the castaway watching the scientist — the castaway replies simply that this is not so. For if you take a step back to see the castaway classifying the messages, you will only see the same thing he sees as he watches the scientist, a man working objectively.
Then, if the castaway is a serious fellow who wants to do justice both to the scientists and to the news in the bottle, he is obliged to become not less but more objective and to take one step back of the scientist, so that he can see him at work in the laboratory and seminar room — and see the news in the bottle too.
What he will see then is not only that there are two kinds of sentences in the bottles but that there are two kinds of postures from which one reads the sentences, two kinds of verifying procedures by which one acts upon them, and two kinds of responses to the sentences.
The classification of the castaway would be something like this:
The Difference between a Piece of Knowledge
and a Piece of News
(1) The Character of the Sentence
By “piece of knowledge” the castaway means knowledge sub specie aeternitatis. By sub specie aeternitatis he means not what the philosopher usually means but rather knowledge which can be arrived at anywhere by anyone and at any time. The islanders may receive such knowledge in the bottle and be glad to get it — if they have not already gotten it. But getting this knowledge from across the seas is not indispensable. By its very nature the knowledge can also be reached, in principle, by the islander on his island, using his own raw materials, his own scientific, philosophical, and artistic efforts.
Such knowledge would include not only the synthetic and analytic propositions of science and logic but also the philosophical and poetic sentences in the bottle. To the logician the sentence “Lead melts at 330 degrees” seems to be empirical and synthetic. It cannot be deduced from self-evident principles like the analytic sentence “2 + 2 = 4.” It cannot be arrived at by reflection, however strenuous. Yet to the castaway this sentence is knowledge sub specie aeternitatis. It is a property of lead on any island at any time and for anyone.
The following sentences the castaway would consider knowledge sub specie aeternitatis even though they might not have been so considered in the past. Notice that the list includes a mixture of synthetic, analytic, normative, poetic, and metaphysical sentences.
Lead melts at 330 degrees.
Chicago is on the Hudson River or Chicago is not on the Hudson River.
2 +2 = 4.
The pressure of a gas is a function of temperature and volume.
Acute myelogenous leukemia may be cured by parenteral administration of metallic beryllium.
The dream symbol, house and balcony, usually represents a woman.
Men should not kill each other.
Being comprises essence and existence.
He is not saying that all the sentences are true — at least one (the one about leukemia) is probably not. But they are all pieces of knowledge which can be arrived at (or rejected) by anyone on any island at any time. If true they will hold true for anyone on any island at any time. He has no quarrel with the positivist over the admissibility of poetic and metaphysical statements. Admissible or not, it is all the same to him. All he is saying is that this kind of sentence may be arrived at (has in fact been arrived at) independently by people in different places and can be confirmed (or rejected) by people in still other places.
By a “piece of news” the castaway generally means a synthetic sentence expressing a contingent and nonrecurring event or state of affairs which event or state of affairs is peculiarly relevant to the concrete predicament of the hearer of the news.