* Some of the bottles must have been launched by Rudolf Carnap, since the sentences are identical with those he uses in the article “Formal and Factual Science.”
* See, for example, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger in What Is Life? and the psychiatrist C. G. Jung in Der Geist der Psychologie.
† I wish to make an objective distinction here without pejoration to castaways on the one hand or scientists, scholars, mystics, and poets, on the other — while at the same time readily admitting we could use a few more of the absent-minded variety at, this time.
* If the depth psychologist objects that the scientist and artist is no different from anyone else: he undertakes his science and his art so that he may satisfy the deepest unconscious needs of his personality by “sublimating” and so on— the castaway will not quarrel with him. He will observe only that, whatever his psychological motivation may be, the scientist and artist — and depth analyst — undertake a very extraordinary activity in virtue of which they stand over against the world as its knowers.
* If one thinks of the Christian gospel primarily as a communication between a newsbearer and a hearer of news, one realizes that the news is often not heeded because it is not delivered soberly. Instead of being delivered with the sobriety with which other important news would be delivered — even by a preacher — it is spoken either in a sonorous pulpit voice or at a pitch calculated to stimulate the emotions. But emotional stimuli are not news. The emotions can be stimulated on any island and at any time.
* Einstein’s discovery of the equivalence of matter and energy and of the ratio of the equivalence was a momentous advance of science. As it happened, it was also a piece of good news for the Allies in World War II. Indeed, pure science, research sub specie aetemitatis, may be undertaken under the pressure of a historical predicament. But the point is that it may also be undertaken — and Einstein’s research was undertaken — with no thought of its possible bearing on politics.
† True, after the announcement, the way out could then be seen by the conferee from where he sits, and so the news verified before it is heeded and acted upon. The event then takes place at an organic level of animal response. But the difference still holds: the prime importance which the hearer attaches to the announcement, even
though it is of no greater scientific significance than the sentence “There is a fly on your nose”; the response of the hearer of the sentence, the getting out rather than the verification in situ.
* Although primarily a teacher, a Person, Christianity, of course, involves a teaching too.
* A similar distinction is made by Newman between real assent and notional assent.
7. THE MYSTERY OF LANGUAGE
LANGUAGE IS AN extremely mysterious phenomenon. By mysterious I do not mean that the events which take place in the brain during an exchange of language are complex and little understood — although this is true too. I mean, rather, that language, which at first sight appears to be the most familiar sort of occurrence, an occurrence which takes its place along with other occurrences in the world — billiard balls hitting other billiard balls, barkings of dogs, cryings of babies, sunrises, and rainfalls — is in reality utterly different from these events. The importance of a study of language, as opposed to a scientific study of a space-time event like a solar eclipse or rat behavior, is that as soon as one scratches the surface of the familiar and comes face to face with the nature of language, one also finds himself face to face with the nature of man.
If you were to ask the average educated American or Englishman or Pole, or anyone else acquainted with the scientific temper of the last two hundred years, what he conceived the nature of language to be, he would probably reply in more or less the following way:
When I speak a word or sentence and you understand me, I utter a series of peculiar little sounds by which I hope to convey to you the meaning I have in mind. The sounds leave my mouth and travel through the air as waves. The waves strike the tympanic membrane of your outer ear and the motion of the membrane is carried to the inner ear, where it is transformed into electrical impulses in the auditory nerve. This nerve impulse is transmitted to your brain, where a very complex series of events takes place, the upshot of which is that you “understand” the words; that is, you either respond to the words in the way I had hoped you would or the words arouse in you the same idea or expectation or fear I had in mind. Your understanding of my sounds depends upon your having heard them before, upon a common language. As a result of your having heard the word ball in association with the thing ball, there has occurred a change in your brain of such a character that when I say ball you understand me to mean ball.
This explanation of language is not, of course, entirely acceptable to a linguist or a psychologist. But it is the sort of explanation one would give to a question of this kind. It is the sort of explanation to be found in the Book of Knowledge and in a college psychology textbook. It may be less technical or a great deal more technical — no doubt modern philosophers of meaning would prefer the term response to idea in speaking of your understanding of my words — but, technical or not, we agree in general that something of the kind takes place. The essence of the process is a series of events in space-time: muscular events in the mouth, wave events in the air, electrocolloidal events in the nerve and brain.
The trouble is that this explanation misses the essential character of language. It is not merely an oversimplified explanation; it is not merely an incomplete or one-sided explanation. It has nothing at all to do with language considered as language.
What I wish to call attention to is not a new discovery, a new piece of research in psycholinguistics which revolutionizes our concept of language as the Michelson-Morley experiment revolutionized modern physics. It is rather the extraordinary sort of thing language is, which our theoretical view of the world completely obscures. This extraordinary character of language does not depend for its unveiling upon a piece of research but is there under our noses for all to see. The difficulty is that it is under our noses; it is too close and too familiar. Language, symbolization, is the stuff of which our knowledge and awareness of the world are made, the medium through which we see the world. Trying to see it is like trying to see the mirror by which we see everything else.
There is another difficulty. It is the fact that language cannot be explained in the ordinary terminology of explanations. The terminology of explanations is the native attitude of the modern mind toward that which it does not understand — and is its most admirable trait. That attitude is briefly this: Here is a phenomenon…how does it work? The answer is given as a series of space-time events. This is how C works; you see, this state of affairs A leads to this state of affairs B, and B leads to C. This attitude goes a long way toward an understanding of billiards, of cellular growth, of anthills and sunrises. But it cannot get hold of language.