A chicken does not know whether the earth is flat or round or a bowl, but a man, primitive or technological, will account for the earth one way or another.
1.522. Sentences refer to different worlds.
A sentence may refer to the here-and-now world, a past world, a future world, an imaginary world, a theoretical world.
There are often cues or referring words in the sentence which indicate its world.
That is a balloon. (Present world)
President Kennedy was assassinated. (Past world)
Communism will disappear. (Future world)
Once upon a time there lived a king. (Fictional past world)
There was this traveling salesman. (Fictional world, joke)
In this dream I saw a burning house. (Dream world)
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. (Hypothetical world)
The square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the opposite sides. (Abstract world)
Once upon a time is a referring phrase which clearly specifies its world for the listener. That in That is a balloon is a referring word which indicates something being looked at or pointed at. But not all sentences have referring words which specify the world of the sentence. In any case a world must be supplied by the listener. Some sentences are ambiguous. Thus a patient may say to his therapist:
This traveling salesman was hoping to meet a farmer’s daughter.
The sentence may be: (1) the beginning of a joke, (2) an account of a dream, (3) a facetious but nonetheless true declaration of lust by the patient, who is in fact a traveling salesman.*
1.523. Since a sentence entails a world for both utterer and receiver, both utterer and receiver necessarily see themselves as being placed vis-à-vis the world, A sentence utterer cannot not be placed vis-à-vis the world of the sentence. If he is not placed, then his relation to the world of the sentence is the relation of not being placed.
Some sentences are uttered and received in the everyday world of marketplace and fireside.
Broker: IBM is up two points.
Husband: The baby is crying, dear.
Other sentences, e.g., scientific propositions, are uttered, so to speak, out of the world, that is to say, from a posture abstracted from the everyday world, or as the scholastics used to say, sub specie aeternitatis. From this posture world items tend to be seen not as consumer articles or sources of need-satisfactions but rather as specimens to be classified or events to be arrayed in causal chains. Even concrete sentences, uttered from this posture, are received as propositions in hypothetico-deductive systems.
Chemist A to Chemist B: The temperature is now 102!
This sentence is not a comment on the weather but is rather an evidential sentence, perhaps an observation of a pointer reading at the end of an experiment which serves to confirm a hypothetico-deductive system.†
The peculiar vocation of the therapist requires that he listen to both kinds of sentences, distinguish one from the other, and respond accordingly.
Thus the sentence
After what happened yesterday, I’ve decided that life is not worth living.
is open to one of several readings. It may be the serious expression of a decision by one man in the world to another. Perhaps the patient intends to commit suicide. More likely, it is uttered by way of a general complaint and to pass the time of day. But perhaps also it could be uttered as a data sentence, i.e., a product of the joint patient-therapist investigation of the patient’s illness. The patient is saying: I have indeed reached a decision but rather than act on it by committing suicide I am going to play the language game of analysis and offer it as data. The therapist in turn is required to decide on the spot whether the sentence (1) is a cry for help, (2) asserts commonplace low spirits, (3) offers data for the language game of analysis, or (4) is all three.
It will be seen in this context that Sullivan’s description of the psychiatrist as a participant-observer is in fact an accurate characterization of the semiotic options available in the therapist-patient encounter.
1.53. Every sentence is uttered and received in a medium.
The medium is a nontrivial parameter or variable in every transaction in which sentences are used. The medium is not necessarily the message, but the message can be strongly influenced by the medium.
In learned or instinctive behavior, stimulus S1 is received by an organism which in turn responds as it has learned or been wired to respond. To a similar stimulus S2 it responds similarly according as S2 resembles S1. A dog responds to his master’s whistle or to a recording of his master’s whistle in the same way.
But the sentence utterance I need you can provoke varying responses according as the medium varies through which it is transmitted.
If the President says to me, “I need you!” my response will vary according as the message reaches me over television or by way of a person-to-person phone call — even though the acoustic and phonemic properties of the two utterances may be identical.
1.54. Every sentence has a normative dimension.
The true-or-false property which Aristotle ascribed to propositions is only one of the norms of sentence utterances. A sentence may be true or false, significant or nonsensical, trite or fresh, bad art or good art, etc.
Behavioral scientists are uncomfortable with the normative because natural science has traditionally had nothing to do with norms. As a consequence, behavioral scientists are usually content to yield the field, to leave true-or-false propositions to logicians, bad sentences to grammarians, metaphors to poets.
Yet sentences are items of behavior and these items have normative dimensions. Therefore a behavioral account of sentence utterances must give an account of these norms.
Behavioral scientists need not have made themselves so miserable. For the fact is that the normative dimension of language behavior is not an awkward addendum to be stuck onto the elegant corpus of behavioral science. No, the normative dimension of sentence utterance is a fundamental property of the coupling of the elements of the sentence, whether the sentence be a true-or-false proposition or a good-or-bad work of art.
A sentence utterance is not like other world events and is not isomorphic with the world event or relation the sentence is about. A world event or relation is generally either an energy exchange (sodium reacting with water) or a real relation (China being bigger than Japan). But a sentence is a coupling of elements by a coupler. It is bothersome to call a world event or relation good or bad. What is good or bad about sodium reacting with water or China being bigger than Japan? But, since a sentence is a coupling of elements by a coupler, these elements can be coupled well or badly.*
World events and relations are neither true nor false but sentences can be. Yet true-or-false is only one normative dimension of sentences.
Here are some others.
Clouds are fleece is false as a literal statement, true in a sense as a metaphor, bad in the sense of being a trite metaphor.
That is a sparrow may be a true assertion of class relationship but it may also be perfunctory, a bored assignment of a commonplace object (English sparrow) to a commonplace class.
That is a dusky seaside sparrow may assert a similar relationship, yet it may be uttered with all the excitement and sense of discovery of a bird-watcher coming upon an occasional species.
Even nondeclarative sentences have normative dimensions.