‡ It is revealing that those philosophers who hold that knowledge is altogether an affair of electrocolloidal brain events must also deny that there are such things as assertions. Thus, Russell says that the word “is” in the sentence A is yellow means nothing, that a logical language will express the same meaning by saying yellow (A).
Russell can leave out the “is” if he likes. But the fact remains that when we see the logician’s symbols, yellow (A), we must know whether he has put them on the blackboard as an exercise in logical possibility, or whether he means that such is indeed the case, that A is in truth yellow.
Similarly, a scientist must make a distinction between real and possible pointer readings. His assistant, whose job it is to call off readings, may fall into a daydream and utter aloud all the numbers on the dial, “2.1, 2.2, 2.3,” etc. But the scientist must still know which of these is actually the reading at the moment.
Some further symbolic notation is required to signify the difference. Perhaps we could subdivide Russell’s yellow (A):
yellow (A) (?) yellow (A) (!)
* F. Mainx: “…the experience of inorganic and that of organic science join together to give a unitary and consistent picture of the world, derived from the fundamental unity of method.”
* Although anthropologists differ greatly in their philosophical allegiances, it is my contention that the two main schools, the functionalists and the superorgani-cists, share a common theoretical posture toward their subject matter. A functionalist like Malinowski may understand culture more or less biologically, as “an instrumental reality, an apparatus for the satisfaction of fundamental needs, that is, organic survival, environmental adaptation, and continuity in the biological sense. A superorganicist like Kroeber or White or Sorokin may understand culture as an autonomous reality which is “participated in and produced by organic individuals.”
In both cases, however, man himself, his personality, is understood as a function of an underlying reality, in the one case, a function of his encounter and response to his environment, in the other, as a function of the culture in which he particpates. In neither case is culture understood as the creation of man which stands over against man as the means by which he can develop the potentialities of his nature— or the means by which he can fall prey to anonymity. For a searching critique of modern anthropology from the point of view of a realistic humanism, see David Bidney’s Theoretical Anthropology (New York, 1953).
* I use the word “causal” without prejudice. It means whatever the reader would have it mean in the context: either efficient causality or a probability function.
* Another member of the Viennese circle is highly critical of Carnap’s logicizing of natural laws. Moritz Schlick writes: “It [the natural law] is then not a natural law any more at all; it is not even a proposition, but merely a rule for the manipulation of signs. This whole reinterpretation appears trivial and useless. Any such interpretation which blurs such fundamental distinctions is extremely dangerous.”
* Heisenberg’s uncertainty relations have been hailed by some enemies of science as proof of the freedom or irrationality or whatnot of the ultimate particles of matter. As Nagel observes, however, “a more sober and prima facie plausible account of the uncertainty relations is that they express relatively large but unaccountable modifications in certain features of subatomic elements, resulting from an interaction between these elements and the instruments of measurement.”
* It would be possible to develop the same antinomy in other “symbolic forms”— art, history, religion.
For example, a contrast could be drawn between the pragmatic theories of art as a “play activity” or the behavioristic theory of art as a traffic in emotions, on the one hand, and the seriousness of the artistic enterprise and the revelatory nature of the art experience, on the other.
In history, a contrast could be drawn between the basically particular and historical character of the scientific observation, on the one hand, and the general character of the ultimate scientific expression, the scientific law, and the inability of the scientific method to grasp singulars except insofar as they exemplify general principles.
As for religion, although it is listed by Cassirer as a separate “symbolic form,” the very nature of the method used cancels the difference between religion and myth, since it refuses on a priori grounds to grant cognitive content to religion, and so ranks religion as a “higher form” of myth. Once the scientific method is elevated to a supreme all-construing world view, it becomes impossible to consider a more radical science, the science of being. Thus, when Cassirer is confronted with the assertion of pure existence which Moses received from God as His Name, I am Who Am, he is obliged to see it as a piece of semantical magic, a “mythical predication of being.”
It seemed more expedient, however, to develop the antinomy by using the same three “symbolic forms” used by Cassirer in his major work: myth, language, and science.
* D. Bidney: “The thesis I am concerned to establish is that the postulate of an ontological human nature is a prerequisite of both individual and social psychology.”
11. SEMIOTIC AND A THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE
A STUDENT OF current philosophies of science must sooner or later become aware of a curious state of affairs. If he is accustomed to the discipline and unity of a particular science, he may reasonably expect that a philosophy of science will in turn confer a larger unity on the elements of the scientific enterprise, not merely the various data of the sciences, but also the conclusions and the activities of the scientists themselves. This is not, however, what he will find. What he is more apt to encounter in the various symposia and encyclopedias of unified science is an inveterate division of subject matters. Some may be written entirely in one language and some entirely in the other; some may be a mixture of both; but neither seems to have much to do with the other. The two approaches are (1) the nomothetic method with which he is familiar, arising from the “inexpugnable belief,” as Whitehead put it, “that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner exemplifying general principles”; and (2) the quite different program which Russell, after completing the Principia Mathematica, staked out for philosophy as its sole concern — the logical analysis of empirical propositions established by perception and science.
To take the most ambitious and interesting example of a “metascience,” semiotic, the science of signs — interesting because, unlike pure symbolic logic, it tries to unite logical analysis with the explanatory enterprise of science, and because, whatever its short-comings, it has at least hit upon the fruitful notion of man as the sign-using animal — here too one encounters the same division of subject matters with no visible means of getting from one to the other, despite the many assurances that semiotic confers unity. If one expects a larger epistemological unity in which the relation of logical analysis to the scientific explanation of natural events is to be made clear, he will be disappointed. He will get logical analysis and he will get scientific theorizing, but he will not learn what one has to do with the other. * There are studies on the biology of sign function, and here one recognizes a basic continuity with the manifold of natural phenomena. When one speaks of animal A responding to buzzer B by salivation in expectation of food F, one is speaking a language familiar to psychologist, physiologist, and physicist alike, the language of spatio-temporal events which lend themselves to causal hypothesis. Stimulus-and-response events occur among natural existents and are mediated by physical structures and a causal nexus which is recognized as valid for organic and inorganic matter.† Thus, whatever the limitations of a biological science of signs in man and animals,‡ one readily recognizes its validity as far as it goes. But then one suddenly finds oneself in the charged atmosphere of the Polish semanticists with their scoldings at the human abuse of signs. At one moment one is studying sign behavior as a natural science, in which “interpreters” behave according to lawful empirical regularities, and in the next moment as a quasiethical science, in which “interpreters” disobey semantical rules and in general behave stupidly and perversely. There will also be articles dealing exclusively with syntactical rules in logic and mathematics, with the arbitrary formation of calculi, with the principles of logical implication. Or one may read statements by the same semioticist that (1) the basic terms of semiotic are all formulable in terms applicable to behavior as it occurs in an environment, and (2) semiotic can be presented as a deductive system with undefined terms and primitive sentences which allow the deduction of other sentences as theorems.