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Relation in Reality and Symbolism
(A Logico-Linguistic Essay)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2022
Extract
The sub-title of this paper is not an apology, but is an “apologia”: the paper is an “essay” in the etymological sense, because, so far as I know, nothing better is possible in the present state of inquiry into the no-man's-land lying between official logic and official linguistics. In trying to write on logico-linguistics for years I have been saved from despair many times by the confession of an eminent mathematician: Professor E. T. Bell, in his little book The Queen of the Sciences, after a particularly difficult passage blurts out: “This sentence is riddled with inconsistencies. It is a fair sample of the difficulties of talking sense about the foundations of reasoning,—mathematical or other.” (P. 136.) The present essay is emphatically concerned with ‘the foundations of reasoning’.
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- Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association 1940
References
1 This may call for some modification of my statement that the proposition is a triad, after the formula SrP, with each symbol denoting an entity of some sort. But still less is the dyadic pattern admissible. (See Philosophical Review, XI.VIII, p. 60.)
2 Metaphysics is always intruding upon semantics, and once in it ‘spoils the broth.‘ At this point I accept at least for semantics the doctrine involved in Dewey's phrase “universe of discourse and universe of having.” (Experience and Nature, p. 140, 1st ed.) (See also my “Preface to Logic”, Monist, Jan. and April, 1931.)
3 Logic, p. 55.
4 For fuller statement, see Philosophy of Science, Vol. 4, No. 4, p. 474. The terms are of course taken from their use in connection with coins but without any considerable analogy.
5 It may fuller stress the importance of this terminology to note that the “familiar” English words “word” and “meaning” both overlap in their denotation: “word” includes both obverse and reverse; and “meaning” includes both reverse and pragma. The only word I happen to know which is at once familiar (to those who spoke the language it belongs to) and quite unambiguous, is the Greek logos, which invariably denoted a duality of obverse and reverse,—“thought borne on words” or “words bearing thought.” Doubtless this clarity which appears in Greek philosophical writing was often lost in common parlance. But the word as an element in diction is flawless.
6 Experience and Nature, p. 140.
7 Here as ever the comic intrudes, this time in the form of onomatopeoia, the case of the obverse being like the reverse and the corresponding thing. This little accident of the physical apparatus of language is most annoying to the semanticist because it trips up so many comfortable generalizations.
8 For fuller treatment of some aspects of this see my “The Copula in Aristotle and afterwards”, Philosophical Review, XLVIII, I, pp. 57f., and “Symbolic Logic and the Embedding Language,” Philosophy of Science, Vol. 4, No. 4, pp. 471 f. especially Section X, p. 480.
9 Die logischen Begriffe als geltende Denkeinheiten müssen ihren Ursprung in der Anschauung haben....Wenn auch die phänomenologische Analyse der konkreten Denkerlebnisse nicht zu der ureigne Domäne der reinen Logik gehört, so kann sie doch zur Förderung rein-logischer Forschung nicht entbehrt werden....Alle theoretische Forschung, obschon sie keineswegs bloss in ausdrücklichen Akten oder gar in kompletten Aussagen bewegt, terminiert doch zuletzt in Aussagen.“
Logische Untersuchungen, I, ii, pp. 5, 3.
10 Philosophy, p. 255.
11 On the inadequacy and even blind character of the symbolic technique for expressing relations, see “The Copula in Aristotle.” p. 60.
12 This parallels Hegel's insistence that truth is to be found only in the whole and never in beginning or middle or even end. A schoolboy may “understand” the “law” and commit it to memory and still have no grasp of the truth involved in it.
13 Physics seems to have about arrived at such a scheme since it says its ultimates, electrons and protons, are “charges of electricity,” but to the question, Charges upon what? it has no answer except to chide the inquirer for his ignorance. Perhaps energy and relation may be one and the same.
14 Philosophy and Civilization, p. 77 et seq. This essay was first published under the title “The Social as Category” in the Monist, Apr. 1928.