No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
The Power of Words
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
Extract
The origin of this paper is a problem: I had long been struck by the fact that if my glance happened to fall on a newspaper, a message on a note pad, printing on a label, etc., I would begin to read what was there written or printed—if I could see it and it was in English. If I can see it, and it is in English, I cannot but read what my glance falls on, even if I wish not to do so. So my reading—at least on these occasions and of this brief sort—seemed to be involuntary. The illiterate person, of course, cannot read and, in that way, is not free to read. The person learning to read does not read freely. But the ‘free’ reader is not free not- to read that on which his glance falls.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1993
References
1 In somewhat similar manner if I hear a brief remark made in English, I shall be able to understand it, or at least repeat it. But I shall concentrate on reading.
2 I must thank Mr. S. S. Pollock, consultant neurologist, Canterbury and Thanet Health Authority, for his help in preparing this paper. All mistakes, of course, are entirely my own.
3 Neurologists have established that this blink is a ‘reflex’ which usage has become part of lay talk. It is protective and depends on the CNS.
4 ‘We control, by will, the movements of our limbs’, p. 27, Neurology, by Bickerstaff, E. R., (London: Unibooks, 4th edition, 1987.)Google Scholar
5 Some sorts of action, in order to be successful, must be executed without due deliberation or any deliberation at all. The tennis player's most difficult volleys are ‘instinctive’, i.e., immediate. Yet such a volley may be executed with skill and judgment, so that the player may, and can properly, blame herself for volleying a ball that was going out or—and worse—for then clumsily hitting it into the net. Almost any action can be ill-considered or, even, precipitate.
6 I have not been able to check the origin or provenance of this story, but its intelligibility is sufficient for our purposes: a man decided to commit suicide and so threw himself from the top of a skyscraper. After falling some distance, a strong gust of turbulence blew him in through an open window of a television studio. He was immediately interviewed and confessed that, having taken his irrevocable step, he immediately had changed his mind, or at any rate decided that really he wanted to live. However, those who choose to commit suicide by cutting their throats, can be identified as suicides rather than homicide by the characteristic preliminary cuts on their throats when resolve temporarily failed or they simply did not cut deep enough.
7 P. 6, Human Neurophysiology, (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990).Google Scholar
8 I once heard an ad. on a local radio station in the West (of the US) in which the disc-jockey said ‘Now listen you folks—I don't want you to think about monkeys for the next thirty seconds’. This wonderful philosophical joke depends on our having, however briefly, to think about what we have just been told not to think about in the immediate future. Furthermore, in speculating about why anyone who pays attention to the request cannot comply with it, we think about thinking about monkeys and, in that way, think about them.
9 For a further discussion of related problems, cf. ‘Morality and Humour’, Cogito, Summer 1989, pp. 132–136.Google Scholar
10 P. 213, The Concept of Mind, (London: Hutchinson's University Library, 1949).Google Scholar
11 Wittgenstein has pointed out (P.I., §302, 3) that we do not say of things, places, persons we see frequently that when we see them they look familiar or even that we recognize them. But, surely, this is only because such recognitions are standard, pervasive, involuntary, therefore unremarkable and thus unremarked. But if, on waking I do not recognize the bedroom in which I have slept the last however many nights, this is only because normally I do—and so something, temporarily one hopes, has gone wrong.
12 Disinterested interest is, of course, morally superior to and more effective than the other sort, unless the practical interest is very pressing. None the less, the desire to get there first, and all that that brings, drives many theoretical scientists in their research. And in philosophy, though we might regret the absence of and yearn for co-operative endeavour, and though we realize that what produces the keenest criticism is not always the desire for truth but victory, and amour propre, perhaps these ignoble motives are most likely to expose and explode pretentiousness, cant, confusion and self-indulgence and are most likely to help us to achieve our proper end.
13 Cf. §§5, 6, 9, 86, 143.