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On the Postulates of Empiricism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2022
Extract
In undertaking a discussion of the postulates of empiricism, I am confronted by the necessity of being empirical concerning the very postulates themselves. Were those postulates directly accessible to the average mind it would hardly be necessary to enter upon an analysis the success of which seems but a remote possibility even to one who has spent years in the effort to trace the priceless ingredient of the method of experiment in the cheap madness of scientific success. How these postulates reveal themselves to more than the average mind would, of course, be very difficult for me to surmise, except by an ambitious extrapolation. It would have to be an extrapolation of the kind which telescopes a multitude of small rational steps into one swift unerring instinctive flight to the goal of goals. Yet, though genius with one intuitive glance may perceive the postulates as revelation—why not grant that there may be seers who can contemplate eternal objects unblinkingly?—it would still have to descend to mundane means to inform the average mind of its transcendental perceptions. Must not everyone indeed attend to the demands of the average mind?
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- Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association 1941
Footnotes
∗
A chapter for a “Festschrift” in honor of Prof. E. A. Singer, Jr.
References
1 My scepticism is expressed at greater length in “What is Insight?”, Philosophy of Science, Vol. 7, No. 2, April, 1940.
2 See my “What is Freedom?”, Philosophy of Science, Vol. 7, No. 3, July, 1940.
3 See my “Emergence Without Mystery”, Philosophy of Science, Vol. 6, pp. 17-24 January, 1939.
4 Henri Poincaré: The Foundations of Science.
5 I have used spatial relations among symbols to define “the structural meaning” of a term. See my “Toward a General Semantics”, Erkenntnis, 1936, and Philosophy of Science, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 271-4, April, 1941.
6 See my “An Examination of the Quantum Theories, IV.” Philosophy of Science, Vol. 2, No. 3, pp. 334-43. July, 1935.
7 Edgar A. Singer, Jr., “Mind as an Observable Object”, Journal of Philosophy, 1911.
8 See my Meet the Sciences, The Williams & Wilkins Co., Baltimore.
9 See E. V. Huntington's “The Fundamental Propositions of Algebra” in J. W. A. Young's Monographs on Topics of Modern Mathematics, Longmans, Green and Co.
10 R. Ablowitz, “The Theory of Emergence”, Philosophy of Science, Vol. 6, pp. 1-16, January, 1939.
11 For illustrations see my “An Examination of the Quantum Theories, I, II, III, IV.” Philosophy of Science, Vol. l, pp. 71-7, January, 1934; Vol. 1, pp. 170-5, April, 1934; Vol. 1, pp. 398-408, October, 1934; Vol. 2, pp. 334-43, July, 1935.
12 For a theory of “conjugates” and illustrations see my “What is an Atom?”, Philosophy of Science, Vol. 6, pp. 261-5, July, 1939, “What is a Gene?”, Philosophy of Science, Vol. 6, pp. 385-9, October, 1939; “What is a Monad?”, Philosophy of Science, Vol. 7, pp. 1-6, January, 1940.
13 E. V. Huntington, Philosophy of Science, Vol. 4, p. 484, October, 1937.
14 Cf. L. A. White's, “Science is Sciencing”, Philosophy of Science, Vol. 5, pp. 369-89, October, 1938.
15 C. W. Morris, Foundations of the Theory of Signs, International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Vol. 1, No. 2, describes semiotic as the science which uses special signs to state facts about signs.
16 E. T. Bell, “Finite or Infinite?”, Philosophy of Science, Vol. 1, pp. 30-49, January, 1934.
17 A linguistic situation is an exceedingly complex relation involving a speaker, a listener, words and objects. There is even more than that in an actual situation because of the background of the purpose of the communication and the uncertainty whether the meanings are sufficiently clear to produce adequate actions. There may or may not be an additional haze due to the fact that the thought of the speaker has not been properly translated into speech or that the speech which reaches the hearer has not been properly translated into his thought and action. Still another difficulty that confronts us is that we have to use speech in order to criticize speech and that our own remarks may suffer from the lesson they teach.
An experiment with a nonsense symbol like “glob” shows readily enough that words have no meanings in themselves or in nature, but acquire meaning by a conventional and social agreement. In time, a word undergoes evolution, ages and may die. At any point in its career, the final court of appeal is “good usage”. This good usage is a kind of summary of all the uses the word has been put to. It is a reflection of all the situations in which the word has been used as a “pointer”. This in turn is a reflection of every variety of error, ambiguity, generalization, and vagueness that characterizes any kind of speech, not excluding mathematics itself. For purposes of classification we may keep in mind three types of limitations of language: (1) Those arising in words as such; (2) Those arising in words as references to things; (3) Those arising from the psychology of word users.
As language stands now, there is scarcely a word or a term which has not become smeared out. This phenomenon we shall call the “term-essence haze”. It refers to the fact that the essence or clear concept is surrounded by many overtones which are almost impossible to dissect away. These overtones are accretions, metaphors, connotations. Two or more terms as used in experience actually hang together better on account of their smeared out character. In these composite situations the framework may be called a “context”. The contexts of expressions may be very hazy. This is the context haze. It is only rarely that contexts can be set with precision even in science. Attempts to break these hazes by definition are usually frustrated by two unfortunate qualities of definition: (1) The necessity of circularity; (2) The appearance of infinite regresses when we attempt to set up processes in place of things in definition. Definition, however, is a very good cure, enabling us to create clusters of instances which make us more confident of success in the use of terms in new situations. Their circularity and infinite regression is not vicious, but benign.
The limitation of words as references to things lies mainly in the dangers of retracing the road of abstraction. We abstract convenient concepts from concrete situations, which, however, change on the return journey because they do not come back to the original concrete situation. There is no guarantee that the new situation is strictly analogous to the old. If it is not, we have the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Divergence between the abstract and the concrete actually leads to a conception of knowledge of two kinds: (1) Knowledge by acquaintance, which is concrete or nearly concrete; (2) Knowledge by description, which is abstract. It also leads to a whole family of distinctions which are much more artificial than they seem to be, for example, of the objects of knowledge into things, ideas, ideas of things, classes of things, classes of ideas, universal fictions, and the like. Abstraction seems to run up some such ladder, becoming, as it were, less and less objective as it goes up. This may only be an indication of the relativity of objectivity, rather than an indication of the lack of objectivity of some things we refer to in language. Everything is a thing for thought and speech.
The limitations of a psychological character are extremely numerous. They range from word worship based on the belief that there is something natural or supernatural about words, to the delicate illusions concerning the absolute character of mathematical symbols. Thought is constantly obstructed by taboos on words, actual fear of words, for example, the word “death”, analogies due to similarities in sound and spelling, impressions from lack of analogies (lucus a non lucendo), and even the faiths of philosophers, e.g. of Bertrand Russell, “that every term is immutable and indestructible.”
18 Edgar A. Singer, Jr., “The Philosophy of Experiment” in The Symposium, Vol. 1, April, 1930.
19 H. Jeffreys, Theory of Probability, Oxford Press, 1939, pp. 8-9.