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Theses ad lauream N.89
Excerptum e dissertatione ad lauream
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Nihil Obstat: |
Imprimi Potest: |
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Censor Theol. Deput. |
Archiep. Dublinen. |
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Dublini, die 23° Augusti, 1968 |
Hiberniae Primas. |
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Vidimus et approbamus ad normam Statutorum Athenæi:
Sac. IULIUS GIRARDI
Sac. DARIUS COMPOSTA
Sac. MARIUS MORO
Romae, die 23° mensis Februarii anni 1968.
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1. INTRODUCTION
2. THE GENERAL CHARACTER OF RYLE'S PHILSOPHY
3. THE DISCUSSION REGARDING The Concept of Mind
4. CONCLUDING EVALUATION
A. The Problem of Ryle:
Common sense assures me I am free and responsible for my actions, but on the other hand it is admitted that my way of acting is determined by temperament, heredity and environmental conditioning.1 Is man an autonomous centre of consciousness expressing himself in feeling-revealing behaviour, or is �man� a short-hand expression for a bundle of heterogeneous phenomena? Ryle believes that the conceptual geography of �I�, �you� and �he� is not yet satisfactorily established.2 But in his view such mental perplexities are growing pains that merely indicate one is in a healthy state.3 We are familiar with the concrete, but unsure about the abstract,4 and it is very rare that we are fully aware of all the logical powers of the expressions that we use.5
How can one avoid Platonism without falling into Nominalism? That was Ryle's question in 1927.6 The Concept of Mind7 reveals a similar preoccupation. Ryle attacks the Cartesian myth of the ghost in the machine, but denies that he can be classed as a Behaviourist.
Ryle is seldom accused of Platonism,8 so there is little need to pursue that side of the question but, as he himself anticipated,9 he is often charged with Behaviourism. For others �it is hard to tell whether Ryle follows Aristotle or accepts Behaviourism�.10 I will show that Ryle's thought is susceptible of a fundamentally Aristotelico-Thomistic interpretation.11
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B. Ryle Rejects Platonism:
One good reason for Ryle's rejecting Platonism is that he thinks it was rejected by Plato himself.12 Ryle approves of Occam's razor,13 and opposes Locke's view of ideas as subsistent entities,14 since ideas are not objects but skills in the use of words.15 Hume thought ideas in the sense of images or pictures in the mind's eye were the ultimate elements of thought, but his psychic atomism was further from the truth than Hartley's theory, and his impressions, ideas and passions are not the genuine point de départ of his psychology, but the abortive fruits of mistaken theory.16 Ryle is sceptical of the Third Realm of Meinong and Frege who, for a time at least, affirmed the subsistence of even nonentities and contradictions.17 Likewise, he dissents from Moore's early view of concepts as building-blocks out of which propositions are constructed.18 He rejects the Descriptive Fallacy, or the �Fido�-Fido theory of meaning.19
Because Ryle does not like the Platonic, Lockean and Meinongian overtones of the words �concept�, �idea� and �meaning�, although he does not find these expressions unacceptable in themselves, he usually says that philosophy is not the science of ideas.20
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C. Ryle Rejects Behaviourism:
L Addis claims that Ryle is a Materialist, crypto-Materialist, Aristotelian or Nominalist (these terms being regarded as roughly synonymous) who accepts the reality of substances or bodies, and of doings, happenings, events, occurrences or processes, while denying the reality of dispositions, properties or attributes (which he reduces to collections of doings), and a fortiori of mind.21 But, though one could call Ryle a logical behaviourist, he is certainly not a Behaviourist in any straightforward manner.22
For Ryle knowledge is not just looking at an object. It is judging that something is the case. Introspection is really just remembrance controlled by special interest, and while one can speak of �conscious� in the sense of �vaguely aware�, �embarassed�, �self-critical�, �sentient� or �attentive�, Cartesian constant conscious awareness if a myth.23 But if, in The Concept of Mind,24 Ryle parts company with Descartes who, afraid of being obliged to regard men as machines controlled by post-Galilean physics, developed from the Protestant view of the moral light of conscience a para-optical theory of consciousness, he also refuses to take sides with Hobbes and Gassendi in their contention that thinking is just the making of certain complex noises and movements.25
In Sartre's La Nausée26 Roquentin says: �I want no secret or soul-states. I am neither virgin nor priest enough to play with the inner life. But I very much like to pick up chestnuts. It is only through others that I can come to know anything about myself. I exist only in so far as I act. When I say �I� it seems hollow to me. I can't manage to feel myself very well, I am so forgotten. The only thing left in me is existence which feels it exists. I yawn, lengthily. No one. Antoine Roquentin exists for no one. That amuses me. And just what is Antoine Roquentin? An Abstraction. A pale reflection of myself wavers in my consciousness. Antoine Roquentin� And suddently the �I� pales, pales, and fades out.� Walker would seem to be mistaken in giving a Behaviourist interpretation to these expressions, but he certainly is wrong in thinking they provide a convenient summary of the position of Gilbert Ryle.27
Ryle's view has also been compared to that of Marx, who saw a category mistake �was involved both in attempts, like that of Feuerbach to �reduce� truths about mental operations to physical and biological terms and in the claims of idealists and utopians to make statements about minds refer to a shadow world divorced from physical and biological facts�.28 But since Ryle's doctrine is positive and not merely negative, it would be better compared with the philosophies of those who assent to its positions, than with those theories chiefly linked to it merely in terms of some common denial.
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The Logical Positivists claimed that we mistake the grammatical rules of our language for logical necessities, and saw the main task of philosophy as linguistic legislation or language reform.29 This theory is useful because it helps to make us careful how we use words, but as an account of the task of philosophy it is wrong-headed.
Language can be compared to a map, and it is arguably the chief lesson of Wittgenstein's Tractatus (1921) that, just as recipes cannot help us to write cookery-books, so maps do not indicate their own whereabouts. In Systematically Misleading Expressions (1932) Ryle argued that concepts, or language-recipes, are merely a handy abbreviation for a family of propositions, i.e. for a class of propositions with some common logical power. But if for the later Wittgenstein linguistic rules are like the rules of football or chess, Ryle, on the other hand, approves of Husserl's rejection of Psychologism, the conception of psychological facts as laws, logical structures, ideal unities.31 Mill assumed word-meanings to be prior to sentence-meanings, but for Ryle propositions are prior to, not subsequent upon ideas or terms,32 and the conceptualized rules of language are regarded as imperfect crystallisations of the subtleties of effective speech, a know-how justifying on occasion the flouting of express rules or conventional norms.
Only dead birds are stuffed. �The suggestion that men should coin a different diction to correspond with every difference in the logical powers of ideas� is like suggesting that drill should precede the formation of habits or that children should be taught the rules of grammar before learning to talk.�33 Certain thorny puzzles cannot be solved by the happy knack of making fine distinctions in the sense of ordinary English words.34 Since philosophy regards use it is highly misleading to call it linguistic or non-linguistic.35
Ryle thinks that Wittgenstein decided certain expressions in human language were meaningful and with this decision as his base, tried, in the light of language as a whole, to determine their correct analysis. But for Ryle the choice of propositions said to enjoy objective significance is more or less arbitrary. He does not know what is an authentic object, but says that language-users agree that whatever authentic objects may be, certain more or less arbitrarily chosen propositions signify them.36 Ryle's point would appear to be that the principle of sufficient reason is primary, and the law of non-contradiction is merely a convenient derivation from it. At least he says that James' most noteworthy contribution to philosophy was to restore to it what it had lost since Hume, who was wise enough to be sceptical of his own scepticism, a pinch of salt i.e. a sense of the ridiculous.37
Correctly Charlesworth says that since the form of a sentence cannot be dissociated from its meaning, Russell's notion of logical form is a fiction which explains nothing, that has never been taken seriously, and that Russell has since admitted to be insufficient.38 But while Russell and Wittgenstein once thought all genuine general propositions were truth-functions of atomic propositions, for Ryle Philosophy is informal, not formal logic.39 One might say that for Ryle it is precisely the logical which is the inexpressible, the mystical, which shows itself, because although it can in a way be said, it cannot be printed.
Charlesworth claims that there cannot be a pure specimen of what Austin called a performatory utterance, that words cannot have meanings which are in every respect relative to the particular context of their use, that one must oppose the Idiosyncracy Platitude according to which every expression has its own peculiar logic.40 But such an unacceptable multiplicity of logics consequent upon the impossibility of common words results from the theory of performatory utterance, only if one takes too narrow a view of context and too rigid and impersonal a view of logic.
Ryle cuts the Gordian knot by grounding the perceptible linguistic occurrence in its informing disposition to speak. The concrete is progressively and ineffably known, but abstract law propositions are never known, they are only established.41 Like Bolzano, Frege and Russell, Ryle realizes that logic is neither inductive nor some sort of mental chemistry.42 Just as we do not separate parsing from syntax when we study the grammar of a language, so we should not separate the study of the category differences of terms from the investigation of the rules of inference.43 The vocabulary we use is syntactical from the start, and Ryle argues with Brentano that words are synsemantic, or syncategorematic, and that judgment is an ultimate and irreducible psychic fact.44 Aristotle noted correctly that �is� and �is not� only operate significantly when they are used to express some synthesis, and cannot even be thought of except together with what is combined in such a synthesis.45 Verbs cannot function in isolation, but the verb is the main word in a sentence, and Plato seems to have seen that as in every word there must be a vowel, if the word is to be pronounceable at all, so a verb is necessary for a sentence to have any asserting force.46
Realizing with Aristotle that �exists� cannot function outside its collocation in sentences, Ryle is in sympathy with the Phenomenologists' stress on moi-avec-les-autres-dans-le-monde, and he has said that The Concept of Mind can be regarded as a phenomenological essay. But because Ryle knows that �exists� is not an ingredient in sentences, just as recipes are not ingredients in cakes, he fights shy of the doctrine of the Phenomenologists, just as he rejects all -isms.47
The focal point of Ryle's argument in The Concept of Mind is the distinction between occurrences which if human can all belong to language in a wide sense, and dispositions which are the ineffable grounds of human speech. Dispositions do not reduce to behaviour, since Michael is an excellent swimmer even when fast asleep.49 Neither are dispositions entitites. �To speak of wisdom is to affirm the general fact that there are or might be subjects of whom it could be true to say that they were wise�.50 Dispositions are faculties of�, capacities for�, aptitudes for�51 They cannot be introspected, since they are not objects, and knowing is not looking, but one can become increasingly aware of one's dispositions, such as charity and wisdom, in proportion as they are brought to an ever fuller expression.
Hence, while Heidegger attempts to seek light by going back to the language of the primitive village or of the baby's pram, Ryle thinks it is in science and philosophy that man may best hope to gradually escape from the bondage of metaphor.52 Ryle criticizes Hume since, while he saw that sometimes only a few, ordinary, non-privileged, sample instances sufficed to establish a law, and that conditioning wasn't the whole story, he nevertheless failed to distinguish conditioning or mere habituation from genuine discipline or training.53 The reason why human excellence cannot be taught is that while men can be instructed in truths, they can be only disciplined in methods. And methods are not so much the drills and habits that dispense with intelligence, as the result of the training that enlarges it. �Philosophy is the replacement of category-habits by category-disciplines�.54 Man's cumulative know-how is fostered by practice, schooled by criticism and example, but only slightly based upon theoretical instruction. In a way, virtue is taught, to give the real answer to Socrates' question, but by inspiring an ideal, kindling aspirations, infecting with enthusiasm. And so the history of philosophy has its point, even though philosophical wisdom is personal, essentially incommunicable, and always capable of further enlargement.55 �Dicendum quod anima humana intelligit seipsam per suum intelligere, quod est actus proprius eius, perfecte demonstrans virtutem eius et naturam.�56
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A. The Problem of Mind in History:
Ryle's Taking Sides in Philosophy (1937) is symptomatic of his realization that the history of philosophy has its point. His programme for collaboration in philosophy is admirable, and he has done much toward its realization. His exposé of the doctrine of ideas as mental objects is a positive contribution towards our understanding of Locke, Hume, Hobbes, Stuart Mill, Bolzano, Brentano, Meinong, Husserl, Ingarden, Frege and Russell. His short study of Hume, his treatment of Plato, and his account of the historical emergence of the Analytic approach to philosophy is useful and enlightening, and what he says about Logical Positivism has its value. Logic and Professor Anderson (1950) is one of too few studies of the work of a main figure in Australian philosophy. Unfortunately Ryle's reference to Occam is only fleeting, and he nowhere discusses the doctrine of Scotus. And rather surprisingly he has never said much about Berkeley.
That The Concept of Mind criticises �a debased and vulgarised Cartesianism�57 and not the doctrine Descartes actually held58 is one of its weak points. Leaving critical history on one side and paying no heed to the voice of poet or mystic, the book neglects the natural and permanent bias of common-sense and ordinary language in favour of body-soul dualism, and asserts �that those who subscribe to a dualistic account of man really wanted a criterion for distinguishing between intelligent and non-intelligent behaviour, etc., but got mixed up and instead looked for a cause to serve as a criterion�.59
But while The Concept of Mind is marred by Ryle's �assumption that the origin of the conception of the mind as a ghost within a machine is of purely historical and of no philosophical interest�,60 historical considerations have in any case no claim to the primacy.
Intelligent speech about mind is basically constant, but has to be mediated in the relativities of a historically fluctuating language. The variety of terminology and the complexities of history are illustrations of Ryle's thesis that the number of categories has no theoretical limit.62 While Ryle's manner of speaking is his own, there is a sense in which he does not reject the view of the soul as the entelechy or form of the body,63 though his language is not always clear.
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B. Recent Trends in Biology:
Ryle says that we distinguish between impulsive, reflex and automatic behaviour on the one hand, and intelligent behaviour on the other.64 �It is Thought that is peculiar to the human animal�.65 Whether thinking is or is not to be identified with image-trains or behaviour-complexes is something that cannot be verified or falsified empirically, but philosophically it is false. For we mean by thinking something that can be characterized as mistaken, correct, fallacious, valid, silly or judicious.66 All life involves purpose, and there are higher and higher levels of purposiveness.67
Smart68 and Hogben claim that as it advances biology becomes more and not less mechanistic. And while granting that explicit avowals of mechanism are now rare among biologists, Tomlin69 agrees with E S Russell that the mechanistic habit of thought still constitutes the prevalent mentality among biologists. Smart rightly points out that from �not all explanations are mechanical� it does not by any means follow that �not everything that happens has a mechanical explanation�, and Pirenne thinks that to say human behaviour is not mechanically determined is to arbitrarily preach a new physics, not applicable to human bodies.70 Yet Ryle maintains that while biologists, zoologists and psychologists may follow Kant in paying intellectual lip-service to Newtonian mechanism, like him they steer their inquiries in the light of a semi-Aristotelian vitalism.71
The difficulty of deciding between Ryle and his opponents is at first sight augmented by the fact that Tomlin interprets Vitalism, which Ryle contrasts with Mechanism, as being itself a disguised version of it. But this really clarifies the issue, transposes it from chiefly historical to primarily theoretical areas of debate, and so partially justifies Ryle's failure to give much space to historical considerations in The Concept of Mind.
Recent developments in biology do bring physico-chemical, and so mechanistic considerations to the fore, and it is arguable that a majority of biologists conceive biology in mechanistic terms. Yet this mechanism is remarkably unlike the Mechanism of Hobbes and Gassendi, to which Ryle refers when he says that Mechanism is on the decline. Mechanism in Ryle's sense declines so far as Positivism, Sensism, Associationism, Pragmatism and the like decline. It declines in proportion as men come to realize that knowledge is not sense-acquaintance, and that Matter as such does not exist.72 To the extent that recent developments in empirical science generally make it easier to learn these lessons, Mechanism is on the decline, though, because the lessons always have to be learned, it will in all probability never be eliminated completely.73
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C. Ryle's Theory of Knowledge:
The distinction between knowing and sense-acquaintance occupies an explicit and cardinal place in Ryle's philosophy. While he thinks it possible for me to know my own experiences and the �I� who has them, he sees no a priori grounds for saying that perceptions can only be knowledge if the perceiver and what is perceived are conjoined in a single stream of consciousness. There is no reason for saying that the knower must be near what he knows. Maybe perception doesn't tell us everything about things, but it tells us something, we need not complain of its leading us astray. In any case, it is self-contradictory to say that one can only know one's own experience and the I who has them, or that if one knows anything else, one can do on only by first knowing one's experience and one's �I�.74 Ingarden has shown that knowledge cannot be a relation of Knowing Act - Object, of Cause - Effect, of Effect - Cause, or of Creator - Creation. Knowledge is essentially self-transcending.75 Brentano and Bradley were right in saying that judgment is not a coupling of two ideas. If there is knowledge at all, it is knowledge of facts, and facts are always complex.
Ryle sometimes just states in passing his important doctrine that knowledge cannot possibly be sense-acquaintance. At other times it is developed at length, especially with reference to Plato. Proper names stand for simples, but we do not know simples - one can only know what one can be mistaken about, and it is impossible to judge rightly or wrongly �that seven� or �that five�. In the Sophist (261d) Plato makes the point that an integral sentence is the minimum vehicle of a truth or falsehood, and on this account the minimum expression of knowledge, belief or conjecture. What isolated words convey are not atomic thoughts, but propositional functions i.e. abstractable thought features or thought differences. We learn what they convey not by apprehending their meanings on their own, but only by comparing partly similar, partly dissimilar complete truths and falsehoods. And as in every word there must be a vowel, if the word is to be pronounceable, so a verb is needed to provide a sentence with its asserting force. Nominative expressions call for verbs, as consonants call for vowels. Nouns and verbs can vary independently in sentences, as consonants and vowels in words, but they cannot function by themselves, just as letters cannot be pronounced in isolation. Sentences are not just lists, they state facts, they state what is the case. And we judge e.g. rightly �that seven and five are twelve� or wrongly �that seven and five are eleven�. Plato used this argument in the Theætetus to prove that knowledge cannot possibly be sense-acquaintance. Proper names are elements in sentences, but sentences are not proper names nor lists of proper names. The simples of sense-acquaintance are elements in what we know, but we know facts, and facts are not simples nor bundles of simples. There is a co-functioning of distinguishable and varied factors in truths and falsehoods. This is why it is nonsense to regard things, processes or entities as the meanings for which our factual statements stand. And this is why it is nonsense to say that knowing is an intuiting of essences. The fact that the pseudo-sentence �This is (or is not) identical with this� lacks the required complexity to be a statement indicates that it is without significance. There is no such predicate as �this� or �being the particular that it is�. But, Plato explains in the Sophist and in the Theætetus, although a word is not just a list of letters and a sentence is not just a list of words, the spelling of a word is not an extra letter, nor is the syntax of a sentence an extra word. You cannot have syntax without words, nor can you have spelling without letters. In the same way, �exists�, �if� and so on, cannot function apart from their collocation in sentences, but they are not extra ingredients in the sentence, somewhat as recipes are not ingredients in cakes. Just as the consonants cannot be pronounced by themselves, being not sounds but con-sonants, so words do not have significance in isolation, in Plato's view, but only in their propositional setting. Elsewhere Plato shows that the word �not� makes its particular contribution in sentences to the saying-about that the verb does, not to the mentioning-of-the-subject that the nominative does. We cannot speak about the nonexistent. There are no negative things to make true or false assertions about, but about anything you please there are true or false denials to make. �Not� is, in different ways, an internal part of the force of any verb. To say something is always to deny some other things. The verb is the main word in a sentence. In the Cratylus Plato's etymological derivations are based on the idea that the original seeds of language were expressions for happenings, undergoings, doings, havings, gettings, startings, stoppings, viz. verbs. The greatest kinds in the Sophist (254 et seq.): kinesis, stasis, being, identity and otherness are basic verb forms, not the supreme genera of nameable things. In the second part of the Parmenides Plato deliberately avoids using verbal nouns, as though he thought that verbal nouns conceal important things which operations with live verbs display. From the Euthyphrus (10) onwards, he frequently contasts poiein with paschein, acting with being acted upon. Loving and being loved are not the same thing though the verbal noun �love� is the same for both. Verbs have tenses, and not only the timeless is real (Sophist 61d, 62b; Theætetus 202b-c). Knowledge always involves verbs, and verbs are never proper names.76
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D. Ryle on Dispositions:
For Ryle knowledge is a disposition. Sentences such as �glass is brittle� and �that man is patriotic� do not report episodes or collections of episodes. Their job is to assert tendencies or propensities, not to report occurrences. To say that e.g. glass has a certain disposition is to say something hypothetically about it.77 To describe someone as having a cerain character is to involve oneself in the making of hypothetical or quasi-hypothetical statements about his behaviour.78 Mental statements about persons are never categoric but always hypothetical or semi-hypothetical in form.79
There is a triple distinction: 1. The dispositional capacity, competency, liability or inclination. Verbs used to refer to these dispositions are hypothetical in force. 2. The attempted exercise of a capacity, e.g. observing, looking, listening. Verbs asserting the exercise of a capacity are semi-hypothetical or mongrel categoric. 3. The successful or illusory outcome, e.g. seeing, hearing, �seeing�, �hearing�. The verbs used to express failure or achievement are categoric though not episodic. Compare the Aristotelian differentiation of potency, becoming and act (energeia not poieisis, agere not facere), which could be illustrated Thomistically in terms of eyesight, looking and seeing, where the eyesight is of the eye, as Ryle's intelligence is of the rational animal, and where the eye is first potency, eyesight first act or second potency, seeing second act, and looking is motion. Because the disposition of intelligence develops cumulatively as it is exercised, Ryle thinks it is perhaps better called a deposit.80
The Concept of Mind's account of man in dispositional terms has met with strong resistance.
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E. Experience as Knowledge?
Indeed Ryle has never denies the existence of private experience. In The Concept of Mind he noted that �there were notoriously some thoughts which Johnson kept carefully to himself.�82 And he wrote that �much of our ordinary thinking is conducted in internal monologue or silent soliloquy, usually accompanied by an internal cinematograph-show of visual imagery�.83
It is rather that when he wrote The Concept of Mind Ryle did not regard one's incommunicable personal experience as a method of verification. This is why he leaves Sibley with the impression that �the questions �what are minds?� and �what is the analysis of mental concepts?� have been confused with the questions �how do we know that there are other minds?� and �what sorts of criteria do we need for asserting that there are other minds?� �.84 Ryle is �not really arguing that statements involving mental concepts are hypothetical statements about overt behaviour but that to give reasons for accepting or rejecting such statements must always involve making some hypothetical statements about overt behaviour�.85 His account covers dispositions in so far as they are empirically observable and verifiable, but there are other aspects to dispositions which his account does not cover.86
The general structure of The Concept of Mind and much of what Ryle says there and elsewhere is governed by the ideal of verification as some sort of logical procedure. He writes as though Cartesianism was a logical category mistake, as though Descartes' main fault was to fall into type confusion.87 He speaks of dispositions in terms taken from logic viz. hypothetical and categorical, and then finds that they don't fit just as they are.88 What is in the ordinary sense logically verifiable is publicly verifiable and expressible in a third-person language, and this underlies much of what Ryle says.
Professor Ayer cites an example suggested by Ryle himself to the detriment of the doctrine in The Concept of Mind about the verification of dispositional statements:
According to Ewing:
Ewing's statement supposes that Ryle interprets propositions about mental states behaviouristically, that he interprets propositions about physical states experientially, and that he theorises as though there were no difficulties involved in knowing bodies. These three suppositions are erroneous.
However, while he argues that there are no such things as sense-data,91 and no such thing as Matter,92 Ryle never explicitly states that the mountains, kittens, books, thimbles, turkeys, fountain-pens and planets we reasonably affirm to exist in true judgment, cannot be reduced to objects simply corresponding to the names �mountain�, �kitten�, �book� etc, when these are used as alternatives to such gestures as pointing, taken in abstraction from the developing horizons of human meaning which are their context and the condition of possibility of their significance. Yet if this is true, the subject performing a human act of pointing must have an inner complexity, not of parts but of dimensions, other than that of the animal aimlessly stretching forth its paw.
Because knowledge is essentially self-transcendent, Ryle seems to believe it cannot be any sort of personal experience considered as such. A residual deference to formal logic and a preoccupation with the communication of his thought has hindered Ryle's full realization that human reasonableness grounds authentic first-person knowledge as well as third-person truth, and that the former is needed to preserve the latter from arbitrariness and triviality. While Ryle rightly avoids Hume's sceptical flux, Associationism, Psychologist, Subjectivism and the rest, not all appeal to the subject is subjective.
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By interpreting Ryle's dispositions as dispositions of the subject it has been found possible to avoid giving them a Behaviourist or Platonist interpretation. If by the asserting force of verbs Ryle means the asserting force of verbs as instruments in human reasonable communication, in living speech, the way is open to a revision or development of his theory of existence-propositions, which at present excludes one's saying �I exist�, without some breakdown in logic. Ryle's appeal to the reasonableness of the affirming subject, instead of to some public deposit called common sense or to ordinary language, or to widespread beliefs, is a token of his rejection of any purely formal logic. His emphasis on ideas as personal skills in the use of words, his account of thinking as a developing human ability, his view of philosophy as type-discipline and, in short, all his main philosophical positions, appear as reasonable positions reasonably maintained, and not just as highly developed instances of playing it cool, sleight of hand or linguistic tea-tasting.
In holding against Ryle that personal experience as such can be knowledge, and is the method of verification, one can remain faithful to the general trend of his philosophy, and need only quarrel with the superficial, though widespread, aftermath of an early and excessive enthusiasm for formal logic.
Sense acquaintance as such is not knowledge, and the awareness each one has of his own sense-acquaintanceship is not knowledge. Neither is mere postulation, mere formulation of hypotheses knowledge, and so the self-awareness of a man engaged in postulating or forming hypotheses is not, as such, knowledge. But there is knowledge. One can know that 7 + 5 = 12. And the self-awareness or experience of oneself in and precisely as knowing that 7 + 5 = 12 is knowledge. And just as subsequent analysis of 7 + 5 = 12 revals that both my acquaintance with 7 this and my acquaintance with 5 that, though not items of knowledge, are still elements in my knowledge, so it is with self-awareness. Reflection upon oneself as experiencing, or being conscious of, or being aware of oneself not as object but as knowing-subject, reveals, as elements in such awareness, the self-awareness that accompanies sense acquaintance and the formation of hypotheses, and it reveals this not as an item of communicable knowledge but yet as indissolubly one with the experiential dimension of one's knowledge of oneself as a knower, and as a self-validating element in that knowledge. Since, as Ryle indicates, knowledge is essentially self-transcendent, to know oneself as a knower, is to know oneself as a subject which is also object. Any view of the objectivity of man and also of that of kittens and kites which does not rest on the acknowledged objectivity of the subject is not objectively reasonable, but subjective, whether it prove to be Nominalist or Platonist in its implications.
Ryle spoke of the need to steer a middle course between Nominalism and Platonism. But really Platonism is itself the half-way house, and Realism transcends Platonism, just as it transcends Nominalism: the latter an optical, the former a para-optical theory of knowledge.
Realism is not obvious. Ryles has seen that �exists� is not a word which operates like a predicative expression, and that to say that such and such exists is not to assign it any determinate species or even genus. But to say that �exists� is not a predicate prompts the questions, �what is it?� and �why do we mistakenly assume that it is a predicate?� Again, why should we want to know what knowing is, what affirming is? Why should we want to make statements that turn out to be, from a logical point of view nonsensical? This question is surely a philosophical, and not merely a psychological one.93 And Ryle does hold that philosophy cannot be satisfied with probability. But his explicit distrust of proofs in philosophy94 leads him to undervalue explanatory theories,95 and fail to provide any explicit justification for his own position.96
Ryle correctly states that philosophy is not a short cut to the knowledge that only empirical science, theology or ordinary experience can bring, but this does not mean philosophy only deals with the logic of the content of speech, and cannot ask the meaning of its origin and purpose. Ryle's attention to detail is far preferable to a priori generalization, and he may be right in thinking that the time for synthesis is not yet ripe. But like Aquinas' wisdom, Ryle's cumulative know-how, whatever its ineffable value for Professor Ryle himself, is bound to appear to others as rather a deus ex machina unless it is adequately discussed. To say that philosophy is the skilful replacement of type-habits by type-discipline does not justify by-passing explicit treatment of the problem of justification.97 �The resolution of dilemmas cannot be more than a propaedeutic�.98
Ryle nowhere denies mystery, and silence about it can be interpreted as consent to it. But it can be interpreted otherwise, and then the cry of �Behaviourism� may be heard.
Salesian House, Beckford, Worcs.
COLIN JAMES HAMER, SDB
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[In Why Ryle is not a Behaviourist (Philosophical Studies, The National University of Ireland - Maynooth, vol. XVII, 1968, pp. 7-25) my statements were buttressed by numerous references to his writings and those of his critics. The present article (originally published in Philosophical Studies, Maynooth, vol. XVIII, 1969, pp. 133-39) is simply my personal interpretation of the central epistemological and, therefore, metaphysical doctrines of Professor Gilbert Ryle. As well as being of interest to students of linguistic analysis, it may help readers more at home in phenomenological or existential perspectives towards a better appreciation of what British philosophy is sometimes about.]
The mind is the locus of various dispositions, of developed sources and motives of action, which are not mere reflex habits but trained abilities and bents, tendencies, liabilities or inhibitions. Human knowing is more an intending of facts or states of affairs than a relation to them. Knowledge is not a predicamental relation. Consciousness is related to its object not as North Pole to South Pole, nor as container to contained, but as matter to form, and to the physical form of the object of consciousness there corresponds the intentional form of the consciousness itself. To know reality is not to acquire it, grasp it, have it, possess it, contemplate it or dwell in it; it is to be informed by it i.e. intentionally to become it. Knowledge is the form rather than the cause of rational behaviour: technique, method, knack, skill, expertise, know-how, flair, strategic sense, prudence, taste, discretion, caution, judiciousness, decorum, conscientiousness, style, discipline, sagacity, discrimination, wisdom, respect for sense. Such principles operate not by description of nor prescription for, but by incarnation in and information of performance. It is, for instance, man's respect for sense that is the form of a logically clear expression, and ideas are skills in the use of words. This human capacity and achievement is an intentional becoming, an actuation of the subject, bringing him to act. Yet, properly speaking, it is not action but passion. For knowing is an effect of which reality is the cause, and this causality is not a relation: actio est in passo - not in the agent, nor between the agent and the patient, but in the patient as from the agent, an actuation of the subject in dependence on the object. Of course it may be argued that non datur actio in distans, but far from requiring some intellectual ether, this only means that action and passion are not candidates for the application of spatial or temporal predicates. The known need not be close to the knower.
True knowledge is the form of our reason when it is truly about matters of fact. It is not, then, a relation between subject and object, but a knowledge of states of affairs or facts constituted by interrelated objects which, to be known, must comprise some states of affairs of whose constituent objects some, at least, are knowing subjects. Inquiry is related to insight as searching to finding, or as trying to succeeding. Knowing is the second act or actualization of the intellect Thomists regard as second potency, first act, or accidental passive potency. But knowing is not a transitive activity. It is an achievement of intention, not an episode. It is a capacity, disposition, proneness or inclination, in so far as it connotes the abiding possibility of its contents' polymorphic propositional and non-propositional expression in rational behaviour, which is an effect of knowing as an achievement, though it is also rightly said to be informed by know-how rather than caused by it. The act of self-knowledge consciously intends the self, but the self is intended as known and not as conscious. Thus, though true of consciousness, the distinction between consciously judging and consciously being tickled is not in consciousness but in knowledge of consciousness. Knowledge shuld be studied not in its products, but in its various expressions, especially in linguistic ones. For words and sentences are the most easily inspected class of things that we think in.
Animal acquaintance, human sense experience or acquaintance, sensation as such is of bodies; it is of what some things, objects, existents, beings, realities, entities would be, if they were not elements, constituents, matters of fact. Nude sense experience, if we could have it, would be not of a full reality but of a sensible abstraction from it and, whatever the accompanying physiological response, an abstraction in the pejorative sense, more partial and bloodless even than any intellectual abstraction. The real tree someone sees can only be by either being a constituent of the fact, The tree is in the centre of the lawn, or a constituent of the fact, The tree is not in the centre of the lawn. Proper names, index-words, designations could be used to indicate objects of perception, noises, colour patches, simples, apparently existing things, which are not, properly speaking, facts but matters of fact, elements in fact. But while proper names may designate in isolation, what is designated cannot be in isolation, nor is designating meaningful by itself. Matters of fact are neither meant nor verified, but they are co-meant and co-verified as elements in meant and verified fact. Human knowing expressed in judgments and conveyed by propositions is knowledge of facts or states of affairs, and these are always complex. A proposition means the fact that one knows in it, and to understand a proposition is to understand what is the fact that the proposition states if it does state a fact; in other words, to understand a proposition is to know a hypothetical fact about it: to know, for instance, that, if Pamela Wey swam the Atlantic, �Pamela Wey swam the Atlantic� is a statement of fact.
If �Zat� is the proper name of a simple entity and �gip� is a simple predicate, �Zat is gip� may state an atomic fact and be a true proposition. But there is no subsistent truth that �Zat is gip�, no entity �gipness� or �isness�. And, while �Zat� in isolation may designate, it may not designate meaningfully in isolation. As a meaningful designation �Zat� designates Zat not nakedly but as characterized by some predicate or other, and as constituent of some fact or other, to say a thing exists is to affirm its entrance into at least one fact as a constituent. [What is succinctly expounded here is the heart and soul of Roger Scruton's excellent Sexual Desire - A Philosophical Investigation (London: Phoenix 1994).]
Facts, truths and propositions are found at different levels. While the subject terms of a basic subject-predicate proposition would designate a simple entity, the subject term of a higher-level subject-predicate proposition about the world may mention a fact - not as a fact but as a constituent element of a higher level fact. Logical propositions instead may state facts whose constituent quasi-material elements are neither simple entities, nor facts about them, but facts about the forms of propositions. The ideal might be for apparently proper names to be the logically proper names of simple entitites, and for the logical forms of propositions to correspond to the forms of the facts, and for propositions to be denied or affirmed according as corresponding facts did not or did in fact obtain. This ideal is chimerical.
Although words, images, maps, symbols, ideas and propositions are not what we think, but what we think in, thought cannot be divorced from the partly conventional symbolic expressions in which alone facts are apprehended, the matrix which enshrines thought only by limiting and distorting it. Furthermore, to ask a question is to adopt a viewpoint on the world. Only the definition of one's viewpoint will make possible the getting of one's answer in focus. But the whole field cannot be in focus at once.
Whether or not a proposition states a fact, whether or not a quasi-designation designates, whether or not a non-formal predicate characterizes, its meaning-potential is unchanged. It is not the task of philosophy to establish matters of contingent fact. In any case, that there are objects to be designated and known is not in serious doubt. Man's intellectual capacity is certainly enlarged in dependence on experience. But while understanding penetrates experience, how much we understand depends not only on observation, but also on know-how. We progressively make sense of reality by understanding directly not facts, nor matters of fact, but the forms of the facts. Philosophical analysis is promoted by the developing synthesis of non-philosophical knowledge, because philosophy, the mediation in statements of an immediate performance, is concerned with the explicitation or thematization through reflective recollection of the implications of our capacity to mean.
It is to reveal the form of the facts that men abstract and generalize, and to be capable of inference is part of man's nature. Nature provides no absurdities. Only expressions can fall into or keep clear of absurdity - and dictionary ambiguities are not the real problem. Since the absurd is unthinkable, thoughts, beliefs, supposals and conceptions neither are nor are not absurd. Granted that rational performers only understand what is logically possible, it would be absurd to exclude any scientific hypothesis a priori. Matters of fact are evidence for any state of affairs not inconsistent with them. So, as well as making use of the resources of formal logic, philosophers may take it to be evidently wise, although not at all logically necessary, to provisionally accept ordinary beliefs. If there later come to light sufficient grounds for modifying these beliefs, if, in other words, they come to feel that it would be less absurd to modify an ordinary attitude than to reject the results of a special inquiry, then modify it they must and will.
Facts are expressed in propositions of whose distinguishable, even when inseparable, co-functioning constituent factors some are proper names, some non-formal concepts, others formal concepts. Non-formal concepts, such as generic and specific characters, are in fact predicated of matters of fact, which are referred to by means of designations. Non-formal concepts are related to the objects they characterize as the meanings of words are related to seeming phonemes. They are the predicates pure reason means things in. Some of them are defined by resolution into simpler concepts, but it is at once clear that not all concepts are definable in this way. There is also a deal of arbitrariness in the conventions for the elaboration and distinguishing of one's non-formal concepts, though their meaning is partly fixed by non-linguistic facts. Philosophy makes clear that simple concepts are not proper names or designations. It explains that, since relations are only conceivable between terms of the same level, the question as to how objects are related to concepts is improper. Abstract nouns are not demonstratives. Philosophical argument, which is not merely analysis, also shows up type-differences between the non-formal concepts or genus-species predicates of one discipline and those of another, thereby resolving antinomies that arise in technical discourse and in daily speech. The meaning-potential of non-formal predicates is, indeed, mainly studied and charted in the special sciences and disciplines, but it devolves upon the philosopher to study the co-functioning of typically different ranges of non-formal concepts. However, his main task is to try and analyse formal concepts, such as unity, manifoldness, similarity, dissimilarity, change, changelessness, existence and non-existence. The analysis of these is crucial, since at least one formal concept crops up in any proposition at all.
The first category-mistake the philosopher needs to avoid is that of confusing formal concepts with some sort of non-formal ones, or, worse still, with specimens of simples. He is not so much concerned with category distinctions between non-formal concepts. The analysis of formal concepts is extremely difficult, because they are irreducibly syncategorematic and, unlike the museum pieces of the logicians' collection, cannot be studied in isolation. The philosopher can only meet them on the busy thoroughfares, since, while their inept use may cause other concepts to break down or jam, formal concepts themselves never find their way to the garage or repair shop. Life itself cannot be dissected in a corpse. Only dead birds are stuffed.
Hence the philosopher attaches little importance to purely formal, abstract, thrid-person, objective logic, but concentrates on the first-person, logical use of expressions too rich to be slotted into stereotyped categories. Formal concepts are grasped in proportion as the philosopher argues out the implications of his speech. It may be objected that while speech does differ from language, it cannot be understood without understanding language. But the point to Professor Ryle's insistence that a proposition is different from its component words, that a journey cannot be reduced to the route one has followed, that business is not synonymous with capital, is not merely that we cannot understand the journey without knowing the route, but that we don't know the meaning of routes except in relation to the possibility of journeys. His concern not with language but with speech, not with usage but with use, not with capital but with business, not with the gallows but with the execution, not with the bat but with the strokes one makes with it, expresses the conviction that language is understood only in function of speech, formal logic only in relation to informal logic. Philosophy aims not at perfect language, but at well-disciplined speech, and sometimes it is lack of regard for linguistic conventions that shows a speaker's master of the rules of effective communication.
It is only within the context of speech that expressions are or are not absurd. Words are synsemantic with language, language with speech, speech with living. Things are constituted as intelligible by being somehow interrelated, and cannot be properly approached piecemeal or in isolation. Problems and solutions are intelligible only in their own context or horizon, and since the context which alone can bring an expression to life necessarily constricts and limits its scope, we are never fully aware of all the implications. Moreover, the world only exists for a person in proportion as he is about it by the questions that he asks. Genius consists in the ability to ask new questions. Questioning gains depth through progressive and dynamic differentiation. Philosophical inquiry, however, always intends the total horizon which particular problems exemplify rather than limit, and so the very distinguishing of questions that is involved in working towards solutions only provokes the further questions: is this a legitimate distinction? how are the several solutions to aspects of a problem to be woven into an integrated answer?
Because the philosopher is a man who wants to be fully informed, he takes nothing for granted and is allowed no presuppositions. This, along with the fact that any question or answer is incarnated in a particular situation, is why there is no philosophers' Mrs Beeton, no metaphysicians' Euclid. Our predecessors help us by their inspiration and encouragement. We learn from the sympathetic and critical exploration of the categories in which they philosophized. We prefer dialogue and collaboration to hostility, silence and suspicion. But our debates are not conducted just to sharpen our wits, become aware of complexities, have the pleasure of disagreement, or win a reputation for ourselves; we really want to learn. For all that, a presuppositionless philosophy does not assume deduction, induction, intuition or introspection to be veridical. It is critical of historical positions, established schools, particular uses of words, a definite logic, the desire for system. Beginning from the question in its total context which alone shows forth its meaning, the philosopher must reject Nominalism and Associationism as incoherent and Platonism as irrelevant. While the contingent performance of questioning necessarily and sufficiently indicates the existence of truth, its meaning needs to be uncovered and man's way of knowing it set out.
The conscious knower as subject transcends, though he cannot eliminate, the limitations of the several intellectual patternings of his experience and of the several linguistic horizons in terms of which it is conceived and formulated. And it is only when the performer who makes statements finds access in the unity of his consciousness to the symbiosis of the various types of intentionality and of knowing which inform it, that the self-enlargement and growth in rationality towards which philosophical type-discipline is directed becomes possible. Philosophical progress can only be achieved by the cumulative and synoptic, yet discriminating mastery of divergent methods, levels of discourse, horizons and contexts. The philosopher's respect for sense is developed, and he becomes fully informed in proporiton as he is fully formed. But philosophy is always in process and never issues a final answer. Wonder at wonder which is the core of meaning remains as a constant stimulus to deeper questioning and humbler probing. The horizons are infinite, and the rising sun knows no zenith.
The nucleus of philosophy is, therefore, a somehow incommunicable living synthesis. No statement of a philosopher's position can be either unambiguous or exhaustive. But the philosopher's ability to speak philosophically is merely a specific form of his generic ability, and of the accompanying proneness or inclination to behave philosophically. And what cannot be said, can be shown, evinced, indicated and exhibited.
Man is an artist, a poet, not an engineer. No tragedy results from the lack of guiding ideas, maps or blueprints for the future. No tears need be shed over the inevitable breakdowns of ideologies. Acceptance of the insights of the Sophists need not invite scepticism. In his review of Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies� Ryle, whose view of philosophy I have sought to outline, has these words:
These sentiments are Karl Popper's but I feel Ryle is wise enough to be in broad agreement with them.
Salesian College, London SW11
COLIN HAMER, SDB
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� Mind, 56 (1947) 167-72. I also highly recommend G. J. Warnock's Preface to Gilbert Ryle's On Thinking, edited by Konstantin Kolenda (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979, reprinted with corrections 1982); it concludes:
My article The Real Meaning of Words was first published in the Clergy Review (vol. 53, no. 7, July 1968, pp. 521-35), where it was sub-titled �A Metaphysical Pilgrimage from the Alphabet to the Word�; it was followed by Meaning Things in Words, which was published in Philosophical Studies (Maynooth, vol. XIX, 1970, pp. 5-10). The present essay integrates and substantially revises that material. Many sentences have been entirely recast both to improve understanding and to take one new variety of contemporary usage more fully into account.
The Quest for Meaning
There is the problem of bringing order out of chaos, of taking the �l� out of the �world� to transmute it into a meaningful �word��
Any focussing of attention occurs within the field of a child, woman or man's global experience of her- or himself as living with others in and about the world. No human person remains merely pasively in the world like water in a glass, or a word resting idly in a dictionary; she is also actively about the world, as a magnet is about iron, or an adverb about the verb it modifies.
Unlike the magnet or the adverb, the human being is about the world, about reality, not unconsciously but consciously. While a lion is consciously about items within the horizons of its biological interest, the range of human attention is potentially infinite. Although in a spatio-temporal universe, a woman is about all that is.
By her wonder, by questioning what is it? and is it?, she is continually about all that is.
Because every human being is a questioner, always questioning, always attending, always concerned, she does not so much start to attend as bring to a focus an attention that is, in some sense, already given. She does not so much ask a fresh question, as pose a problem, define an issue, concentrate on a particular area within the totality her questioning permanently intends.
This totality, the field of each person's global experience of herself with others in and about the world, is acknowledged implicitly in all Traditional Symbolism and in mythic consciousness, and it is their incoherence with it that makes it reasonable to reject Empiricism and Rationalism. Cartesian dualism has been called a myth, but it is rather the inconsistency between mythic consciousness and any subject-object dichotomy that condemns the latter.
Abstraction enriches when it nurtures a greater awareness, better understanding, and fuller use of the possibilities afforded in experience, but cultivated for its own sake, it is alienation and impoverishment. Philosophy fails whenever it ceases to clarify, stimulate and criticise individual and social development.
Things make sense if they can be understood; a man or a child or a woman also makes sense because she can understand. If a human being were just flesh and bones, words merely pronounceable combinations of letters, knowing really limited to bare sense experience, and language just a logical construct of representative, gesture-substituting, labelling, designating or referring names, then Logical Positivism might have been in some ways less implausible. But as words are more than collections of letters, men and children and women cannot be reduced to hot numbers, curves and vital statistics. If the word �elephant� could speak, only falsely could it say: �I am just a nice-sounding but slightly complicated list of letters that begins gently and ends with a snap� - for �elephant� is a word with a meaning-potential integrating letters reasonably used to fulfil a rôle in the community of speech.
Even the earthwork's negotiation of a right-angled bend in a T-tube may evince insight into its situation, but the human person may enjoy insight into insight and an intellectual appreciation of her situatedness. Meaning or insightful attention is characteristic of human beings. A person is not just a peculiar arrangement of flesh and bones entering actively and passively into a field of global experience; she is a questioner at least potentially making sense of herself and of her world.
A wasp may settle on the page of an open book and walk aimlessly across it, yet the printed letters present the reader with a problem to be solved. As understanding pivots between the concrete and the abstract, so each person's search for meaning pivots between the visible letters and her understanding of the words. The reader assumes the book's contents say something, and supposes this meaning may become clear, not just as a result of looking hard at the letters for a long time, but if she maintains an attitude of respectful inquiry, puts forward tentative interpretations of the visual symbols, takes steps to verify or falsify any likely explanation.
A first clue may be that the black markings are not strung together continuously, but come together in small groups. Careful inspection of the various markings reveals that they do not all differ, but fall into three categories.
The marks: a, b, c, d, etc., are found in all positions within each group; the marks: A, B, C, D, etc., exclusively or predominantly at the start of groups; �.�, �;�, �:�, �,�, etc., at the ends. The significance of apt symbolism is found in the relative ease in detecting the presence of an alphabet of twenty-six letters, as against that of one of, say, a thousand.
The theory is that the black markings belonging to the category most commonly employed, the �letters�, are not significant in themselves, but are simply factors in more complex representations, viz. visible �words�, which are sometimes separated by spaces, sometimes by signs of the third category, �punctuation marks�. Letters are therefore nominally defined as the twenty-six highest common factors or as the smallest linguistic symbols in the English language, and words are nominally defined as the resultant of writing down letters in a given and conventionally accepted order.
For the combination �rsacde� is not a word; it is just a list of letters. Nor is the difference between a jumble of letters and a word merely that in a word the letters conveniently interlock into a pronounceable unity, while in a jumble of letters no such unity obtains. �Dersac� is a ponounceable unity, but it is not a word. For letters to fit together into the pattern of a word, more is called for than their happy coalescence through some quirk of chance.
This something more is not to be explained by the isolated letters, but is added to them from without. It is its meaning-potential that makes �scared� a word, while �dersac� is not. The meaning-potential or the possibility of being meaningfully employed is to some extent dependent upon the possibilities offered by the letters, but enjoys in their regard a twofold freedom: being able both to accept or reject the linguistic candidature of pronounceable syllables, and out of identical sets of letters to build up different words. �Rsacde� is not a candidate, �dersac� obtains no votes, both �scared� and �sacred� are elected.
The discriminating reader seeks the within of things, recognising that a difference of understanding does not correspond to every difference in data: �crased�, �radces�, and �rsacde� are all equally devoid of immanent intelligibility, have no acknowledged meaning-potential, and are just lists of letters.
What then is a word? It is not the letters, since without the meaning-potential, while one may certainly still have a pronounceable unit, one has no word. It is, however, not the meaning or the meaning-potential alone - for who could mean successfully without symbolic expressions of one sort or another to mean in?
Moreover, while the letters are many, the word is one, and it is its meaning-potential that gives this degree of unity to the otherwise separate letters so that they coalesce into a word.
On the other hand, although the word is visible when it is written down, the word is visible only because it is made up of visible letters - one cannot actually see its meaning-potential. The meaning of books, chapters, paragraphs, sentences and, therefore, in a sense, words is not an extra letter or set of extra letters, nor is it the shadow of the letters somehow falling on the retina of the reader's mind. Although meaning and meaning-potential cannot be seen, however, it can be understood, yet only in relation to the letters. Hence, while the letters can be seen in isolation, they can be understood only in relation to the meaning that accrues to them from the use to which they are put. Letters and meaning together constitute both words and sentences, and one appreciates words as words, and as distinct from merely pronounceable units, by recognising their meaning-potential, or at least by recognising that they have some meaning-potential.
It is the meaning-potential of the word that, albeit indirectly, fixes the letters according to their more or less determinate spelling; the letters to not determine either the meaning of sentences nor the meaning-potential of their constituent words. On the other hand, while one understands words by grasping their meaning in context, the ability so to do is commonly at least to some extent dependent upon the prior ability to see and recognise letters.
Saint Paul struck blind could still understand, but he could no longer read; even a cat sees the letter-shapes, but pussy does not know these make up words. And this means that while pussy sees LETTERS, pussy does not seem them as �letters� - for that would be to understand their potential relationship to sentences via words as the latter's possible components or material constituents.
Letters, then, unlike words, have no explanatory definition, and words are to be explained as the basic although incomplete units of linguistic communication.
Like complete sentences words are defined implicitly in use, which shows that letters, having no immanent intelligibility of their own, pertain to the empirical residue in the world of language, so that, taken in isolation, their size, colour, style, place and time of employment very often have no particular significance.
Understanding, in a sort of inverse insight, that letters are therefore not singificant in themselves, the clever reader soon learns to see them from a higher viewpoint as conditions for the formation of potentially meaningful words.
�Letters�, �meaning� and �word� are, then, examples of primitive terms. They are defined in terms of their reciprocal relations, and are either grasped all together, or not properly grasped at all.
The meaning of the letters is their use. A word results when letters are used in certain ways. Where meaning is what is meant, the meaning of any appropriate combination of words (and quite frequently one word is all that is needed) is in the letters, but, considering meaning as each woman's active and, at least implicitly, intentional performance, it is insightful attention within an intellectually focussed field of experience.
As the meaning of words resides in the letters, communication is mediated by material instruments - eyes, ears, amplifiers, microscopes, litmus paper, etc., and is in symbols: spoken words, gestures, movements, postures, representative and conventionally symbolic signs.
This distinction between representative and conventionally symbolic signs is far from clear-cut. �G-d� is a symbolic expression only by convention.* At the other end of the scale, rather than representing anger, a red face is anger. �3� is only conventionally symbolic, but �III� is also representative. Maps are more representative than they are conventional, and onomatopoeic words as well as tending towards the representation of their usual meaning can also be highly symbolic in other ways.
*[ Strictly speaking this is no more true in English than would be the parallel assertion in Arabic about ��Allah�, in Armenian about �Asdvadz�, in Manx about �Jee� or in Romani about �Devel�. In English there is a connection in meaning-potential between �God� and �good� but, of course, both the visiblly written GOOD and the audibly pronounced �good� (and although quite different, these two are normally treated as practically indistinguishable) are also symbolic expressions only by convention, while some worshippers of Jahweh or �Allah may insist quite strongly that G-d's Name Itself Is Revelation� ]
When woman is defined as the �symbolic animal�, part of what is meant is that she is more poet than statistician, that she needs constantly to achieve her meaning in self-representation and must not succumb to loss of identity nor consent to be a mere cipher. It is not by dilating our pupils nor straining our ears, but by growing in wisdom that we learn how to refine, communicate and apprehend meaning. Communication is only meaningful because it signifies and conveys an at least implicit intention, and invites the interpretation of that intention.
Both the transmission and reception of meaning, both the signification and the interpretation of intention are imperfect. As well as only imperfectly understanding others, human beings never arrive at full awareness of the implications of their own meaning.
One reason for this is that meaning, viz. what is meant, is spelled out either in an alphabet of natural and spontaneous smiles and grimaces which are too fluid and too rich and too precise adequately to be consciously apprehended, or within the context of our far more limited conventional grammar and syntax, which have been and continue to be determined not by individuals, nor explicitly, nor rigidly, but by the gradually and constantly developing (for better or worse) make-shift patterns of usage implicit in the speech-habits of the entire language-using community.
Communication is constituted by the twin active and passive dimensions of meaning within the human group. But while no great harm results from construing the transmission and reception of material signals objectively in terms of a pushes-and-pulls, action-and-reaction, mechanistic model of causality, it is important to note that the active aspect of formal interpersonal communication is more a personal achievement than a transitive action, more agere than facere, more energeia than poiesis.
But seeing results from light, and the individual person is no more the efficient cause of her human meaning than eyesight is of its vision: agere est quoddam pati. Each student is the subject of her own increment in knowledge, but it is often the teacher who is the principal responsible agent of this advance.
The metaphysical inquiry into the meaning of the human person works towards an interpretative explanation of the data on our situation, and it seeks a criterion for the verification and falsification of the rival hypotheses regarding the human condition. The approach is abstract, but the result should be a concrete achievement, where by �concrete� is meant not necessarily that which can be the object of sense experience, but whatever satisfies the demands of human questioning and can truly be said actually to exist or occur.
Reality
The totality of the particular and concrete is here called reality or being. It can be regarded as speech in use, from which language and usage are abstractions.
Some philosophers have regarded the Aristotelian categories: substance, quantity, quality, relation, action, passion, place, time, posture and habitat, as metaphysically ultimate. A word* has a meaning in itself and so is a substance. It is written down in letters of a certain size and so has quantity. It is red or black, nominal or adjectival, standard or colloquial, commendatory or flatly descriptive and so has quality. It modifies a verb, or is its subject or object, or qualifies a noun and so stands in certain relations. It is a self-expressive utterance provoking a response and so action. It is dependent on another's request for information or on one's own struggle for self-expression and so passion. It is uttered in a particular time and place, with a particular tone or stress, and so has place, time and posture. It finds its habitat in the English language, in the small talk of retired colonels, in the jargon of professional philosophers�
* [Although what might be called one-word sentences are employed quite frequently in ordinary English, it remains true that in our language the typical unit of meaning is not the individual word but rather the complete sentence or, more precisely, the proposition that sentence is used to convey. In the scholastic Latin usage of the great mediæval Christian theologians and also in the related Latin usage of very many more recent philosophers and divines �verbum�, although the dictionary equivalent of �word�, primarily refers to the proposition. However, etymologically �propositio� implies process and becoming, so the Divine �Verbum� IS Infinitely Efficacious Proposal rather than a simple proposition� In the present essay �word� is sometimes, cæteris paribus, used in much the same way as Aquinas might have used �verbum�.]
Yet, if Metaphysics is, pursuing this analogy, the science of words in terms of their ultimate causes, these reduce to four: the material letters, the forms or meanings, the intrinsic end or purpose, viz. the achievement of communication, and the efficient act of speaking or writing.
We have in words a very good analogy to assist us in our efforts to understand the Aristotelian theory of matter and form. The union of letters and meaning within a word or sentence is akin to the hylomorphic composition of material substance. The letters represent matter, the meaning is the form, but what exists is neither the letters nor the empty spaces between them nor the abstract hypothetical meaning of the sentence and its component words but the living word-proposition - the thing we actually assert is, in this sense, metaphysically compounded of matter and form in the order of essence.
Of course, any word only exists in so far as it is intelligently written down or pronounced. This relationship of both letters and meaning considered in their unity to a speaker or writer may, perhaps, serve to indicate the Thomist (as distinct from any other merely Thomistic) refinement on Aristotle, according to which material essence is in being only as actuated its own act-of-being, the contingent created term of the divine decree that gives existence to the essence as such.
On this view, material things are, indeed, seen and touched, but thanks to their matter; their form cannot be seen, but it can be understood as the explanation of the disposition of the matter in view of the substance.� Material dimensions of reality can be seen in apparent isolation, but matter is understood only in the act that grasps its reciprocal relation with form, and, furthermore, the dependence of that union of matter and form contingently on its own intrinsic sustaining ground, raison d'être or act-of-being - and so by hypothetical necessity on G-d as its First Cause.
� [Quite harmlessly and, indeed, not really at all misleadingly, this understanding is often called �seeing� as distinct from mere �seeing� on the one hand and illusory or more than normally perceptive �seeing� on the other�! Thomist realism insists not merely that all reality is intelligible, but that all reality is intelligibility.]
Moreover, substantial permanence does leave room for accidental variation. A statement is not essentially different for being louder, or high pitched, or written vertically, or qualified by another set of words, or because it is being made in order to modify some other statement.
While the word �brother� in the sentences �He is a brother of General de Gaulle� and �He is a brother of someone who has seen General de Gaulle� remains from one standpoint constant in meaning-potential, from another its actual reference is clearly modified by context. This context need not comprise all the external circumstances. Since space, time and numerical multiplication pertain to the empirical residue, a reader of one particular newspaper enjoying a summer cruise in the Pacific shares her knowledge of the latest society gossip with another reader mulling over a quite separate copy of the same issue in, say, a Birmingham restaurant during her lunch-time break.
The word �thing� can - along with whole sentences in which it features - be written in a variety of ways: more or less continuously in long-hand, or printed in block letters, large or small, in black or red ink, tidily or smudged. It may also be written down, like the dreaded lines of our school days, a number of times in the same way. One might distinguish between one instance of the word �thing� and another one by saying that the first was larger, or neater, or in read, or written further to the left.
But to say how we can conveniently distinguish between various instances of the same word is not to say how there can be various instances of the same word. Yet the meaning of this word �thing� is taken to be not only similar to, but substantially identical with the meaning of that word �thing� - nevertheless, the two words are quite obviously numerically different, and the two sets of physical letters of which they are comprised are visibly quite distinct. It is �matter� which is the principle of individuation.
The preceding sentence in a conversation may be the occasion for my present utterance, but its efficient cause is not something higher up the page, earlier on in the cassette-recording, or prior in time; it is the present act of speaking. Speech as content is the effect of speech as performance because it is seen to be intelligibly dependent upon it, not because it follows it in time.
And the activity of speaking, which is from the speaker, is in the effect, in that person's speech - actio est in passo.
Similarly, while the performance with chalk and talk which is instrumental to teaching is the school mistress's, her actual teaching is in the learner, being called �learning� because it is in the learner, and �teaching� because it is from the teacher. One cannot actually teach in a classroom that is completely empty of pupils.
To express it differently, the adjective �green�, e.g., functions by qualifying the meaning of �bottle�, but this action of qualifying, far from changing the meaning of �green� supposes it to remain constant with a consequent �accidental� modification of the word �bottle� in its particular context within speech on that occasion.
David Hume does not seem ever to have grasped this meaning of efficient causality.
The maxim �no action at a distance� is sometimes invoked to show that æther must exist. If there were any chinks in the space-time continuum, if there were anywhere a vacuum, then, so it is argued, the transmission of magnetic and gravitational forces would break down. No smile without the Cheshire cat, no meaning without fully integrated strings of letters�
Whether æther exists or not, any argument of this sort is a philosophical howler. When a word is printed, as on this present page, the letters are not contiguous in space. Nevertheless, their meaningful integration is not �at a distance�; it results from their being used with a unitary intention as together constituting the material basis for, the building-blocks of meaningful communication. In Aristotelian terms, space and time are two categories, action is quite another one - and it is utterly distinct.
Hence, while spatial and temporal conditions may somehow influence action, they can never, as such, directly determine it. To action considerations of distance are, as such, irrelevant. It may still be helpful to imagine sunbeams as travelling 92,000,000 successive miles through space, but the fact that we can see the Sun from planet Earth does not in any sense make it self-evident that material substance of some sort needs to be continuously present throughout the intervening mathematical interval. Does the audibility of speech show that periods of silence are impossible?
Similarly, on this view, a unitary being need not be evidently integrated at the level of sensation; an unum per se need not be a continuum. For a single sentence is one sentence as distinct from a mere string of words, and a word is a �word� as distinct from a mere sequence of letters, even though the separate elements are written or printed out quite distinctly and not compacted together somehow into a seemingly continuous stream.
The gaps between the printed letters in no way detract from the potential intelligibility of each individual word and, similarly, even if the material elements in living organisms are not physically contiguous, this need not furnish grounds for declaring the latter to be mere aggregates rather than truly individual things.
As meaning lies outside the area of the juxtaposition of letters in space, though explaining some of the circumstances of their occurrence, so the unity of being transcends the categories of space and time.
Aristotle defined time as �the numeration of motion according to the befores and afters of place�, and places as �the immediate surface of a material body's circumambient medium considered as relatively still�. Like the definition of �cat� as �a three-letter word composed of c-a-t in that order�, all such descriptions are merely nominal definitions that help us to get our questions clear.
Just as one can in some sense explain letters and spellings indirectly as conditions for the possibility of the transmission of meaning, so space and time may be understood indirectly as conditions of possibility for any universe accounted for in terms of Emergent Probability.
Like all letters, those that go to make up the word �space� and the word �time� occupy space when written and take time to write down or pronounce, but the meaning of �space� and �time� is no more in either space or time than is the meaning of G-d!
A correct determination of the meaning of �space� and �time� can be valid always and everywhere, even if that meaning has to be incarnated in any relevant letters differently according as one's frame of reference is a spoken or a written language or, perhaps, the notably different linguistic geometry of the deaf-and-dumb sign-alphabet.
Space and time are not understood in themselves, but as conditions for the distinguishing of letters from each other, which is in turn a condition of the possibility of both the meaning-potential of words and the relatively complete meaning of propositions in language and speech as we know them.
Noticing that when the sign �.� occurs, the following word usually differs from its fellows in commencing with a capital letter, the reader may reasonably suppose that words are not being used significantly in isolation, but as constituent elements of much more complex symbolic sequences, viz. the �sentences� already mentioned - which, typically, commence with a capital letter and end with a full stop.
The series of sentences going from the beginning of an indented line to the full stop prior to a further indentation (or other strongly disjunctive indicator) constitutes that even more complex symbolic unit we call a paragraph. Paragraphs coalesce into sections�, chapters�, parts�, volumes�, libraries.
But while sentences are nominally defined as whatever occupies the space between two full stops, it is not only the case that �yb lal urneta deiers nowem wonk ot� has no meaning; neither has �by all nature desire women know to�. Meaning belongs to the proposition mediated by the sentence: �all women by nature desire to know�. Sentences may in this way be explained as the minimum vehicle for the expression of a proposition.
It is not merely that looking and sense acquaintance alone do not disclose the reality of things, that things are understood only by relating what is experienced in sense to some conception of the mind, but the understanding of reality and actuality is only possible if one accepts the fact that nothing is an isolated individual unit, that, without their being necessarily intelligibly related to everything else, all things are related - positively or negatively - to something else and, indeed, acquire any meaning and value that is theirs only in terms of these interrelations.
If one is set predominantly in the biological pattern of experience, the indications �Danger� and �Please take one� may be taken notice of instinctively, and no questions asked, but when a person moves into the aesthetic pattern of experience, she savours the melodious lilt of a fine voice or lingers lovingly over the neatness and beauty of accomplished penmanship. In this way one may catch some shade of meaning not otherwise grasped: �whisper� is an evocatively onomateop�ic word.
In the dramatic or perhaps pragmatic pattern of experience the orator weighs the lively effect her words may have, and may be held back from asking questions even when in doubt, or may refrain from using knowledge possessed - for fear of risking an exposure of its limitations; and so the orator takes refuge in small talk. In the intellectual pattern of experience, however, the aim is always to come to grips with meaning.
The scientist's task is to decipher the meaning of the universe. The clue is that the meaning is the meaning of the words as they are actually used. Hence one's primary concern is not to see which letters are nicest to look at, closer to the reader, or easiest to handle, but to find out how they are interrelated. Moreover, while the investigator expects the large writing on hoardings to appear small when viewed from a distance, and the apparent shape of the painted letters on the road's surface to vary with the position of the car she is travelling in, the actual meaning of the words is taken to be invariant for all readers of their message.
And this does not mean, of course, that any given scientific model of the universe born of human ingenuity is an acceptable understanding of reality. Ability to decodify and spell does not automatically imply any real ability to understand what is written.
Such models, in fact, are at best no more than stepping-stones along the path, banisters in the gradual ascent to understanding. Words only truly exist when they are meaningfully written or uttered, and only one with a message to utter can succeed in giving meaning to the paragraphs, sentences, words and hence even letters that are the vehicles of her communicative intention.
Pursuing the analogy further, this account of metaphysical composition posits a real major distinction between �cat� and �dog�, a real minor distinction between the possible pronounceable unit c-a-t, the conventional meaning of �cat� and the asserting force immanent in �cat� as part of a normal performatory propositional utterance, together with various logical distinctions, as between �cat� as having a given conventional meaning, �cat� as a noun, �cat� as a word, etc.
Likewise, in actual English speech, there is implicitly affirmed an intrinsic constitutive relationship of the pronounceable unity of each word to its conventional meaning, of the unity of both to that word's immanent assertive force and, of course, of the whole word to the speaker uttering it in some proposition as being totally and radically dependent upon her, without excluding the possibility of her remaining silent should she so wish.
In addition, one must admit a variety of relations between the various words and propositions in a complete speech, without any implication that such relationships need all be regarded as constitutive of the various words' essential meaning - though, admittedly, in some cases they may be - or that any one given word is related to all the other words comprising the entire speech.
Furthermore, one does well to learn to distinguish, even though one cannot separate, the metaphysical distinctions and relations consequent upon meaning as such from the purely scientific distinctions and syntactical relations proper to the particular grammar of the language in which that meaning is expressed. The Bible may be read in Hebrew, Maltese, Greek, Latin or English; the fall of a coin may be described relatively to the floor of a moving train, to the railway-embankment or to a particular spot on the surface of Neptune; the movements of the planets may be discussed in terms of the love alliances of the gods, of epicycles or of universal gravitation�
Some languages are more highly developed, nuanced and sophisticated than others - but this does not mean the modern scientific account of the world need be any more true than the ancient Babylonian or Sumerian view, especially as there exists considerable evidence that the very opposite is in several important respects far more likely to be the case! No reference-frame automatically guarantees the truth of statements made in terms of it. Science or cosmic grammar is admittedly important as well as interesting, but it is not to be overrated.
One may resist this, and say words have no meaning beyond that women care to give them. As long as one sees words only as letters, there is no way out of the impasse. But actually to say that words are just �lists of letters� really is to contradict oneself - it is only partly a matter of convention that �word� means �not just a list of letters�.
If one wishes to remain indifferent to the world, there is no answer to a yawn. But to say �there may not be an explanation for it all� is to contradict oneself; the proposition �there may not be an explanation for it all� conveys the idea that one may have grounds for holding that grounds are lacking! Abstract language alone proves nothing; but no one can use living speech effectively to deny the possibility of language�
To refer to material and, more generally, created things as words is to focus attention on an important aspect of their actual reality, but it is even more. It is to bring out their transcendent significance. The words of a language fit together in all sorts of ways in the warp and woof of discourse, and it is both possible and necessary to study the grammatical and syntactical rules of their intertwinings and entanglements.
Yet it always remains true that language is pointless, except for purposes of speech (and/or, of course, its quasi-equivalent: writing and reading). The correlations obtaining between the many and various parts of the Cosmos are extremely complex, and it need occasion no surprise that vast expenditure of effort is called for, if human beings are to be successful in deciphering things and in discerning the ever-shifting patterns of cosmic grammar, which are never more than very imperfectly articulated in the corpus of the sciences.
Since language acquires significance only as a vehicle of communication, in our reading of the universe (or pluriverse?) we should pay more heed to the intentions of the actual Speaker(s) or Writer(s), remembering, too, that much of what She (or He or Them or, as some are more inclined to conclude, It) may have to say, indeed, may already have said or written, is not necessarily always, if at all, expressed in the sorts of finite words or in any of the variety of performative utterances persons such as we can manage to perceive and understand - and even when we do understand, we do not always readily accept!
To recommend greater attention to any message conveyed by the words that are our universe is not, I think, in any way either to deny that �Silence is golden�, or to detract from the importance of scientific study and of cosmic grammar. Clearly, if there is no actual message being communicated, spelling is reduced to a pointless game.
Furthermore, it should not be thought that one needn't feel concerned about penmanship. By all means let us take pains to master calligraphy. If the message is important, surely it deserves a fitting and dignified vehicle to convey it, the best that rhetoric and beautiful handwriting can supply.
But to spend all one's time in quest of sensible strength and beauty, to draw fine and enduring letters without bothering to read, perhaps even without ever learning how to spell, that were folly indeed!
A concrete decision as to the correct meaning of a given list of letters supposes knowledge of grammar and syntax together with exact information about the letters concerned. From time to time one comes across words that are, as far as one is concerned, new, and the practical persons consults a dictionary only when it is needed to help one sort out the message in hand; the theoretician, on the other hand, while realising that even the most comprehensive dictionary never exhausts the potentially infinite range of the vocabulary available, nevertheless studies a good dictionary beforehand, and lives in hope of finding the words she had found in it being actually put to use.
To guide such theoreticians there is a canon of selection - the student of the cosmic code limits her theories about possible meanings by the proviso that any meaning will be of the letters, and not primarily of numerals (but perhaps you disagree?), twitches, pricks or other non-linguistic elements.
There is a canon of operations - knowing the rules of grammar and syntax, one can construct words, sentences, paragraphs and chapters oneself, and in this way seek to elicit further information about language from one's ongoing dialogues with various other language users and, by trial and error, grow towards mastery of the language.
There is a canon of relevance - no doubt someone wrote down the message, the ink and paper could be analysed, one could find out how and when it was printed, or whether it was originally written down with an eye to financial gain - but the main way to understand any actual message that has been communicated is to read and study it.
There is a canon of parsimony - one can say �wux� is not English, but further evidence is required before one may legitimately conclude that �wux� is not a word at all. Also, if �tae� can be decoded as �ate� or �tea� or �eat�, it is quite unscientific to say forthwith that it is correctly decoded as �tea�.
There is also a canon of complete explanation - one should not be content to spell out �oasto� as equivalent to �oats�.
On the other hand, readiness to accept the non-significance of the empirical residue in any given context is not opposed to but complementary to the anticipation of some significance being found in the data - the �e� in �Thank your lucky stares� may amuse but is, nevertheless, taken to be irrelevant, because the phrase as a whole is thought to make better sense without it. Of course, as an office-worker's Freudian slip, it may betoken her happy acceptance of her supervisor's or even her employer's more than sisterly admiring glances!
There is, finally, a canon of statistical residues - the laws of correct English do not suffice to determine the relative frequencies in use of �ate�, �tea� and �eat�.
Yet abstraction is enrichment, not impoverishment. Because meaning is only mediated and not determined by its individual expressions, if one copy of a newspaper gets lost, one can read a second one in its place; if an experiment fails, it may be repeated with fresh materials. And while a reader may find visualising the �letters� a help towards understanding a �word�, it is not required that she visualise the whole lay-out of letters in order to understand the meaning of a book!
To understand a piece of English the reader needs to be familiar with the words, and to grasp how they fit together into sentences, paragraphs, sections, and so on. If there is something obscure, she can re-read it, leave it on one side to return to it later, study carefully the words and their syntactical relations as they lie spread before her on the page.
This reader's task is easier than that of someone following a lecture. Here one must do one's best to understand the words as they come, to grasp the significance of the whole sequence, despite its not being given all at once. One may ask questions, or make tape-recordings, but the act of questioning may disturb the sequence of the lecturer's presentation, and the tape-recorder will only replay one word at a time.
These similarities and dissimilarities of approach called for in persons trying to understand the written and the spoken word may shed some light on the relationship between mathematical and scientific understanding.
An expression is what has been, is being or will be uttered.
Linguistic communication is a spatio-temporal manifold of expressions.
These can be classified, and they can be repeated. Some of them enter into linguistic circuits: if I send Christmas greetings to Judith, she reciprocates them, and if she does so�
Such circuits can be arranged in conditioned series: unless we both use the same language, we will not exchange invitations, and unless these are received, we do not acknowledge them. It is more probable that you invite a person to a birthday party, even more probable that you communicate with her in some way, if that person wires you her best wishes for the occasion, than if she is merely someone who shares with you an ability to use what is officially regarded as being one and the same English language.
Sometimes, of course, we speak to people who do not understand English, but even nowadays the vast majority of us do not do this systematically, just as we do not habitually say �Happy Christmas!� on Easter Sunday morning. But while even our friends cannot predict our exact use of words, they usually have a pretty good idea what we will not say, and they often also have a shrewd idea of the likely drift of our argument. The actual frequencies of expressions of each sort in each place and at each time do not diverge systematically from their probabilities�
Emergent Probability is the successive employment of linguistic expressions in accord with the successive schedules of probability of a conditioned series of linguistic circuits.
Language grows from generation to generation. Its development is flexible but increasingly systematic, yet admits of enormous differentiations, with the possibility of falling into contradiction and nonsense.
And given sufficient time a person might just conceivably be able to say in a language all that could be meaningfully said in it but, as Gödel has helped us to appreciate, this would not be because one had exhausted the potentially infinite grammatical and syntactical possibilities afforded by any sufficiently developed language, but simply because one's understanding of �words� had reached the point of transcending all mere �words� - for, as I earlier intimated, Silence is, indeed, truly Golden�
When the theoretician observes �deter-� at the foot of p. 513 of the 1957 edition of Bernard J. F. Lonergan's Insight - A Study of Human Understanding, the argument and even the terminology of which has inspired a great deal of what I have so far said in this essay, she may anticipate the appearance of �minations� at the top of p. 514, just as, of course, she anticipates its being p. 514 and not some differently numbered page. In fact, as regards the pagination, most readers, even of especially demanding and obscure works of erudition, soon reach the supreme moment when all relevant data fall into a single perspective, so that they can confidently predict that p. 99 will be immediately followed by p. 100.
On the other hand, there is no insight into any author's mind which enables one to forecast accurately the entire sequence of words in a book he has written. Though not devoid of system, this sequence also contains merely coincidental aggregates. For instance, on page 118 of the work just quoted you may, I suspect, be inclined to agree with me that the last complete sentence might just as well have begun with �This� as with �It�.
Certain combinations of letters are ruled out of the English language as impossible features within words, but if a grouping of letters does belong to the language, then it can certainly be used to mean something in its proper context, even though it is no more than probable that it will ever actually be put to use.
Whenever a word exists in a language, it is not only probable that it will be used, but also that it will be used in combination with any other word one cares to mention though, admittedly, this probability may sometimes be very slight.
Classical linguistic science determines which meanings have a home in the language, lists the words, establishes the alphabet, draws up syntax.
Statistical linguistics determines the frequency with which words are used, surveys their co-functioning, identifies pronounceable units, collects sentences.
Thus, linguistic usage is classical; the use of speech is statistical. If �Jack and Jill� occurs more frequently than �Jill and Jack�, this is not because of grammatical or syntactical requirements.
One student of English may concentrate on the meaning of words in order to grasp the whole, and she is likely to consider the difference between �This� and �It� or between �Fourthly� and �Next� as utterly devoid of significance. Another student will concentrate precisely on such points, list all words used according to their frequencies of occurrence and co-occurrence, and in that way come more closely to grips with her favourite author's way of thinking, her style, her dominant interests.
Because conventions are there to guide them, readers of books may hope to understand, but they also hope their eventual understanding will be well worth the effort because they believe the use of speech goes beyond the limits of mere linguistic usage.
Moreover, just as words are often implicitly defined without reference to their etymology, so an author's meaning is frequently weighted without attaching very much if, indeed, any importance to its ascertainable historical antecedents.
Each existing thing or word is materially an individually pronounceable mathematical unit, formally a natural unit of communication whose specific meaning-potential is recognised in usage, actually a meaningful component in speech and so, like very other word used in that context or community of speech we call conversation, something that originates quite distinctly from some speaker or other as an element in her self-expressive contribution to it.
In a traditional terminology, the spoken word (in the sense of verbum or proposition) is �true� if it adequately corresponds with the mind of the speaker, �good� if it fulfills her intention, �real� if it makes sense, �something� as distinct from other propositions, �one� as being in its own appropriately interpreted context unambiguous, and �beautiful� in so far as the intrinsic meaning of the utterance lends grace to the sound itself.
In this sense, too, �words� are created out of No-Thing, i.e. they are uttered in silence in total dependence upon some speaker or other. Their meaning is their participation in that speaker's mind, and that mind produces them. The dignity of words does not, therefore, derive from their individuality as perceptible units of sound, but from their subsistence in speech (their �personhood� in the privileged case of proper names), thanks to which their meaning, even though derived, is also very definitely �their own��
For the meaning of any verbum (word) or proposition comes entirely from that proposition, and yet entirely from the mind of she who utters it, although only the speaker may also control the context that helps effectively to determine the overall meaning of any particular illocutionary performance. I suggest that this is also how G-d respects the nature of all creatures, expressing a sovereignly divine intention in a context of truly real and actual human freedom.
To state a proposition harshly rather than softly, crisply rather than in a stutter only �accidentally� modifies its meaning, but there is a �substantial� or �essential� difference between the various meanings of �I like your cheek!�
Accidental shades of meaning are said to inhere in their subject, the substantially meaningful verbum or propositional �word�. The relation between sound and meaning within words can be called adhesion.
In Father Bernard Lonergan's somewhat unusual terminology, the propositional �word� acknowledged as meaningful is a �thing�; the sentence mediating it in �words� misconstrued as mere sight-or-sound phenomena is a mere abstraction and is, therefore, although commonly, quite wrongly regarded as capable of that allegedly autonomous existence many attribute to physical �bodies� as such.
Any propositional �word� (as distinct from the superficially more obvious �body� with which it is typically associated) may also be called a reality, being or existent. Its objective meaning as abstractable content presupposes the subjective reality it has as expressive of personal speech. This meaning, which is, of course, more often than not finite, is what is also called, pace J. D. Solomon, �perfection�. The shift of attention from vision-or-sound to meaning is �conversion�. Integrity of meaning is �authenticity�.
A speaker can usually achieve more with words than conventional usage might at first blush suggest: �Darling, you are such a twerp!� may actually be an expression of loving sympathy and even personal admiration. This aspect of words illustrates the difference between what scholastic philosophers and theologians have called natural and obediential potency. All human beings may use water to wash their bodies clean, but under G-d it becomes in Baptism an instrument of supernatural Grace.
If to the dictionary word �he� is added the abbreviated word �ad�, the result is �head�. We could say that when �he� and �ad� are associated in this way, they change into �head� - from two actual words potentially one, we move to one actual word potentially two.
If words were just so many lists of letters, it would be misleading to speak of any actual change - there would be merely spatial juxtaposition in the special way that results in the formation of a conveniently pronounceable unit. �Head� would then be merely the aggregate of �he� and �ad�. But while �head� does, indeed, contain as its constituents all the letters and only the letters that go to make up �he� and �ad�, the meaning-potential of �head� is acknowledged by a separate dictionary entry; it is not simply the sum-total or fusion of the two quite distinct dictionary meanings of �he� and the common abbreviation �ad�.
This difference cannot be seen, one may possibly object. Precisely, but it can be understood. The Atomism of the ancients and the more recent Mechanist Determinism seem plausible enough, because it is regarded as obvious that organisms are simply aggregates of molecules, molecules of atoms, atoms of fundamental particles. On this basis, the transmutation of �he� into �head�, of �head� into �headstrong� and, to coin a word, of �headstrong� into �headstrongwise� (meaning �in a notably headstrong manner�), etc., and you have a fair enough analogy for Evolution through Chance, or the Natural Selection of Pronounceable Units.*
* [This is very probably why, like the editors of the first book of the Torah, R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz preferred to speak of �Genesis� rather than of �Evolution�, although there is nothing especially objectionable about the latter term as such.]
On the view here put forward, however, what takes place is not the transformation of species in virtue of their native resources, but rather the emergence of new species in accordance with certain objective schedules of probability. The letters do not legislate on meaning, and matter does not determine form, though it may condition it.
The rules of correct English make it possible for �he� to grow into either �head� or �heed�, and while (on the hypothesis that there are only words in English and no separate letters - save, of course, �I� and �a�) �head� may, as already mentioned, develop via �headstrong� to �headstrongwise�, �heed� may not develop beyond �heedless�. So too, in Nature, fundamental particles may rise to atoms and thence to molecules, but it is the organic compounds that then win through to life; the inorganic is caught in a blind alley or cul-de-sac - at least until and unless other already living propositional-words combine into appropriately structured command-chains that provide the instructions needed for the breaking-up and subsequent re-synthesis of otherwise inert vocables.
In any event, all propostional-words and the sentences in which they are communicated acquire meaning only in living speech, and letters, too, are only there for the sake of words and sentences. Not matter, therefore, but G-d decrees the course of Nature in all her rich variety, since matter, like form, is of G-d's fashioning.
-Isms are abstractions, and there is no such animal as the flesh-and-blood typical Sensist or average Materialist. The history of Philosophy cannot properly be studied with a slide-rule. Nevertheless, it can be provisionally helpful to suggest that Materialists, Sensists, Associationists, Pragmatists, Sensationalists, Positivists and Nominalists live in a world of �letters�, perhaps even in a world of pronounceable units, but are unaware of �words�. They have heard of meaning, indeed, have sought it diligently, but, mistakenly supposing it was an extra �letter� they were looking for, they have failed utterly in their search for real meaning, and have, therefore, pronounced �it� a myth (using this latter term in its pejorative sense).
Platonists, Idealists and Phenomenologists, realising that meaning is not anything so ordinary as a �letter�, let alone a �letter�, consider the Positivists to be much too earthly, too closed to the appeal of transcendent values. There are letters, of course, but more important than any letters is the �meaning� - allegedly some sort of unearthly and even mystic shadow the �letters� cast in the light of the ineffable. Real values, therefore, according to them, are only to be found by neglecting any merely sensual �letters�, no matter how beautifully they have been written down, no matter how bewitchingly they have been pronounced, in order the better to concentrate on their so called shadows. These latter are a mere myth to the Materialist, but for the spiritual person they are welcome pointers to the only �true reality�.
Followers of the Aristotelico-Thomist tradition (never to be confused with their many pseudo-colleagues: the Thomistic wordolaters) adopt instead what is most simply called the doctrine of the incarnation of meaning. Propositional-words and the various performatory utterances that express, convey and sometimes successfully communicate them are real and sometimes true expressions of the ineffable - to reverse Wittgenstein's expression, if not his sense, they say what they cannot show! Thus, although what is of value for the understanding of words (primarily in their propositional sense as verba) is, indeed, their �meaning�, it is only in and through their �letters� that this meaning is to be grasped or, if not entirely grasped, at least, howsoever fleetingly, in some sense touched.
As long as we �rational animals� are engrossed in the routine business as usual of human biological process, only �letters� may seem real to us. There is no evading this issue by an asceticism of escape to transcendental shadows. What is called for is, I suggest, the honest reading of the Book of Life - careful attention to the letters, yes, but always with an eye to what all the �words� are meant to mean when understood in their primordial and total context, viz. that of Life Itself. And, unscrambled, Life Itself means (as I and others have already elsewhere argued at, we trust, sufficient length to be going on with) Living I+N The Boundless Here-&-Now�
Here, in an attempt to secure a maximum of simplicity of illustration, and at the cost of slightly modifying our earlier hypothesis, the sequence of words: �pa�, �pat�, �pate�, �paten�, �patent�, �patents� may conveniently be used to bring out one peculiarity of what seems to be the concrete pattern of Emergent Probability. Although �patents� is a different word from �patent� and like the latter has only one meaning in English, the meaning of �patents� is nevertheless determined by the meaning of �patent�, as this latter is not determined by that of �paten��
Thus, sub-atomic particles may provide the matter for atoms and yet not actually be present in atoms; atoms suitably disposed may provide the matter for molecules and yet not actually be present in molecules; and so on. Yet while, according to Christian theologians, all human persons do have a supernatural vocation to their self-transcending incorporation in the Paschal Mystery of Christ's Risen Body, it appears to be an abiding condition of this shared One Life we may each and all of us hope for in Christ Jesus that we become and remain mature individual human persons dwelling together as one family at peace with and in Nature�
Human apprehension of meaning is conditioned by our powers of hearing so to �speak�. Whatever makes sense, exists, but we are only directly aware of that particular audible speech which is the universe of proportionate being and of its subjectively apprehended conditions of possibility, e.g., that there must be a Speaker.
To call the Speaker a thing or a reality is not to use either of these terms univocally or equivocally or even analogously in any immediately obvious acceptance of this still controverted but already thoroughly explored technical terminology. Nevertheless, acknowledged technical difficulties regarding the usage of �is� need not entirely prevent our having some inkling of what we mean to mean, when we say �there is a Speaker��
If one considers the suggestion: �Charlie Chaplin is the Shakespeare of the screen�, and if one feels this statement hits off an important truth, spontaneously one assents to this propositional judgment, makes it one's own, rejoicing both in one's heart-felt assent and in what one is assenting to, this joy being not twofold but one. Joy of this sort is not constituted, nor need it be accompanied by any sensible feeling of pleasure, but it actually is quite real. Possibly one is more aware of such joy when it is absent, than by direct attention to its presence when given.
Thus, a person who tells an untruth is disgruntled with herself, even when she otherwise feels pleased with life, and she tends to disown what she has said.
As joy is delight in successful self-expression, each one's joy, either in her personal statements or in that broader field of utterance which is the dramatic patterning of her entire life, must needs be finite - both on account of the limits to what created persons naturally succeed in saying and, much more fundamentally, because of the limits to what they have to say� This is not to deny that their potential is infinite, but this infinite potential will, unless substantially subsumed into the Life of Grace, necessarily remain for ever confined within the possibly ever-expanding but still not absolutely infinite horizons of that particular order in creation to which these particular persons belong.
If, however, as Christian Revelation allows, we suppose an Infinite Being to engage Her-, Him- or Itself or Themselves in One Act of �Self-Expression�, that One Act will be Freely and yet by Absolute Necessity �Substantially� and not only �accidentally� Infinite. The �Expressed� will likewise be Substantially Infinite, and so there will be, too, Substantially Infinite Joy - Intelligent-&-Voluntary Joy springing from Intelligent-&-Voluntary Affirmation of the Infinitely Expressive.
This would appear to be a way of thinking, writing and speaking about G-d that fits in with the traditional teaching regarding the Parent-Father as Ipsum Dicere, regarding that Single-Parent's Son as Verbum: The Word of G-d, and regarding the Holy Spirit as Interior Maternal Love proceeding to each from both in a Unique and Substantially Infinite reciprocal Act of Self-Giving.
The Divine Word Being Infinitely Expressive, there is no necessity of finite words to manifest the Single-Parent-Father's Glory, and creatures say nothing about G-d that is not already and more finely Said I+N The Infinite Word. However, somewhat as the �words� we human Earthlings utter are real �pronounceable units�, although no more than external and partial expressions of our overall present �mentality� or �onlook�,* in which we neverthelss rejoice on account of their conformity with our mind, so �creatures� are external and partial expressions of Divine Wisdom, and the Father (a style of address which Tradition has for strictly Symbolic motives and not at all because of gender-prejudice hallowed) actually does rejoice in them most truly when He rejoices in them only In-&-Through His Infinitely Co-Substantial Word�
* [For �onlook� cfr Donald Evans, The Logic of Self-Involvement (London: SCM Press, 1963. Differently but equally helpful are: Stan Rosenthal, A New Concept of Self (226 Cathedral Road, Cardiff CF1 9JG, 1981) and Robert Elbaz, The Changing Nature of the Self - A Critical Study of the Autobiographical Discourse (London & Sydney, Croom Helm 1988). Rosenthal concludes: �In the �fully functioning person� the quintessential metaconscious archetypes of the Selbstgestalt perform their rightful function of transcending modal discrimation. They thus integrate subjective, objective and quintessential meanings so that the Selbstgestalt has no need of any proof of its own existence, other than the experience of its functioning as an interactively independent aspect of a total situation. This continuing situation is the internalization of the Umwelt into the continuously developing structural pattern and content of the Selbstgestalt, which is the symbiotic and only genuine manifestation of self.� (op. cit., no. 7.7.7, p. 19.)]
Knowing
The meaning of a proposition-word is in the letters of the sentence that conveys it not like fruit in a dish, but more like one's reflection in a mirror. Just as a person sees herself by looking in the mirror rather than at it, so she enjoys insight into possible routes by inspecting the relevant map instead of just glancing at it, and in this way she may understand �meaning� in �signs� and �images� that are acknowledged to be �signs� and �images�.
This position of human understanding in a conditioning context of bodily behaviour and a material environment is obvious enough, and is what is referred to as the human incarnation situation. For the same reason the body is sometimes called our universal epistemological and ontological mediator, and knowing is said to require conversion to phantasm; �understanding� is embodied in �sensation�.
Speech is really made up of what the scholastic writers call verba, i.e., proposition-words and kindred performatory utterances or illocutionary acts. Hence, if we understand it, we actually are really, viz., from an ontological point of view, understanding �words�. We can, of course, also hear �words�, just as we can pronounce them. We hear words in so far as they are audible; we understand them in so far as they are intelligible. Although we express this more briefly by saying that we understand meanings, this is an abstract way of speaking.�
� [In presenting and exploring Doctor J. D. Solomon's philosophy of language I distinguish seven aspects of words; some readers of the present paper may wish to take a preliminary look at what is there explained before re-reading what I have written here� Although the mediæval scholastics have been rather unkindly ridiculed for attempting to count Angels dancing on the heads of pins, no scholastic Doctor or commentator ever produced a One-Pulsation Cosmology of the sort Academician Solomon postulates and recommends to our attention� For the time being, however, I content myself with the usual Thomist tradition, and distinguish here only between the three degrees of abstraction.]
Concretely, proposition-words occur in and are conditioned by a context of living speech, subject to tone and emphasis, coloured by one's mood, supported by gesture, set in a framework of behaviour and environment.
The first degree of abstraction results when such words are interpreted solely in the light of a dictionary of words and phrases or some similar guide to approved usage. The natural sciences have long been regarded as interpretations of reality at this first degree of abstraction, which is said to prescind from individual but not from common matter - from use, but not from the conventional vehicle of usage.
In terms of the analogy we are here exploring, the sciences have been classed as cosmic grammar, useful and possibly even pratically indispensable, but unable to provide recipes for happy living; correct usage can never guarantee a wise use of language.
The second degree of abstraction prescinds from common and individual sensible matter, but not from intelligible matter, and this sort of consideration belongs to post-Euclidean mathematics. While a chemist, for instance, speaks in general terms of �2 grams of sulphur� and can perform a relevant experiment with any two grams of sulphur that are conveniently available, the modern mathematician speaks of �a triangle� which, as such, not only does not but cannot exist.
Nevertheless, this mathematician is not thinking purely of the abstract notion of �triangularity�, since she is able to speak also of a plurality of triangles, of two triangles which are congruent, etc. This is possible because the modern mathematician, unlike her Ancient Egyptian counterpart, embodies her notion of triangularity in an only hypothetically existing imaginary field of conventional symbols, and operates with these.
Such an approach to language is perhaps exemplified in the work of the compositor who is professionally concerned neither with actual communication nor with linguistic propriety but simply with the technology of the material vehicles of communication for which she is responsible.
A developed mathematics of this kind is a condition of possibility of a developed modern science, which is not to say that the media of communication are the message�
The third degree of abstraction prescinds from all matter in order to attend to pure form.
This raises the question of the possibility and nature of Metaphysics. If the body is woman's universal epistemological and ontological mediator, if all understanding is in either representative or at least symbolic images, is it really possible to prescind from all matter, and does it ever make sense to speak of pure form, of completely disembodied meaning?
Suffice it here to say that if the universe is interpreted in accordance with the analogy of speech that has been developed throughout this paper, modern mathematics investigates the various possible linguistic geometries or sign-systems in terms of which it may be construed, the sciences map it out in accordance with a conventionally and provisionally interpreted and selected sign-system or set of sign-systems, and Metaphysics tries to ascertain, what, if anything, it �actually means� - where �what� means �why�, and �why� drives towards an end or purpose which, to be ultimate, must be more æsthetic than utilitarian, and which must also be religious.
Spontaneously the drive towards meaning is manifested and the questions �what?� is first raised with respect to the individual proposition-words that together constitute our natural environment or Umwelt, viz., all the particular, concrete realities by which we are surrounded. This was what the scholastics meant when they stated that the quiddity or whatness of sensible realities is the moving object of direct understanding.
That particularised questioning which is the initial stage of human knowing is called objective abstraction. It is called abstraction not because it leaves something out, for human experience is always the total one of oneself as living with others in and about the world, but because the focussing of attention that particularises one's questioning into a question about this as distinct from that, necessarily blurs one's awareness of the foreground and background to what is being inquired into and, as it were, prescinds from it - though, as one finds to one's cost, only falsely will one ever deny its relevance!
This dynamic questioning that drives towards meaning as the eye towards colours is the spirit of wonder and inquiry, the efficient cause of knowing - as the eye is moved by light to see, the living mind is moved to understand by the interior light of its own active desire to know and understand.
Such questioning uses images or sense expressions just as an author uses a word-processor, or an orator conventional sounds.
The author is not especially concerned with the colour or weight of of her electronic keyboard, nor the orator with the absolute pitich of her voice, and the concern of our questioning with images is equally abstract, some aspects of the image, such as its inevitable here and now character, being usually without any particular relevance to the issue in hand. In trying to understand a book such as Bernard Lonergan's Insight, for instance, unless we happen to have enriched the margins of our personal copy with annotations of our own, we do not ordinarily object to reading some other copy instead, just as we don't normally mind in which colour of ink the letters have been printed, nor bother our heads trying to fathom out why the English rules of orthography are precisely as they are generally held to be.
This focussing of attention effectively assumes sense experience into an intellectual horizon. Instead of a having just a jumble of �letters� in front of us to look at, we have �words� to read and interpret.
In this way human sense knowledge is actually and not just potentially intelligible, the experiential aspects of sensible things are material causes of human knowledge, and particular data furnish us with material evidence for an eventual judgment about the actual meaning of reality.
In our analogy the universe is a meaningful speech, and each human person, Heidegger's clearing (Lichtung) in the forest of being, is the questioner in whom meaning is progressively brought to light and expressed. Active questioning is the relentlessly dynamic performance that is constitutive of human Dasein, of each one's being about and not merely in the world.
The particularised question in which questioning expresses itself vis-à-vis any given situation is determined efficiently by that questioning and materially by the data of the situation. Such particularised questioning is orientated towards the achievement of the corresponding answer.
Essentially this question stands to its answer as eyesight to seeing. As penetrated by a person's basic questioning it stands towards that answer, and within the limits set by the nature of the question, as looking to seeing, i.e., as motion to rest.
The intrinsic relation of questioning as intentional content to a particularised question, and of both to the corresponding answer, is parallel to that of the eye to eyesight and seeing. As active performance, questioning really drives towards meaning as light causes seeing in a healthy eye.
Like seeing, the activity of knowing, understanding, or appreciating meaning is passion rather than action; it is a fresh achievement in the intentional order of which the desire to know is the principal ontological efficient cause.
The first stage of human know is, as I have said, objective abstraction or the posing of a particular question; the second is the particularised answering considered relatively to the question as heuristic content and in abstraction from its vital context. From this point of view, answering is apprehensive abstraction, direct understanding or insight.
At this stage understanding a word is appeciation of at least one possible meaning of a set of letters independently of the limitations imposed by the context. Such understanding is abstract, prescinds from truth and falsity, puts Dickens' account of Pickwick on a par with Boswell's report on Johnson. Here the visible or imagined �letters� are understood as the exemplar* cause of a meaningful �word�.
* [Although banks and building societies require depositors to furnish a specimen signature, handwriting experts are agreed that no individual ever signs her own name in exactly the same way twice.]
In the imagined or imaged sensible qualities the mind grasps a possible form, like a reflection in a mirror. As a country is in the map, a person in his photograph, an exemplar or derivative in a function or exemplatum, eyesight in an eye, so is insight in the image and a possible meaning in the �letters� of a �word� - there is no difference at this level between a map of Africa and one of Ruritania, between fact and fiction, history and legend, or (Lonergan added, though I would not add) between alchemy and chemistry, astronomy and astrology, mystery and myth.�
� [Nowadays I would instead contrast Alchemy and alchemy, Astrology and astrology, Myth and myth. In his later years Lonergan acknowledged that the normal use of �myth� had changed, but remained confident, and I believe quite reasonably so, that his own use of a mystery - myth contrast in Insight is clear enough in its context.]
For only the intelligible, viz., the intrinsically possible, can be understood. In its own way direct understanding, like seeing, is infallible.
The letters in our present analogy are the material cause of the word-proposition they constitute, its meaning is the formal cause that explains the construction of the entire sentence and the choice of its individual component words, the person uttering the propositon by making a statement is the efficient cause, social communication is the final cause, a microphone may be an instrumental cause, and a demonstration by a professional elocutionist may be an exemplar cause.
Thus, in the image the sensible data are material causes of knowing and, as assumed into an intellectual horizon, the image is an instrumental cause of knowing, active questioning being the principal efficient cause.
The formal cause of direct understanding is supplied by the whatness of a sensible reality as moving object of direct understanding. As the eye stands to eyesight, or the tongue to the sense of taste, so man's open questioning stands to its specifying formal cause.
The mind if a self-assembling, self-adjusting, multi-purpose tool. For while the eye cannot hear, nor the nose see, the mind may be brought to understand not only flavours, sounds, perfumes and colours, but all that is. Its potentiality is infinite.
Insight or direct understanding is related to informed questioning as seeing to eyesight, as tasting to the sense of taste.
In considering the particularised answering not so much in its relation to the question as heuristic content, but rather as being itself the formulation of a possible answer, theory or hypothesis, one arrives at the third stage of human knowing, which is formative abstraction.
As well as grasping an intelligibility in the data, insight is itself actually and actively intelligible, each person being intellectually conscious of her own understanding.
Insight into a relevant representation or symbolic image suggests an answer to the question - what is a �person�? what is a �person�?, where �what� means �why� - whay are these six �letters� �p�-�e�-�r�-�s�-�o�-�n� used in this combination? why are these particular flesh and bones human? As supplying the answer to such a question insight is formative abstraction.
The tentative answer, concept, or suggested meaning proceeds from insight as learning from teaching. This concept or projected meaning is an instrument of self-expressive understanding, and since what is known by intellect is a partial constituent of a reality first known by sense, this concept potentially refers to things.
To understanding and meaning there corresponds what is understood and meant, so that the conceptual content is objective, not merely subjective.
If the universal abstract conceptual formulation is one that expresses the essence of a material thing, the usage of a given word-proposition, its reference to that thing or word (verbum) is still only potential, since essence as understood is compounded of form and common matter, of meaning and a rule of spelling, while all existing matter is individuating and individual, spelling only becoming concrete in individual letters, usage in use.
However, if the concept expresses the meaning alone, the intrinsic intelligibility of a material thing in complete abstraction from matter or alphabets, it assigns the formal cause.
Thus rationality is the form of the human person; essentially she is a rational animal.
Whatever is directly understood is possible of itself and intrinsically, since intelligibility is the ground of possibility, but it may be impossible incidentally - as swimming, even for a swimmer, is impossible in the absence of a liquid medium.
Human knowing is not content with a grasp of possibilities, and its fourth stage is that of reasoning and weighing the evidence. As supplied by the letters or sensible data the evidence is material, as construed by direct understanding and then by reflective understanding it is formally meaningful, as the integration of experience, imagination, understanding and conceptualisation in function of the mind's active questioning intention of being it is actual: the dialectical interplay of sense, memory, imagination, insight, definition, critical reflection, and judgment, the moving object of reflective understanding, the sufficient ground of assent.
The aim is to bring to bear on the issue in hand all available resources, such as the gradually developing intellectual habits or dispositions of nous or understanding to penetrate principles and to grasp the point, of episteme or science appreciating its implications, of reflective wisdom or sophia and phronesis estimating the validity of principles, understanding what is and what is to be done, and testing the strength of one's conclusions, of know-how or tekhne grasping how to act.
At this stage, dominated by the question �is it so?�, reasoning stands to understanding as motion to rest, as travelling to arriving, as seeking to finding, as looking to seeing, as racing to winning. With the attainment of understanding one effects the rational transition to judgment. Reason and conscience discipline imagination, and assent depends upon the harmonious interaction of all the faculties.
Judgment is the fifth stage of human knowing in which one affirms truly or falsely that things exist or that events occur. Judgments stand to reflective understanding as concepts and definitions to direct understanding.
The procession of judgment from reflective understanding is actually and actively intelligible and critically reflective in accordance with the naturally known first principles of Identity, Non-Contradiction, Excluded Middle and Sufficient Reason.
One knows by what one is. The disposition called wisdom is the known sufficient ground and cause of what it does, the birth and life in us of the light and evidence by which we operate on our own. It is reason which both gives meaning to and is the criterion of �reality�.
The first principles which are in the intellect as the efficient cause of both direct and reflective understanding and judgments are not laws, but the self-evident essential conditions of there being objects to be related by laws and relations to relate them.
Intelligence stands to law as speaker to message, as cause to effect. Intelligence is constitutive and creative of meaning and law, and the ground of its intelligibility.
Since first principles are grounded not merely in intelligibility and linguistic usage, but in intelligence or the capacity for speech, their valid application is not limited by the limits of language nor to the realm of possible human experience, but extends to all that is.
Although the validity of rational understanding is self-evident, it is not known objectively, but somewhat as the eye sees light not as object but in seeing coloured objects.
The light of the mind constitutes our power of understanding, manifests first principles, makes them evident, motivates rational assent to them, is the actuating element of all intelligible meanings, the immanent ground of certitude, the notion of being.
The objective judgment which is the instrument of reflective understanding is merely conditioned by experience, or the givenness of inner or outer activity.
Moreover, this judgment is not what is known, but the medium in which reality is known. For the transcendental object of human understanding is the concretely real, and truth is correspondence not between the objective judgment and reality, but, in that judgment, between mind and thing.
Hence, human truth is not truth absolutely, but truth as in a subject - such relative truth (relativity, not relativism) can be expressed absolutely only at the abstract level of the objective judgment; as normative for action it must be taken in the full context of the total person-world situation, of our global experience of ourselves as living with others in and about the world.
Knowledge is by identity, knowing is the being-present-to-itself of being, which being-present-to-itself is the being of any existent. Growth in human knowledge is from an initial potential wisdom towards an intentional identity with the universe of being, about which each woman by her personal questioning progressively is.
Communication
Interpersonal communication and ultimately personal communion is the supreme norm for ethics or, to use a more sensitive term, for an æsthetic of human living. For as the good of desire is comprised in the good of order and loved as an element in the good of value, so the partners to a conversation think it good to hear clearly as part of the process of using a mutually agreed language in order to share ideas and arrive at a common viewpoint.
Though natural to humans, communication comes to expression in a conventional language of sounds, ritual gestures, movements, shapes, colour-codes, etc. Each person's own intelligence naturally inclines her to speak, but the conventions of language are fixed by the community.
As the pronounceable unity of a word (verbum) is distinct from its customary meaning and from the asserting force of its utterance, so one may distinguish the human person as flesh and bones, as rational, and as leading a human life.
Similarly, one may distinguish the intersubjective forces that are the bricks and mortar of community, the scaffolding of institutional structures that are its scientific grammar, its spelling and syntax, and the possibly and actually meaningful human relations that give human form and life to the group.
Shakespeare thought all the world a stage, but human beings are not divorced from Nature. All the world's a play, the children, the women and the men - in each of whom the totality is at least potentially expressed - are its verbal ingredients, and their individual and (at least provisionally hierarchically) collective task is to discover and realise the possibilities of speaking and acting it out well, beautifully and with grace.
There is, however, no recipe for success, and neither historical records nor legal abstractions can or should deprive any of us of our unique personal responsibility, The Queen's English and the Hansard Reports are useful sources of reference, but each M.P. is expected to answer to her constituents for her own performance when on the job.
Jean-Paul Sartre claimed that the morality of any particular act should be judged like a work of art, viz. by the law that is born with it. This is true, but it is always a question of a dynamic rather than a static Gestalt and there is an a priori law immanent in the dynamism of human performance as intentional of reality and as transcendent with respect to any particular, contingent, situated achievement.
One cannot get an �ought� from an �is�, but any �is� is only truly human when it derives from the dynamic �ought� latent in good performance, which, precisely as dynamic, resists any attempt to formulate it in rigid or static terms. Only dead birds are stuffed.
One can respect the sacred meaning of marriage without exaggerating the importance of the biological ingredients of sex, and while remaining open-minded about the institutional varieties of marriage as a socially determined structure.
Theological pluralism and a variety of forms of liturgy and Church life are quite compatible with real unity in religious Faith, Hope and Love.
Concern for effective speech together with increased awareness of the relativities of language and the varieties of culturally expressive forms saves us from relativism, and should also prove an effective antidote to any obstinate and self-centred dogmatism, or superstitious ideological or institutional commitment.
There is need for a greater reverence for life and a deepened sense of the mystery of reality. This is of crucial importance in dialogue between people of differing beliefs.
It also enhances the importance of Philosophy of Art. A marble statue is beautiful if it is seen as unmistakeable and frankly marble, yet expressive of something it is not. This may be why one is sometimes more moved by a painting of a tree than by sight of the tree itself.
Ecclesiastical institutions are most effective when they are unmistakeably and frankly human, yet without ceasing to mediate the Transcendent Mystery they exist to serve.
To save the human person both as an individual and as a social being from enslavement to objective science and technology, and to enable her to recover in philosophic faith the mystery of human dialogue and communication which grows out of the depths of what he called the transobjective comprehensive (mediated historically by the great philosophers and popularised by religion, mainly in non-significant symbols pregnant with meaning) was said by Karl Jaspers to be the goal of that intellectual method which is Philosophy.
The real meaning of the spoken words is one thing, the conventional determination of linguistic usage another. Usage naturally changes, and stereotyped language deadens speech.
Human discourse should be joyful. The grammar of one generation is not automatically normative for the literature of the next. One does not look for petrol-pumps on railway-stations, nor judge a mini-skirt by one's ideal of a crinoline.
Human goodness is expressed in speech; it cannot be preserved in a dead language. G-d Is The Speaker of Infinite Wisdom and Boundless Joy. Creation or audible speech is contingent, and G-d's potentialities in self-expression are inexhaustible. Although it is intrinsically intelligible, the full meaning of this speech is adequately known only to The Speaker, and one can never hear the last word on any speaker's mind.
Nevertheless, our human status as questioners gives us a radical desire to know all about G-d. Christian Faith gives us Hope in this direction. Such Faith is never to be confused with belief, although it finds its theoretical articulation in a number of interdependent language-games or theologies, some more highly developed and technically refined than others. G-d uses these to communicate The Divine Word to us, normally via the teachings of the Church.
To discard any one particular language and to learn another demands effort, sometimes very considerable effort, but is nevertheless clearly desirable at time. Moreover, even the total jettison of any given language need never entail the sacrifice of any particle of the message it had been used to convey.
Fidelity to Tradition and preserving one's various traditional links with the past ought not to mean insistence on baby-talk, and there is no reason at all why our contemporary Church should not be dynamically polyglot, as we believe it certainly was on the occasion of the first Pentecost.
Hence, incarnational theology need not imply historicism. The long traditional distinction between Nature and Grace reminds us that G-d's Covenant does not depend for its validity on the quality of its prose, the freedom form acid content of the paper on which it has been printed, or the heat-resistance of the ink.
Proper names don't have meanings in any dictionary sense, but they are impulsive triggers - the subjects of the dynamic verbs which give life to all that is said by any of the various actors in the play. No human person can ever be �defined�, because she is potentially infinite, a shepherdess of being, constitutionally about the world. This sometimes ugly but always potentially beautiful world, this cosmos is dynamically in process towards the achievement of its unity of plot in the grand finale of a human accomplishment that primarily is the chef d'�uvre of G-d and, minute as has been and is my part in this play, I hope and pray you and I will one day, with G-d's entire approval, feel free to applaud each other's performance I+N One Eternally Grateful �Amen���
� [As I mentioned in Ecstasy and Vendetta
(Peter Davies 1973, p. 106), when I was Professor of Philosophy at
the Salesian Institute of Further Education in Beckford, Father
George Williams, SDB, suggested I should provide my then students
with some sort of relatively simple introduction to Bernard
Lonergan's Insight. The published articles which I have very
considerably revised and integrated into the present paper grew out
of lecture notes originally prepared in response to that request and
were, therefore, never meant to substitute for or to replace that
book in any way. It is true not only that Father Lonergan found my
July 1960 exercitatio, �The Method of Metaphysics in
Lonergan's Insight� to be an accurate reflection of the relevant
portions of his 1957 masterpiece, but by its use of what was, in
fact, one of Giulio Girardi's favourite terms, �horizon�, it also
actually anticipated a standpoint that Lonergan only made his own
several years later in �Metaphysics as Horizon� (Gregorianum
44, 1963, pp. 307-18). Nevertheless, he and I agreed then (and I
still regard it as undoubtedly true) that what Lonergan had required
767 pages of text to clarify, could not realistically be properly
expressed in any very much shorter form. Hence, while I believe I
have now in principle freed my earlier articles of their more obvious
infelicities and grosser systematically misleading expressions, I
still strongly recommend the reader to study Lonergan's work in its
original form.]
- Shalom & Welcome! - 
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