The Analysis of Mind by Bertrand Russell (best large ereader .txt) đź“–
- Author: Bertrand Russell
- Performer: 0486445518
Book online «The Analysis of Mind by Bertrand Russell (best large ereader .txt) 📖». Author Bertrand Russell
impossibility in walking occurring as an isolated phenomenon, not
forming part of any such series as we call a “person.”
We may therefore class with “eating,” “walking,” “speaking” words
such as “rain,” “sunrise,” “lightning,” which do not denote what
would commonly be called actions. These words illustrate,
incidentally, how little we can trust to the grammatical
distinction of parts of speech, since the substantive “rain” and
the verb “to rain” denote precisely the same class of
meteorological occurrences. The distinction between the class of
objects denoted by such a word and the class of objects denoted
by a general name such as “man,” “vegetable,” or “planet,” is
that the sort of object which is an instance of (say) “lightning”
is much simpler than (say) an individual man. (I am speaking of
lightning as a sensible phenomenon, not as it is described in
physics.) The distinction is one of degree, not of kind. But
there is, from the point of view of ordinary thought, a great
difference between a process which, like a flash of lightning,
can be wholly comprised within one specious present and a process
which, like the life of a man, has to be pieced together by
observation and memory and the apprehension of causal
connections. We may say broadly, therefore, that a word of the
kind we have been discussing denotes a set of similar
occurrences, each (as a rule) much more brief and less complex
than a person or thing. Words themselves, as we have seen, are
sets of similar occurrences of this kind. Thus there is more
logical affinity between a word and what it means in the case of
words of our present sort than in any other case.
There is no very great difference between such words as we have
just been considering and words denoting qualities, such as
“white” or “round.” The chief difference is that words of this
latter sort do not denote processes, however brief, but static
features of the world. Snow falls, and is white; the falling is a
process, the whiteness is not. Whether there is a universal,
called “whiteness,” or whether white things are to be defined as
those having a certain kind of similarity to a standard thing,
say freshly fallen snow, is a question which need not concern us,
and which I believe to be strictly insoluble. For our purposes,
we may take the word “white” as denoting a certain set of similar
particulars or collections of particulars, the similarity being
in respect of a static quality, not of a process.
From the logical point of view, a very important class of words
are those that express relations, such as “in,” “above,”
“before,” “greater,” and so on. The meaning of one of these words
differs very fundamentally from the meaning of one of any of our
previous classes, being more abstract and logically simpler than
any of them. If our business were logic, we should have to spend
much time on these words. But as it is psychology that concerns
us, we will merely note their special character and pass on,
since the logical classification of words is not our main
business.
We will consider next the question what is implied by saying that
a person “understands” a word, in the sense in which one
understands a word in one’s own language, but not in a language
of which one is ignorant. We may say that a person understands a
word when (a) suitable circumstances make him use it, (b) the
hearing of it causes suitable behaviour in him. We may call these
two active and passive understanding respectively. Dogs often
have passive understanding of some words, but not active
understanding, since they cannot use words.
It is not necessary, in order that a man should “understand” a
word, that he should “know what it means,” in the sense of being
able to say “this word means so-and-so.” Understanding words does
not consist in knowing their dictionary definitions, or in being
able to specify the objects to which they are appropriate. Such
understanding as this may belong to lexicographers and students,
but not to ordinary mortals in ordinary life. Understanding
language is more like understanding cricket*: it is a matter of
habits, acquired in oneself and rightly presumed in others. To
say that a word has a meaning is not to say that those who use
the word correctly have ever thought out what the meaning is: the
use of the word comes first, and the meaning is to be distilled
out of it by observation and analysis. Moreover, the meaning of a
word is not absolutely definite: there is always a greater or
less degree of vagueness. The meaning is an area, like a target:
it may have a bull’s eye, but the outlying parts of the target
are still more or less within the meaning, in a gradually
diminishing degree as we travel further from the bull’s eye. As
language grows more precise, there is less and less of the target
outside the bull’s eye, and the bull’s eye itself grows smaller
and smaller; but the bull’s eye never shrinks to a point, and
there is always a doubtful region, however small, surrounding
it.**
* This point of view, extended to the analysis of “thought” is
urged with great force by J. B. Watson, both in his “Behavior,”
and in “Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist”
(Lippincott. 1919), chap. ix.
** On the understanding of words, a very admirable little book is
Ribot’s “Evolution of General Ideas,” Open Court Co., 1899. Ribot
says (p. 131): “We learn to understand a concept as we learn to
walk, dance, fence or play a musical instrument: it is a habit,
i.e. an organized memory. General terms cover an organized,
latent knowledge which is the hidden capital without which we
should be in a state of bankruptcy, manipulating false money or
paper of no value. General ideas are habits in the intellectual
order.”
A word is used “correctly” when the average hearer will be
affected by it in the way intended. This is a psychological, not
a literary, definition of “correctness.” The literary definition
would substitute, for the average hearer, a person of high
education living a long time ago; the purpose of this definition
is to make it difficult to speak or write correctly.
The relation of a word to its meaning is of the nature of a
causal law governing our use of the word and our actions when we
hear it used. There is no more reason why a person who uses a
word correctly should be able to tell what it means than there is
why a planet which is moving correctly should know Kepler’s laws.
To illustrate what is meant by “understanding” words and
sentences, let us take instances of various situations.
Suppose you are walking in London with an absent-minded friend,
and while crossing a street you say, “Look out, there’s a motor
coming.” He will glance round and jump aside without the need of
any “mental” intermediary. There need be no “ideas,” but only a
stiffening of the muscles, followed quickly by action. He
“understands” the words, because he does the right thing. Such
“understanding” may be taken to belong to the nerves and brain,
being habits which they have acquired while the language was
being learnt. Thus understanding in this sense may be reduced to
mere physiological causal laws.
If you say the same thing to a Frenchman with a slight knowledge
of English he will go through some inner speech which may be
represented by “Que dit-il? Ah, oui, une automobile!” After this,
the rest follows as with the Englishman. Watson would contend
that the inner speech must be incipiently pronounced; we should
argue that it MIGHT be merely imaged. But this point is not
important in the present connection.
If you say the same thing to a child who does not yet know the
word “motor,” but does know the other words you are using, you
produce a feeling of anxiety and doubt you will have to point and
say, “There, that’s a motor.” After that the child will roughly
understand the word “motor,” though he may include trains and
steam-rollers If this is the first time the child has heard the
word “motor,” he may for a long time continue to recall this
scene when he hears the word.
So far we have found four ways of understanding words:
(1) On suitable occasions you use the word properly.
(2) When you hear it you act appropriately.
(3) You associate the word with another word (say in a different
language) which has the appropriate effect on behaviour.
(4) When the word is being first learnt, you may associate it
with an object, which is what it “means,” or a representative of
various objects that it “means.”
In the fourth case, the word acquires, through association, some
of the same causal efficacy as the object. The word “motor” can
make you leap aside, just as the motor can, but it cannot break
your bones. The effects which a word can share with its object
are those which proceed according to laws other than the general
laws of physics, i.e. those which, according to our terminology,
involve vital movements as opposed to merely mechanical
movements. The effects of a word that we understand are always
mnemic phenomena in the sense explained in Lecture IV, in so far
as they are identical with, or similar to, the effects which the
object itself might have.
So far, all the uses of words that we have considered can be
accounted for on the lines of behaviourism.
But so far we have only considered what may be called the
“demonstrative” use of language, to point out some feature in the
present environment. This is only one of the ways in which
language may be used. There are also its narrative and
imaginative uses, as in history and novels. Let us take as an
instance the telling of some remembered event.
We spoke a moment ago of a child who hears the word “motor” for
the first time when crossing a street along which a motor-car is
approaching. On a later occasion, we will suppose, the child
remembers the incident and relates it to someone else. In this
case, both the active and passive understanding of words is
different from what it is when words are used demonstratively.
The child is not seeing a motor, but only remembering one; the
hearer does not look round in expectation of seeing a motor
coming, but “understands” that a motor came at some earlier time.
The whole of this occurrence is much more difficult to account
for on behaviourist lines. It is clear that, in so far as the
child is genuinely remembering, he has a picture of the past
occurrence, and his words are chosen so as to describe the
picture; and in so far as the hearer is genuinely apprehending
what is said, the hearer is acquiring a picture more or less like
that of the child. It is true that this process may be telescoped
through the operation of the word-habit. The child may not
genuinely remember the incident, but only have the habit of the
appropriate words, as in the case of a poem which we know by
heart, though we cannot remember learning it. And the hearer also
may only pay attention to the words, and not call up any
corresponding picture. But it is, nevertheless, the possibility
of a memory-image in the child and an imagination-image in the
hearer that makes the essence of the narrative “meaning” of the
words. In so far as this is absent, the words are mere counters,
capable of meaning, but not at
Comments (0)