Matter, mind and meaning / by Whately Carington.

  • Carington, Whately, 1892-1947.
Date:
[1949]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Matter, mind and meaning / by Whately Carington. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    62/288 (page 36)
    Now sophistication does not necessarily bring wisdom or critical power, and the forces of superstition and the tradi¬ tions of magic die hard; indeed, except they be most resolutely challenged, they never die at all. Thus the naive belief (or rather ‘taking for granted’) that for every word used in a language there must be a corresponding and identifiable existent in the factual universe is only too likely to persist unless active steps are taken to counteract it; and meta¬ physicians have only too easily fallen into the error of supposing that, because they can find such words as ‘sub¬ stance’, ‘absolute’, ‘reality’, ‘essence’, and the rest in their dictionaries, they must be talking about something when they use the words in discussion. This supposition is comprehen¬ sible enough and even pardonable, in view of what I have just said; but it is a complete fallacy, and unless the existents allegedly referred by the words can, in principle at least, actually be identified by some sort of observation, they are, in fact, talking about nothing at all. 16. Reaso?is for Failure (3); Grammar. A language does not consist of v/ords alone; there must also be rules for modi¬ fying and arranging them (grammar and syntax), or otherwise so contriving that the sentences in which they occur corre¬ spond correctly to the relations between the objects, etc., referred to. Thus the sentences ‘Dog bites man’ and ‘Man bites dog’ refer to two importantly different situations, as every journalist is taught in his cradle. In English this difference is expressed by changing the order of the words; but in Latin, and other more highly inflected languages, one or more of the words themselves is altered, and variations in order become available for more subtle purposes of emphasis, etc., without relevance to the situation described. The words canis, mordet, and hominem will always mean (i.e. be trans¬ lated as) ‘Dog bites man’, whatever the order in which they are arranged, and never ‘Man bites dog’, for which we need mordet, canem, and homo, with equal indifference to order. Now, just as metaphysicians and others have taken for granted that to every word in the language there must corre¬ spond some existent in the world of observables, so there is a