Walker Percy - The Message in the Bottle - How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other

In summary, the sentence you speak is not, after all, a true-or-false-or-nonsense claim referring to a state of affairs in the world. It is instead a biological signal mediating an adjustment between organisms and the organisms’ response to an environment. It is impossible for me to take your meaning intersubjectively; I can only respond to your behavior.

(3) Comment. The source of the antinomy and the central phenomenon of language is a relationship which the scientific method cannot construe by its functional schema and hence must disqualify as “wrong.” It is the peculiar relationship of denotation between name and thing and the relationship of identity between subject and predicate.

The antinomy is found in its most characteristic form in the current discipline of “semiotic,” which attempts to bring together pragmatics, syntax, and semantics into the unity of a single science. Semiotic is basically incoherent because it tries to unite the corpus of natural science (organic and inorganic matter in functional interaction) with the corpus of semantics and syntax (naming and asserting and calculus formation by rule) without showing how one discipline is related to the other.

Thus semanticists find themselves in the position of protesting as objective scientists against the very subject matter of their science, the relation of denotation. The science of semantics is the study of the rules by which symbols are assigned to their designata. Yet the science of responding organisms (behavioristics) does not explain how organisms can “assign” names to things in the first place. The relation of denotation is said to be only a “semantical relation,” but its status is never settled from the point of view of the scientific method beyond saying that it is not a “real” relation. One simply speaks in one breath of organisms responding to an environment and in the next of organisms assigning names and making propositions about the world (Reichenbach).

The central act of language, both of naming-classificatory sentences and predicate sentences, is an intentional act of identity. It is essentially a pairing of elements which amounts to an is-saying. In a naming sentence, This is grass , a symbol and a thing are paired and the pairing is the means by which the namer intends that this green blade is one of a group. The basic sentence Grass is green is an identification brought about by a dividing and a composing, a union of the thing with what the thing is. The identity in either case is not real — no one believes that word is the grass or that the grass is the same as its color — but intentional. The identity is the instrument with which the knowing subject affirms the object to be what it is.

The stumbling block to a scientific philosophy of language is the pairing of elements in the assertory act. The scientific method can only grasp elements ordered in a functional or dependent relation, the causal order of the function E =f ( C ).* The assertory act cannot be grasped in a scientist-data framework in which the scientist practices an activity which he disallows in the data. A scientist will accept the statement S is P as a proposition open to verification or disproof. He pays attention to sentences and for himself accepts them as stating a possible fact about the world. When he hears this sound in the air, “A gas expands in direct proportion to temperature increases,” he receives the sound as an intending instrument, an assertion open to verification. But if one asked the scientist to study the sound-sentence not as an assertion to be proved or disproved, not as a phonetic phenomenon subject to Grimm’s law of consonantal change, but as an assertory phenomenon to be grasped as such by his method, the scientist cannot reply coherently. The functional method of the sciences cannot construe the assertory act of language. The only alternative open to the positivist philosopher of language is to accept the peculiar assertory relation of language as a “semantical phenomenon” but to disqualify it as a real “scientific” phenomenon. The upshot is not merely an incoherent exposition of language but a contradictory one, an antinomy.

The Antinomy of Science

Examples of the scientific assertion S is P:

The square of the time of revolution of any planet is proportional to the cube of the mean distance from the sun. T 2=KD 3

(Kepler’s third law of planetary orbits)

The force of attraction between two bodies is in direct proportion to the product of the masses of the two bodies and varies inversely as the square of the distance between them. F =GM 1M 2/d 2

(Newton’s law of gravitation)

The inertia of a system necessarily depends on its energy content…inert mass is simply latent energy. E = mc 2

(Einstein)

In isolated historical systems tribal organization precedes the beginnings of the state.

(Zilsel: a “temporal historico-sociological law”)

(1) What the scientist thinks of the assertion S is P when the assertion is proposed to him as a true-or-false-or-nonsense claim:

The scientific assertion, observation, correlation, hypothesis, theory, deduction, law, is accepted as a true-or-false, or at least as a more or less probable, claim. The claim is assumed to refer to a state of affairs other than the claim and the scientist, and to be open to techniques of verification, pointer readings, and so on. The scientific method presupposes that there is something to be known, that a degree of knowledge is possible, that this knowledge can be expressed as assertions and reliably transmitted from teller to hearer.

(2) What the scientist thinks of the assertion S is P when the assertion is itself a phenomenon under investigation to be ordered with other phenomena in the general corpus of scientific knowledge:

What does the scientist think of science as a phenomenon, not, what does he do as a scientist as he practices his science, assembles his data, sets up a controlled experiment, makes pointer readings, puzzles over discrepancies, gets a hunch, tries a new hypothesis, etc. — but what does he think of science as a happening in the world which takes its place along with other happenings?

If he is to understand science as a phenomenon to be ordered to other phenomena in a general functional scheme, he is obliged to disqualify the major assumptions which he has made in the practice of his science: that valid scientific knowledge is possible and that it can be transmitted from teller to hearer by means of assertions.

The dilemma of the modern philosopher of science has these two horns. It appears to him that he may pursue only one of two alternatives without betraying the rigor of the scientific method. Yet in each case the consequence is an antinomy in which his explanation of science as an activity stands in contradiction to his assumptions about science if he is a practicing scientist.

First, he may proceed according to the realistic assumptions of science, that here we are with a real happening between us which we must try to understand — and study science as a phenomenon which happens to real organisms in a world, just as metabolism and bee dances and dog salivation are real happenings. It seems reasonable to approach the organisms who are scientists with the same objectivity with which he approaches organisms who are searching for food or organisms who are making a myth. Thus he is obliged to understand science as an instrumentality, as either a mode of biological behavior or of cultural behavior and meaningful only as gauged by biological or cultural needs. Thus Dewey sought to understand science and knowledge as but one of many social instrumentalities whose validity and adequacy are measured in terms of the degree to which they make possible an adjustment between the individual organism on the one hand and the social and physical environment on the other. A kindred view of science as a phenomenon-to-be-explained is that of dialectical materialism, which sees research not as an enterprise freely undertaken and specified by the subject to be known but as itself determined by the economic organization and needs of society. In each case, instrumentalism and dialectical materialism, the theorist appears to be following the legitimate procedure of the scientific method; he is looking upon science as a phenomenon to be explained by a functional principle. In one case the principle is sociobiological, in the other dialectical.