The Semantics Of Science

The Semantics of Science

ROY HARRIS

Continuum

The Semantics of Science

Related title The Necessity of Artspeak – Roy Harris

The Semantics of Science ROY HARRIS

Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 15 East 26th Street 11 York Road New York, NY 10010 London SE1 7NX © Roy Harris 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 08264 8450 6 (hardback) 08264 7847 6 (paperback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

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Contents

Preface Introduction 1 Language and the Aristotelian scientist 2 Before and after Aristotle 3 Semantics and the Royal Society 4 Science in the kitchen 5 The rhetoric of linguistic science 6 Mathematics and the language of science 7 Science and common sense 8 Supercategory semantics 9 Integrating science Appendix 1 Einstein on science and reality Appendix 2 Heisenberg on language References Index

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Preface

Most of our science is a matter of inference. Oliver Lodge, 1927 Every scientist [. . .] is constantly confronted with the problem of objective description of experience, by which we mean unambiguous communication. Niels Bohr, 1954 It is a major triumph of science to have evolved a language which is largely independent of culture. Colin Cherry, 1957

One of the drawbacks of writing about ‘the language of science’ is that it may give rise to the false impression that the writer believes in the existence of some single, monolithic language or form of discourse that is typically used by all or most scientists. So it may be as well to enter straight away a disclaimer to the effect that I hold no such belief. My main concerns in this book are not the grammatical and stylistic topics which seem to have preoccupied others who have written on the language of science (e.g. Savory 1953, Halliday 2004). I have nothing to say about such matters as nominalization in scientific reports, or clause structure in the scientific sentence. Nor is my point of departure the naive assumption that there actually is a linguistic variety we can immediately recognize as, say, ‘scientific English’; let alone treat its ‘grammar’ as a subspecies of ‘English grammar’, or as an epiphenomenon with respect to some better understood whole called ‘the English language’. (One might as well suppose that there were distinct varieties of ‘tennis English’, ‘Christian English’, ‘horticultural English’ or ‘railway English’.) Exactly the same applies to French, Latin, Greek and other languages which scientists have adopted or adapted for their own purposes. Beyond the superficial language-specific question of what marks out the kind(s) of vocabulary and syntax that scientists choose in order to write about their work, there lies a much deeper question concerning the assumptions about

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language that scientists make in their work. This is the area of my inquiry. It is a common misconception to imagine that it falls within the professional competence of linguists to describe the language of science ‘from the outside’; that is, without ever themselves engaging directly with the question ‘What is science?’. I do not think that is possible. Most of the issues I wish to raise fall within an area roughly marked out by the three pronouncements by eminent scientists of the twentieth century that I have quoted above. I construe these as pointing to much wider questions about the interface between scientific and linguistic inquiry. At first sight there are many such questions. But perhaps in the end they could be reduced to just two. If so, and in advance of any debate about how precisely to define the words science and language, these two questions would be: ‘What does science require of language?’ and ‘What does language require of science?’ In The Semantics of Science I embark on what may seem to amount to a radical rethinking of science and scientific language; at least, science as understood (or misunderstood) by many people of my generation, whether they would have regarded themselves as scientists or not. One reason why my perspective may be unfamiliar is that ‘the word science’, as commonly used for the past hundred years or more, has been enlisted in the service of a way of thinking about Nature and human inquiry that is quite different from that adopted here. So I shall be contesting the received wisdom that emanates jointly from Laboratories and Libraries. (By ‘Laboratories’ I mean the collectivity of research institutions that support scientists, regardless of whether they actually work in laboratories or not; and ‘Libraries’ I use as a convenient term for all the dictionaries, textbooks and encyclopedias compiled under the auspices of the current academic Establishment.) My title The Semantics of Science calls for a preliminary explanation. ‘The word semantics’, according to lexicographers, has a relatively short history: ‘the word science’ has a much longer and more complicated one. Semantics, we are told, is an English version of the French sémantique, a term invented by the French linguist Michel Bréal towards the end of the nineteenth century (Wolf 1991: 3–17). Science, on the other hand, is derived ultimately from the Latin scientia; but who coined the word scientia, and in what context, lexicographers do not know. One connexion between semantics and science that I am interested in relates to the way in which Bréal, and many others after him, chose to define the inquiry that he baptized in pseudo-Greek fashion as sémantique (from the verb semaino ‘to signify’). It was, he said, the ‘science of meanings’ (science des significations). When Bréal published his Essai de sémantique in 1897, science already belonged among the prestigious conceptual supercategories in terms of which the intellectual life of the modern world is organized. Every new branch of

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academic inquiry seeks to establish its own credentials by reference to one or other of the supercategories. Each of these supercategories in turn has its own rhetoric, assiduously cultivated by those who thereby promote their own interests and convictions. Science is no exception. Bréal was fully aware of that when he claimed that semantics was a science. He did not feel called upon to explain further in what sense semantics was scientific: the rhetorical force of the term science alone was already sufficient for his purposes. It is ironic that, for Bréal, the semantics of science was no more than a very small component of the science of semantics. It is virtually impossible to discuss the semantics of science without getting caught up in the rhetoric of science; for the connexions between them are too close. At the same time, I would not wish to overexpand the domain of rhetoric in the way some modern theorists have tried to do, so that it encompasses ‘the study of all areas of symbolic activity’ (Bazerman 1988: 7). That move in rhetorical empire-building seems to me to blur, for no good reason, a number of useful distinctions. Nor am I interested, as Bazerman is, in the study of the scientific publication as a ‘literary genre’. (In this connexion, I should perhaps point out that although Bazerman refers to ‘integrative machinery’ and ‘integrative apparatus’ in scientific writing, the reader should not suppose that this alludes in any way to integration as a theoretical concept in linguistics. See further below.) I am not proposing to give scientists lessons in how to write more persuasively. What I am concerned with under the heading of rhetoric are the public claims that scientists make on behalf of science. For these, whether justifiable or not, colour what the general public understands science to be. Furthermore, ‘explaining’ science to the public has now become a full-time occupation for certain writers, journalists and academics, whose efforts have gone a long way towards institutionalizing the rhetoric to which I refer. There are even university courses advertised under the rubric ‘rhetoric of science’; this is said to be an area of studies which ‘applies the tools of classical rhetoric and literary criticism to texts and communication patterns in the natural and social sciences’. It has all come out of ‘writing courses that are routinely required of science and engineering students’ (Fuller 1999). Those who ‘did their science’ in the days when no such writing courses were required, or even contemplated, may well raise an eyebrow at the apparent recycling of antiquated academic divisions (which already presupposes that, unlike arts students, science students are in some respects illiterate); but this is an issue I do not propose to explore further in the following chapters. It deserves a book to itself. What I take the rhetoric of science to involve is in any case much more complicated than that. One complication is that few of us nowadays know whether we are getting our ‘scientific information’ at first hand, second hand, or forty-ninth hand. To take a simple example, Mr Overweight who visits the

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gym for his morning exercise before going off to the office is likely to find that he is exercising on a machine with a dial that purports to tell him how many calories he has lost after so many minutes. Does Mr Overweight believe this? Does Mr Overweight know what it means? Does he know how the information is calculated? Does he know how reliable that system of calculation is, or how it can be applied to his particular case? Not many Mr Overweights do. But Mr Overweight nevertheless believes (as the proprietors of the gymnasium intend that he should) that, at whatever remove and with whatever qualifications, this information is in some sense ‘scientific’. That seems to Mr Overweight to be guaranteed by the word calory itself: clearly a ‘scientific’ word. Much more pretentious than the crude promises that weight-watchers consume for their intellectual diet is the rhetoric telling us that science has discovered in DNA a concealed ‘genomic language’ that can be compared directly to English. We are asked to believe that the genome is ‘a lexicon, a collection of arbitrarily ordered sentences, similar to the arbitrary alphabetical order of entries in an encyclopedia’ (Pollack 1994: 68). Nonsense of this order nowadays gets by as ‘scientific’. Like the dubious information handed out to Mr Overweight, it is all part of the modern propaganda of science. The question is: do scientists believe their own propaganda? If they do – and some of them certainly seem to believe some of it – then the situation is disturbing. Within the linguistic confines of the rhetoric I have briefly described, to represent a work or a procedure or an opinion as ‘scientific’ is by implication to attribute a certain kind of status or authority to it: to dismiss it as ‘unscientific’ is a corresponding condemnation. To say that a person is a scientist is to suggest that the individual in question has a certain range of knowledge or expertise or professional qualifications denied to non-scientists. To classify a discipline as a science is to claim that it enjoys a certain kind of superiority over non-sciences: it has established certain criteria or standards that non-sciences lack. Apart from its own journalists, science has its own historians and its own philosophers, who specialize in subjects called ‘history of science’ and ‘philosophy of science’ respectively. As a supercategory, science stands in these respects on a par with other supercategories in the same league; in particular those with which it is often contrasted, such as art and religion. One mark of this parity is the difficulty of explaining what science is without, implicitly or explicitly, contrasting it with other supercategories. Sciences versus arts and science versus religion are familiar oppositions. But where do all these supercategories come from? If anyone thinks that science is a supercategory that I have invented in order to attack it, they would do well to reflect on what happened in 2003 when a well-known British scientist had the courage to suggest that since the general public directly or indirectly financed most scientific research, the

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public ought to have a say in what research was undertaken. The chorus of condemnation from his fellow scientists was deafening. (It was as if a notable bishop at a synod had suggested a referendum on whether the Church of England should be disestablished.) ‘Ridiculous’ and ‘reactionary’ were among the adjectives that appeared in print, and many less printable ones could be heard in the Laboratories. This reaction is an example of the supercategory in action, determined to protect its own autonomy. My contention throughout will be that supercategories such as science, art, religion, and history are themselves verbal constructs, and thus languagedependent. But they do not all come to be constructed in the same way. That is why it is worth paying attention to the linguistic process involved in each individual development. This will hinge in various respects on the stage a society has reached in its own internal evolution. It may also owe a great deal to the impetus provided by the work of an outstanding individual at a particular time. The basic function of the supercategory is to integrate what would otherwise be separate activities and inquiries; and the result of that integration is to re-draw the map of the intellectual world that society as a whole adopts. In previous publications (The Necessity of Artspeak, 2003; The Linguistics of History, 2004) I have applied this approach to showing what assumptions underlie the language of the arts and the language of history. The language of science seems to be amenable to similar treatment. Adopting an integrational approach to the supercategories allows us to explain much that would otherwise remain inexplicable. It accounts for why, for example, the Greeks of the Classical period had no such supercategory as science (despite the claims of many modern authorities), whereas they did have the supercategories of religion, politics and philosophy. Such an approach also allows for transition over time from one supercategory to another. Gilbert Murray in Five Stages of Greek Religion cites the case of agriculture. This, he points out, ‘used to be entirely a question of religion; now it is almost entirely a question of science.’ What does this mean in practice? Murray puts it as follows: In antiquity, if a field was barren, the owner of it would probably assume that the barrenness was due to ‘pollution’, or offence somewhere. He would run through all his own possible offences, or at any rate those of his neighbours and ancestors, and when he eventually decided the cause of the trouble, the steps that he would take would all be of a kind calculated not to affect the chemical constitution of the soil, but to satisfy his own emotions of guilt and terror, or the imaginary emotions of the imaginary being he had offended. A modern man in the same predicament would probably not think of religion at all, at any rate in the earlier

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stages; he would say it was a case for deeper ploughing or for basic slag. (Murray 1935: 5) A farmer of a more recent generation might well say it was a case for pesticides. But that would still come under the supercategory of science. Perhaps a clearer example would be the agricultural requirement of adequate water. The farmer who copes with this by installing an up-to-date system of irrigation treats the problem as scientific. The farmer who goes to church and prays for rain is reverting to an earlier system of supercategories. (Some farmers may do both.) Each supercategory always presupposes some hierarchy. A variety of lower-order enterprises cluster under the umbrella of a superordinate. Take the case of ‘art’. There is, we recognize, no such activity as art per se, (‘pure art’), but only what qualifies as art in virtue of being in the first place one of the more restricted activities of painting, music, poetry, etc., or some combination of these. So it is in science. There is no such activity as science per se: scientific activity must first qualify as physics, chemistry, geology, etc. or some amalgamation of these. In the case of science, as in the case of art, the inclusion of a certain activity may be contentious in particular cases. Thus, for instance, those who take for granted that physics and chemistry qualify as sciences may not agree that economics is a science. This is not just a dispute about definitions, or a clash of professional prides, although that is how such disagreements are often presented. When Bréal claimed to being laying the foundations of a new science, hitherto nameless, his claim could hardly be other than controversial. For, if accepted, it brought the term science itself, together with all other supercategory terms and concepts, under the critical scrutiny of one new science, semantics. Although the supercategories we recognize are familiar enough, there often seems to be some doubt about what exactly they are, or what belongs to each. Kant, for example, in his Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Naturwissenschaft, argues against counting chemistry as a branch of natural science as follows: Only that whose certainty is apodeictic can be called science proper; cognition that can contain merely empirical certainty is only improperly called science. That whole of cognition which is systematic can therefore be called science, and, when the connection of cognition in this system is a coherence of grounds and consequents, rational science. But when these grounds or principles are ultimately merely empirical, as, for example, in chemistry, and when the laws from which reason explains the given facts are merely laws of experience, then they carry with themselves no consciousness of their necessity (are not apodeictically certain), and thus the

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whole does not in a strict sense deserve the name of science. Therefore, chemistry should be called systematic art rather than science. (Kant 1786: 4) Whether we agree here with Kant or not makes no difference for my purposes. In proposing to investigate the semantics of science, I am not intending to go through prescriptive arguments about the proper or improper use of terms such as science, Wissenschaft, and so on; nor how to distinguish between science and art, or between science and anything else. The point is that the way such arguments are conducted, as Kant’s example illustrates, already presupposes that there is a supercategory concerning which such questions can be raised. Similar considerations apply when we find books with interrogative titles like What is Science? (Campbell 1921) and What is this thing called Science? (Chalmers 1982). These titles already assume the legitimacy of treating science as a supercategory. We would hardly expect to find titles like What are Sciences? or What are these things called Sciences?. The reader is assumed to have some practical acquaintance with the plurality before proceeding to the more difficult question of why or how they all qualify as belonging to the supercategory. It is also interesting to note how the question is posed. What is Science? sounds like a Socratic question (cf. ‘What is justice?’), whereas What is this thing called Science? already presupposes that science is the name of a ‘thing’, and we are looking for whatever thing it is that has this name. (It may be significant that one book was written by an eminent scientist and the other by a philosopher; both titles, in my view, are question-begging, although in different ways.) From the sequence of chapters, it may look as though my own approach to the supercategory of science is historical. So perhaps I should say at the outset that in my view the discipline called ‘history of science’ has laboured hitherto under the joint tyranny of two linguistic fallacies. One involves searching for the earliest uses of ‘the word science’ (or one of its etymological forebears), and the other involves trying to detect the earliest manifestations of a certain ‘idea’ of science (the idea supposedly expressed by ‘the word science’ itself). Both fallacies are rooted in a particular philosophy of language, which presupposes that a word such as science gets its meaning by standing for something that certain human beings (often called scientists) actually do, or at least think they do. These are what I regard as semantic fallacies. I shall suggest that these fallacies underpin the way science is frequently discussed in the modern world. I shall also suggest that we should all come to terms with science better if we recognized such fallacies for what they are. As a therapy, I recommend examining how the use of ‘the word science’ functions to integrate our picture of the world as a whole. (I put ‘the word science’ in scare quotes because,

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for reasons that will emerge, I regard this as a metalinguistic abstraction with no genuine scientific credentials at all.) My ‘integrational’ approach to science and its terminology is based on a philosophy of language that departs radically in certain respects from that adopted by the thinkers who are usually regarded as the founders of science in the Western tradition. I do not intend to set out the integrationist case in detail, because that has already been done elsewhere (Harris, R. 1996; Toolan 1996; Harris, R. 1998). But I owe the reader some preliminary account of how integrationist thinking applies to the analysis of supercategories. For an integrationist, language is the product of our daily attempts to integrate our activities with those of our fellow human beings. Verbal signs – words – come to be relied on (often mistakenly) as means by which to establish more or less permanent frameworks for our dealings with others. All the modern supercategories are the result of complex integrational processes over a period of time. Because of changes in society, what were formerly independent human activities acquire a relationship of interdependence. The integration is itself facilitated by adopting new ways of speaking about it. A supercategory requires, for its elevation to that rank, the linguistic support of a specific terminology and a discourse in which that terminology is deployed, on a cross-disciplinary basis, by many practitioners, with a certain regularity and assurance. Exactly how that may work out varies from one case to another. I have limited the discussion in this book to the Western tradition, and more narrowly to what I see as being the principal phases in Western thinking on the subject. That does not always correspond to the view taken by accredited ‘historians of science’. They, I think, have often neglected or misconstrued the linguistic dimension of their discipline. Why and how they have done so are in themselves questions worth pursuing. The answers, I believe, are to be found in the ways in which, throughout the Western tradition, both the scientists and those who interpret their achievements for the rest of society have alike been enmeshed in a tangle of confusions that I call ‘the language myth’. I shall give a preliminary description of this myth in the Introduction. Those taken in by the myth, in one or other of its many versions, have supposed that the connexions between words and discovering ‘the truth’ about the world are far simpler than in practice turns out to be the case. They have been misled into assuming that language is in some sense a mirror of reality, and have seen scientific discourse as providing, at least ideally, a reliable and objective reflection of what exists in Nature. I shall not go into details about how the various sciences came to develop the specialized vocabularies that they use. Nor shall I be concerned with the etymological patterns of word-formation that underlie the verbal jargon of science. Much of that ground has already been covered by modern lexicographical studies. (See, for instance, Flood 1960; Hogben 1970.) A more inter-

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esting question, in my view, is what semantic assumptions scientists have made about the ways in which the language of science functions, and how they see its relationship to the patently ‘non-scientific’ language that most of us find convenient for conducting our everyday affairs. I do not think that academic linguists have concerned themselves much with these quite fundamental questions. Doubtless because their own terminology was itself founded upon the same fallacious assumptions as those of the larger scientific community to which they aspired to gain membership. For this reason I have devoted a special chapter to ‘linguistic science’. This seemed to me all the more necessary inasmuch as linguists who have been tempted to make pronouncements about language and science easily fall into the trap of explaining nothing, but simply compounding existing muddles by importing their own disciplinary hobby-horses and metalinguistic terminology. (An example would be Halliday 1987 on ‘Language and the order of nature’. This is based on very questionable Whorfian assumptions and couched in an elaborate pseudo-scientific vocabulary of ‘codes’, ‘systems’, ‘subsystems’, ‘cryptogrammar’, ‘grammatics’, ‘n-order metaredundancies’, etc., as well as obscure metaphors like ‘dialogue with nature’, all of which merely serve to dress up in sciencespeak notions derived from Western traditional grammar. That would be bad enough, without building up to such an exaggerated claim as ‘the science of information is linguistics’ (Halliday 1987: 152) that no one can take seriously.) I resisted the notion of including a chapter on the language of science fiction. Not because I think that science fiction is not a significant mainstay of the image that the supercategory has built up in the modern world; but because I foresaw that it would provide critics with too easy an excuse for ignoring the more important arguments about the language of science that I wish to present. There is one other preliminary point I should like to address here. It is prompted by finding one commentator who seems to think that all this fuss and bother about science is a peculiarly Anglophone phenomenon, based on the dubious semantics of ‘the word science’ itself. According to this writer: ‘Outside the English-speaking world nowadays, the science word does not have epistemological clout.’ The French and German triads that correspond to our plain English “natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities” are “les sciences naturelles, les sciences sociales, et les sciences humaines” and “die Naturwissenschaften, die Sozialwissenschaften, und die Geisteswissenschaften.” [. . .] In Japanese, Finnish, Tamil, Turkish, Korean, and all the Indo-European languages, the science word means “systematic inquiry.” [. . .] The point is that the foreigners have gotten it right. “Literary

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criticism is a science” or “Economics is a science” should not be the fighting words they are in English. (McCloskey 1998: 20–1) Perhaps all that needs to be said is that if this complaint were well-founded, then translating French science or German Wissenschaft into English as science would be immediately identifiable as a fourth-form howler. But it isn’t, and never has been. (Cf. the passage from Kant quoted above.) There is nothing for ‘the foreigners’ to have ‘gotten right’, and no sense in which scientific inquiry ought to mean no more than ‘systematic inquiry’. To pursue an inquiry systematically is not necessarily to pursue it scientifically. Nor is scientific pursuit necessarily systematic pursuit. Anyone who cannot see that would do well to ply another trade than linguistic adviser to the scientific community. There are enough serious semantic issues about science: we could do without concocting silly ones. In order to open The Semantics of Science to as wide a readership as possible, I have deliberately avoided detailed discussion of the very technical matters that arise in many scientific controversies, and have shunned algebraic formulations like the plague. Insofar as I understand anything about these more arcane areas (and the frontier posts of that forbidden kingdom are very soon reached as far as I am concerned), they do not raise semantic issues that are any different in character from the less enigmatic examples that I do discuss. R.H. Oxford, May 2004

Introduction

We still say ‘The sun rises in the east’, even though the truth of that statement was called into question long ago by adopting a heliocentric model of the solar system. The old way of speaking has survived, but it has now become a kind of semantic fossil. The lesson we learn from this is that human beings can be, apparently, quite content to believe certain things about the universe they live in, while nevertheless describing it as if they inhabited a different universe altogether. Cases like the sun still allegedly rising in the east, just as for our ancestors, show us how easily a time-lag can open up between language and systems of belief. The former has not caught up with the latter. Fortunately, in other instances it often catches up quite quickly. It did not take many years from the publication of William Harvey’s De Motu Cordis in 1628 for the general public – not just the doctors – to start talking confidently about ‘the circulation of the blood’. In the following chapters I shall be discussing aspects of a more profound time-lag that also involves science and language. It is not generated by anything as simple as abandoning an old model of the solar system and switching to a new one. It subsumes both cases like the sun rising in the east and cases like the circulation of the blood. The time-lag that interests me goes far deeper, but it too involves a conflict between models of the way things are – or are believed to be. It is a conflict between, on the one hand, modern scientific thinking about science itself, and, on the other, an ancient model of language that still survives as the basis for formulating scientific statements. Another way of describing this time-lag would be as follows. Since the days of Newton the thinking of scientists about Nature has advanced far beyond the speculations put forward in ancient Greece; but, with a few honourable exceptions, the thinking of those same scientists about the language of science has not progressed much beyond Aristotle. Consequently, there can be very considerable disparities between the modern discoveries of science and, on

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the other hand, the language available for scientists to report and explain what they think science has discovered. Scientific discourse in the modern world, in short, has an internal time-lag. It is not like the external delay that may sometimes occur in reporting events from far-off places. The time-lag in this case is built into the language itself. It is a semantic time-lag. (It is as if one were living in a house where all the clocks were permanently slow, but that was never admitted or even discussed as a possibility: the fact that they all told the same time was taken as showing that each clock told the correct time.) The existence of the time-lag thus goes unnoticed by the many people who believe that scientists collectively command some privileged way of describing the world in which we live, a language not designed for comprehension by the hoi polloi. They do not ask on what basis that claim to superiority might rest or whether the language of science is itself beset by exactly the same linguistic problems as we encounter in everyday communication. Unless and until such problems can be recognized and resolved, scientists risk misdescribing their findings not only to one another and the general public, but to themselves. They are caught, unwittingly, on the horns of a linguistic dilemma that most of them do not even recognize. I state the difficulty in this blunt form in order to explain why I have thought it necessary to include so much discussion of early thinkers in a book concerned ostensibly with a modern supercategory, viz. science. I shall argue that setting up science as a supercategory, subsuming diverse individual disciplines such as physics, geology, botany, etc., required the support of a particular philosophy of language. Science cannot be divorced from language. Science cannot maintain its identity in a linguistic vacuum. Far from it. The plausibility of scientific claims, whether scientists realize it or not, depends on the plausibility of the language in which they are articulated. Accordingly, a theory of science requires the backing of a theory of language. Otherwise there is no basis for explaining what the statements of science are supposed to mean. Looking at the claims that are made on behalf of the language of science, I notice a certain recurrent pattern. The way scientists tend to interpret their own scientific pronouncements involves (1) assuming that a certain relationship exists between the language of science and what they call ‘ordinary’ or ‘everyday’ or ‘non-scientific’ language, and (2) adopting certain assumptions about the latter, in order to (3) explain how the former serves the legitimate purposes of science. The nexus of their semantic thinking thus depends rather crucially on (2), and it is here that the trouble begins. I think that for most of its history science has subscribed to an erroneous theory of language, originally propagated in antiquity, which I call the ‘language myth’. It still flourishes today, not only in Laboratories and Libraries.

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According to this myth, language ‘works’ as follows. Words are items belonging to a conventionally agreed linguistic code, shared by all members of a linguistic community. This code allegedly functions as a system enabling one member of the community to exchange thoughts with any other member who understands the code. Thanks to this, A can know what B thinks (provided B has used the code correctly to express those thoughts). The alleged process of codified thought-transference I call ‘telementation’ (as distinct from telepathy). The difference between telementation and telepathy is that telementation requires the transference of thoughts to be mediated by public signs, and it is the purpose of the code to provide the signs. These linguistic assumptions, it seems to me, underlie the whole enterprise of Western science and scientific education, including mathematics. They provide the basis for believing that there is such a body as ‘the scientific community’, whose members, although divided into various subcommunities with their own technical dialects, nevertheless have access to a common language of science. The common language unites them by providing basic terms, propositions and definitions on which all are agreed. This whole raft of assumptions needs to be questioned. Are they provable, or even credible? If they are not, there is no way of evading the conclusion that the impressive edifice of scientific thinking is itself based on linguistic foundations of sand. I shall distinguish between two views of meaning associated with the language myth. On one view, words get their meanings by ‘standing for’ ideas in the mind: I call this the psychocentric version of the myth. On the other view, words get their meanings by ‘standing for’ things in the ‘real world’ outside the mind. I call this the reocentric version of the myth. In the work of individual theorists, psychocentric and reocentric assumptions are often combined in various ways. If you think that the word copper is to be defined by reference to the actual properties of a certain metal, your definition will be reocentric. But if you take it to be defined by reference to certain conceptions of, or beliefs about, a metal (whether such conceptions or beliefs are mistaken or not), your definition will be psychocentric. I shall treat this as an important distinction in language-myth semantics. Someone who adopts psychocentric definitions for a certain range of terminology will, I assume, be using that terminology in a significantly different way from that of someone who adopts reocentric definitions. Thus a statement that may be held to be true under a psychocentric definition of the relevant term or terms may well turn out to be false under the corresponding reocentric definition(s). If scientist A adopts a reocentric semantics, while scientist B opts for the psychocentric alternative, sooner or later communication between them seems destined to break down. Scientists on the whole tend to favour reocentrism over psychocentrism,

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and some – perhaps the majority – regard that commitment to reocentrism as the essential characteristic of the language of science. It is, in their view, a language based on things ‘as they really are’ and not just on appearances or assumptions. This is the point at which ‘time-lag’ questions begin to bite. Does the language of science in toto still rely on a linguistic model that is out of date? Can it accommodate new discoveries and conclusions that are incompatible with its fundamental assumptions about words and meanings? Or do those assumptions restrict the ways in which new discoveries and conclusions can be reported? Is it possible for science to construct a semantics on scientific principles that is independent of the non-scientific language that most of us speak and write for the purpose of conducting our everyday affairs? If the language of science is to have a credibility that matches its prestige in the modern world, these are questions that need to be addressed.

1 Language and the Aristotelian scientist

Anyone interested in examining the semantics of science would do well to begin by considering the curious case of Aristotle. Aristotle, we are often told nowadays, was a great pioneering scientist in his own right. Particularly in the field of biology, his work was ‘the greatest contribution to science ever made by an individual’ (Farrington 1944: 103). He ‘created the idea of a general scientific investigation of living things’ (Lennox 2001: xx). In addition, he was also ‘the first philosopher of science’ (Losee 1980: 6). Such claims are sometimes backed up by accounts of what Aristotle’s theory of scientific method allegedly was. Side by side with this story of Aristotle the scientist, however, runs another. According to the counter-story, science hardly begins until later scholars stop taking everything Aristotle says as gospel. The trouble with Aristotle, Sir Peter Medawar tells us, was that he was too much of an Athenian gentleman to get his hands dirty doing hands-on experiments (Medawar 1982: 15). (According to Farrington, on the other hand, Aristotle personally dissected fifty different species of animal.) If we believe Medawar, the role of experimentation, in Aristotle’s view, was restricted to illustrating ‘a preconceived truth’ (Medawar 1982: 95), and Aristotle thought that poetry was superior to science anyway (Medawar 1982: 54). A third story represents Aristotle as a thinker who ‘made a resolute attempt to combine religion and science’. Gilbert Murray says: ‘If he had not written his other books he might well be famous now as a great religious teacher. But his theology is dwarfed by the magnificence and mass of his other work’ (Murray 1935: 115). So we have no fewer than three Aristotles: the champion of science, the anti-scientist, and the thinker who tried to reconcile science and religion. Which story are we to believe? If we are sensible we shall believe none of them. There is not a scrap of evidence that Aristotle thought himself as being either for or against science; and none that he regarded himself as a philosopher of science, or a philosopher of anti-science, or as holding some kind of compromise philosophical

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position. The reason for such scepticism has been put very clearly by G. E. R. Lloyd: Science is a modern category, not an ancient one: there is no one term that is exactly equivalent to our ‘science’ in Greek. The terms philosophia (love of wisdom, philosophy), episteme (knowledge), theoria (contemplation, speculation) and peri physeos historia (inquiry concerning nature) are each used in particular contexts where the translation ‘science’ is natural and not too misleading. But although these terms may be used to refer to certain intellectual disciplines which we should think of as scientific, each of them means something quite different from our own term ‘science’. [. . .] Different ancient authors whom we can loosely describe as ‘scientists’ had [. . .] very different conceptions of the nature of the inquiry they were undertaking. (Lloyd 1970: xv) In brief, the whole notion that Aristotle can be called to account at the bar of science is a gross anachronism. But it is not only Aristotle whose intellectual perspective is thus distorted. We find experts in the field delivering such confident pronouncements as ‘It was the Greeks who invented science as we now know it’ (Crombie 1969: 24); or telling us that ‘the Greeks [. . .] gradually fashioned science into an intellectual discipline in its own right’ (Michel 1963: 180); or declaring that ‘In essence, the Greek notion of scientific explanation [. . .] did not differ from that of modern science’ (Hall 1962: 160). These conclusions go far beyond any available evidence or plausible speculation: the Greeks did not invent ‘science as we now know it’; nor did they make it ‘an intellectual discipline’ at all; nor did their notion of scientific explanation coincide with ‘that of modern science’. Far from describing accurately anything that went on in antiquity, the statements just quoted are misleading by-products of a rhetoric that flourishes under the aegis of the modern supercategory. It incorporates a scale of values in which science ranks as the supreme achievement of the human race, and Brownie points are awarded to our ancestors for their contributions (witting or unwitting) thereto. Far from taking up any position at all in respect of science, Aristotle managed to do something much more important: namely, to articulate a linguistic framework within which claims about the natural world could be affirmed, denied or debated. That this Aristotelian philosophy of language was subsequently adopted by later generations of scientists is a matter of some importance: but its elaboration by Aristotle has nothing to do with science or Aristotle’s view of science, since he had none. Nor did any of his contemporaries. What Aristotle’s view of science might have been it is possible to ask; but in just the same way as one could ask what he might have thought of the capitalist system or Association Football.

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If we make a conscious effort to set aside modern presumptions and try to read, say, Aristotle’s Parts of Animals as a course of lectures or discussion in the Lyceum, we soon see that what modern philosophers of science make such a song-and-dance about as Aristotle’s ‘scientific method’ is in the first instance for Aristotle a matter of systematizing facts assumed to be known. To this problem Aristotle applies his own doctrine of ‘causes’. Nevertheless, the zoological facts he reports can be organized and interrelated in any one of a number of ways, depending on the interests of the inquirer. Aristotle bluntly insists on the priority of his own interests, which are philosophical and metaphysical. (Quite understandably. His students, after all, were not training to be zoo-keepers or veterinary surgeons.) For Aristotle, then, there is no such thing as a zoological perspective per se. This is evident from the way he dismisses the inquiries of his predecessors. Richard McKeon, discussing ‘Aristotle’s conception of scientific method’, describes the reason for Aristotle’s rejection of the work of Democritus as follows. The failure of Democritus to discover the true method of the physical and biological sciences, in spite of his close approximation to it in use, was due to his lack of any notion of essence or definition. (McKeon 1957: 79) In other words, it was not because Democritus did not know enough about animals, or had not carried out sufficiently careful observations. In support of this, McKeon cites what Aristotle says about Democritus in Parts of Animals 642a24–31. On this basis, pace McKeon, it is evident that the difference between Democritus and Aristotle is not one of ‘scientific method’ in the modern understanding of that expression. This is not an argument about the best way to test claims about the natural world or acquire more reliable information. The basic difference is one of metaphysical assumptions. It may be true that Democritus did not believe in ‘real definitions’; but he did, it would seem, believe that ‘to seek the causes of things is supremely worth while’ and that this knowledge is a ‘knowledge of essentials’ (Freeman 1966: 310). So it seems quite likely that Aristotle, for his own purposes, was exaggerating the difference between his own approach and that of Democritus. What emerges is that it seems to matter very little for Aristotle how you set about investigating Nature. What matters is how the results are assumed to be related in terms of ‘causes’. For that will give a different picture of Nature as a whole and of its various domains. In brief, the contentious issues are actually about the metaphysical framework applied to interpreting the results of observation. Neither Aristotle, nor Democritus, nor any of their predecessors proposed a ‘scientific method’ for obtaining and verifying accurate information about animals. In this sense (pace Lennox 2001: 110: ‘Zoology, as a special

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science, was the invention of Aristotle’) none of them had even started on ‘scientific’ zoology. *

*

*

In the everyday world of Aristotle’s Greece, in the fourth century bc, no distinctions were drawn in practice between what would nowadays be called science and technology, on the one hand, or between arts and sciences on the other. Practitioners with very varied skills, from mathematicians and politicians to farmers and doctors, all claimed expertise of one kind or another. Not only, as Lloyd points out, was there no general term for any of these practices that divides them into sciences and non-sciences, but there was no form of inquiry or activity that had for Aristotle’s generation the kind of public prestige, educational resources and financial backing that science has acquired in modern times. The Aristotelian scientist, in short, is a mythological figure, but the myth is of modern not ancient making. At best this figure is a hypothetical inquirer conjured up by historical hindsight, rather than an accredited, qualified member of a certain profession or professions that actually existed in Aristotle’s Greece. That must be borne in mind throughout any discussion of Aristotle’s ‘philosophy of science’ and whenever modern translators render the word episteme or other Greek expressions by ‘science’. Just how problematic such translations may be can be illustrated briefly by considering three English versions of one passage at the end of Chapter 2 of Posterior Analytics (72a38–b4). The first version reads: Moreover, if a man sets out to acquire the scientific knowledge that comes through demonstration, he must not only have a better knowledge of the basic truths and a firmer conviction of them than of the connexion which is being demonstrated: more than this, nothing must be more certain or better known to him than these basic truths in their character as contradicting the fundamental premisses which lead to the opposed and erroneous conclusion. For indeed the conviction of pure science must be unshakable. (G. R. G. Mure) To the modern reader, it will sound as if a very strong claim is being made here on behalf of the scientist, or, more exactly, of ‘pure science’ (whatever that might be). For the modern reader, the expression ‘pure science’ immediately implies a distinction between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’. But whether Aristotle had any such distinction in mind seems questionable when we turn to the following version: And if a man is to possess the knowledge which is effected by

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demonstration, not only must he recognize and believe in the first principles more than in that which is being proved, but nothing which is opposed to the first principles and from which will result a syllogism of the contrary error, must be more credible or better known to him than those principles; since one who has absolute knowledge should be unshakable in his belief. (H. Tredennick) Here the scientist has disappeared altogether and the discussion seems to focus on a distinction between what can be known and what can be demonstrated. But how to construe ‘absolute knowledge’ remains far from clear. A third version reads: Anyone who is going to have understanding through demonstration must not only be familiar with the principles and better convinced of them than of what is being proved, but also there must be no other thing more convincing to him or more familiar among the opposites of the principles on which a deduction of the contrary error may depend – if anyone who understands simpliciter must be unpersuadable. (J. Barnes) Here there is no scientist on the scene nor any ‘pure science’: we seem to be discussing what kind or degree of conviction is involved in ‘understanding’. Whether ‘understanding simpliciter’ has anything to do with science remains an open question. There is ample room, it would seem, for entertaining misgivings about when or whether Aristotle is talking about science (as a modern reader would understand it) at all. In short, ‘philosophy of science’ is itself a questionable rubric under which to discuss Aristotle’s position concerning issues of proof and conviction. But since that is the straitjacket into which Aristotle’s views have been relentlessly forced by modern commentators (with the assistance of dubious translations), it is nowadays difficult to extricate him from it. Since it would be tedious to keep putting the terms ‘science’ and ‘philosophy of science’ in scare quotes, and even more tedious to keep comparing translations, I give the reader advance notice that the appropriate scare quotes should be supplied whenever in this and the following chapters I use these expressions in connexion with Aristotle and his Greek predecessors or successors. (The translations of Aristotle I quote will be, unless otherwise indicated, those of the Revised Oxford Translation, edited by Jonathan Barnes.) *

*

*

With these qualifications duly made, it is not difficult to establish the main outlines of Aristotle’s approach to the search for knowledge about both

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The Semantics of Science

human beings and the natural world. There could apparently be nothing clearer as a starting point than his magisterial pronouncement that ‘in regard to the first principles of science [NB if we accept the equation between episteme and science] it is improper to ask any further for the why and wherefore of them; each of the first principles should command belief in and by itself ’ (Topics 100a30–b20). The reason for this insistence on ‘first principles’ is evidently the avoidance of some kind of epistemological regress: our knowledge cannot be certain, Aristotle thinks, if it rests ultimately on a basis that does not ‘command belief in and by itself’ but requires further justification or additional investigation. An incomplete search for the truth will not do. Thus it is already being taken for granted that episteme involves something more than successful practice; for successful practice does not necessarily require a basis in principles that ‘command belief’. (One does not have to subscribe to the theory underlying Chinese acupuncture, let alone believe its theoretical credentials to be established beyond doubt, in order to recognize the beneficial effects such treatment may bring.) Hence ‘Science is what works’ cannot be the motto for Aristotelian scientists: nor even ‘Science is what can be shown to work’. For if those were the only demands on science, all successful practitioners in any field would be scientists, even if they manifestly failed to understand the reasons for their own success, or showed no interest in understanding them. Even less would the Aristotelian scientist be likely to subscribe to the view that ‘science is nothing but trained and organized common sense’ (T. H. Huxley). But it is not merely the avoidance of a regress into the unknown that motivates Aristotle’s insistence on first principles. What underlies – some would say distorts – his entire epistemological approach is a deep mistrust of the senses. This is made quite explicit, for instance, in Posterior Analytics 87b29ff. in a famous pronouncement variously rendered by English translators as ‘Scientific knowledge cannot be acquired by sense-perception’ (Tredennick) or ‘Nor can one understand through perception’ (Barnes). This scepticism about perception (aisthesis), if taken at face value, would seem to imply that we cannot know that the summer sky is blue simply by repeatedly observing it to be that colour, nor that water is wet (a commonsense proposition if ever there was one) from our many experiences of immersion. However strong our impressions may be that these things are so, they do not, as such, have any unimpeachable (scientific?) status. More interesting still are the linguistic implications of Aristotle’s insistence on indubitable first principles. Although Aristotle does not mention this specifically, he seems to take it for granted that the inquirer will require a language of inquiry: the search for knowledge cannot be conducted in a non-verbal vacuum. Candidate ‘first principles’ presumably have to be such as to admit a

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clear formulation about which there is no ambiguity and to which it is possible to assent (or, alternatively, disagree). Otherwise it would be uncertain what ‘first principles’ were being accepted (or rejected), and hence no sure basis for the Aristotelian scientist would be provided. Until such a language is available, we would be dealing with no more than a selection of ad hoc claims, of very uncertain meaning, which offered no solid foundation. To accept this is in effect to admit that neither observation nor experiment, however meticulously conducted and repeated, will suffice in themselves. The Aristotelian scientist also requires an appropriate terminology, in which the results of observation and experiment can reliably be stated and discussed. By the same token, the lack of such a terminology will inevitably hamper the development of inquiry. If there are no such words as those for ‘plant’, ‘tree’, ‘leaf’, ‘flower’, ‘growth’, and ‘seed’, we can hardly expect to see the development of botany, or the flowering of astronomy in the absence of such words as ‘star’, ‘planet’, ‘sun’, and ‘moon’. This much, it might be supposed, is so incontrovertible that even Aristotle does not bother to state it. But once a general linguistic requirement of this order is recognized, it immediately raises an awkward question for any philosopher of science. Where does the guarantee come from that an appropriate scientific language is available? Or, to put it in more practical terms, how can we recognize whether, in a particular instance, the description of the case and the explanation offered are scientific or not? Here, for example, is a well-known extract from the Hippocratic Corpus, the most important collection of documents on which Greek medicine was based: The body of man has in itself blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. These constitute the nature of his body, and through these he feels pain or enjoys health. Now he is particularly healthy when these constituents are in due proportion to one another with regard to blending, power and quantity, and when they are perfectly mixed. Pain is experienced whenever one of these constituents is deficient or in excess or is isolated in the body and is not blended with all the others. For, whenever any one of these is isolated and stands by itself, of necessity not only does the place which it left become diseased, but also the place where it stands and floods causes pain and distress through being over-full. (Longrigg 1998: III.4) If this is to stand as an account that satisfies the Aristotelian scientist, we appear to need at the very least unambiguous definitions of the names identifying the four basic ingredients (‘blood’, ‘phlegm’, ‘yellow bile’ and ‘black bile’), and of the general terms relating to the state of the body (‘health’, ‘pain’,

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The Semantics of Science

‘deficiency’, ‘excess’): for unless these can be appropriately clarified to begin with, it is difficult to see how any of the claims the account makes can be put to the test. The case of Greek medicine illustrates the point – of which Aristotle was doubtless well aware – that the linguistic requirement in the development of a field of inquiry was not merely a theoretical desideratum but also a practical necessity. What was integral to the advancement of medicine in the Greek world was that rival schools of doctors made conflicting claims about illness and treatments. As Lloyd notes, earlier civilizations had also practised medicine, but not quite in the way the Greeks did: though the remains of Egyptian, Assyrian and Hittite medicine are impressive, there is nothing comparable with the systematic debates on, for example, the causes of diseases and the nature of medicine itself that we find in the Hippocratic Corpus. They, so far as we can judge, were a new phenomenon. (Lloyd 1978: 13fn.) Similarly, Roger French in Medicine Before Science draws our attention to the way in which ‘literate doctors from the middle of the fifth century [bc] were discussing the nature of medicine and using rhetoric to persuade their readers of the superiority of their own medicine in a competitive situation’ (French 2003: 10). Such debates between doctors, it need hardly be stressed, required an appropriate technical language in which to be conducted. If Lloyd and French are right, it would be no exaggeration to say that the Greeks set about transforming medicine from a traditional praxis into a science, and they did this by approaching the subject as being rationally debatable. While, doubtless, successful treatment of individual cases remained of paramount importance in daily life, when medicine is regarded as seeking to supply general answers to certain general questions (as in the Hippocratic Corpus) we have already moved into a different sphere of intellectual activity. For questions and answers are linguistic operations, not cures or amputations. This transformation was not the work of Aristotle: he had already inherited a conception of episteme in which such a transformation had been made. His problem rather, qua philosopher, was how to deal with the linguistic fallout from that transformation. *

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There is nothing special pertaining to medicine or physiology in particular that affects the linguistic requirement per se: the example quoted above from the Hippocratic Corpus concerning the causes of health and pain can stand as

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a general illustration of what kind of verbal clarification would be needed in any domain of investigation before scientific debate between rival positions could be engaged. In the case of Aristotle, the requirement is particularly crucial because, as modern commentators have pointed out, Aristotle’s notion of what constitutes an explanation, in any field whatsoever, is closely connected with the model supplied by his analysis of logic, which in turn relies on his philosophy of language. Discussing the presuppositions of Aristotelian logic, Cassirer tells us that ‘the gaps that are left in logic are filled in and made good by the Aristotelian metaphysics’. This means that: For Aristotle, at least, the concept is no mere subjective schema in which we collect the common elements of an arbitrary group of things. The selection of what is common remains an empty play of ideas if it is not assumed that what is thus gained is, at the same time, the real Form which guarantees the causal and teleological connection of particular things. (Cassirer 1923: 7) This places Aristotle at the opposite end of a linguistic spectrum from, say, Locke. For Locke it is equally clear that every individual is at liberty to pick out what common features seem to be present in particular cases, and apply general terms accordingly. Both Aristotle and Locke take names to ‘stand for’ something else: names are verbal surrogates. But what they stand for, or are assumed to stand for, is quite different in the two cases. We have two ‘surrogational’ positions, two forms of ‘surrogational’ semantics, but no surrogates in common. Thus Aristotle’s contribution to philosophy of science is not quite what his modern admirers and critics have supposed. Aristotle had no notion of science in the modern acceptation of that term. But he did contribute to the establishment of a philosophy of language that was to provide an indispensable foundation for later scientists and scientific discourse. He was instrumental in setting up a language myth that has survived down to the present day. What he did was to reject Plato’s doctrine that our words and concepts, whether we realize it or not, are ultimately anchored to sempiternal Forms or Ideas, supposedly existing in a mysterious transcendental realm of their own, with which we were acquainted in a former existence. Instead Aristotle proposed to view the words we use as arising directly from our everyday encounters with the world around us in our present existence, and the necessity of communicating about this world with our fellow human beings. He was the first major theorist of a thoroughly down-to-earth reocentric semantics. Locke, on the other hand, championed a psychocentric semantics which

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puts all the emphasis on how the language users conceptualize the world in which they live. To state the difference crudely, but not misleadingly: for the reocentric theorist, the meaning of the word gold is ultimately guaranteed by the existence of the metal gold; whereas for the psychocentric theorist what matters is not whether gold actually exists (it may or may not), but that those who use the word gold should have such a concept in mind and apply it (whether rightly or wrongly) in their description and classification of metals. In the reocentric case, gold ‘stands for’ the metal, whereas in the psychocentric case gold ‘stands for’ an idea, irrespective of where that idea comes from. Thus, according to Locke, ‘words, as they are used by men, can properly and immediately signify nothing but the ideas that are in the mind of the speaker’ (Locke 1706: III.2.4). This clearly will not do for the Aristotelian scientist. Locke goes on to add straight away that men nevertheless give words a ‘secret reference’ to two other things: they suppose them to correspond also to the ideas in the minds of other men and, at the same time, suppose them ‘to stand also for the reality of things’. Locke’s psychocentric approach can thus be seen as putting Aristotle’s reocentric view in its proper perspective. The Aristotelian scientist emerges as an inquirer committed to a naive belief in words as surrogates for real things. On the other hand, from the Aristotelian point of view, the Lockean scientist can never quite be sure whether a scientific term corresponds to any thing more real than an idea in the scientist’s mind. Reocentric scientists (as I shall call them from now on) are scientists for whom the language of everyday life provides, at the very least, an indispensable first approximation to understanding what goes on in the world of Nature. The verbal distinctions recognized in that familiar language correspond grosso modo to distinctions that ‘really exist’. If we have two different words, gold and copper, that is because there ‘really are’ two distinct metals, however poorly we understand what distinguishes one metal from the other. And should it turn out that, according to the latest science, gold and copper are ‘really’ one and the same metal, just as the Morning Star and the Evening Star turned out to be ‘really’ one and the same planet, that revolutionary discovery would be simultaneously a great contribution to metallurgy and a great contribution to lexicography (requiring the revision of all dictionary definitions of gold and copper). The model offered is one in which Nature’s stall is already laid out with her genera and species neatly arranged upon it. All that scientists have to do is come along and, by means of careful observation and experiment, affix the right verbal labels to the right items. Getting it right is the foundation of good science. This is the reocentric ideal. *

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According to Cassirer, the Aristotelian view both of logic and of science requires ‘reference to these fundamental relations of the real’. More specifically: The determination of the concept according to its next higher genus and its specific difference reproduces the process by which the real substance successively unfolds itself in its special forms of being. Thus it is this basic conception of substance to which the purely logical theories of Aristotle constantly have reference. The complete system of scientific definitions would also be a complete expression of the substantial forces which control reality. (Cassirer 1923: 7–8) A related way of looking at the connexion between Aristotelian logic and Aristotelian metaphysics is the following: Aristotle thinks that in science we are working our way back up through syllogisms from facts to their reasons, from conclusions to premises. The facts we know are the conclusions we wish to prove, so the job of a scientist is to find suitable premises from which to construct suitable syllogisms. (Harré 1970: 5) This search boils down to looking for a ‘middle term’ which, as in logic, enables a link to be established between major premise and particular conclusion. Harré concedes that Aristotle does not give us many clues as to how the scientist is to set about finding the appropriate middle terms, or how to judge whether or not the right ones have been found to ‘explain’ what needs explaining. Nevertheless it is clear that for Aristotle a scientific answer to a question involves stating causes. So any middle term that does not establish a causal relation can be discarded. A scientific explanation tells us that something is the case ‘because of’ something else: it takes the general form ‘X because Y’. (In the Hippocratic passage quoted above, we are told that pain occurs because of a deficit or excess or imbalance in the four fluids mentioned.) Now causes, for Aristotle, come in four varieties, which he distinguishes as follows: We call a cause (1) that from which (as immanent material) a thing comes into being, e.g. the bronze of the statue and the silver of the saucer, and the classes which include these. (2) The form or pattern, i.e. the formula (logos) of the essence and the classes which include this (e.g. the ratio 2:1 and number in general are causes of the octave) and the parts of the formula. (3) That from which the change or the freedom from change first begins, e.g. the man who has deliberated is a cause, and the father a

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The Semantics of Science cause of the child, and in general the maker a cause of the thing made and the change-producing of the changing. (4) The end, i.e. that for the sake of which a thing is, e.g. health is the cause of walking. For why does one walk? We say ‘in order that one may be healthy’, and in speaking thus we think we have given the cause. (Metaphysics 1013a24–36)

These are nowadays usually referred to as (1) ‘material’, (2) ‘formal’, (3) ‘efficient’ and (4) ‘final’ causes. Earlier (Metaphysics 996b5ff.), Aristotle takes the example of a house to illustrate how all four types of cause may apply to one and the same thing (the material, earth and stones, of which the house is made; its form as a building; the builder who built it, by erecting earth and stones into that particular form; and the architectural function the completed structure fulfils). Ideally, then, a complete explanation of something involves specifying all the relevant causes pertaining to it. Aristotle is insistent that the kinds of causes involved in any given case are limited; for, he argues (Metaphysics 994b28–31), if the kinds of cause operative were infinite in number that would make knowledge impossible. Here again we encounter a concept of knowledge/science that demands ultimate certainty from the inquiry, and therefore cannot accommodate any evidence not entirely subject to scrutiny, nor accept processes that cannot be brought to a conclusion. The Aristotelian doctrine of causes tacitly reinforces the importance of the linguistic requirement for any valid form of scientific statement. The terminology of each inquiry, in short, will require specific words for the various causes encountered in that domain. Only then will it be possible to distinguish one explanation clearly from another. But it is here, precisely, that the credentials of a technical vocabulary are most vulnerable. To take a couple of simple examples (Lloyd 1978: 352), Greek medical writers often used the term phleps, which fails to distinguish between veins and arteries. This perhaps would not matter if the most important things true of arteries were also true of veins; but this is not so. Thus the term phleps rides over a distinction which might be of medical importance. Similarly, neuron may cover not only nerves, but also tendons and ligaments. The question in such instances is how the doctor can know that terms in which cases are described do not, actually, obscure the nature of the problem and thus direct medical inquiry along a false trail. If, therefore, Aristotle is a philosopher of science, then he has constructed for himself, as philosopher of science, a formidable linguistic problem. How does he propose to tackle it? Most modern commentators agree that Aristotle’s ‘solution’ hinges on the view he takes of the relations between words and reality. As a reocentric surrogationist, he holds that it is in virtue of certain primary correspondences between names and selected features of

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reality that we are able to formulate sentences describing the world in which we live and what happens in it. A surrogationist view of names very similar to Aristotle’s is expressed by the author of the Hippocratic Science of Medicine: The activities of the sciences that are taught are things that can be seen and there is none that is not visible in one form or another. I at least am of the opinion that it is from the visible forms of things that they take their names. It is absurd to suppose that forms spring from names; that were impossible since names are adopted by convention, whereas forms are not invented but are characteristic of those things from which they spring. (Lloyd 1978: 140) The word-thing correspondences, in Aristotle’s view, are indeed not natural (in the sense maintained by Cratylus in Plato’s dialogue of that title), but conventional. ‘A name is a spoken sound significant by convention’ (De Interpretatione 16a19). ‘I say “by convention” because no name is a name naturally but only when it has become a symbol’ (De Interpretatione 16a27–8). Thus there is nothing in nature that determines that gold should be called ‘gold’ (rather than ‘dolg’ or ‘silver’ or any other name), and nothing about the word gold or its constituent vowel and consonants that requires that it should be applied to gold rather than to anything else: the correspondence comes about solely in virtue of its symbolic function. But what exactly is this function? The term ‘symbol’ (sumbolon) plays a key role in Aristotelian semantics. It is a curious metaphor borrowed from an ancient trading practice. A contract or other agreement between two parties might be formalized by breaking in two a shard, bone or other small object, with each person retaining one half. This provided a crude kind of safeguard against deception, since proof of identity could be established later, if challenged, by fitting together the two (unique) halves of the broken item. (‘Here is mine: let’s see if it fits yours.’) According to Whitaker, Aristotle’s application of this commercial metaphor to the case of names is intended to imply that the meaning of a word is fixed by convention ‘just as the importance attached to a tally, token, or ticket depends on agreement between the parties concerned’ (Whitaker 1996: 10). However, this interpretation does not altogether match what Aristotle’s text says. In De Interpretatione we find no suggestion that it is up to individuals, by private agreement, to determine what meaning a particular name shall have. If that were the case, it is difficult to see how Aristotelian logic could even get started; for it would then be up to individuals to determine between themselves how the premises of any given syllogism should be interpreted. But, as Aristotle sees it, it is not up to you and me to determine whether it follows

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from the mortality of all men that a particular man, say Socrates, is mortal. Furthermore, by appeal to private agreement there seems to be no guarantee against the possibility that it might subsequently emerge that each party to the contract had understood this agreement differently: for in trading practice the sumbolon itself did not serve to identify what agreement was reached, but merely to bear witness that an agreement was reached. For Aristotle’s purposes this is not enough. He needs to be able to show how, in principle, it is possible to reach a public consensus whereby the name identifies what is named. He tries to resolve this difficulty in De Interpretatione by invoking two explicit but highly questionable assumptions. Having stated that spoken sounds are symbols of ‘affections of the soul’, he claims that ‘affections of the soul’ are the same for all members of the human race. Furthermore, these ‘affections’ are likenesses of actual things, and the latter are also the same for everybody. In short, we all live in the same world and perceive that world identically. Aristotle’s reocentric philosophy of language rests on these two (metaphysical) assumptions. Here we have a language myth that invites comparison with Rousseau’s myth of the ‘social contract’ (to which it may have made an important contribution, in spite of the many centuries separating Aristotle from Rousseau). These two assumptions in tandem enable Aristotle to shortcut any problem about whether what Jones means by gold is the same as what Smith means by gold. The problem is ‘solved’ by never being allowed to arise. In Aristotle’s scenario, all that needs to be assumed is that Jones and Smith belong to the same linguistic (scientific?) community, a community in which everyone agrees that one and only one ‘real’ metal bears the conventional name gold. The word is thus, along with many other names and grammatical devices, part of that community’s language. No private agreements are necessary. The convention is collective. Thus arises an internal conflict that Aristotle never managed to resolve between his reocentric semantics and his view of the conventionality of language. The dubious way Aristotle goes about dealing with it (by postulating that the ‘real world’ is the same for all observers, whose perceptions of it are likewise identical) I shall call ‘Aristotle’s fudge’. With this in place, he can then proceed as if those who speak ‘the same language’ can understand one another, simply by virtue of their linguistic knowledge. The trouble is that the metaphysical assumptions involved in Aristotle’s fudge, even if we accept them, do not conjointly suffice to explain the fact (if it is a fact) that the meanings of words are constants for all speakers of a given language. For, as Locke pointed out many centuries later, there is nothing to prevent individuals using (public) words in whatever way they find expedient. An analogy that springs to mind is currency. Coins and notes would be

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worthless unless there were ‘real’ goods and services to be exchanged: in that sense, they are ‘symbolic’ in a way that resembles Aristotle’s account of names. The analogy must have occurred to Aristotle, since he himself gives a ‘conventional’ explanation of what money is (Nicomachean Ethics 1133a7ff.). According to this, ‘all things that are exchanged must be somehow commensurable’ and money has been invented precisely for this purpose. Money ‘becomes in a sense an intermediate; for it measures all things’. Now what underlies commerce, says Aristotle, is demand; ‘but money has become by convention a sort of representative of demand’. The analogy could be pressed further. Just as words vary between one community and another, so do coins; but the things bought and sold are, according to the Aristotelian account, the same. Apples and pears are still apples and pears, in whatever market they are offered for sale, and irrespective of the currency used to purchase them. Aristotle also throws in a dubious etymological argument: this is why it has the name ‘money’ (nomisma) – because it exists not by nature but by law (nomos) and it is in our power to change it and make it useless. (Nicomachean Ethics 1133a30–31) It is interesting to note that the same weakness occurs in this account of money as we see in Aristotle’s account of the meanings of names. Individuals may strike private bargains about the price of goods for sale: but this plus the fact that the world remains unchanged (‘apples and pears are still apples and pears’) does not suffice to explain why the currency used for these transactions is worth what it is. Individuals can buy and sell, but they cannot strike private bargains about the value of the public coins or notes in which the price is to be paid. Strawberries may be dear in the local market this week and cheap next week. But it would be a misconception to confuse such fluctuations with currency changes. The currency is, like the community’s language, a public institution, not subject to alterations agreed to suit the ad hoc convenience of particular buyers and sellers, or what might be available in this market or that. If the currency value altered automatically every time the prices altered, there would be no sense in distinguishing between ‘dear’ and ‘cheap’. And even if a community’s currency should be subject to rapid devaluation over a short period of time, in such a way that, irrespective of which local market we go to, all the prices have gone up by roughly the same amount since last year or six months ago, that is a public phenomenon pertaining to the currency, and not to be confused with the negotiations agreed among themselves by vendors and purchasers. *

*

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In all these respects Aristotle’s characterization of names as ‘symbols’ emerges as unfortunate or misleading. It appears to make voluntary and deliberate agreement between individuals the basis of meaning. And this in turn is hard to reconcile with Aristotle’s evident commitment to ‘real definition’, a commitment he shared with his teacher, Plato, and Plato’s teacher, Socrates. One modern commentator describes that commitment as follows: The inventors of the notion of definition, Socrates and Plato, were obviously thinking only of the definition of things and not at all of the definition of words. The search for the definition of piety in Plato’s Euthyphro is certainly an inquiry about the thing piety, not about the word ‘piety’. Socrates does not ask Euthyphro what piety is because the word ‘piety’ is new to him, or because he cannot think of an effective method of teaching the use of this word to those who do not know it. He is not asking a question about the word ‘piety’, but using the word ‘piety’ to ask a question about the thing piety. He assumes that both he and Euthyphro already know the use of the word. (Robinson 1954: 149) This account may be infelicitous in its characterization of piety as a ‘thing’, but the point being made is clear enough: whatever piety is, asking what it is must not be confused with asking something about the word ‘piety’. Nevertheless, Robinson goes on to argue, asking what piety is cannot be totally divorced from questions about the word piety: for the original formulation of the question about piety itself relied on an assumed grasp of the word. That particular word served to identify the specific question being asked. If two individuals understand the word piety differently, they will presumably identify differently what it is that the Socratic question is asking. So there is no escaping an investigation of the word-thing nexus between piety and piety. Robinson, for his part, comes to the conclusion that the whole notion of ‘real definition’ is a muddle: those who champion it (including Socrates, Plato and Aristotle) are conflating verbal with non-verbal questions. This is particularly evident, he thinks, in the case of Aristotle, who regards a definition as identifying the essence of something. On this interpretation, if ‘x is yz’ is a significant and true real definition of x, then x is a thing and yz is the essence of that thing. (Robinson 1954: 154) The problem is, according to Robinson, that ‘there is no such thing as essence in the sense intended.’ He argues: We can convince ourselves of this by studying the most serious attempt

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there has ever been to make sense of the notion of essence, namely, Aristotle’s Metaphysics Z 4–6. In these bewildering chapters we find Aristotle reaching the mysterious conclusions that some things have an essence and others do not, and that of the things that do have an essence some are the same as their essence and others are not. These doctrines, and the very great obscurity of the chapters, suggest strongly that there is a muddle somewhere. If a man asks Aristotle what he means by the word ‘essence’ [. . .], the nearest Aristotle comes to a reply is to say that an essence is what is stated in a definition. This would help if we knew what a definition was, but according to Aristotle a definition is a statement of essence. A definition states essence, and essence is what you find in a definition. This useless circle is the best that can be extracted from Aristotle when we ask what he meant by ‘essence’, and it is strong evidence that there is no such thing as essence in his sense of the word. (Robinson 1954: 154) This is not the place to embark on a detailed analysis of the chapters Robinson refers to. But perhaps even the first example Aristotle takes is sufficient to show what a thorny path to knowledge he has chosen. The essence of each thing is what it is said to be in virtue of itself. For being you is not being musical; for you are not musical in virtue of yourself. What, then, you are in virtue of yourself is your essence. (Metaphysics 1029b13–16) This seems to rest on the dubious counterfactual proposition that you could have been yourself (or, perhaps more exactly, your self) without being musical; which may seem plausible for those of us who are not endowed with great musical gifts, but hardly for the Beethovens and Mozarts of this world. However we look at the matter, there seems to be an awkward tension between Aristotle’s alleged philosophy of science and his actual philosophy of language. Qua philosopher of language, he is anxious to reassure us that we all live in the same world, and experience it everywhere as the same, even though in different places there may be different words used to describe it. But these are merely unimportant differences of verbal ‘convention’. Qua philosopher of science, on the other hand, he is anxious to stress that nothing we learn from sense experience can be taken as certain, and hence that no vocabulary based merely on sense experience can be other than deceptive. So we are left in a cleft stick. For all practical communicational purposes we have to work with the language we have, which is manifestly based on precisely the kind of everyday common experience that, although shared by everyone, is not scientifically reliable. The tension, accordingly, is between (1) a view of

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language in which names have no other foundation than established convention, which is in turn based on ‘affections of the soul’ common to all mankind, and (2) the demand for a language in which names reflect reality ‘as it really is’, irrespective of how it may superficially appear to the senses, or of how it may have been traditionally described. What I have called ‘Aristotle’s fudge’ (although doubtless others were guilty of it too) would later be a source of semantic confusion, and I shall come back to it subsequently. As for the connexion between Aristotle’s ‘first principles’ and his view of real definition, the link is simple enough. When we have discovered the essence of something, we have discovered not just what it is but what it necessarily is. What is necessarily so could not be otherwise, and hence realizing what is necessarily the case commands belief in and by itself. *

*

*

The main theses of Aristotle’s alleged philosophy of science are summed up by Losee as follows: (1) Certain properties inhere essentially in the individuals of certain classes; an individual would not be a member of one of these classes if it did not possess the properties in question. (2) An identity of structure exists in such cases between the universal affirmative statement which predicates an attribute of a class term, and the non-verbal inherence of the corresponding property in members of the class. (3) It is possible for the scientist to intuit correctly this isomorphism of language and reality. (Losee 1980: 14) Here (1) makes clear what Aristotelian philosophy of science has in common with Aristotelian syllogistic logic. It is (2) which characterizes Aristotelian semantics as a reocentric variety of surrogationism, but (3) which raises the unsolved problem of how the scientist manages to ‘intuit correctly this isomorphism of language and reality’ in spite of sharing with the non-scientist a language manifestly based on the unreliable deliverances of the senses. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that when Aristotle stops talking about first principles and puts his empiricist hat on instead (as in his treatise on Parts of Animals) he seems happy to accept that if we seriously want to study Nature we have no alternative but to use our eyes, ears and other sense organs to acquaint ourselves with how Nature works. Of substances constituted by nature some are ungenerated, imperishable, and eternal, while others are subject to generation and decay. The

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former are excellent and divine, but less accessible to knowledge. The evidence that might throw light on them, and on the problems that we long to solve respecting them, is furnished but scantily by sensation; whereas respecting perishable plants and animals we have abundant information, living as we do in their midst, and ample data may be collected concerning all their various kinds, if only we are willing to take sufficient pains. (Parts of Animals 644b21ff.) But how are we to build up a systematic body of knowledge in this way without falling into the semantic trap of defining terms by reference to the information supplied by the senses? That is never explained. According to Losee, ‘Aristotle viewed scientific inquiry as a progression from observations to general principles and back to observations’ (Losee 1980: 6), this two-way process involving an ‘inductive’ and a ‘deductive’ phase. Scientific explanation was a transition from ‘knowledge of a fact’, via explanatory principles, to ‘knowledge of the reasons for the fact’. If this is a correct interpretation, however, the whole procedure is patently vulnerable to errors embodied in the terms used to describe the original fact and to formulate the explanatory principles: for it is on these that the validity of the eventual explanatory syllogism depends. Thus if your medical vocabulary does not distinguish between veins and arteries in the first place, there is every likelihood that the medical symptoms of a thrombosis will have been misdescribed at a very early stage in the proceedings. If the ‘inductivedeductive procedure’ is to work to the patient’s advantage, the doctor cannot afford to be working with a language (and its classificatory system) that simply does not allow the relevant distinctions to be drawn. What is perhaps less obvious is that the inductive-deductive model is just Aristotle’s philosophy of language in another guise. For reocentric conventionalists like Aristotle, a word comes into existence when a community fixes on an arbitrary sound to designate a person, or a thing, or some class of persons or things perceived to have common features. Once a language is envisaged as a vocabulary built up in this way, plus conventions for word-combination, a language myth is already up and running. The formation of the language will follow exactly the same inductivedeductive steps as in the case of what Losee calls ‘scientific inquiry’, of which it is indeed a primitive example. First comes the phase of observing particular cases; from these observations a generalization is drawn about common features; on this basis an arbitrary designation is chosen; and finally the generalization embodied in the designation is applied to newly observed cases. Thus, for example, from the observation of hitherto unnamed creatures (say dogs) a generalization is reached about their common characteristics and the conventional term dog is agreed upon. Armed with this convention, the observer

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can now return to the inspection of more creatures and designate by the term dog any previously unseen animal satisfying the generalization. If this is the basic linguistic mechanism of nomenclature, it can readily be extended to naming particular features of behaviour. By a further process of generalization from the behaviour observed, and a further selection of another conventional designation, one progresses from Here is a dog to A dog barks. And now the possibility of explaining certain facts and making certain predictions appears. Rover barks because he is a dog. If Rover is a dog, then he will bark. Further observations may lead to modifications in the generalizations originally adopted, and this may lead to terminological innovations in the community’s collective practice. But all the way from the individual word up through the sentence to the syllogism, the same cycle of processes is repeated: reocentric philosophy of science recapitulates reocentric philosophy of language.

2 Before and after Aristotle

I have examined the case of Aristotle in some detail in order to try to establish that science is not some ‘timeless’ supercategory that has always existed in the consciousness of civilized societies. Whether Aristotle was a scientist or not can be debated; but, if it is, it has to be debated in modern terms, not Aristotle’s. For in the language of Aristotle’s age there are no terms in which to debate it. I now wish to move on to argue that Aristotle’s case is not atypical. It is characteristic of scientific thinking to assume that its criteria can be applied retrospectively in such a way as to reveal ‘the history of science’. The modern search for ancient scientists, not content with identifying Aristotle as one of the landmark figures, reaches back well beyond Greece, Pharaonic Egypt and Babylon into the mists of prehistory. In the course of this search, a number of assumptions derived from the modern supercategory make their appearance. One of these is the notion that it is possible to identify something called ‘science as such’. This seems to be a modern version of the Aristotelian doctrine of essences and real definitions. The Preface to the four-volume General History of the Sciences by an international team of experts, under the editorship of Professor René Taton of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, invokes this notion in its opening sentence: ‘While there have been many histories of the various branches of science, there have been few attempts to present a comprehensive history of science as such’ (Taton 1963: xv). Such a history, the implication seems to be, is to be found in the four volumes in question. What exactly is to be understood by setting out the history of science as such is not further elucidated. The comprehensive history seems to have been produced by collecting together the separate histories of the branches. But there is no account of how the branches qualify as branches of science. A related assumption is the validity of the distinction between science (or science as such) and mere technology. The first chapter in the General History of the Sciences is entitled ‘The Dawn of Science’ and has the subtitle ‘Prehistoric Beginnings’. It begins by asserting: ‘No history of science can ignore the

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achievements of prehistoric man.’ It goes on to claim (Taton 1963: 1): ‘Prehistoric man was the first creature to apply reason to the satisfaction of his everyday needs. Hence the history of science begins with the history of technology.’ The logic of this statement repays attention (the hence in particular), together with its implied dismissal of the possibility of rational dinosaurs. The relationship between science and technology, already presented as a fait accompli, is then explained as follows. ‘Clearly, scientific explanations cannot precede the actions which they attempt to interpret.’ And that seems to clinch it: technology preceded science. Human beings were technologists (necessarily) before they were scientists. So technology, we are expected to infer, is tentative, primitive and full of blunders: science is smart and provides the explanations. The example adduced in support of this is metallurgy: Thus the earliest metallurgists, who melted copper some 8,000 years ago, had no idea of the distinction between oxides, carbonates, and sulphides, though they managed to find and to use the ore from which they could obtain pure copper. (Taton 1963: 1) What these prehistoric metallurgists lacked, according to this scenario, was (1) realizing that what they had obtained was ‘pure copper’ and (2) understanding how the procedures they employed managed to produce it. Another version of the same story, but going back to a pre-metallurgic era, is to be found in E. W. MacKie’s Science and Society in Prehistoric Britain (1977). There the technological achievement is the construction of megalithic stone circles. This presupposes, we are told, that considerable achievements were made at that time in ‘intellectual’ matters, namely elements of what was later called Euclidean geometry, of field surveying and exact measurement to a high degree of skill, and of observational astronomy of a systematic and advanced kind. (MacKie 1977: 208) A question that arises in accounts of this type is the following. Presumably it did not matter as far as the primitive metallurgists were concerned that they did not have a scientific account of copper, provided their production of the metal was fairly reliable for their purposes. Why then did they ever advance to science at all if their technology was so successful? Likewise, the builders of Stonehenge may have had no scientific theory of why the movements of the heavenly bodies were regular, or of what the heavenly bodies actually were. But did it matter, provided the predicted movements were regular enough for erecting their stone circles?

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An attempt at an answer that crops up repeatedly in one form or another in modern histories of science introduces a third topos: the prehistoric ‘leisured class’. Members of this class, allegedly, had nothing better to do than ponder such problems and exercise their minds on constructing plausible explanations. (This postulation makes its first appearance as early as Aristotle.) MacKie gives his own version of this for prehistoric Britain: such achievements are only credible in a stratified Neolithic society, one which was organised to allow specialised groups to pursue these activities for the whole of their time, supported by mass labour when necessary and always by surplus food. (MacKie 1977: 208) Here we see emerging the important notion that science is something more than intellectual achievement, more than mere technological achievement, and more than both combined. An essential ingredient of the modern supercategory is insistence on the social dimension of science. Society as a whole takes the credit for science. But only on condition that society is wise enough to realize the special talents of its scientists and allow them to pursue their work unfettered by the daily needs that press upon ordinary mortals. (In the prehistoric scenario they command mass labour and surplus food. The modern counterpart to this is presumably commanding high salaries and expensive research equipment.) Thus science, in its social dimension, is represented as a quid pro quo arrangement, in which scientists and society reap mutual benefits. The point of tracing the social arrangement back into prehistory is to show that this has always been so. In short, recognition of a special status for scientists is a necessary condition of science. This is patently a more sophisticated addition grafted on to a simpler story. The simpler story has it that science emerges through the application of ‘reason’ to the observations of experience. The trouble with the simpler story was that, depending on how you construe ‘reason’, science can begin at almost any stage in human history you choose and does not require any ‘leisured class’. Presumably, there is some kind of reasoning involved even in looking for the same kind of ore twice or the reappearance at intervals of the same heavenly body. In which case, the thinking of the primitive metallurgists and the henge-builders was already and ab initio scientific. Here we see how the modern rhetoric of science can easily stand history on its head. Given a certain conception of science that pleases modern scientists, one works back to what primitive society ‘must have been like’, assuming that our ancestors had to have such-and-such conditions available in order to fulfil their allotted role in the history of science. *

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A recurrent leitmotif in some accounts of the history of science is that a language of science and a proper scientific attitude is developed through systematic elimination of a whole battery of words and concepts that are available in everyday discourse: namely, those referring specifically to gods and their activities, or to superhuman beings and supernatural events in general. Thus, for example, an investigation of thunder and lightning can remain on the scientific agenda, provided these phenomena are not discussed by reference to the doings of Zeus, Jupiter or any comparable deities. This puts a retrospective question mark against the builders of Stonehenge, who, for all we know, may well have regarded what went on in the heavens as due to the activities of divinities up above. The new requirement makes science depend not on technological achievement or calculation but on the kind of explanation that accompanies it. This view of science and scientific language is popular with those scholars who hold that ancient cosmology sowed the seeds for the emergence of scientific inquiry. One curious result is that even those thinkers of antiquity who held such counter-intuitive and unprovable theses as that everything was water, or fire, or some other element, can, by this reasoning, be included retrospectively as scientists, simply because their explanations did not appeal to supernatural agencies. It is apt to be forgotten nowadays that the modern word scientist, one of the most important additions to the language of science, was not invented until 1840. Moreover, it was invented by a ‘philosopher of science’ (William Whewell in his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences). Why Whewell needed a new word, and was not content with natural philosopher, or some even vaguer term, is the crucial question. The deliberate coinage is from its inception, and by its inception, implicated in a certain view of the history of ideas. This was the history needed to elaborate Whewell’s theory of scientific induction. By this ingenious lexical manœuvre, the world was suddenly populated by a body of like-minded investigators (henceforth to be called ‘scientists’), whose existence strongly supported the view that there was a common enterprise (i.e. science) in which they were all engaged, even if they had not all realized that fact. It set the stage for Whewell’s account of the inductive method, supposedly shared by all those working in the inductive sciences, a comprehensive history of which was now available, having been published three years earlier. By whom? None other than Whewell himself. Whewell’s (controversial) claim was that there is no ‘inductive logic’ involved in the mental processes of the inductive scientist. The key ideas are hit upon by chance, or by a process of trial and error. The scientist’s task is to demonstrate that these ideas are sound, not that they have been arrived at in some logically rigorous manner. Thus the newly enfranchised ranks of scientists, or a large section of them,

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found themselves willy-nilly equipped simultaneously with a name, a theory about how they qualified for it and a thesis about how, in practice, they operated. The irony was that, in Whewell’s view, all the fundamental ideas which scientists use are not generated by the scientists themselves but have a divine origin. This idea was not welcomed by Whewell’s agnostic critics; for it seemed that, by this circuitous route, science ended up not as a selfsustaining body of human knowledge but one requiring supernatural assistance after all. In the mid-nineteenth century when Whewell was writing, the place that science occupied in the landscape of education was itself in part determined by a more general view of Western history. According to this, the Greeks had played a key role in the intellectual development of European civilization. The Greek outlook and attitude was seen as contrasting with commitment to a set of values rooted in revealed religion. Matthew Arnold, in Culture and Anarchy, baptized the distinction ‘Hellenism’ versus ‘Hebraism’. In Arnold’s view the tendency to ‘Hebraise’ in modern times had been a tendency ‘to sacrifice all other sides of our being to the religious side’. He believed that ‘we have Hebraised too much’ and now it was ‘a time to Hellenise, and to praise knowing’. ‘The uppermost idea with Hellenism,’ he wrote (Arnold 1875: 131), ‘is to see things as they really are; the uppermost idea with Hebraism is conduct and obedience.’ For many of Arnold’s contemporaries, the pursuit of knowledge with the sole aim of trying to ‘see things as they really are’ was, precisely, the goal of science; a goal thwarted for centuries by ignorance, prejudice and organized religion (the paradigm case being the historic clash between Galileo and the Inquisition over the geocentric model of the universe). It was consequently natural, in the eyes of these ‘Hellenists’, to look to the Greeks of the preChristian era as precursors of the modern scientific attitude. Some of the champions of Hellenism, moreover, were determined to find that connexion in the historical record itself, even if it meant redefining terms in order to do so. Thus we find a distinguished Classical scholar, John Burnet, proclaiming that ‘a new thing came into the world with the early Ionian thinkers – the thing we call science’ (Burnet 1920: v). There is no delving into prehistory here: the ‘thing’ was a purely Greek invention. How many of ‘us’ would concur with Burnet’s account of this ‘thing’ is another question: for he goes on to assert: it is an adequate description of science to say that it is “thinking about the world in the Greek way.” That is why science has never existed except among peoples who have come under the influence of Greece. (Burnet 1920: v)

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Burnet’s conception of science had at least one supporter among the ranks of eminent modern scientists, for this statement is quoted with approval by the Nobel laureate physicist Erwin Schrödinger (otherwise famous for his unfortunate cat) in his much lauded Nature and the Greeks (1954). Burnet rejected the view that Greek astronomy owed anything to Babylonian astronomy. The fact that the Greeks themselves acknowledged their debt to Egyptian mathematics and geometry he countered by conceding that the Egyptians developed what the Greeks called logistike but refusing to accept that they had achieved anything that could properly be called arithmetike. The indigenous development of sciences in China, which owed nothing to Greek influence at all, he passed over in silence. Burnet’s determination to establish that there was a way of ‘thinking about the world’ that was specifically and uniquely Greek never carried much conviction for those who realized that Greek civilization lasted a very long time and gave birth to many conflicting ways of interpreting the universe and humanity’s place in it. But this did not bother Burnet unduly. According to Burnet, the early Greek cosmologists were in certain respects ‘more scientific than Aristotle’. For Aristotle made the gross blunder in his Meteorology of distinguishing between the heavens and the region immediately adjacent to the earth, and the even graver mistake of supposing that the nature of these two realms must be different. The early cosmologists, Burnet says, were right to draw no such distinction: ‘Aristotle’s theory arrested the growth of science’ (Burnet 1920: 27). The condemnation throws interesting light on Burnet’s conception of science: it appears to depend very much on who turned out to be right after all, in the light of posterity’s superior knowledge. But how any Greek at the time could have pronounced a scientific judgment on who was ‘right’ remains unclear. In order to explain away the manifestly mystic elements in the teachings of such major thinkers as Plato and Pythagoras, Burnet invokes a religious revival that allegedly ‘swept over the Greek world’ as a result of the arrival of the Achaians from the north. Under this religious stimulus, philosophy developed from mere curiosity about things into a serious search for some deeper meaning to life. Science, then, became a religion, and to that extent it is true that philosophy was influenced by religion. It would be wrong, however, to suppose that even now philosophy took over any particular doctrines from religion. (Burnet 1920: 83) Here we see a modern writer juggling with two modern supercategories and trying (not very convincingly) to reconcile their application to an ancient civilization.

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Persistent in his idée fixe of the ‘secular’ character of Greek science, Burnet goes out of his way to discount the retention of apparently religious terms in the language of the early Greek thinkers, in particular the word theos. According to Burnet, that just referred to the ‘primary substance’ and to ‘the world or worlds’. This non-religious use of the word “god” is characteristic of the whole period we are dealing with, and it is of the first importance to realise it. No one who does so will fall into the error of deriving science from mythology. (Burnet 1920: 14) This would have been more convincing if Burnet had explained why the Greek pioneers of science, who were certainly no sluggards at inventing new terminology, kept on using a term that must have been (if Burnet is right) totally inappropriate for their ‘secular’ purposes. It would have been more convincing still if Burnet had been able to cite any textual evidence showing that the Ionian philosophers regarded their theories as implying a rejection of religious ideas. *

*

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In spite of Schrödinger’s endorsement, Burnet’s erudite but question-begging book would be of little interest in the present context were it not that Burnet’s partisan rhetoric of science has been followed by many others devoted to admiration for Greek intellectual achievements. For example, Benjamin Farrington in his book Greek Science begins Greek science with Thales. According to Farrington, the intellectual achievement of Thales was the following. The Egyptians and the Babylonians had old cosmogonies, part of their religious inheritance, which told how the world had come to be. Since in both countries, in cold fact, the land on which they lived had been won in a desperate struggle with nature by draining the swamps beside their rivers, naturally enough their cosmogonies embodied the idea that there was too much water about, and that the beginning of things, in any sense that mattered to men, was when some divine being did the equivalent of saying, Let the dry land appear. The name of the Babylonian creator was Marduk. In one of the Babylonian legends it says: ‘All the lands were sea . . . Marduk bound a rush mat upon the face of the waters, he made dirt and piled it beside the rush mat’. What Thales did was to leave Marduk out. He, too, said that everything was once water. But he thought that earth and everything else had been formed out of water by a natural process, like the silting up of the delta of the Nile. (Farrington 1944: 30)

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A variant version of this ‘beginning of science’ is given by Lloyd. Again, Thales is the hero, but this time the achievement is his theory of earthquakes. Thales apparently imagined that the earth is held up by water and that earthquakes are caused when the earth is rocked by wave-tremors in the water on which it floats. The idea that the earth floats on water is one that occurs in several Babylonian and Egyptian myths, and we have no need to go beyond Greece itself for a mythical precursor to Thales’ theory, for the idea that Poseidon, the god of the sea, is responsible for earthquakes was a common Greek belief. Simple as Thales’ theory of earthquakes is, it is a naturalistic explanation, making no reference to Poseidon or any other deity. (Lloyd 1970: 9) It is evident from these examples that the notion of the origin of science that we are being presented with owes little to the recognition of any new branch of inquiry pioneered by Thales, or by anyone else, but a great deal to the semantics of the modern term science. Lloyd, having admitted that there was no Greek term exactly equivalent to science, is not inhibited by this from inventing a whole scientific tradition, complete with an honours list of thirty ancient Greek scientists from the sixth to the early third centuries bc. This list, which starts with Thales, includes Anaximander, Anaximenes, Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Alcmaeon, Zeno, Anaxagoras and Empedocles. We are, in brief, invited to consider these worthies as founder members of the Royal Society avant la lettre. It reminds one of those Christian sects who believe in the possibility of belatedly baptizing their ancestors. What is happening here? The modern semantics of ‘the word science’ is being retrojected into antiquity, where it does not belong, and on this basis the past is reconstructed in the image of the present. What is even more interesting is that in these instances a single semantic contrast is being taken as definitional and everything else is ignored. Burnet, Farrington and Lloyd elect to see science as opposed primarily to religion. By doing this they are able to equate the origin of science with the abandonment of supernatural explanations. But that deft equation begs a number of questions. Perhaps the most important is the question of whether it is not better to have a supernatural explanation than no explanation at all. Not far behind it comes the question of whether supernatural explanations may not also be in certain respects scientific. In this connexion it is relevant to observe that if Thales was indeed acquainted with the belief that Poseidon caused earthquakes and deliberately rejected this account in favour of a theory of wave tremors, then he had not done his scientific homework very well. For Thales is unlikely to have observed waves strong enough to cause a landslide, let alone cause an

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earthquake. So his postulation that such phenomena occurred, quite apart from their alleged seismic effects, was pure speculation. Furthermore, once Poseidon is demoted from his role in seismological theory, we are left with a gap when it comes to identifying the cause of these hypothetical wave tremors themselves. In short, the so-called ‘natural’ explanation is a non-explanation, a retreat into unsupported conjecture. If this is scientific thinking, it does not have a great deal to recommend it. It also seems to have escaped Farrington’s attention that the story of Marduk’s mat can be construed as a piece of scientific explanation just as well as Thales’ story of silt deposits. Behind Marduk’s mat lies the recognition that it is possible to weave reeds into a structure that will float and support the weight of human beings, their goods and chattels. This knowledge must have been gained at some time in the past by observation and experiment, rather than by divine revelation. The notion of dry land as such a structure, floating upon a subterranean body of water, is plainly an analogical extension of this idea. And since mats have to be made by hand, Marduk or some other maker is required by the internal logic of the analogy. If Thales adopted a theory of silt deposits, all this shows is that he preferred a different analogy. But it is an inferior analogy if the aim is to rationalize the concept of dry land floating on water, which, at least according to Aristotle, was Thales’ view of the earth. It also shows that Thales did not pursue his analogy very far. Even a superficial study of geological samples would have thrown doubt on the hypothesis that all dry land is composed of alluvial deposits from rivers. Whatever research into the matter Thales may have done, his credentials as the founder of soil science are hardly impressive. Such shortcomings matter little to theorists obsessed with the idea that science is fundamentally incompatible with the notion of supernatural agency. Nor are they impressed by the fact that most of the ‘scientific advances’ of the past three thousand years were made by investigators who did not recognize that incompatibility, but, on the contrary, believed they were studying amazing examples of divine handiwork. There is no evidence to support the view that Thales himself thought he was taking a great step forward by eliminating all reference to divine influence in the world. That kind of ‘scientific attitude’ is in any case difficult to square with the most celebrated dictum attributed to Thales in antiquity: ‘All things are full of gods.’ But of course that can be discounted too if we accept Burnet’s dismissal of the term theos. *

*

*

The background to this nineteenth-century enlistment of science and the Greeks on behalf of the ‘secular’ cause against religion was the furore caused

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by the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859, brought to a head by the famous public debate between T. H. Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce at a British Association meeting in 1860. The first edition of Burnet’s book appeared in 1892: it was written for a readership who had had thirty years to take on board the outcome of that debate. The casus belli was one particular thesis about biology, and more particularly the publication of one particular book. This seems to have had a significant influence on what the general public henceforth understood as being implied by ‘the word science’. If Darwin was a typical scientist, and The Origin of Species a typical work of science, and if the problem was that accepting Darwinian biology meant rejecting the account of creation given in the Bible, then what science ‘stood for’ assumed a quite specific public profile that it had not had previously. Science came to be seen as alternative to Christianity, which in turn was seen as a long-standing obstacle to scientific progress. Organized religion had not changed its spots: Huxley versus Wilberforce was a middle-class replay of Galileo versus the Inquisitors. But Darwin was a scientist who neither did ‘experiments’ nor presumed to offer ‘proofs’. He had spent many years collecting observations about living species, including a fiveyear tour of foreign parts on board HMS Beagle. His conviction that the extant species were not stable, much less eternally fixed by some original divine act, seems to have arisen quite early on in his career, and by his own account the notion of natural selection would never have occurred to him had he not chanced to read Malthus’s great work on population. Views differ as to why he delayed publishing The Origin of Species until 1859, but one account has it that he realized only too clearly its materialist implications (Gould 1980). Certainly Karl Marx was not slow to realize them too, and wrote to Engels to that effect, as well as sending Darwin an inscribed copy of Das Kapital. The other conspicuous feature of The Origin of Species as a work of science is that it is not written in impenetrable biological jargon. A fairly representative passage reads as follows: It has been argued that, as none of the animals and plants of Egypt, of which we know anything, have changed during the last three or four thousand years, so probably have none in any part of the world. But, as Mr. G. H. Lewes has remarked, this line of argument proves too much, for the ancient domestic races figured on the Egyptian monuments, or embalmed, are closely similar or even identical with those now living; yet all naturalists admit that such races have been produced through the modification of their original types. The many animals which have remained unchanged since the commencement of the glacial period,

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would have been an incomparably stronger case, for these have been exposed to great changes of climate and have migrated over great distances; whereas, in Egypt, during the last several thousand years, the conditions of life, as far as we know, have remained absolutely uniform. The fact of little or no modification having been effected since the glacial period would have been of some avail against those who believe in an innate and necessary law of development, but is powerless against the doctrine of natural selection or the survival of the fittest, which implies that when variations or individual differences of a beneficial nature happen to arise, these will be preserved; but this will be effected only under certain favourable circumstances. (Darwin 1859: 193) Whatever one may think of the argument, its verbal presentation is so lucid that even a lay person who had never studied biology could hardly profess not to understand what was being argued without appearing obtuse. Although Darwin’s text was subsequently provided with a glossary (because ‘several readers have complained to me that some of the terms used were unintelligible to them’), the reader does not have to consult this glossary very often. Furthermore, the terms glossed are very simply explained, without any recourse to unfamiliar doctrines or assumptions. In short, there is no insuperable obstacle to the general reader who knows little or nothing about the details of biology as available to nineteenth-century students of the subject. Nor is the general thesis difficult to grasp. (If it had been, presumably it would not have aroused such controversy.) It is of some interest to note that of the two-hundred-odd terms that were regarded as requiring definitions in The Origin of Species there is not one that could be counted as crucial to the theory itself. Quite a number would nowadays be regarded as items of general educated vocabulary, including: ABNORMAL. Contrary to the general rule. ATROPHIED. Arrested in development at a very early stage. BOULDERS. Large transported blocks of stone generally embedded in clays or gravels. CUTANEOUS. Of or belonging to the skin. DORSAL. Of or belonging to the back. EMBRYO. The young animal undergoing development within the egg or womb. FUNGI (sing. FUNGUS). A class of cellular plants of which Mushrooms, Toadstools, and Moulds are familiar examples. Others are less familiar, although still surviving as technical terms, such as:

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The composition of this glossary is of some significance. It indicates fairly clearly not only that Darwin took for granted an already established language of biology, but that he saw no problem in translating this language into terms that most educated readers could understand. Furthermore, anyone wanting to challenge any one of these definitions would have been making no serious inroad into the main thesis of The Origin of Species; while anyone minded to challenge them all would have been refusing the currently accepted language of biology tout court. This was not without relevance to the storm that the publication of the work occasioned. In writing as he did, Darwin presented his professional credentials by displaying an effortless mastery of the language of biology, while the glossary cleared him of any charge of obfuscation. Whether Darwin and The Origin of Species were typical examples of the scientist and the work of science is not of great importance when set beside the consideration that this is how they came to be regarded, for better or for worse. The fact remains that what the book presents is not a demonstration but a biological hypothesis, backed up by a certain corpus of reports and observations, couched in an appropriate technical idiom. Whether the hypothesis was correct was an open question. A hundred years later, a sympathetic editor could still point out that Huxley’s acceptance of what Huxley himself referred to as ‘Mr Darwin’s hypothesis’ depended on ‘the production of proof that physiological species may be produced by selective breeding’, and add: ‘That proof has never been produced, though a few not entirely convincing examples are claimed to have been found’ (Matthews 1971: x–xi). The absence of proof notwithstanding, few critics were inclined to challenge Darwin’s standing as a serious scientist. That had already been established for all to see by his selection of evidence and by the language of his book. Darwin’s great contribution to science as a supercategory was that he managed to get an unprovable and patently metaphysical thesis accepted at one stroke as an outstanding advance in scientific thinking because it offered a rational alternative to revealed religion. (In calling the thesis ‘metaphysical’ I imply no more than this: that the issue between creationists and

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evolutionists could not be settled by appeal to experience, observation or experiment.) *

*

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Thales’ account of earthquakes is not even mentioned in Aristotle’s discussion of the subject in his Meteorology, much less lauded as the first scientific account. However, Aristotle’s discussion in turn can hardly be held up as a shining example of how to construct a scientific theory. He does not proceed by setting out the available information about earthquakes and then asking (1) what facts require explanation and (2) what could explain them. Instead he embarks straight away on demolishing the theories held before his time by Anaxagoras, Anaximenes and Democritus. In this brief survey of views advanced during the previous two centuries, Aristotle does not even bother to state whether more information has become available since the earliest theories were formulated. Nor does he feel obliged to examine how reliable the reports of those earthquakes he has heard of actually are. He proceeds as if he were in debate with contemporaries about matters where the facts were not in dispute. But some of the alleged facts that his own theory appeals to (such as that most earthquakes occur either at night or, if by day, about noon; or that earthquakes tend to take place either in spring or in autumn) are, to say the least, dubious. In part the shortcomings of the discussion presented in Meteorology may be due to its being a summary of Aristotle’s case rather than a detailed report, although there is no clear indication that this is so in the text that has come down to us. Furthermore, Meteorology is an exemplary illustration of Aristotle’s method, inasmuch as it starts with an exposition of first principles and an account of the four elements (fire, air, water, earth) that are taken to underlie all geological phenomena. The trouble lies exactly here – at least, from a modern point of view: it provides too narrow a basis for explaining earthquakes. What is missing is any notion of plate tectonics or the gradual coming together of Africa and Europe, nowadays regarded as responsible for most of the earthquakes in the Mediterranean region that Aristotle could possibly have heard of. In short, Aristotle’s geological language simply lacks the terms and concepts necessary. One technical term that Aristotle does rely on a great deal in his Meteorology is anathumiasis (often translated as ‘exhalation’ or ‘vaporization’). It plays a crucial role in his account of earthquakes, because Aristotle holds that earthquakes are caused by winds, and winds in turn are examples of ‘exhalation’. If this is to be convincing, it seems to require some account of the exact mechanism of anathumiasis, but Aristotle never supplies one. In short, here we have an example where the role of the technical term, while purporting to be explanatory, actually blocks further explanation.

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It can doubtless be urged in Aristotle’s defence that, given these linguistic limitations, he does not make too bad a job of accounting for earthquakes. At least he does not fall back on invoking the popular Homeric ‘earth-shaker’ Poseidon. However, it remains the case that explanations of earthquakes couched in the restricted terms Aristotle allows himself to use are never going to be adequate when compared with explanations possible in a relevantly richer language. In short, the language of science available for a given purpose limits the range of explanations available, at the same time as it makes that range of explanations possible. Just as the Greek word phleps constitutes a possible obstacle to medical diagnosis by perpetuating a confusion between veins and arteries, so, it might be argued, it is unclear whether what Aristotle counts as an earthquake does not involve a confusion between different kinds of geological disturbance that might possibly require different geological explanations. On at least one occasion where Aristotle explicitly defends the retention of a popular term as part of his explanatory vocabulary, his justification blatantly depends on a priori reasoning. This is the case of the term aither as the name of a hypothetical fifth element. In Meteorology we are told that ‘men seem to have assumed that a body that was eternally in motion was also divine in nature; and, as such a body was different from any of the terrestrial elements, they determined to call it “ether” ’ (Meteorology 339b25–27). (The etymological connexion seems to be based on aie (‘always’), thein (‘run’) and theios (‘divine’).) But, argues Aristotle, these primitive word-coiners may have been right up to a point, inasmuch as it cannot be supposed that either fire or air (much less earth or water) is what fills the space between the earth and the stars. In short, we have to postulate a fifth element, and it might as well be called by the old name ‘ether’. But this sits uncomfortably with any doctrine of ‘real definition’; for by Aristotle’s own admission it is not the case that here someone has first identified the essence of something and then allocated an arbitrary name to it. Rather, an old question-begging name has been borrowed as a stopgap to fill what would otherwise be an awkward lacuna in an account of the universe. Can Aristotle be held up as an example of the more general thesis that the advance of science is to be equated with discarding belief in the supernatural? Burnet accused him (in one case) of holding up the progress of science. Aristotle may indeed be read, as Peters reminds us, as having never quite abandoned the Platonic notion that stars have souls. In On the Heavens 292a19–21 he says: We think of the stars as mere bodies, and as units with a serial order indeed but entirely inanimate; but we should rather conceive them as enjoying life and action.

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This, if taken seriously, would have serious consequences for any ‘real definition’ of what a star is. By the time we get to Metaphysics the notion has dropped out of sight. Peters comments: ‘This is not to say, however, that Aristotle ceased believing in the divinity of the heavenly bodies; he merely discarded them as philosophical causes’ (Peters 1967: 147). In Nicomachean Ethics 1141a35–b1 we are told quite plainly that ‘there are other things much more divine in their nature even than man, e.g., most conspicuously, the bodies of which the heavens are framed’. The question remains as to whether Aristotle was deliberately dodging the issue, or simply at a loss to integrate the stars as animate bodies, and therefore potential sources of action and influence, within his more general theory of the universe. We thus come to an intellectual crossroads as regards developing a language of inquiry. The choice seems to lie, at least for avowed reocentrists like Aristotle, between (1) deliberately restricting in advance the explanatory terminology that will be used (in accordance with Aristotelian ‘first principles’ or some analogous set of axioms) or (2) admitting ambulando as many terms and concepts as seem to be useful in describing particular cases that may eventually turn out to have some relevance to the investigation. The former approach seems to project a notion of science whereby an explanation is scientific only if it fits in with some total scheme already established, whereas the latter admits explanations that may in certain cases go beyond any such scheme. There is no plausible compromise to be reached between the two approaches, since accepting (1) automatically rules out (2) and vice versa. But Aristotle, on the evidence supplied by his own surviving works, seems to waver according to context between these irreconcilable linguistic strategies. What may in part explain this is a revealing remark in On the Heavens 294b7–8 to the effect that ‘what we are all inclined to do’ is ‘to direct our inquiry not to the matter itself, but to the views of our opponents’. For this is exactly what Aristotle himself might be accused of doing in the case of earthquakes. He is more anxious to show that his opponents’ theories must be rejected than he is to establish that his own theory is entirely satisfactory. From this emerges a somewhat different view of scientific progress than is usually attributed to Aristotle. It comes down to conceding that the only sure road to knowledge is basically confrontational (as doubtless Socrates would have agreed). There is no point in advancing a new theory, however original, if it leaves the old theories in place: this is no advance, except in the proliferation of theories. It merely adds to the problem of deciding between different explanations. And this will in any case be impossible unless there is an unambiguous terminology into which the rival theories may be translated and thus compared. Once again we are brought back to the question of establishing a viable language of inquiry. Aristotle seems to have had no hesitation, as Lloyd observes, in describing the theories of his Milesian predecessors in

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terms which they themselves would not have used, and could not have used, since the words in question had not yet been coined (Lloyd 1970: 19). Similarly, when Aristotle reports Thales’ view that all things are full of gods (On the Soul 411a9–10) he immediately translates it into his own terms as meaning that everything has a soul, and rejects this. why does the soul when it resides in air and fire not form an animal, while it does so when it resides in mixtures of the elements? [. . .] for it is beyond paradox to say that fire or air is an animal, and it is absurd to refuse the name of animal to what has soul in it. (On the Soul 411a10ff.) Here we see Aristotle struggling hard to achieve levitation by tugging at the lexical bootstraps of his own vocabulary. He is not willing to countenance the idea that everything has a soul because for him the (real) definition of ‘animal’ is applied to that which has a soul, and one does not talk about air or fire as animals. But suppose that had been the case. The linguistic argument is a complete muddle. That in everyday parlance Greeks did not refer to air or fire as ‘animals’ has nothing to do with determining whether or not soul is present in either. For it might be that the popular use of the name is based on mistaken assumptions. (The general point had already been raised in Plato’s Cratylus.) On the other hand, if ‘animal’ is here being regarded as part of a vocabulary based on ‘real definitions’, this is a desperate case of Aristotle’s explanatory lexicon coming to its own rescue: for what is at issue is nothing other than the legitimacy of defining ‘animal’ by reference to ‘soul’. *

*

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Whereas in ancient Greek, as Lloyd warns us, there was no single word corresponding to the modern term science, the situation might at first sight appear to be different in Latin. For there we find scientia well attested in Classical authors, and this is the very word to which the etymology of science is traced. However, this does not mean that Latin writers were already familiar with the modern concept: far from it. A first clue to the Latin usage is provided by the fact that the word scientia usually occurs only in the singular: we do not often hear of ‘sciences’ in the Classical period. Scientia is simply the abstract noun corresponding to the verb scire (‘to know’) and it can apparently be applied in principle to almost any area of human knowledge, skill or expertise. So too can the term ars (‘art’), although this, unlike scientia, is frequently found in the plural (e.g. artes belli ‘arts of war’). The Roman divided the artes into two classes: those befitting free citizens (artes liberales ‘liberal arts’) and those considered as being of a lower status (artes illiberales). But no corresponding division is made in the

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case of scientia. When a distinction is drawn between ars and scientia, it seems that the former term tends to reserved for practical application and the latter for the knowledge or ability thus applied. In the Middle Ages the two terms were often coupled together in a way that blurred what some writers recognized as an important distinction between theory and practice. The ars et scientia of a subject was simply all there was to be known about it. In the medieval universities the seven subjects of the standard curriculum were universally referred to as artes, even though they included arithmetic and astronomy. However, the fact that they were also sometimes referred to as ‘the seven sciences’ shows that there was no clear distinction generally accepted. By the time of the Renaissance we find Leonardo anxious that painting should be classified as a science (scientia) and willing to tackle head on the question ‘Is painting a science or not?’ (Richter 1949: 22). Even then it is not clear that we are dealing with sciences in the modern sense; for what Leonardo is basically objecting to is that painting is not included among the liberal arts (Richter 1949: 69). We should also bear in mind that, for Leonardo, poetry is also a ‘science’, as is theology. But sculpture is not: ‘La scultura non è scientia’ (Richter 1949: 94) Nevertheless, his definition of scientia is interesting. It is, he says, a ‘mental discourse’ (discorso mentale) that goes back to the ‘ultimate principles’ of a subject, beyond which there is nothing further that can be found belonging to it. Thus in geometry we have to begin with the point, from which can be derived lines, and from lines can be derived surfaces. But there is nothing geometrically prior, from which a point can be derived, ‘either in nature or in the human mind’ (Richter 1949: 22–3). The example is strategically well chosen, for Leonardo will go on to argue that painting is an application of geometry, which is in any case a science by common consent. But there are two further requirements for a science in Leonardo’s view. One is that it should pass the relevant mathematical tests. The other is that it should be based on experience: if you say that the sciences which begin and end in the mind contain truth, this cannot be conceded, and must be denied for many reasons. First and foremost because in such mental discourses experience does not come in, without which nothing reveals itself with certainty. (Richter 1949: 23) When he writes of ‘sciences which begin and end in the mind’, Leonardo is presumably referring primarily to logic, or at least to an interpretation of logic that some logicians championed. The emphasis on experience, as Richter observes, is already found in the thirteenth century in Roger Bacon’s Opus

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Majus, a work that Leonardo seems to have known. But in any case it fits his own defence of painting perfectly. He insists on it repeatedly. They say that knowledge born of experience is mechanical, but that knowledge born and consummated in the mind is scientific (scientifica), while knowledge born of science and culminating in manual work is semi-mechanical. But to me it seems that all sciences are vain and full of errors that are not born of experience, mother of all certainty, and that are not tested by experience, that is to say, that do not at their origin, middle or end pass through any of the five senses. (Richter 1949: 25–6) The above passage is of particular interest because it highlights a conflict between two uses of the term scientia. On one side there are those who (mistakenly in Leonardo’s view) regard science as located in the mind, and use the word accordingly: these are those who can speak of ‘knowledge born of science’. On the other side are those who, like Leonardo, deny that there can be any science confined to the mind alone, and denounce such inquiries as ‘vain and full of errors’. In short, what one side regards as science par excellence the other side rejects as not being science at all. The important point to grasp is this: here is a conflict where there can be neither ‘objective’ resolution nor compromise, since there is no common ground. Or, to put it in Aristotelian terms, there can be no ‘real definition’ of science: science has no ‘essence’ that attentive inquiry can reveal. But the shadow of that semantic fallacy still obscures many modern discussions of the subject. *

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A hundred years after Leonardo’s death, Francis Bacon drew a distinction very reminiscent of Leonardo’s between science and mechanical arts: [. . .] in arts mechanical the first deviser comes shortest, and time addeth and perfecteth; but in sciences the first author goeth farthest, and time leeseth and corrupteth. (Bacon 1605: I.iv.12) He cites artillery, sailing and printing as examples to substantiate the first point, while the second is illustrated by the way in which ‘the philosophies and sciences’ of Aristotle, Plato and Democritus were misunderstood and ‘imbased’ by later commentators. This seems to suggest that whereas the arts proceed by empirical trial and error over a period of time, the sciences are set up fully constituted through the insights of great thinkers. But that is hardly borne out by the way in which, elsewhere in The Advancement of Learning,

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Bacon refers to inquiries which have not yet been ‘reduced’ to a science. He writes, for instance, of the ‘philosophical’ study of words that it is currently handled ‘sparsim, brokenly’; but adds, ‘though I think it very worthy to be reduced into a science by itself’ (Bacon 1605: II.xvi.4). Bacon is dithering here. He drew no very clear general distinction between sciences and arts: if he had, that would presumably have led to a rather different schema of the branches of human inquiry than the one he presents in The Advancement of Learning. There we find knowledge divided into three main compartments, according to which of the three human faculties of memory, imagination and reason is considered to be principally involved. These are for Bacon the three great supercategories. Science has not yet achieved that status. What Bacon does recognize is that although words may be instruments of communication they may also be obstacles to understanding. Hence his condemnation of ‘idols of the market-place’ (idola fori) as false appearances that are imposed upon us by words, which are framed and applied according to the conceit and capacities of the vulgar sort: and although we think we govern our words, and prescribe it well, loquendum ut vulgus, sentiendum ut sapientes; yet certain it is that words, as a Tartar’s bow, do shoot back upon the understanding of the wisest, and mightily entangle and pervert the judgment. So as it is almost necessary in all controversies and disputations to imitate the wisdom of the mathematicians, in setting down in the very beginning the definitions of our words and terms that others may know how we accept and understand them, and whether they concur with us or no. For it cometh to pass for want of this that we are sure to end there where we ought to have begun, which is, in questions and differences about words. To conclude therefore, it must be confessed that it is not possible to divorce ourselves from these fallacies and false appearances, because they are inseparable from our nature and condition of life. (Bacon 1605: II.xiv.11) This is an implicit criticism of Aristotle and a significant retreat from the doctrine of ‘real definition’. Does it make the development of a foolproof language of science impossible? Certainly in the Aristotelian sense. For the only precautionary remedy suggested is manifestly too weak to scotch the proliferation of idola fori. There is no guarantee that in setting out our definitions for others to consider we have not included terms which themselves embody and perpetuate ‘fallacies and false appearances’. The fact that others may accept the very same ‘fallacies and false appearances’, along with the terms in question, is no assurance that our inquiry is soundly based. All Bacon’s advice guarantees, in fact, is that such mistakes as are made will be

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made in common. But science, at least before the advent of postmodernism, was not supposed to be about how to make collective mistakes. It is interesting to note that Bacon criticizes Aristotle’s language of inquiry: I cannot a little marvel at the philosopher Aristotle, that did proceed in such a spirit of difference and contradiction towards all antiquity: undertaking not only to frame new words of science at pleasure, but to confound and extinguish all ancient wisdom. (Bacon 1605: II.vii.2) Presumably Aristotle would not have incurred this censure had he, in Bacon’s view, adequately defined his ‘words of science’. But later Bacon himself seems to have recognized the weakness in his own proposal about definitions, since in Novum Organum he concedes: Yet even definitions cannot cure this evil in dealing with natural and material things; since the definitions themselves consist of words, and those words beget others [. . .]. (Bacon 1620: I, lix) Here is one sentence that marks a watershed in the development of Western thought about both language and science. For Bacon, clearly, there is no way out of the semantic circle: definitions do not lead us from words across the great divide to non-verbal reality. A definition is no more than the replacement of one set of (conventional) words by another set of (conventional) words. If this linguistic thesis is correct, it has profound implications for the meaning of the word science itself. *

*

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The French word scientifique, we are told in Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751–80), is hardly ever used of persons (ne se dit guere des personnes). Today it has become, as a noun, the usual French term for a scientist. The difference between the eighteenth-century and the modern usage tells us a great deal about certain developments in social and intellectual history. The ‘ne se dit guere’ of the Encyclopédie suggests the very beginning of an era in which ‘being a scientist’ was becoming recognized as one of the things you could ‘be’ (given the requisite education, social standing, etc.). The same work marks the beginning of public recognition of science as a distinct supercategory: that is already implied in the full title of the great project: Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. The editors took sciences, arts and métiers as terms identifying the three principal divisions into which the whole realm of human knowledge could be organized. Of particular interest in the present context are the remarks on language in

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the Discours préliminaire concerning the development of the arts and sciences. There is no mention of the common eighteenth-century belief that language is originally a gift from God. The gradual improvement of language from its beginnings down to the eighteenth century is treated as having been achieved by mankind’s own efforts. Originally, human linguistic resources were very imperfect, since they answered to no more than the most basic and pressing of human needs. But this could not suffice indefinitely. The expansion of human vocabulary, according to the Discours préliminaire, must have followed the order dictated by the development of ‘operations of the mind’ (opérations de l’esprit); that is, names were first found for particular items (individus), then for qualities common to groups of such items (‘which, although not existing independently, exist in the individual items and are common to several’), and finally names for abstract ideas (termes abstraits). This is a story deeply indebted to Lockean psychocentrism, although not quite in a form that Locke would have approved. It is also deeply indebted to Aristotle. The debt to Aristotle can be identified in the implicit rejection of the Platonic view that universals somehow exist independently of their manifestation in particular cases. (It would seem to follow from this that the qualities deemed to be common to a group of separate items – and thus nameable – must be either perceptual constructs of the human mind or else categories innately given to it.) The debt to Locke resurfaces when we come to the prophetic mention of a science de la communication des idées. Such a science, we are told, would be concerned with expressing each idea in the clearest manner possible (exprimer chaque idée de la maniere la plus nette qu’il est possible). The goal would be perfection of the instruments of communication (perfectionner les signes). Here we see a very typical example of the Enlightenment programme which looks for continued improvement in human affairs by the application of reason. But where does reason itself come from? It is no God-given faculty, according to this account, but the product of human efforts to cope with the world into which we are born. In the case of language, this led eventually to the science of grammar (grammaire). But grammar itself is identified as a byproduct of logic (une des branches de la logique). It is at precisely this point in his own exposition that the author has to face up to the (Aristotelian) doctrine of the conventionality of language. How does one reconcile the dependence of a science of grammar on logic with any notion that linguistic signs are, individually, purely arbitrary? The ancient debate between anomalists and analogists suddenly and unexpectedly re-emerges. Or perhaps, as Gérard Genette argues persuasively in Mimologiques (1976), it had never gone away. The Discours préliminaire shifts uncomfortably from one foot to the other. We are told that ‘the apparently bizarre choice’ that selects one sign in preference to others (choix bizarre en apparence qui fait préférer un signe à un autre) might

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perhaps be explained if we had a metaphysics (métaphysique) guided by ‘the philosophical spirit which reaches back to the source of everything’ (cet esprit philosophique qui remonte à la source de tout). A likely story. Cratylus would have turned in his grave. The notion that some verbal signs are less arbitrary than others was to be re-examined a hundred and fifty years later by Saussure, but developed in quite a different way as part of a science de la langue. In the Discours préliminaire dozens of sciences are identified by name, but more interesting is the way the whole enterprise of scientific inquiry is explained. Science and philosophy are one and the same: the words science and philosophie are synonymous, we are told bluntly. Philosophy/science is simply that part of human knowledge that we owe to reason (la portion de la connaissance humaine qu’il faut rapporter à la raison). It is thus distinguished from those realms of knowledge that fall under the aegis of memory and those that fall under the aegis of imagination. All this is déjà vu for readers of Bacon, whom the Discours préliminaire acknowledges as a precursor, while claiming that the editors have not followed his system slavishly. (Accusations of plagiarism were not wanting at the time.) Although the Encyclopédie is a landmark, it is still far from being a work of reference in which the modern scientist would recognize a clear description of the kind of enterprise nowadays championed as science, or the confraternity of specialists nowadays recognized as scientists. The Encyclopédie represents a half-way house in the transition between Bacon’s supercategories and those of modernity.

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If I have presented my case at all competently so far, the reader should need no more convincing of at least one basic point: that in the Western tradition science did not emerge in a non-verbal vacuum. On the contrary, developing a language of science was always a vital part of developing scientific inquiry itself. There are no languageless sciences. This being so, the next questions I wish to pursue are these. What kind of language was seen as being appropriate to science? What was the theoretical basis of this language? How was this language seen as relating to the ordinary, non-scientific language of the day? The paramount consideration to grasp is that as the modern supercategory of science gradually took shape from the seventeenth century onwards, it emerged as the concept of a literate society. It is timely to remind ourselves of this because those who championed ‘experimental philosophy’ in the early days often insisted that they were concerned with things, not words. They were deceiving themselves. Their concerns were always those of a literate intelligentsia, who conceived of all knowledge as being reducible to writing of some kind, and as being cumulative because documents could reliably pass on the results of past investigations from one generation to another. They regarded the primary function of universities as being to transmit important texts in this way and to facilitate the study of them. These assumptions underpinned the great prestige that Aristotle still enjoyed in the seventeenth century. Even those whose work showed Aristotle to have been wrong were not always among his detractors. William Harvey, for example, whose discovery of the circulation of the blood is fundamental to modern medicine, was both a brilliant anatomist and a staunch Aristotelian. He recommended John Aubrey ‘to goe to the fountain head and read Aristotle, Cicero, Avicen’, while dismissing the propagators of newfangled doctrines as ‘shitt-breeches’ (Wear 1990: xxv). It is only in a literate society that this kind of attitude is comprehensible. *

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That ‘experimental philosophy’ was destined to have an effect upon the English language was prophesied by Thomas Sprat in the seventeenth century. But Sprat thought it would probably amount to no more than the loss of twenty or thirty words. He did not foresee the day when each one of many sciences might need its own glossaries and dictionaries, containing a prolific terminology that would form an inpenetrable barrier to anyone lacking the requisite education. I grant indeed that the greatest part of the former Body of Physics, may hereby chance to fall to the ground. But to what sum will the dammage amount? What can we lose, but only some few definitions, and idle questions, and empty disputations? [. . .] Perhaps there will be no more use of Twenty, or Thirty obscure Terms, such as Matter, and Form, Privation, Entelichia, and the like. (Sprat 1667: 327) It is no coincidence that all the examples of words that Sprat singles out as likely to disappear are Aristotelian terms. The passage I quote is, in fact, a barely disguised attack on Aristotle’s Physics, still regarded by some scholars in Sprat’s day as the basic text in the subject. Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667) is in many ways an invaluable piece of documentary evidence concerning the emergence of science in the early modern period. Its overtly propagandist aims and claims allow the reader to see clearly why the work of the Royal Society was regarded as controversial, in spite of the fact that the Society had been granted a royal charter by Charles II in 1662. In Part III of his History, Sprat takes one by one all the objections that have been or might be raised against the new ‘experimental philosophy’ and tries to show that these objections are groundless. He begins by arguing that experimental philosophy will do no harm to the education of the young, because it is reserved for ‘men of Ripe years’, not ‘thrust into the hands of Boyes’. It will not impinge upon such traditional studies as grammar, rhetoric, moral philosophy, history or mathematics: these ‘great and fundamental Parts of education [. . .] will be unalter’d, whatever new changes of Opinions may arise about Natural Things’. It is interesting that Sprat makes no attempt to recruit either mathematics or logic to the cause of experimental philosophy. It is not the complaint of the promoters of Experiments, that men have bin wanting to themselves, in regulating, disposing, or judging of their own thoughts. Nay they rather condemn them, for being wholy imployd about the productions of their own minds, and neglecting all the works of Nature, that are without them. (Sprat 1667: 326–7)

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By far the most detailed part of Sprat’s apologia, however, is devoted to arguing that experimental philosophy represents no threat to established religion. It is, he says, ‘the weightiest and most solemn part of my whole undertaking’. Evidently the lesson of Galileo’s brush with Rome had been not only learnt but well digested. Sprat finds it expedient to spell out, for the benefit of those who might harbour doubts, that experiments are ‘not dangerous to the Christian religion’, ‘will not destroy the Doctrine of the Godhead’, are ‘not injurious to the worship of God’, are ‘not prejudicial to the doctrine of the Gospel’, will not ‘overthrow the Doctrine of the Primitive Church’, will not ‘hinder the Practice of Religion’, will not ‘destroy the Doctrine of Prophecies and Prodigies’, and finally, perhaps most importantly of all, are ‘not dangerous to the Church of England’. Nor, he says, will it do to cite against experimental philosophy the fact that some of its practitioners are unbelievers; for although ‘some Experimenters may be inclinable to irreligion; yet this rather proceeds from their own Genius, than from any corruption that could be contracted from these Studies’ (Sprat 1667: 375). One of the most significant of Sprat’s observations about language immediately follows his comment about the ‘twenty or thirty’ words likely to drop out of use. He does not envisage these obsolete words being replaced by other words, but that an ‘infinit variety of Inventions, Motions, and Operations, will succeed in the place of words.’ For Sprat, the Royal Society is ‘a Society that prefers Works before Words’. It offers ‘to the most zealous lovers of Liberty, the surest way to randsome the minds of all mankind from Slavery’. The slavery to which Sprat refers is nothing other than the tyranny of words, Bacon’s ‘idols of the market’ and their intellectual progeny. For Sprat, Aristotelian distinctions like form versus substance are nothing but metaphysical obfuscations superimposed on reality and held in place simply by words. Only by sweeping away such verbal shibboleths can human inquiry come to terms in a clearsighted way with the world of Nature. In this respect, linguistic reform is an essential part of the experimenters’ philosophical programme. It must have occurred to many of Sprat’s readers that these admonitions about the deceptions of words proceeded from the pen of a writer who was not backward in the deployment of rhetorical skills and verbal polish. Sprat, not being himself a scientist, was in some ways an odd representative of any case for ‘works before words’. Furthermore, even experimenters relied on words to communicate their findings to one another and to the general public. Doubtless anticipating this kind of objection, Sprat seems to have tried to deal with it in advance in various ways. First, he presents the Royal Society as being committed to what amounts to a moral doctrine of semantic perspicuity. Sprat’s observations on this subject constitute the most frequently quoted passage from his History. He attributes to the Society

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a constant Resolution, to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style: to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver’d so many things, almost in an equal number of words. They have exacted from all their members, a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions, clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness, as they can: and preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants, before that, of Wits, or Scholars. (Sprat 1667: 113) In this carefully worded statement, the expression Mathematical plainness is of particular interest for the present discussion. There is almost certainly a direct allusion to what Bacon says about ‘idols of the market-place’ and his advice to imitate ‘the wisdom of the mathematicians’. Apart from their explicit definitions, the ‘plainness’ of the mathematicians seemingly resides in (1) using no superfluous symbols in their formulae, and (2) governing all substitutions by strict rules. I shall discuss mathematics as ‘the language of science’ in a later chapter: for the moment I wish to make only the point that here we have no suggestion that mathematicians have any special insight into, or role in, the study of the natural world. What attracts Sprat is rather that mathematical discourse offers a semantic model for experimental philosophers. Its virtues are economy and precision of expression, together with fixed definitions of terms. This recommendation is at first sight oddly combined with a preference for the language of ‘Artizans, Countrymen and Merchants’. But it seems less odd when we realize that what Sprat is presenting here is a doctrine of natural speech. The more down-to-earth the speaker the better. It is the wits and scholars who have lost contact with everyday realities, and their language likewise. *

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Sprat’s concerns about language have their counterpart in the criticisms brought by experimenters against the writings of their opponents. Robert Boyle, a founder member of the Royal Society, whose name is still attached to the famous law which he formulated in 1662 relating the volume of a gas to its temperature at a constant pressure, lost no opportunity of excoriating the language of those whom he referred to as ‘Aristotelians’ and ‘spagyrists’. Their linguistic crime, according to Boyle, is ‘canting’, i.e. the use of ‘ambiguous or obscure’ terms. In The Sceptical Chymist (1661), Boyle complains about ‘the intolerable ambiguity they allow themselves in their writings and expressions’ and ‘the unreasonable liberty they give themselves of playing with names at pleasure’.

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And indeed if I were obliged in this dispute, to have such regard to the phraseology of each particular chymist, as not to write anything which this or that author may not pretend, not to contradict this or that sence, which he may give us as occasion serves to his ambiguous expressions, I should scarce know how to dispute, nor which way to turn myself. For I find that even eminent writers (such as Raymund Lully, Paracelsus and others) do so abuse the termes they employ, that as they will now and then give divers things, one name; so they will oftentimes give one thing, many names; and some of them (perhaps) such, as do much more properly signifie some distinct body of another kind; nay even in technical words or termes of art, they refrain not from this confounding liberty; but will, as I have observed, call the same substance, sometimes the sulphur, and sometimes the mercury of a body. (Boyle 1661: 113) The sole topic of inquiry in The Sceptical Chymist is: how many basic substances are there in Nature? The answer of the ‘Aristotelians’ or ‘peripatetics’ was that there are just four ‘elements’ (earth, air, fire and water). The answer of the ‘spagyrists’ was that underlying all things there are three ‘principles’ (salt, sulphur and mercury). Boyle’s dispute with the spagyrists was not about the use of experiments. For the spagyrists’ approach was just as keenly experimental (as it had long been by those who hoped, by trial and error, to discover a reliable method of transmuting base metals into gold). The issue between Boyle and the spagyrists was not so much about the use of experimental techniques as about the inferences to be drawn from them; and these depended on definitions of crucial terms. Boyle’s plan of attack on his opponents is primarily linguistic. He is questioning their semantics, not their methods. In one sense, this is a strategy forced upon him, because Boyle himself has no answer to the question of how by experiment one could be sure that a substance had been reduced to its basic components. So he aims to show that Aristotelians and spagyrists have no answer either. They simply obfuscate, substituting assertion for demonstration and description for definition. Boyle, for his part, undertakes in his Introductory Preface to report the experiments he refers to in such a way that ‘an ordinary reader, if he be but acquainted with the usual chymical terms, may easily enough understand them’. This openness he contrasts with the reports of his adversaries: a person anything versed in the writings of chymists cannot but discern by their obscure, ambiguous, and almost aenigmatical way of expressing what they pretend to teach, that they have no mind to be understood at all, but by the sons of Art (as they call them), nor to be understood even by these without difficulty and hazardous trials. (Boyle 1661: 3)

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Boyle’s first linguistic move in the campaign against Aristotelians and spagyrists is to insist that, despite their differences of terminology (‘elements’ versus ‘principles’), both parties are seeking to identify the same irreducible items. Thus the words element and principle may be regarded as synonyms (‘terms equivalent’) and defined in common as ‘those primitive and simple bodies of which the mixt ones are said to be composed, and into which they are ultimately resolved’ (Boyle 1661: 18). By this shrewd opening gambit, and before even a single experiment has been cited, Boyle has his adversaries on the back foot; for it is clear that at least one of the two opposition parties must be wrong. If they agree that there is no semantic distinction between the terms element and principle, the propositions that there are four elements in Nature and three principles cannot be reconciled arithmetically. And if either Aristotelians or spagyrists should be tempted to counterargue that elements are not the same as principles, it would become clear that at least one of these concepts must be based on an inadequate definition. In any case, as Boyle goes on to argue, having two names for the same thing is an ‘impropriety of speech’. This latter claim is worthy of note: the experimenters evidently accept a semantic principle that there is, or should be, a one-one correspondence between names and things named. The Sceptical Chymist is written in the form of a debate between spokesmen for different positions. Themistius, who speaks for the Aristotelians, claims that ‘it is much more high and philosophical to discover things a priore than a posteriore’. He cites this as the reason why Aristotelians ‘employ experiments rather to illustrate than to demonstrate their doctrines’. Nevertheless, he maintains, there is at least one piece of experimental evidence that suffices to vindicate Aristotle’s claim that there are just four elements. This is the effect produced by burning a piece of green wood. The wood decomposes into flame (fire), smoke (air), hissing liquid (water) and ashes (earth). To this Carneades (who speaks for the experimenters) objects that this by no means proves that the original piece of wood contained fire or water; nor, more generally, that ‘nothing can be obtained from a body by the fire that was not preexistent in it’. Carneades proceeds to carry the attack further into Aristotelian territory by questioning Aristotle’s own definitions of ‘heat’ and ‘cold’. The interesting point here is that both of Aristotle’s definitions are reocentric: they are based on what Aristotle takes to be the final causes of heating and cooling. To these considerations Carneades opposes the equally reocentric objection that Aristotle’s definitions do not correspond to the facts. In short, the battle is fought on the field of semantics, and experimentation is relevant only insofar as it provides ammunition for that battle. *

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Apart from Boyle, did the experimenters of the Royal Society practice what Sprat preached? As if to demonstrate that they did, Sprat includes a number of papers by its members, fourteen in all. Their titles include ‘A method for making a history of the weather’, ‘Direction for the observation of the eclipses of the moon’, ‘A proposal for making wine’, ‘An account of a dog dissected’ and ‘Experiments of the recoiling of guns’. It is worth noting that what the Royal Society regarded as ‘experimental philosophy’ was not restricted to performing experiments: a considerable part of their work was observational and they attached great importance to designing instruments for more accurate observation, together with keeping accurate records of series of observations. The papers Sprat selects as examples are more notable for simplicity of diction and presentation than for any care taken by the authors to define in advance the terms they will use. Sprat’s linguistic desiderata do not in the end sit comfortably together. For, on the one hand, the use of common terms widely understood tends to undermine any perceived need for verbal definitions; while, on the other, if verbal definitions are allowed and satisfactorily provided, it is unclear why there is any necessity to restrict the vocabulary of experimental philosophy to terms in common use. It is evident in retrospect that Sprat’s doctrine of natural speech lacks something essential for a fully coherent experimenters’ programme. What is missing is the concept of ‘ostensive definition’, a lacuna not to be filled until ostensive definition was introduced formally into philosophy by W. E. Johnson more than two hundred years later. For Sprat, proposing a theory of ostensive definition might have been too metaphysical an enterprise. Without it, however, his notion of a primitive linguistic ‘purity’, when the number of things equalled the number of words, reduces to the simplistic nomenclaturism of Adam in the Garden of Eden. (I shall say more about Adamic nomenclaturism in Chapter 4.) *

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As if seeking a way out this semantic impasse, Sprat falls back on recommending the universal language devised by his mentor John Wilkins, ‘this excellent Man’ whose aim is to ‘teach a Communion of Speech amongst all Philosophers’). The description is not quite accurate. The primary aim of what Wilkins called his ‘real character’ was, as that term indicates, to set up a form of writing that would directly represent reality (as opposed to representing words). The semantic key to Wilkins’ project is the idea that ‘in a Philosophical Language, every word ought in strictness to have but one proper sense and acception, to prevent equivocalness’. Wilkins was by no means the first or the only scholar to propose such a system. Contemporary proponents of other schemes included Francis

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Lodwick (whose Common Writing was published in 1647) and George Dalgarno (Ars Signorum, 1661), with whom Wilkins had previously collaborated. The version of Wilkins’ Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language which has survived was published in 1668. (There appears to have been an earlier publication of which most copies were destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666.) The quest for a ‘real character’ on which Wilkins embarked can be seen as the direct continuation of a theme that runs throughout the Western linguistic tradition and goes back to Plato. The obscurity of the connexion between a sign and what it means is felt to be an imperfection of language. A ‘real’ system of communication, therefore, would avoid or at least minimize that obscurity: it would provide a direct link with reality. This, at least, was Wilkins’ intention. His point of departure, however, was an essentially Aristotelian view of the relationship between words, concepts and things. He states his initial premise as follows: As men do generally agree in the same Principle of Reason, so do they likewise agree in the same Internal Notion or Apprehension of things. (Wilkins 1668: 20) This evidently corresponds to Aristotle’s claim that the ‘affections of the soul’ are the same for everyone. Wilkins also accepts the Aristotelian view of communication as a transference of ideas between individuals: The External Expression of these Mental notions, whereby men communicate their thoughts to one another, is either to the Ear, or to the Eye. (Wilkins 1668: 20) Later in the same paragraph, he tells his readers explicitly: That conceit which men have in their minds concerning a Horse or Tree, is the Notion or mental Image of that Beast, or natural thing [. . .]. (Wilkins 1668: 20) Here we see another component of Aristotle’s doctrine: that affections of the soul are derived from external objects, which are the same for all observers. The Names given to these in several Languages, are such arbitrary sounds or words, as Nations of men have agreed upon, either casually or designedly, to express their Mental notions of them. The Written word is the figure or picture of that Sound. (Wilkins 1668: 20)

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Thus, still following Aristotle, Wilkins assumes that there is no ‘natural’ connexion between the word and what it stands for. He proceeds to argue that, if all this is so, then it lies within our power to institute a universal system of communication. So that if men should generally consent upon the same way or manner of Expression, as they do agree in the same Notion, we should then be freed from that Curse in the Confusion of Tongues, with all the unhappy consequences of it. Now this can onely be done, either by enjoyning some one Language and Character to be universally learnt and practised, (which is not to be expected, till some person attain to the Universal Monarchy; and perhaps would not be done then:) or else by proposing some such way as, by its facility and usefulness, (without the imposition of Authority) might invite and ingage men to the learning of it; which is the thing here attempted. (Wilkins 1668: 20) Wilkins’ view of the origin of language and its diversification was entirely orthodox. He did not even admit the validity of speculation on such matters; for to us, who have the revelation of Scripture, these kind of scruples and conjectures are sufficiently stated. And ’tis evident enough that the first Language was con-created with our first Parents, they immediately understanding the voice of God speaking to them in the Garden. And how Languages came to be multiplyed, is likewise manifested in the story of the Confusion of Babel. (Wilkins 1668: 2) Wilkins also acknowledged the reality of linguistic change. If any English man should now write or speak as our forefathers did about six or seven hundred years past, we should as little understand him as if he were a foreiner. (Wilkins 1668: 6) To illustrate this point, Wilkins supplies various versions of the Lord’s Prayer at different times from the year ad 700 down to his own day. But the reason for the differences between these versions is seen as being that the written form copies the spoken language. As Wilkins puts it, the variety of Letters is an appendix to the Curse of Babel. And therefore, for any man to go about to add to their number, will be like the inventing of a Disease [. . .]. (Wilkins 1668: 13)

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However, if a writing system were independent of speech, there would be no reason why a text should not remain comprehensible for centuries. This logic is crucial to Wilkins’ project. Writing affords a permanence that speech cannot guarantee. But how can writing be liberated from its dependence on speech, and thus be equipped to serve as the basis for an international language of science? Wilkins’ answer was a writing system ‘that should not signifie words, but things and notions, and consequently might be legible by any nation in their own Tongue . . .’ In short, he proposes keeping the Aristotelian model, but promoting writing to the role traditionally played by speech. The result is to bring the written sign into a direct, rather than an indirect, relationship to what it stands for. The feasibility of this project he took to have been demonstrated in principle by the men of China, who do now, and have for many Ages used such a general Character, by which the Inhabitants of that large Kingdom, many of them of different Tongues, do communicate with one another, every one understanding this common Character, and reading it in his own Language. (Wilkins 1668: 13) This interpretation of Chinese writing was common in the seventeenth century. Bacon states unequivocally that it is the use of China, and the kingdoms of the high Levant, to write in characters real, which express neither letters nor words in gross, but things or notions; insomuch as countries and provinces, which understand not one another’s language, can nevertheless read one another’s writings, because the characters are accepted more generally than the languages do extend. (Bacon 1620: II.xvi.2) But merely replacing words by written signs would not be sufficient to create a system of communication adequate for the purposes of science. For it would leave writing to inherit exactly the same defects as those which beset existing languages, all of which, together with their writing systems, Wilkins considered to be vitiated by the ‘imperfections’ of words; specifically, that different meanings may attach to the same form, that different forms may have the same meaning, and that words may not be pronounced as they are written. These imperfections would have to be eliminated in a rationally designed system of communication.

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This, in his view, would be a better solution to the problem than the forced adoption of any existing language. He held that there are no Letters or Languages that have been at once invented and established according to the Rules of Art; but that all, except the first, (of which we know nothing so certain as, that it was not made by human Art upon Experience) have been either taken up from that first, and derived by way of Imitation; or else, in a long tract of time, have, upon several emergencies, admitted various and casual alterations; by which means they must needs be liable to manifold defects and imperfections, that in a Language at once invented and according to the rules of Art might easily be avoided. Nor could this otherwise be, because that very Art by which Language should be regulated, viz. Grammar, is of much later invention then Languages themselves, being adapted to what was already in being, rather then the Rule of making it so. (Wilkins 1668: 19) Although he concedes that there were both Greek and Latin grammarians in ancient times, Wilkins points out that an interest in grammar did not emerge until long after those languages were established: which is the true reason of all those Anomalisms in Grammar; because the Art was suted to Language, and not Language to the Art. (Wilkins 1668: 19– 20) The argument, in brief, is that science needs a more carefully constructed system of communication than any existing language, with or without the help of grammarians, can supply. *

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Where Wilkins goes beyond the linguistics of Aristotle is in distinguishing between ‘instituted’ grammar and ‘natural’ grammar. On the basis of the latter, he argues, it becomes possible to propose a whole range of improvements in human communication. At the heart of his proposal lay a systematic classification of everything known, set out in a series of tables. In his Essay he claimed that the reducing of all things and all notions, to such kind of Tables, as are here proposed (were it as compleatly done as it might be) would prove the shortest and plainest way for the attainment of real Knowledge, that hath yet been offered to the World. (Wilkins 1668: Epistle Dedicatory)

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Wilkins’ analysis of ‘all those things and notions to which names are to be assigned’ is based on a type of semantics that would nowadays be called ‘componential analysis’. In Wilkins’ version, this proceeds by means of a triple subdivision into ‘genus’, ‘difference’ and ‘species’. This subdivision is hierarchically arranged: each genus comprises a number of differences and each difference comprises a number of species. This hierarchy in turn provides the graphic rationale for the writing system, in which various lines, hooks and loops are formed into complex symbols according to the classification of the thing or notion designated. In practice, Wilkins’ real character turned out to be very difficult to use, in part because of its rigid but highly arbitrary design. Because the various lines, hooks and loops all have a fixed interpretation within the scheme, the characters need to be written with the greatest care. In other words, their designer failed to appreciate the value of redundancy in a communication system. It has neither the visual aids of pictography nor the latitude of alphabetic writing. Moreover, the complexity of each character grows in proportion to the number of semantic features which become necessary to identify the thing or concept in question. Thus, for example, in order to work out the meaning of the character standing for ‘parent’, the reader has to know that a horizontal line with two open loops in the middle signifies the genus ‘œconomical relation’, that a stroke making an acute angle at the left end of such a horizontal line indicates the first difference under that genus, which is ‘consanguinity’, and that a vertical stroke making a right angle at the opposite end of the line signifies the second species under that difference, which is ‘direct ascending’. So, putting all this together, the compound character signifies ‘person consanguineally related in direct line of ascent’, i.e. ‘parent’. Wilkins’ ambitious approach to the problem of combining individual characters into propositions is based on a theory of ‘natural’ grammar, to which fourteen chapters of the Essay are devoted. Natural grammar he defines as conforming to principles which ‘do naturally and necessarily belong to the Philosophy of letters and speech in the General’, as distinct from ‘instituted’ grammar. The latter, which he also calls ‘particular’ grammar, is concerned with ‘rules which are proper and peculiar to any one Language’; for example, the rules pertaining to the inflexion of words and the government of cases. His natural grammar has three divisions. The first is devoted to the ‘doctrine of words’, itself divided into consideration of the ‘formal differences’ and the ‘accidental changes’ that words show. Under the ‘formal differences’, Wilkins presents a parts-of-speech system of some originality. He divides all words into two major classes, which he calls ‘integrals’ and ‘particles’. Integrals consist of nouns (themselves divided into ‘substantives’ and ‘adjectives’) and ‘derived adverbs’. All other words count as particles. The basis for this primary division is purely abstract and rational: it is said to be

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that integrals ‘signifie some entire thing or notion’. What Wilkins means by an ‘entire thing or notion’ is not further explained, but the class is taken to include words signifying ‘the Ens or Thing it self, or the Essence of a thing, as Nouns Neuter, whether concrete or abstract; or the Doing or Suffering of a thing as Nouns Active or Passive; or the manner and affection of it, as Derived Adverbs.’ But proper names, Wilkins declares, although they are words, cannot ‘be brought under the rule of any science’, because ‘Individuals are Infinite’. Particles are divided into ‘grammatical’ and ‘transcendental’. The grammatical particles in turn fall into two subdivisions: those ‘essential and perpetual in every compleat sentence’ and those ‘not essential but occasional’. The first of these two subdivisions has only one member: the copula. Tense and mood fall into the second subdivision as ‘accidents’ of the copula. ‘Transcendental particles’ is Wilkins’ term for affixes or comparable devices ‘which do circumstantiate words in respect of some Metaphysical notion; either by enlarging the acception of them to some more general signification, then doth belong to the restrained sense of their places: or denoting a relation to some other Predicament or Genus.’ Thus a diminutive suffix in a language such as Latin would count as ‘transcendental’: x + diminutive suffix = ‘little x’. But perhaps the most controversial feature of Wilkins’ analysis is his refusal to recognize the verb as a ‘natural’ part of speech. As regards the ‘accidental differences’ of words, Wilkins takes a bold line but, again, one which is not very cogently argued. He treats inflexion as consisting in ‘the several ways of varying the same word to sundry modes of signification’ and regards all integral words as ‘capable of Inflexion’. However, he notes that in instituted grammar inflexion is often ‘arbitrary’, whereas in a philosophical language ‘it ought to be founded upon the Philosophy of speech and such Natural grounds, as do necessarily belong to Language’. When it comes to spelling out the linguistic details of ‘natural’ inflexion, Wilkins unwittingly reveals just how committed his own thinking is to a Latin-based education; but, at the same time, how radically he envisages a ‘philosophical’ language as being structured otherwise. For example, he claims that the distinction between singular and plural is so ‘Intrinsical’ to substantives that it should not be marked by an affix. Instead, it should be ‘provided for in the Character or word it self’. (Taken to its logical conclusion, this should mean that the difference between ‘dog’ and ‘dogs’ would be expressed not by the equivalent of adding a plural -s, but in a way analogous to that between goose and geese or between mouse and mice.) Gender, on the other hand, Wilkins considers ‘less Intrinsical to the primary notion of the word’. It applies only to ‘things that are capable of Sex.’ There are ‘naturally’, he says, only two genders, masculine and feminine. These can be appropriately distinguished in a philosophical language by affixes. The

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advantage of this is that ‘the kind or species of every Animal . . . may be signifyed by the Radical word it self, without any sign of Sex, which will prevent much equivocalness’. (Thus words like bull and cow would be, in Wilkins’ scheme, ‘unnatural’ because (1) they overdifferentiate a mere sex difference by selecting two lexically disparate forms of expression, and (2) they provide no formal clue as to what the ‘natural’ connexion between them is.) Case, according to Wilkins, is ‘not so essential and natural to Substantives, as to be provided for in the word it self.’ Nor even by ‘varying the Terminations of it’. He notes that there is no variation of termination for case in Hebrew, Chaldee or Arabic; nor in French, Italian or Spanish. And he adds: ‘nor I think doth any Modern Tongue in the world this way express them.’ The remark is interesting, because it exposes the dilemma of the ‘natural’ grammarian, who claims to be expounding an organization of language which is independent of and prior to the ‘instituted’ grammar of actual languages. Yet when it comes to identifying these ‘natural’ principles, the grammarian will inevitably fall back on the evidence of the instituted languages already familiar. The same dilemma overshadows Wilkins’ discussion of syntax. He considers syntax to be ‘the proper way of Union or right Construction of words, into Propositions, or continued Speech’. Again, this is divided into ‘natural’ and ‘customary’ kinds. The distinction becomes even more problematic, because Wilkins concedes that although there are certain ‘Metaphors which are peculiar to some Tongues, there are others of a more general use, which may be well enough retained in a Philosophical Language’. Nevertheless, he defines ‘natural’ syntax as proceeding ‘according to the natural sense and order of the words’. Here Wilkins flounders in a theoretical quicksand of his own making. He wants to claim that, at least for integrals, ‘that which governs should precede’. Among the consequences of this principle are alleged to be that in ‘natural’ syntax the noun in the nominative case precedes the verb, while derived adverbs follow the verb. But he has in fact laid no ground for this sequence as a ‘natural’ order. In his own ‘real character’ version of the Lord’s Prayer, it turns out that he has to make only minimal adjustments to the English in order to present it as conforming to natural grammar. *

*

*

After Wilkins’ death, the Royal Society set up a committee to improve his scheme. The committee never delivered its report, perhaps because of internal disagreement as to how Wilkins’ system could be perfected, or perhaps because its members came to realize that no such perfection is possible.

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What Wilkins failed to appreciate was that the attempt to combine an Aristotelian semantics with strict adherence to the tenets of experimental philosophy generates contradictions that cannot be resolved. In the first place, drawing up a definitive universal language on this basis of a comprehensive classificatory scheme such as Wilkins proposed presupposes that a complete knowledge of the world of Nature is already available. (It is hard to see how Wilkins or other members of the Royal Society could ever have supposed this to be the case. Had it been so, the Royal Society would hardly have been necessary.) In the second place, if the proposed language is to allow in due course for the acquisition of new knowledge, it must be so constructed as to admit additions. But these additions must not be such as to upset the basic classification: otherwise the whole language has to be restructured every time such an upheaval occurs. Occasionally Wilkins’ remarks seem to reflect some disquiet on this score. He notes: it would be necessary, that the Theory it self, upon which such a design were to be founded, should be exactly suted to the nature of things. But, upon supposal that this Theory is defective, either as to the Fulness or the Order of it, this must needs add much perplexity to any such Attempt, and render it imperfect. (Wilkins 1668: 21) It is interesting in this connexion to see how Wilkins deals with the same problem that Boyle later tackled in greater detail; namely, determining how many elements are there in Nature and which those elements are. There could hardly be a more fundamental issue for the classification of ‘all those things and notions to which names are to be assigned’. It is a formidable challenge: but Wilkins dodges it. He retains the Aristotelian quartet of earth, air, fire and water as part of his classification, but declines to commit himself on their status as elements. Whereas men do now begin to doubt, whether those that are called the Four ELEMENTS be really the Primordia rerum, First Principles, of which all mixed Bodies are compounded, therefore may they here be taken notice of and enumerated, without particular restriction to that Notion of them, as being onely the great Masses of natural Bodies, which are of a more simple Fabric than the rest. (Wilkins 1668: 56) But that in turn begs the question of whether they are indeed ‘of a more simple fabric than the rest’. The trouble is that once such a basic question has been evaded in this devious way, it casts serious doubt on how far the underlying ‘Theory’ is ‘exactly suted to the nature of things’.

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To see this is to see that there is no way out of Wilkins’ reocentric dilemma. He cannot put the cart before the horse; a classification system that purports to reflect the ‘real’ organization of the world of Nature cannot be proposed in advance of the experimental investigations necessary to determine that organization. That would be to risk prematurely adopting an ‘incompleat’ language. And an ‘incompleat’ language might be a positive hindrance to ‘real Knowledge’ rather than a means to attaining it. Wilkins’ enterprise was not – as is sometimes supposed – a direct precursor of modern auxiliary languages such as Esperanto. Esperanto and its rivals are essentially based on the simplification of existing (spoken) languages; whereas Wilkins’ real character is a Begriffsschrift which aims to bypass existing languages – and speech – altogether. Wilkins may nevertheless be regarded as a forerunner of Linnaeus and the taxonomics of the eighteenth century. All such attempts to identify and label the constituent classes of the world of animals, plants, etc. are in effect logical continuations of the reocentric semantics of Aristotle. The goal is an ideal vocabulary of science that corresponds exactly to the ‘real’ classes of Nature. That objective, however, did not meet with universal approval. For example, the article ‘Botanique’ in the Encyclopédie condemns the obsession with nomenclature on the part of botanists as an obstacle to the advancement of that science. (The author, Daubenton, was a colleague of Buffon, and one of the most distinguished French naturalists of his day.) Coming down to more recent times, modern biologists, who presumably know far more about biology than Aristotle or the eighteenth-century taxonomists ever knew, find themselves forced to fall back on quite un-Aristotelian ‘polytypic’ terms and classifications. Why? Because they now recognize that in Nature ‘things are not so clear-cut’ (Beckner 1967: 312). In brief, when it comes to establishing a comprehensive isomorphic correlation between words and the possible classifications of living organisms, that scientific basis is lacking, or has not yet been discovered. (The idealization, however, survives in a variety of forms.) Wilkins’ system never caught on. A few people associated with Wilkins seem to have tried it for a short time, but in spite of various plans to popularize it – including a projected children’s game – it was never more widely adopted either in scientific circles or as an interlingua. It is interesting to reflect, however, that although in practical terms Wilkins’ enterprise was a failure, nevertheless the debris of the enterprise survives in parts in the language of modern science; at least insofar as it implicitly endorses his aspiration that we should, by learning the Character and the Names of things, be instructed likewise in their Natures, the knowledg of both which ought to be conjoyned. (Wilkins 1668: 21)

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When, for example, the chemist of the twenty-first century adopts the designation H2O for water, he takes that formula as expressing directly the real nature of a substance in the physical world. It does not capture anything our senses and everyday experience tell us about water. It does not express, for instance, the fact that water is wet, or drinkable, or a substance you can drown in. All these properties, as far as science is concerned, are either irrelevant or merely secondary: they are consequences which follow from the real nature of water, and its real nature, allegedly, is that its molecules consist of two atoms of hydrogen combined with one of oxygen. The language of chemistry, the basic characters of chemical formulae, identify the inventory of known elements. Every possible chemical substance can be designated by the appropriate combination of characters. Those characters and combinations mirror one part of the scientist’s ‘real’ knowledge of the world. This is an achievement of chemical notation that would have filled Wilkins with delight had he lived to see it. He would doubtless have taken it as vindicating his entire project and proving that he was right after all, at least in principle. Whether he was is a question that is still open to debate; but there is little doubt that the modern scientific community, in general, believes in a Wilkinsian semantics, at least insofar as the language of science should aspire to be one in which we might find, as Wilkins put it, ‘Names of things [. . .] answerable to the nature of the things which they signified.’ With the hindsight of history, Wilkins’ real character might be said to illustrate the folly of trying to set up an empirical language of science without first establishing an empirical science of language. Paradoxically, although his fellow members of the Royal Society held Aristotle in such low esteem, Wilkins accepted on their behalf what I earlier called ‘Aristotle’s fudge’. He never seems to have realized the basic incompatibilty between an Aristotelian semantics and an experimental philosophy that questioned, in so many ways, lay interpretations of the evidence of the senses.

4 Science in the kitchen

Arguing about what Aristotle might have meant more than two millennia ago could perhaps be dismissed as a quaint antiquarian pursuit. That would be a mistake. For Aristotelian semantics and an associated philosophy of science are still alive and flourishing today. They are simply dressed up in new linguistic garb. The reocentrism of modern science emerges clearly enough when it comes to giving definitions of terms ‘standing for’ substances and properties. There is an entrenched Western view that scientific advance has consisted, fundamentally, in formulating ever more accurate descriptions of the natural world. Thus it tends to be supposed that if we can now say (as our ancestors could not) that blue is the colour that has the approximate wavelength range 500– 445 nm, we now know what blue ‘really is’. According to Harré and Madden (1975), who cite successive definitions of the word copper from Paracelsus onwards, these definitions have been continuously improving over the years. The latest definition they cite reads: something having the properties of malleability, fusibility, ductility, electric conductivity, density 8.92, atomic weight 63.54, and atomic number 29. (Harré and Madden 1975: 12–13) This progress in definitions clearly holds out the hope that one day scientists will arrive at the ‘true’ definition of copper, if they have not already done so. Presumably the same applies, in principle, to all other metals. This is reocentric science at its most arrogant. Not only does it assume that the meaning of a word like copper is derived from the substance copper, but that the search for meaning is co-extensive with scientific research into the natural world. As Harré and Madden put it: since the properties set out above serve to specify what a substance has to be, and to be capable of doing to be copper, if an entity lacked any of these

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properties it would not properly be called ‘copper’. (Harré and Madden 1975: 13) ‘Since’ is the weasel word here. The semantics of this brand of science is not only surrogational and reocentric but prescriptive into the bargain. If you apply the term copper to anything else, you are not using the word ‘properly’. According to Harré, who rejects the charge of prescriptivism, it is important to distinguish between what he calls ‘linguistic essentialism’ and ‘material essentialism’. Linguistic essentialism is the thesis that there is something which a word really means. Material essentialism is ‘the thesis that each kind of material being has a constituent structure, whose particular manifestation in this or that instance of the kind is causally responsible for the manifest properties of its sample realizations’ (Harré 1990: 323). He argues that linguistic essentialism does not have to keep company with material essentialism. He himself holds that the linguistic thesis is false, whereas the material thesis is true (‘at least,’ he adds, ‘in some restricted domains such as inorganic chemistry’). The point of drawing this distinction is evident. It allows him to divorce the claim that metallurgists have at last discovered what copper really is from the claim that, in so doing, they have also discovered what the meaning of the word copper really is. And thus, while science advances, the language of science is saved from the academic taint of claiming papal infallibility. This defence, however, hardly tallies with what was said in the passage from Harré and Madden cited above. For there we saw the law being laid down about the ‘proper’ use of the word copper, where the proper use was identified as being in conformity with the latest scientific definition. It will not do to excuse this by saying that all that was meant by ‘proper’ there simply was ‘in accordance with the latest scientific definition’; for then the whole statement becomes circular. In any case, proper is manifestly a prescriptive term and its prescriptive character cannot be camouflaged. It is disingenuous to suppose that the metallurgist who comes up with the latest definition is merely saying, ‘Well, folks, here’s another definition of the word copper: take it or leave it. It’s no better or worse than any other.’ What would be the point of that addition to the dictionary of science? This is to cast the metallurgist in the role of Humpty Dumpty. But any non-Humpty-Dumpty metallurgist seems to be at the very least claiming: ‘I have formulated a new definition of the word copper which is superior to any other definition on offer in that it better captures the essential nature of the metal which it designates than previous definitions.’ And that seems to be not just material essentialism but linguistic essentialism too. It is uncontentious, as Harré points out, that we do not need this superior definition in order to go into the local ironmonger’s and buy a few copper

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nails. But that has nothing to do with either kind of essentialism, or even with definitions per se. For experience teaches us that we do not need any explicit definition in order to complete a successful purchase in the shop. Nor, it should be noted, is there any explicit definition latent in the background to underpin any such transaction, much less guarantee that the parties to the transaction were getting precisely what they had tacitly agreed to. In defending his own brand of scientific surrogationism, Harré argues that we need to disentangle two constituent strands in the surrogationist position. The first is the proposition that ‘words stand for entities’. The second is the proposition that ‘these entities are given independently of the words’. Harré takes issue with the second proposition, but not the first. He claims that ‘entities are never given independently of words, concepts, procedures and practices, though they may exist independently of the activities of the scientific community’ (Harré 1990: 321). Many will find this unconvincing, for roughly the same reason that they find it difficult to accept that the continent of America did not exist before Columbus discovered it. The discovery of America was quite unlike the invention of the steam engine. Nobody ‘discovered’ the steam engine in the sense that we say America was ‘discovered’. To say that words stand for entities given independently of the words is to claim no more than that if America had not existed Columbus could not have discovered it. The paradigm myth of reocentric surrogationism in the Western tradition is the Biblical story of Adam naming the animals in the Garden of Eden (Harris and Taylor 1997: 36–46). The King James version reads: And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field. (Genesis 2.19–20) It is not clear from the Biblical account what qualifications Adam had for undertaking this momentous task. If we assume that the names Adam gave were entirely arbitrary in the Saussurean sense, the nomenclatorial qualifications required would not have been great. But many later thinkers in the Christian tradition believed that Adam gave each creature its name according to its nature. Others, following on from this, supposed that if the original language of the Garden of Eden could be recovered, the names would reveal a knowledge of God’s creation that had been lost with the Fall. What is clear is that Adam was not called upon to name anything other than already existing creatures, animals that had already been created regardless of what Adam called them. In that sense, the animals were ‘given

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independently’ of the names that Adam allocated. Harré is doubtless right to maintain that not every scientific advance consists in the discovery of something ‘given independently’; nevertheless, to suppose that in science nothing is ‘given independently’ makes a nonsense of the notion of discovery itself. That is the relevant consideration as regards the metallurgists and copper. The metallurgists do not claim to have invented copper, but merely to have discovered its true nature; and that had presumably long lain undiscovered. It is otherwise difficult to see why metallurgists would give the traditional name copper to the metal in question. They could just as easily have said that earlier definitions of copper corresponded to nothing real, and therefore, having at last discovered the real metal, they would give it a quite different name (say fludge). For the Aristotelian scientist fludge would be perfectly acceptable as the name for this unique metal, since in Aristotelian semantics names are purely conventional; and it might even be preferable inasmuch as fludge would obviate any confusions arising from earlier uses of the word copper. What the Aristotelian scientist cannot afford to admit is that not only names but distinctions between names are purely conventional. To differentiate copper from gold is, presumably, not merely a verbal convention: the distinction corresponds to something real, whatever particular lexical terms may be chosen to mark it. The only question for the (scientific) metallurgist is on what basis that distinction shall be drawn. Here it becomes clear how the latest definition of copper (at least, as construed by Harré and Madden) inherits all the problems of Aristotelian real definition. What we are asked to accept is not just that any metal lacking one of the listed features would be some different kind of metal, but that it would not be copper. This, then, is a definition of essence. But the material essentialism is immediately cashed in linguistic terms. We are told that this means that the word copper cannot properly be applied to anything else. Here we see coming to the surface a characteristic of real definition that remained unexamined in my earlier discussion (v.s. Chapter 1). What is the linguistic function of the logos, the defining formula, in any Aristotelian account? It is not merely to supply a correct description or alternative form of words. The function of the defining formula is no more and no less than to close the circle linking language to reality. It must leave no semantic gap between the conventionality of names and the requirements of a language of science. It is not enough, therefore, for the metallurgist to say that there really is a metal with the properties of malleability, fusibility, ductility, electric conductivity, density 8.92, atomic weight 63.54 and atomic number 29; nor even to offer supplementary definitions of those properties. For that would still leave open the question of which of the metals the complete definition applied to. We would, rightly, ridicule the editor of a biographical dictionary who, for fear of intruding on the personal privacy of distinguished individuals,

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decided to delete the name at the head of each entry. For then, while the entries would still contain a wealth of information about many individuals, we should not know who these individuals were, and thus the whole purpose of the enterprise would be defeated. Similarly, the role of the definiendum expression x in a real definition ‘x is yz’ is, precisely, to identify what is being defined. Without that, there would be no answer to the question ‘But what is it that this list of features identifies?’ And this is important in Aristotelian semantics, because if we cannot say what is defined by a definition, then we are back in the realms of uncertainty: a scientific statement has eluded us after all. Thus the sine qua non for an Aristotelian language of science is not merely that its terms be defined by reference to how things necessarily are in themselves (and not how things happen to appear to our fallible senses). These definitions also have to be formulated verbally in such a way as to leave no doubt in our minds about the things to which they apply in the world reflected by our ‘affections of the soul’. The reconciliation of these two demands is the permanent semantic dilemma of the Aristotelian scientist. To put it more bluntly, the metallurgist who says that copper ‘is something having the properties of malleability, fusibility, ductility, etc.’ has so far told us nothing. For we are still waiting for an explanation of how to interpret the use of the word copper that featured as the subject term of the metallurgist’s ‘real definition’. It will not do to reply that the definition itself supplies the relevant semantic interpretation of the word that stands as its subject term. For in that case the definition is merely stipulative, and no information about a real metal has been given. Why do scientists (and others) often fail to see this? Because they think uttering or writing the word copper is somehow like pointing a finger at an object already before us or present in the mind. Which is exactly what Aristotelian semantics leads them to suppose, being based on the twin assumptions that the world is the same for all its inhabitants, and identically represented in their minds. But even if that were so, it would not be something scientists had discovered for themselves, much less demonstrated to be the case. We are not dealing here with ‘scientific facts’ about copper or about anything else, but with metaphysical propositions (as we always are in semantics whenever meanings are interpreted as constants in some fixed code). *

*

*

If and when the ghost of ‘real definition’ is finally exorcised, where does that leave the discourse of science? Perhaps in a position where many scientists would not like it to be: namely, as a form of discourse like any other. And

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therefore language-dependent, subject to all the defects and fallibilities that words are heir to. Which in turn is a notion that threatens to undermine the foundations of science as a supercategory. In Sir Peter Medawar’s book The Limits of Science (Medawar 1984) there is no mention of any linguistic limits to science. This is in some ways understandable, because scientists are great neologisers. Therefore it might seem, optimistically, that whatever unforeseen things scientists may discover in the future there will surely be no problem about inventing a few more words or symbols to cope with the situation. Medawar readily admits that scientists have no authority in non-scientific areas of discourse; but he seems reluctant to admit that within the world of science itself there are any linguistic problems. According to Medawar the fact that science as a whole has its limits is revealed by its inability to answer childlike elementary questions having to do with first and last things – questions such as “How did everything begin?” “What are we all here for?” “What is the point of living?”. (Medawar 1984: 59) He continues: Doctrinaire positivism dismisses all such questions as nonquestions or pseudoquestions – hardly an adequate rebuttal because the questions make sense to those who ask them, and the answers to those who try to give them. Here the issue is formulated in more overtly linguistic terms, and Medawar promises to try to explain ‘why science cannot answer these ultimate questions and why no conceivable advance of science could empower it to do so’ (Medawar 1984: 59). It will not have escaped the notice of Medawar’s more attentive readers that this way of circumscribing the questions that science cannot answer (questions about ‘first and last things’) conveniently passes over many more mundane questions that science cannot answer either: questions such as ‘Why did John fall in love with Mary?’ or ‘Can I afford to buy a new car?’. Talk of ‘first and last things’ carries the unstated implication that science can cope with all the rest, everything ‘in between’ the first and the last. But in the view of many people who do not share Medawar’s overweening scientific confidence, the balance is manifestly the other way round: there are very few urgent questions that arise in everyday life to which science can supply any reliable kind of answer at all. Although Medawar does not directly address the semantic issues that arise

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for the sciences, what he does say certainly has semantic implications. He argues that scientific truth is not any special kind of truth. There is not one kind of truth within the Laboratory and a quite different kind outside. Science, he says, has ‘a humbly commonsensical conception of truth’. Whenever scientists start appealing to ‘common sense’ in defence of science it is time for alarm bells to start ringing for the rest of the population; for common sense has been aptly described as ‘the most powerful ideology there is’ (Cameron 1995: xiii). Medawar, to be sure, is not content with common sense, but in almost the same breath invokes Tarski’s theory of truth for good measure. He apparently invites us to see commonsense truth and Tarskian truth as one and the same, or at the very least as mutually supportive. Why science needs Tarski if it already has common sense is not immediately obvious. And the further one pursues that question, the less obvious the connexion becomes. For, according to Medawar, the nucleus of Tarski’s conception is contained in the assertion: ‘A true sentence is one which states that a state of affairs is so and so and the state of affairs is indeed so and so.’ The trouble is that this is not common sense at all. Far from it. There is no commonsense assumption that ‘sentences’ state anything. It is people who make statements, not sentences. Furthermore, common sense tells us that the same or a very similar sentence may be used by different people on different occasions to make quite different statements. It would, moreover, be a great mistake to suppose that Tarski was trying to capture and explicate any commonsense notion of truth. Tarski, a Polish logician, was engaged in the strictly metalogical task of formalizing the value ‘True’ for logical calculi. He himself claimed that this problem could be solved ‘only for those languages whose structure has been exactly specified’ (Tarski 1944: 347; italics in the original); and this crucial proviso immediately excludes languages like everyday English. When one turns from reading Medawar on truth to reading Tarski on truth, Medawar’s mistake becomes obvious. It is, in fact, a double mistake. For the Tarskian definition of truth is not only irrelevant to common sense but irrelevant to science as well (at least, science as Medawar seems to understand it). Anyone who doubts this should consider the way Tarski deals with the crucial objection that his formula is circular. The objection relates to the way Tarski defines truth by requiring the link between definiens and definiendum clauses to be expressed by the connective expression ‘if, and only if’. However, the objection goes, in logic the meaning of sentential connectives is standardly explained in a way that already presupposes the notions ‘true’ and ‘false’; for instance, by stating truth conditions or referring to truth-tables. So Tarski’s formula is actually circular, although the circularity is superficially masked by the sentential connective. Tarski concedes that if this objection were valid ‘no formally correct

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definition of truth would be possible’ (Tarski 1944: 356). But the objection, he maintains, is not valid. Why not? Because any statements giving explanations of sentential connectives by means of truth conditions or truth-tables ‘are outside the system of logic’. Furthermore truth-tables are in any case merely ‘a formal instrument for checking the provability of certain sentences’. The symbols T and F which are conventionally used in such tables do not have to be interpreted as meaning ‘true’ and ‘false’. In fact they should not, warns Tarski, ‘be interpreted in any intuitive way’. This does not help Medawar in the least: on the contrary, Tarski is not on his side at all. It seems clear that for Tarski any two symbols would do (say C and D, or a circle and an asterisk), provided their logical values were opposed in the appropriate manner for tabular calculation: their function is purely formal. How far we are here from any commonsense notion of truth is a point that I do not propose to labour further. Clearing Tarski out of the way leaves us free now to consider Medawar’s more interesting claim to the effect that science deploys no special concept of truth. If this is to be taken seriously, it would seem to follow that scientific claims are ultimately to be judged by the criteria of common sense. But here language interposes a familiar question-mark once again; for in order to judge a claim one must first be able to understand it. Notoriously, the language(s) of science would seem to constitute a major obstacle to comprehension by the non-specialist. Darwin thought so when he appended a glossary to The Origin of Species. General glossaries of scientific terminology are nowadays commonplace. But is the linguistic barrier quite what it seems? It is at this point that a certain affinity begins to emerge between Medawar’s position and that championed by a number of theorists in philosophy of history. Their claim is that the language of the historian is no more than an extension of ordinary language (due allowance being made for technical terms such as medieval, feudalism, fiefdom, serf and so on). Some philosophers of this persuasion, however, draw a distinction on precisely this issue between the language of the historian and the language of the scientist, claiming that historians must, for purposes of historical explanation, use words that scientists would reject as ill-defined. A full discussion of this issue is to be found in The Linguistics of History (Harris, R. 2004) and I do not propose to recapitulate that discussion here. It suffices to draw attention to the fact that science is not a unique case. Wherever and whenever specialists embark on developing a language of their own, the question will inevitably arise at some point: ‘How does the specialized language relate to the general language of the community?’. It is this question that is very pertinent to Medawar’s claims about science and common sense. The topos of ‘science-as-common-sense’ has a long history. Medawar’s version runs as follows. He offers

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an example of scientific inquiry from everyday life – one that illustrates the comparative ordinariness of the talents and simplicity of the logic needed, and makes it clear why residence on the foothills of Mount Parnassus is not necessary. A busy housewife finds that the lamp on her worktable isn’t working. Why not? It can’t be a fuse or the wall plug that’s wrong, because she can still use an iron off it; the bulb, moreover, works in the lamp by the sewing machine. The switch is of unsound design and has given trouble before – can it be that? She decides to take the whole contraption over to a plug which is known to be in order; it doesn’t work there, so that is probably it. It won’t take a moment to fit on that spare switch and then lo, the lamp goes on again. The scenario I have just outlined is that of the “hypothetico-deductive” method as William Whewell envisaged it, and differs only in degree of difficulty from that which a scientist employs in studying more difficult and more important problems. The logical procedures are straightforward and anyone can use them who has the wits to stay alive in a complex modern world offering us so many easy opportunities to depart from it. (Medawar 1984: 16–17) Why doesn’t Medawar go the whole hog and tell us that we are all scientists every day of the week? Doubtless because dumbing down science too far would not suit his purpose. It might be difficult to reconcile with the more exalted claims he wants to make on behalf of the professional scientific community. In any case, the tension is interesting because it underlies much of the rhetorical strategy that is such a characteristic feature of Medawar’s science writing. The theme that ‘anyone-can-be-a-scientist’ has to be carefully balanced against the ‘scientist-as-genius’ theme. Budding Einsteins must not be discouraged. One reason why the housewife-scientist story does not exactly carry conviction is this. The kitchen/laboratory that Medawar supplies her with has been set up in such a way as to ensure her eventual success. She obviously knows all about mains electricity, understands what can go wrong with various familiar pieces of equipment, and is a dab hand with a screwdriver. But supposing she didn’t have either that knowledge or handyman ability? How then would her potential as a scientist have been revealed? Suppose she had just jiggled the switch to and fro and the light had come on again. Would that too have been a scientific success? Other features that make the scenario less than convincing concern those things that this housewife-scientist is not called upon to do. She does not have to make anything new: she simply fiddles about with components that are already given. She is in fact just repairing a system whose workings she already understands (sufficiently, at least, for her purposes). She does not

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have to make any measurements or calculations. Nor does she have to get help from anyone else. In short, Medawar’s scenario is set up in a way that does not require the housewife-scientist to exercise any communication skills at all. She could be, for all we know, deaf, dumb and illiterate. She is depicted as applying her intelligence directly to an impersonal mechanical problem, where the most likely solutions are already known to her. More importantly still, in this scenario she does not need language to be a scientist in her own kitchen. But suppose it had worked out differently. Suppose she had had to take something apart and reassemble it in accordance with a diagram and instructions supplied by the manufacturer. Where would that fit in to the picture of her scientific accomplishment? Medawar, it is interesting to note, always presents science as tackling Nature in a kind of communicational vacuum: it is an essentially languageless engagement. Insofar as they enter into it all, words have merely ancillary functions, enabling scientists to collaborate with one another, or gain access to results from the past, or jot down ideas, or publish their results. But linguistic communication is not in any way intrinsic to success in the scientific enterprise, which is a pure problem-solving exercise. One is left with the impression that somewhere at the back of Medawar’s mind there lurks an image of the ideal scientist who can always work out the correct solution in total silence by the mere exercise of brainpower, applied through systematic observation or ingenious experiment. That would dovetail neatly with a reocentric philosophy of language which, for centuries, had demoted words to the status of arbitrary labels, playing no essential part in thought processes. It is unsurprising that someone who takes Medawar’s view of science should find the language of science an embarrassing topic. The reason why is pinpointed in the following passage from a scientific journal, quoted by T. H. Savory in The Language of Science, and before him by V. Grove in The Language Bar. Its opacity has already secured an anecdotal niche for it in the history of the subject. Begoniaccae, by their anthero-connectival fabric, indicate a close relationship with anonaceo-hydro-charideo-nymphaeoid forms, an affinity confirmed by the serpentarioid flexuosonodulous stem, the liriodendroid stipules, and cissoid and victorioid foliage of a certain Begonia, and if considered hypogynous, would, in their triquetrous capsule, alate seed, apetalism and tufted stamination, represent the floral fabric of Nepenthes, itself of aristolochioid affinity, while, by its pitchered leaves, directly belonging to Sarracenias and Dionaceas. (Savory 1953: 100–1) It is perhaps no coincidence that the epigraph to Savory’s book is a remark by Logan Pearsall Smith: ‘There can be no doubt that science is in many ways

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the natural enemy of language.’ There are various ways in which that dictum might be taken: they can be left on one side for the moment. The most obvious enmity which seems to emerge from the passage cited above is not so much grotesque indifference to any sense of style but downright hostility to lay comprehension. That is why such examples are best passed over in silence by those who, like Medawar, take upon themselves the task of forever singing the praises of science in public. For the apprehension of the general public where science is concerned is in no small part due to the public’s awareness of a small but very powerful coterie in their midst, whose language they simply do not understand. One function of the ‘science-is-just-common-sense’ theme so arduously cultivated by the apologists for science is, precisely, to allay the fears prompted by this linguistic malaise. Hence noddy examples like the housewife and her table lamp. That, however, is only one part of the problem. For prose like the example Savory cites is not only incomprehensible to the general public but to a large percentage of scientists themselves if they do not happen to be specialists in the field in question. In other words, such examples contradict another favourite leitmotiv that reappears constantly in the supercategory rhetoric, telling us that science is here to spread enlightenment and combat ignorance. On the contrary, it would seem, to judge by their language many scientists are interested in nothing but their own parochial academic concerns and communicating to the few colleagues who happen to share them. Spreading enlightenment to the community at large just does not enter into it. As the various sciences have become more and more specialized, committed to working with words and concepts that researchers in other sciences do not understand, so it has become all the more imperative to counter this fragmentation by proclaiming the unity of science. The ‘supercategory paradox’ (as this might be called) is the recognition of a language of science that, on examination, turns out to be nothing more than an agglomeration of mutually incomprehensible dialects. Actually, mutual incomprehensibility is almost the only feature they have in common. This conclusion is not belied, but rather confirmed, by the attempts sometimes made to turn a scientific topic into popular television entertainment. The results fall rather neatly into discernable classes. They include programmes that are mainly biographical, telling the story of some great discovery or great scientist; programmes that are basically travelogues (most of the ‘wild life’ variety); programmes about digging a hole in the ground (to rediscover the past); and programmes that aim at some kind of ‘star wars’ or science fiction appeal. In some of these, experts are wheeled on in short bursts to put the scientific message very simply for the ignorant; but much of what

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scientists (as distinct from presenters) say in their TV mode relies crucially on stretching a few metaphors to the limits of comprehensibility and beyond. Moreover, from the painful way in which this is done, the viewer easily grasps that the poor expert has been wrenched from some back room or research bench and reluctantly thrust in front of the cameras with a brief that is quite beyond his or her expository abilities. Talking about their speciality in a way that is comprehensible to a general audience is obviously a task fraught with problems.

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Whether one is bemused by, amused by, or indifferent to these rather sorry communication difficulties, they do raise a serious linguistic question already alluded to above. How does the language of science relate to the rest of our language? There are basically two views to consider. I shall call them for convenience the ‘semantic continuity’ thesis and the ‘semantic discontinuity’ thesis. The semantic continuity theorist holds that the language of science is no more than an extension of the familiar language of every day. The semantic discontinuity theorist holds that this is not so. Medawar seems to want to have a foot in both camps. On the one hand he insists that in science there is no special concept of truth. On the other hand he claims that the reason why science cannot answer questions about aesthetics and the existence of God is that these questions belong to a different ‘world of discourse’. Wanting to have it both ways is, by any criteria, an awkward stance. For if there are indeed different ‘worlds of discourse’ to reckon with, it seems quite likely that there will be different criteria of truth as well. In some cases, moreover, that seems bound to be the case. When Keats proclaimed ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ he was not making what Medawar would count as a scientific statement; but Keats regarded it as a true statement nevertheless. It would seem, therefore, pace Medawar, that science cannot claim to have a concept of truth applicable to ‘worlds of discourse’ other than its own. This conclusion raises no problems for the semantic discontinuity theorist, who argues that for scientific purposes the language of daily life is plainly inadequate. There just is no way of translating every scientific proposition into a synonymous proposition in the language of everyday discourse. If there were, then the language of science would be redundant. It would never have been necessary at all. Furthermore, talking about the everyday world as if it were basically no different from the scientific ‘world of discourse’ is not only mistaken but potentially dangerous as well. The issue is a contentious one in modern philosophy of science. The later

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Wittgenstein was a semantic continuity theorist, if we are to judge by the evidence of the following passage from Philosophical Investigations: Our language may be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses. (Wittgenstein 2001: §18) With this striking simile Wittgenstein compares the language of science and the language of every day to patterns of urban development. ‘The symbolism of chemistry,’ he says, and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus are ‘suburbs of our language’. According to this analogy, the citizen can proceed from the centre of the city out to the suburbs without encountering an insurmountable obstacle or barrier. The suburbs are some distance from the centre; but they are not on the other side of the world. They are part of the same conurbation. And, more importantly, their location as suburbs presupposes the existence of the city centre. Without it, they would not be suburbs. Wittgenstein’s view appears to be very much in line with that expressed a century earlier in Whewell’s essay on ‘The language of science’ (first published as a prologue to his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences in 1840, and reprinted with minor modifications as a postscript to the second edition of 1847). According to Whewell: in writing on science in our own language, it is not possible to avoid making additions to the vocabulary of common life; since science requires exact names for many things which common language has not named. (Whewell 1847: 550) These additions might be envisaged as located in Wittgenstein’s new suburbs. But Whewell mentions more specific requirements: Common language has, in most cases, a certain degree of looseness and ambiguity; as common knowledge has usually something of vagueness and indistinctness. In common cases too, knowledge usually does not occupy the intellect alone, but more or less interests some affection, or puts in action the fancy; and common language, accommodating itself to the office of expressing such knowledge, contains, in every sentence, a tinge of emotion or of imagination. But when our knowledge becomes perfectly exact and purely intellectual, we require a language which shall also be exact and intellectual; – which shall exclude alike vagueness and fancy, imperfection and superfluity; – in which each term shall convey a meaning steadily fixed and rigorously limited. (Whewell 1847: 479)

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Whewell does not believe in inventing new terms when ‘common words’ will serve the purpose. However, he adds two stipulations. The first is: When common words are appropriated as technical terms, their meaning and relations in common use should be retained as far as can conveniently be done. (Whewell 1847: 503) The second is: When common words are appropriated as technical terms, their meaning may be modified, and must be rigorously fixed. (Whewell 1847: 504) Thus Whewell’s version of continuity theory envisages both (1) plugging the semantic gaps in ordinary language by the invention of new terms, and (2) the ‘appropriation’ of common words by giving them a more carefully restricted application. But nowhere does he advocate constructing a language of science from scratch: i.e. building a new town quite outside the old conurbation. *

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Analogies are all very well, someone may object, but how do we demonstrate in practice the possibility of taking a non-stop linguistic journey from the centre out to the suburbs? Perhaps one illustration would be the following. In his book Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, Einstein introduces his argument by considering the example of a stone dropped from a moving railway carriage. The beginning of this section reads as follows: I stand at the window of a railway carriage which is travelling uniformly, and drop a stone on the embankment, without throwing it. Then, disregarding the influence of the air resistance, I see the stone descend in a straight line. A pedestrian who observes the misdeed from the footpath notices that the stone falls to earth in a parabolic curve. I now ask: Do the ‘positions’ traversed by the stone lie ‘in reality’ on a straight line or on a parabola? Moreover, what is meant here by motion ‘in space’? (Einstein 1961: 9) Einstein goes on to argue that we cannot make much sense of the idea of motion ‘in space’ unless we replace it by ‘motion relative to a practically rigid body of reference’. If we then replace ‘body of reference’ by ‘system of coordinates’, we are in a position to say:

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The passage I have quoted comes from Chapter Three of Einstein’s book. Some twenty pages later, however, Einstein has got as far as discussing the Lorentz transformation, complete with diagrams and complex equations. This masterpiece of exposition is one Wittgenstein might well have cited as an example of how to proceed from the language of the city centre, with its trains and embankments, to the suburbs of mathematics. Theorists of semantic discontinuity, on the other hand, will claim that there could be nothing more misleading than Wittgenstein’s city analogy. For the chemist or the mathematician really does have to learn a new language, a different conceptual system, in order to do chemistry or mathematics. The language of science is not just an extension of the language with which we go about our daily business. The units and relations that science deals with do not have any counterparts in the objects and processes that we meet with every day. They belong to an order of abstraction which is not the physical world as our senses perceive it. For the discontinuity theorist, the difference between, say, the statement ‘Luther preached against extortioners’ and the statement ‘The volume of a given mass of gas at a constant temperature is inversely proportional to its pressure’ is that the former states something that happened in the real world, whereas the latter, Boyle’s law, does not in fact apply to gases in the real world, but only to an ideal gas. There is no such gas in the housewife’s kitchen. So the criteria of truth are not the same. If Luther did preach against extortioners, then that really happened. But Boyle’s law is true, or would be true, only in an ideal world. More specifically, it would be true only of a gas consisting of molecules that occupied negligible space and had negligible forces between them. Actually, however, there is no such gas. Thus the questions about truth and the meaning of the word gas are interconnected. Does gas mean the same for the housewife, who thinks of it in connection with her gas cooker, and for the scientist, who thinks of it in connection with Boyle’s law? (Scientists may sometimes cook by un-Boylean, domestic gas; but this does not help with the linguistic question.) Typically, the continuity theorist will maintain that there is no real disjunction between the language of the housewife and the language of the scientist. The discontinuity theorist, on the other hand, will maintain the opposite, on the ground that what is true of gas in the kitchen is simply not true of gas as represented by Boyle’s equation.

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Could the problem be resolved by saying that although the truth of Boyle’s law does not hold in the kitchen, nevertheless it is true in its own world of discourse? But this would be to capitulate before the problem rather than to offer a solution. For the relationship between the different worlds of discourse (housewife’s and scientist’s) is thus left in obscurity. As for Einstein, according to the discontinuity theorist what Einstein is doing, although pedagogically brilliant as an example of how to present science to the non-scientist, is also an example of how to convince people that they understand something when in fact they do not understand it (unless they themselves have the requisite scientific education). Einstein creates the illusion of continuity between everyday language and its world, in which there are trains and embankments, and the abstract language and world of mathematics. But he creates this illusion by means of a subterfuge. Having replaced real space by systems of co-ordinates, he invites us to conclude, disingenuously, that ‘there is no such thing as an independently existing trajectory’ for the stone which fell from the train window. But this does not follow. What follows is that in the language of mathematics there is no describable trajectory independently of a set of co-ordinates. *

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One particular version of the continuity thesis deserves special mention here. It centres on the claim that there is no clear way of determining what belongs to the language of science and what does not. This relates to the campaign against metaphysics waged by Carnap and other philosophers during the interwar period. The distinction between science and metaphysics was often associated with the claim that, unlike the propositions of science, the propositions of metaphysics are meaningless. Rejecting Carnap’s ‘empiricist’ view, Karl Popper pointed out that if all statements using terms not definable on the basis of observation or perceptual experience were to be dismissed as meaningless, the first casualty would be the ‘laws of nature’. Scientific theories, he maintained, are no more reducible to observation reports than metaphysical pseudo-propositions (Popper 1972: 261). So Carnap’s semantics of science defeated its own ostensible objective. Popper’s own semantic proposal was to distinguish between statements that are empiricially testable and those which are not. Only the former would belong to science. Popper went on to point out, however, that in certain cases a statement ‘belongs to science since it is testable, while its negation turns out not to be testable’ (Popper 1972: 257). Now it seems implausible to claim that an affirmative statement belongs to one language, whereas its negation belongs to a different language. Both, if meaningful, must be meaningful within one and the same language. It would seem to follow from this that

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there is no such thing as a separate language of science, in which all and only scientific (i.e. testable) statements are formulated. Turning to a later version of Carnap’s view, Popper notes that even here Carnap often speaks of ‘the language of science’: ‘the impossibility of such a language he still does not realize’ (Popper 1972: 274). My thesis is that a satisfactory language for science would have to contain, with any well-formed formula, its negation; and since it has to contain universal sentences, it has therefore to contain existential sentences also. But this means that it must contain sentences which Carnap, Neurath, and all other anti-metaphysicians always considered to be metaphysical. (Popper 1972: 274) Popper proceeds to demonstrate how even such a blatantly metaphysical statement as ‘There exists an omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient personal spirit’ can be accommodated under the criteria Carnap proposes, even though the proposition cannot be subject to any scientific test. Popper concludes: The problem of how to construct a language of science which includes all we wish to say in science but excludes those sentences which have always been considered as metaphysical is a hopeless one. It is a typical pseudo-problem. (Popper 1972: 276–7. Italics in the original.) Popper also advances a historical argument bearing on the same topic. According to him, history shows that science originated in myth: in fact ‘most of our scientific theories originate in myths’. Examples include the Copernican system, atomism and the corpuscular theory of light. In such cases, Popper argues, it is implausible to maintain ‘that these theories are nonsensical gibberish in one stage of their development, and then suddenly become good sense in another’ (Popper 1972: 257). His historical claim, manifestly, runs directly counter to the views of those such as Burnet who maintain that science was a quite new form of inquiry, invented by the Greeks, and opposed to all forms of supernatural speculation or traditional mythology. Popper, in linguistic terms, is not merely a continuity theorist on the synchronic front but on the diachronic front as well. *

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The first point I wish to make regarding all the controversies surveyed briefly above is that they are not about the validation of what the scientist says. Nor

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are they about problems of scientific method. They are controversies, rather, about whether and how what the scientist says can be linguistically integrated into other (non-scientific) forms of discourse. This integration is the ultimate locus of dispute. All the problems generated are integrational problems. How do these problems arise and assume such importance? The background is an agenda, developed in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth, which sought to shift the intellectual balance of power away from philosophy and in favour of the natural sciences. It was an agenda that received important contributions from scientists such as Hertz and Boltzmann as well as philosophers (in particular, the philosophers associated with the Vienna Circle). In order to further this agenda, its advocates had to develop a position on language. Why? Because language was the only common ground between themselves and their opponents, and certainly the only ground on which it seemed possible to inflict a decisive defeat on the non-scientists. The famous ‘verifiability principle’ first formulated by Waismann in 1930 is a classic example of bad linguistic theorising tailored to suit non-linguistic desiderata. It allowed unverifiable propositions to be dismissed as ‘meaningless’. Meaningless? The only point in trying to establish this bizarre ‘linguistic’ thesis was the discomfiture of the opposition. Although logical positivism is now, in the words of one philosopher, ‘dead, or as dead as a philosophical movement ever becomes’ (Passmore 1967: 5.56), and although I have no wish to exhume the corpse, it needs to be said that continuity theory and discontinuity theory must be seen in the context of the same agenda. They answer, however, to different requirements. Continuity theory answers to the need to show that science has both feet on the terra firma of empiricism. Discontinuity theory answers to the need for drawing a sharp distinction between the language of science and non-scientific discourse. They reflect different strategies, and the two strategies conflict. Can we integrate what the housewife says about gas with what Boyle’s law says about gas? Yes and no. The question itself highlights a whole comedy of errors. The housewife has to be recruited on the side of science, because she is certainly living in the ‘real world’ and not in any scenario dreamed up by metaphysicians. The snag is that Boyle’s gas never belonged to the real world in the first place. That being so, Boyle’s law about gas cannot apply to the real world (at least, not to that portion of the real world in which the housewife pays for her supply of gas, settles her gas bills and worries about gas leaks). But the word gas does not wear its meaning on its sleeve. The integrational problem turns out to be insoluble. (Insoluble, that is, in any non-questionbegging way.) My second point is that such integrational problems emerge as insoluble because, and only because, they are formulated on the basis of a traditional reocentric semantics. It is typical of reocentric semantics to conflate questions

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about meanings with putative descriptions of realia. (This is a semantics in which gas appears as a given, a ‘real fact’ of Nature, not to be questioned. The only scientific question is what this ‘real fact’ actually amounts to. Is gas this, or is it that, or is it some third thing? Or perhaps all three? Real definition again.) Adopting a non-reocentric philosophy of language at least holds out the hope of putting such problems in a quite different light, and perhaps of dissolving them altogether. But before proceeding to examine non-reocentric alternatives, it is necessary to say something about the status of linguistics itself as a science.

5 The rhetoric of linguistic science

The claim that linguistics is a science has been repeated so often over the past two hundred years that it is nowadays difficult to know whether to treat it as a platitude, or a tautology, or a harmless placebo for linguists worried about their academic status. It even turns up in the guise of a lexical definition, as when the term linguistics itself is glossed as ‘the scientific study of language’ (Crystal 1997: 225), or in the even more peremptory equation that appears in the glossary of the ten-volume Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, which reads cryptically but emphatically: ‘linguistic science = linguistics’ (Asher 1994: 5141). These are blatant cases of a discipline laying claim by definition to an achievement that is far from being borne out in practice. On this shaky basis, the rhetorical topos of ‘linguistic science’ has entered into the general discourse of language studies. Whenever the claim that linguistics is a science is made today, in the overwhelming majority of cases the terms science and scientific are wearing their familiar haloes. As Alan Chalmers observes: The naming of some claim or line of reasoning or piece of research “scientific” is done in a way that is intended to imply some kind of merit or special kind of reliability. (Chalmers 1982: xv) The suitably rebarbative term scientificization is sometimes used to imply a certain scepticism about the ways in which ‘scientific’ status can be acquired and why it is sought. One linguist claims that over the past two centuries science has become virtually synonymous with academic prestige, as measured by institutionalization (creation of departments and positions, launching of journals, organizing of conferences), financial support from governmental and other grant-giving agencies, and public recognition. Not surprisingly, then, for linguists progress came to be equated with scientificization. (Joseph 1994: 4790).

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This anachronistic little sketch, unfortunately, puts the cart before the horse. The rhetoric of ‘linguistic science’ was already in full flow long before departmental budgets, research funding, conference grants and the proliferation of academic journals became part of the daily round of university life. Nor is there any serious evidence that the success and expansion of linguistics depended on the extent to which linguists managed to convince their colleagues and the rest of the world that their discipline had been ‘scientificized’. (In some cases, that might have done more harm than good.) The scientificization of linguistics is in any case not the subject of this chapter. That would have been a story about academic politics, personalities, social conditions, the development of higher education in various countries and much else besides. The only aspect of that story that will be relevant here concerns the production within linguistics of a ‘language of science’ devoted to it. The quotation from Chalmers cited above continues as follows: But what, if anything, is so special about science? What is this “scientific method” that allegedly leads to especially meritorious or reliable results? (Chalmers 1982: xv) It is the second of these questions that I shall focus on here as a point of departure. This means, in the case of linguistics, asking whether linguistics has found any such method for attaining meritorious and reliable results, and, if so, what it is. For unless credible affirmative answers are forthcoming, it seems that the claim that linguistics is a science will have to be rejected as disciplinary claptrap. It takes more than thousands of linguists chanting in unison ‘Linguistics is a science’ to make it so. If by scientific method is meant ‘the procedure by which, as a matter of definition, scientific laws, as contrasted with other kinds of general statement, are established’ (Quinton 1999: 775) the problem of scientific method in linguistics is the problem of determining whether linguistics has any such procedure. Is there a general procedure for establishing scientific laws of language, and, if so, what is it? A more subtle question lies concealed within the ‘problem of scientific method’ described above. It concerns the effects of deliberate attempts by linguists to conduct their investigations in accordance with what they believe to be the canons of scientific method. Such attempts have had no small effect upon the orientation of the discipline itself and upon the way in which, as a consequence, linguists have come to conceptualize language as a field or object of study. *

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It may be helpful to begin by setting these issues in their historical context. The thesis that linguistics is the science of language is first articulated in the nineteenth century. It is associated with the rise of Indo-European comparative and historical studies. It is based on the assumption that the foundation of scientific method is the systematic collection, comparison and classification of samples. The locus classicus is the famous passage in which Max Müller compared the neonate linguistics of his day to such disciplines as geology, astronomy and botany. The language which we speak, and the languages that are and that have been spoken in every part of our globe since the first dawn of human life and human thought, supply materials capable of scientific treatment. We can collect them, we can classify them, we can reduce them to their constituent elements, and deduce from them some of the laws that determine their origin, govern their growth, necessitate their decay; we can treat them, in fact, in exactly the same spirit in which the geologist treats his stones and petrifactions, – nay, in some respects, in the same spirit in which the astronomer treats the stars of heaven, or the botanist the flowers of the field. There is a Science of Language, as there is a science of the earth, its flowers and its stars. (Müller 1864: 1) The reasoning underlying this passage seems to be the following: A. Sciences typically proceed by collecting and classifying samples, analysing them, and drawing conclusions about the interrelationships and past evolution of forms. B. Some students of language do likewise with linguistic materials. C. Therefore, such studies constitute ipso facto a science of language. By no means all ways of studying rocks or plants or stars qualify as science: likewise for Müller not all ways of studying linguistic materials count as scientific. Excluded from Müller’s science of language are all linguistic studies which have overtly pedagogic aims (e.g. teaching foreign languages) and all linguistic studies which merely subserve other academic purposes (e.g. the study of literature, the editing of texts). Müller makes it plain that in his view one of the hallmarks of a science is that it studies a chosen range of materials solely for its own sake, and not in order to achieve objectives external to the field of study in question. To study rocks in order to bring about technological improvements in building or mining is not part of the science of geology, any more than studying the stars in order to cast horoscopes is part of the science of astronomy. Here we see very clearly how, from the very beginning,

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insistence on the scientific status of linguistics goes hand in hand with insistence on the academic autonomy of linguistics. Müller’s arguments mark a bid to break away from an educational tradition in which language studies had an established place in the humanities and were predominantly controlled by normative grammarians and literary specialists. Accepting the distinction between the study of Nature and the study of culture is therefore an important part of Müller’s case. It goes back, as Trevor Pateman observes, at least as far as Vico. The distinction hinges on the contention that whereas the objects and mechanisms studied in natural science exist independently of our conceptions of them (gravity, atoms, gases, viruses, etc.), the objects of cultural science are concept dependent; they do not exist independently of what we (or somebody) think they are. (Pateman 1987a: 259) But whereas for Vico the study of language is an important part of what Pateman called ‘cultural science’, Müller wishes to reassign part of it to the rival domain. The terminology Müller uses is physical science versus historical science, the former dealing with the works of God and the latter with the works of man (Müller 1861: 22). His thesis is that whereas traditional philological and literary studies are correctly classified as historical sciences, comparative philology (which he equates with the Science of Language) is the sole branch of investigation concerning language which ranks among the physical sciences. For it deals with those aspects of language which, unlike the composition of literary works and the teaching of languages, are beyond human control but nevertheless manifest order. This order, since it is not of human making, is presumably divine, as in all other areas of Nature. The cogency of Müller’s case need not concern us here. What should be noted is that if Müller’s bold claim for the scientific status of certain forms of language study is to be at all plausible it has to presuppose the legitimacy of a wholesale decontextualization of language. It has to assume, in other words, that the study of language does not entail the study of its users or the study of the circumstances under which language is used. This decontextualization Müller freely admits: languages can be analysed and classified on their own evidence, particularly on the strength of their grammatical articulation, without any reference to the individuals, families, clans, tribes, nations or races by whom they are or have been spoken. (Müller 1861: 76) Sundering languages from their speakers is an essential move in Müller’s

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academic strategy. Without it, his assignment of linguistics to the physical sciences would have no foundation. Two aspects of this decontextualization need to be distinguished, for each left a separate legacy in twentieth-century linguistics. 1. First, it involves divorcing language from communication. Attention is turned away from words as means of exchanging ideas and information. It is focussed instead on the sounds uttered and the forms recorded. This shift is inevitable, because language as communication poses serious problems for the methods of investigation which Müller proposes. Simply by observing, collecting and comparing samples of speech as they occur in everyday discourse, or of written forms as they occur in documents, it is not possible to address effectively the semantic dimension of language. If someone is heard to utter a certain sequence of sounds, no amount of collation with other samples of similar sounds on other occasions will of itself yield much information about what people understand these sounds to mean. Nowhere does Müller suggest that it might be necessary for the linguist to ask speakers what they mean by the sounds they utter; for had he done so his scientific method would immediately have been vulnerable to the charge of embarking on a regress. If the reply to a question about the meaning of one sequence of sounds is given in the form of a different sequence of sounds, then the second sequence stands in no less need of semantic elucidation than the first. Each reply simply prompts a further question, and so on ad infinitum. So one major weakness of Müller’s science of language is that its method does not address the central problem posed by the fact that the meanings of words are not open to inspection in the way that their oral or written forms are. The investigation proposed thus seems intrinsically ill-adapted to the kind of activity that language is understood to be. In effect it reduces that activity to the production of vocal articulations and written marks. 2. Second, the scientific method advocated by Müller involves ignoring the individual as a source of linguistic evidence. When focussing on what is available to observation and comparison, priority is given to those similarities which enable the linguist to proceed with a general classification. The extent to which the linguistic behaviour of any individual does not conform to the classification tends automatically to be ignored, since it does not contribute to the overall picture; just as the individual peculiarities of a single flower are ignored by the botanist interested in describing the species. The result is that variation in language is acknowledged only to the extent that it can be given a collective characterization of some kind. This means in practice that it is taken into account only if it can be interpreted as reflecting an ongoing linguistic change, or else at the level of ‘dialect’, where it is assumed to reflect a linguistic change that has already taken place at some time in the past. In effect,

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an investigation which proceeds on the basis of collecting, comparing and classifying samples implicitly redefines language in terms of conformity to existing norms and the establishment of new norms. Everything else drops out of view. The corollary of Müller’s strategy is to treat the viewpoint of the language user as totally irrelevant to the scientific investigation of language. The language user knows little or nothing of the past history of the linguistic forms currently in use, nor of their relationships to forms in other languages; and moreover does not need to possess any such knowledge for everyday communicational purposes. From Müller’s point of view, the language user has no more scientific knowledge of language than the hen has of laying eggs. The scientific method that Müller espouses requires the linguist to abstract from the speakers altogether, to ignore the communicational activity of the language community and to treat ‘the language’ simply as a set of forms and combinations of forms. Only then is there any basis for the operation of a scientific method which equates the collection, classification and comparison of words with the collection, classification and comparison of rocks and plants. Thus Müller’s claim for the scientific status of comparative philology was ultimately based on a misleading metaphor. The metaphor removes language from its natural embedding in the communicational practices of a living community and reduces it to a static inventory of discrete, collectable items. These items, recorded one by one in the notebooks of grammarians and lexicographers, are available for inspection, analysis and classification on whatever principle the linguist may decide. How could a reduction involving distortion of this magnitude have gone virtually unchallenged in the nineteenth century? It owes a great deal to the fortuitous fact that the languages originally subjected to the operation of this supposedly scientific method were Indo-European languages, most of which had long traditions of alphabetic writing. Furthermore, a number of them were dead languages and could thus be studied only in written form. In one sense, the advent of scientific linguistics merely carried one stage further the potential for linguistic decontextualization inherent in the writing process itself, which in effect enabled scholars of Müller’s generation to treat all languages as if they were dead languages. Without the alphabet as a common basis for comparison of forms across space and time it is doubtful whether any science of the kind Müller proclaimed would ever have emerged. Müller was right – although not for the reasons he gave – to deny that his brand of linguistics belonged to the historical sciences. For the decontextualizing scientific method annihilates history, even while claiming to reconstruct historical linguistic processes and affiliations.

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The most celebrated ‘law of language’ to emerge in the nineteenth century was the Neogrammarian law of exceptionless sound change: Every sound change, insofar as it occurs mechanically, proceeds according to laws that are without exception; that is, the direction of the sound shift is always the same for all the members of a linguistic community except where a division into dialects occurs; and all words in which the sound subjected to the change appears under the same conditions are affected by it without exception. (Osthoff and Brugmann 1878: xiii) This linguistic law is a classic example not only of the weakness of inductivism but also of a certain kind of intellectual bewitchment that inductivism leaves in its wake. At the time when it was formulated, relatively little was known about sound change in languages outside the Indo-European family. Therefore the inductivist leap from cases in which the regularity of sound change appeared to be solidly established to the sweeping generalization stated by Osthoff and Brugmann seems in retrospect to be particularly rash. According to Labov (1972: 100), this Neogrammarian law should in any case have been discredited after 1905, when Gauchat demonstrated that in the speech community at Charmey in the Gruyère valley sound changes ‘proceeded across three generations by fluctuations and lexical oscillations’. But Labov is here doubly mistaken. Gauchat’s findings at Charmey do not invalidate the law as formulated by Osthoff and Brugmann, because in their version (1) no time span is specified for completion of a sound change, and (2) the term dialect is left undefined. This left it open to defenders of the Neogrammarians to explain away cases of the kind Gauchat had documented. They were able to make unrestricted appeal to the notion of ‘dialect borrowing’. In short, the law as formulated by Osthoff and Brugmann is empirically unfalsifiable as well as being empirically undemonstrable. This crowning achievement of Neogrammarian linguistic science seems to have left a legacy of respectful bemusement among later generations of linguists. Bloomfield, although well known for his pronouncement that ‘features which we think ought to be universal may be absent from the very next language that becomes accessible’ (Bloomfield 1935: 20) nevertheless, apparently without tongue in cheek, praised the method adopted in Indo-European comparative philology as one of the triumphs of nineteenth-century science. In a survey of scientific method it should serve as a model of one type of investigation, since no other historical discipline has equaled it. (Bloomfield 1939: 2)

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Similarly Labov, in his paper on ‘Some principles of linguistic methodology’, while holding Osthoff and Brugmann’s law to be empirically false, nevertheless praises it as embodying an important ‘methodological principle’ (Labov 1972: 100). What kind of science it is that seeks to apply important methodological principles in domains where they are quite out of place we are not told. *

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A quite different perspective on language and science makes its first appearance in the work widely regarded as laying the foundation of twentiethcentury linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale. Although Saussure insists time and again that linguistics is a science, what he means by that is quite different from what his predecessors meant. Saussurean structuralism may be seen as a deliberate attempt to correct the gross decontextualization of language inherent in nineteenth-century comparativism. It does so by bringing the viewpoint of the linguistic scientist more closely in line with that of the lay language user. The relevance of the language user’s perspective is emphasized repeatedly in the Cours de linguistique générale. It forms the basis of Saussure’s distinction between the synchronic and the diachronic study of languages. The first thing which strikes one on studying linguistic facts is that the language user is unaware of their succession in time: he is dealing with a state. Hence the linguist who wishes to understand this state must rule out of consideration everything which brought that state about, and pay no attention to diachrony. Only by suppressing the past can he enter into the state of mind of the language user. (Saussure 1922: 117) It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of this statement or its bearing on the question of scientific method in linguistics. For the method practised by the Neogrammarians had in no sense been a method intended to afford entry ‘into the state of mind of the language user’. On the contrary, it was a method designed to avoid reference to the language user altogether. Nothing could be less true of the professed aims of Saussurean synchronic linguistics. Synchrony has only one perspective, that of the language users; and its whole method consists of collecting evidence from them. In order to determine to what extent something is a reality, it is necessary and also sufficient to find out to what extent it exists as far as the language users are concerned. (Saussure 1922: 128)

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Saussure’s methodological critique of his predecessors is an interesting and original one. He does not accuse them of failure by their own methodological criteria. There is no complaint that the collection and classification of forms was faulty or the analysis lacking in objectivity. Nor does Saussure object to the historical correlations arrived at by this method. He does not challenge the etymologies or the patterns of sound change proposed. What he denies is something far more radical. He denies that the method comes to terms with linguistic realities at all. Saussure’s attack is trident-pronged. (1) He accuses the comparative philologists of confusing synchronic facts with diachronic facts. This alone for Saussure is sufficient to invalidate their method, however sound it might otherwise seem. Such a confusion is the crudest mistake it would be possible to make in any science (comparable, as Saussure’s own analogy suggests (Saussure 1922: 125), to a botanist’s failure to distinguish between the crosssection of the stem of a plant and the longitudinal section). (2) The comparativist method, according to Saussure, creates the illusion of entities which in fact have no existence in language, but are merely artifacts of the method itself. For example, the etymological derivation of French chaud from Latin calidum creates the illusion that there is a word which has somehow survived from Latin into French with a modification of its form. This, from a structuralist point of view, is a diachronic mirage: there is no such word. (3) Saussure rejects outright the ‘hunter-gatherer’ method of the natural sciences. For Saussure there are no linguistic items lying around waiting to be collected as ‘data’ and classified in the way that a botanist collects and classifies plants, or a geologist rocks. What distinguishes linguistics is precisely that it is not one of those sciences ‘provided with objects of study given in advance’ (Saussure 1922: 23). On the contrary, in linguistics ‘it is the viewpoint adopted which creates the object’. Does this mean that for Saussure there simply is no scientific method applicable in linguistic studies? If we take scientific method to be not merely the method which guards investigation against error but the method that is guaranteed eventually to deliver scientific laws, then the answer to this question must be affirmative. For Saussure is in any case a sceptic as regards ‘laws of language’. The question is addressed directly in Part I Chapter III of the Cours. The discussion begins by drawing a distinction between synchronic laws and diachronic laws, and argues that so-called synchronic laws ‘are general, but not imperative’ (Saussure 1922: 131), whereas so-called diachronic laws are imperative but not general. Saussure concludes from this that, in the sense in which a law is understood to demand compliance (i.e. to be ‘imperative’) and at the same time to cover all cases (i.e. to be ‘general’), ‘neither synchronic nor diachronic facts are governed by laws’ (Saussure 1922: 134). For Saussure, therefore, the famous law of exceptionless sound change

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formulated by Osthoff and Brugmann could have no law-like status at all. It could at best be a report summarizing the totality of investigated instances, and at worst a disguised definition of the concept ‘sound change’. But in neither case could it represent a law governing all diachronic facts. Saussure proceeds to consider the possibility that laws of language might be neither synchronic nor diachronic, but that they belong to a panchronic realm, i.e. operating as ‘in the physical and natural sciences’ (Saussure 1922: 134). He concedes that it is indeed possible to formulate panchronic generalizations; for example, the generalization that sound changes occur. But he argues that such generalizations will hold ‘independently of concrete facts’ (Saussure 1922: 135). In other words, to treat the truth that sound changes occur as a law of language is for Saussure rather like treating the truth that people die as a law of society. Although sociologists doubtless need to take into account the fact that in all societies people die, this is in no sense a discovery revealed by the application of scientific method to the study of social phenomena. It is ‘given’ independently of any such study. Nevertheless, Saussure is no advocate of an amethodical or an unmethodical linguistics. His contention, rather, is that the only method which makes sense is one which yields analyses reflecting the language user’s own grasp of linguistic structure. This is the method referred to in the passage quoted above (Saussure 1922: 128). As described in detail by Saussure (1922: 146–8) it is a method characterized by the utmost simplicity, at least on the surface. It consists in matching linear segments of speech with linear sequences of meanings. (Thus [maikat] divides into [mai] = my and [kat] = cat.) In short, it starts from the speaker’s (and hearer’s) recognition that utterances divide up into chains of meaningful units. The only guarantees that a proposed analysis is correct and complete appear to be (1) that no residual segment of speech be left unaccounted for (i.e. left ‘meaningless’), (2) that the analysis cannot proceed further and still yield one-to-one pairings of speech segments with meanings, and (3) that no residual element of meaning be left unaccounted for (i.e. not allocated to one or other of, or some combination of, the speech segments). Saussure makes no attempt to deal with such awkward questions as why it should be assumed that speech includes no meaningless segments, or whether it is legitimate to postulate a meaning for a given segment if that particular segment with that particular meaning only recurs in one and the same combinatorial sequence. Nor, evidently, is he concerned with the question of how the linguist is to gather the information necessary for the application of the method he describes. These particular defects, however, are less relevant to the present discussion than the more general criticism that by substituting this synchronic method for the unsatisfactory procedures followed by the comparative philologists Saussure merely succeeds in replacing one decontextualization of language

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by another. The Saussurean method assumes that linguistic communication is possible only on the basis of a determinate inventory of determinate signs known in advance to both speaker and hearer. But this assumption ignores the role of contextual factors in the speech situation, and the Saussurean method itself appears to operate on speech segments (e.g. [maikat]) somehow suspended in a communicational vacuum. This is no accidental omission. For Saussure, the physical world lies outside the language system as such. The notion that words are designations of objects or qualities or relations existing in the real world is dismissed by Saussure as a nomenclaturist fallacy. This dismissal might in turn be instanced as an indication of how far Saussurean linguistics is from its proclaimed theoretical goal of capturing the viewpoint of the language user (for whom doubtless many words do have precisely the designatory function that Saussure rejects as illusory). Although Saussure regards synchronic linguistics as constituting a science of language, he makes no attempt to demonstrate that the synchronic method is a scientific method. Nor is this omission accidental, given Saussure’s view of the nature of the linguistic object. For Saussure, the method is itself the instrument by which the linguistic object is created. It corresponds, allegedly, to the relevant mental processes of the language user. To demand a demonstration of its scientific validity would be for Saussure an academic bloomer on a par with asking for proof that the rules of chess provide a scientific way of playing chess. *

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In 1928 Edward Sapir delivered a much-discussed paper on ‘The status of linguistics as a science’ to a joint meeting of the Linguistic Society of America and the American Anthropological Association in New York. It was published in the journal Language in the following year. What Sapir has to say is of particular interest in the present context. While Sapir accepts without question the (by then) traditional rhetoric of ‘linguistic science’, he is perhaps the first linguist to recognize that this traditional rhetoric stands in need of justification. So he sets out explicitly to address the question ‘in what sense linguistics can be called a “science” ’ (Sapir 1929: 161). It is clear that when Sapir raised this question he had not yet taken on board Saussure’s contribution to linguistic theory (even though the second edition of Saussure’s Cours had appeared six years earlier and been reviewed in America in the Modern Language Journal). Saussure’s view of linguistic science is not mentioned once in Sapir’s paper. Sapir, evidently, is still thinking of linguistics in nineteenth-century terms. He begins by extolling the achievements of the Indo-European comparativists. In his opinion, they had

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‘developed a technique which is probably more nearly perfect than that of any other science dealing with man’s institutions’. He goes on: Many of the formulations of comparative Indo-European linguistics have a neatness and a regularity which recall the formulae, or the so-called laws, of natural science. (Sapir 1929: 160) Two points in this entrée en matière repay attention. One is Sapir’s initial assumption that linguistics deals with language under the rubric of ‘institutions’. (In other words, language is envisaged as a social rather than a psychological phenomenon.) The other is the reference to the ‘so-called laws’ of natural science, which suggests that these laws are not quite what their proponents claim them to be. Both have a bearing on the conclusion that Sapir’s paper eventually reaches. Although Sapir makes no direct reference to the Neogrammarians, he accepts that the achievements of Indo-European linguistics are based chiefly on ‘the hypothesis that sound changes are regular and that most morphological readjustments in language follow as by-products in the wake of these regular phonetic developments’. He does not discuss whether or to what extent the apparent regularity of sound change might be an artifact of the comparisons that the comparativists chose to focus on. Instead, he claims that, whatever the doubts about this hypothesis may be, ‘it remains true, as a matter of actual linguistic experience, that faith in such regularity has been the most successful approach to the historic problems of language’ (Sapir 1929: 160. My italics). This remarkable pronouncement is a classic of twentieth-century scholasticism. It rivals any of its medieval forerunners. It is on a par with claiming in the thirteenth century that, whatever doubts there might be about Aristotle’s theory of mechanics, one’s own teaching experience showed it to be the most successful approach to dealing with problems of motion. Sapir immediately concedes that linguistics may be unable to explain why sound change should necessarily be regular. But, he says, this failure does not license ‘discarding well tested hypotheses’ or ‘throwing the field open’ to explanations that ‘do not immediately tie up with what we actually know about the historical behavior of language’ (Sapir 1929: 160). Thus what was originally treated as a ‘hypothesis’ is transformed in the course of a single paragraph into ‘what we actually know’ about language. As Sapir’s argument develops, it becomes increasingly apparent that the real purpose of the paper is to enrol linguistics under the disciplinary banner of anthropology. Sapir’s agenda has to be set in the context of American higher education in the interwar period. Whereas in Europe comparative linguistics had developed out of the nineteenth-century study of Greek and

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Latin, in America there was an alternative focus of interest. This was research on surviving Amerindian languages, pioneered by Franz Boas and scholars working for the American Bureau of Ethnology. In practice, the differences between these two approaches was profound. The European approach required expertise in ancient manuscripts and a paleographical training. The American approach required recruits who would be able to interview live informants (mostly living on reservations in conditions somewhat removed from modern industrialized society). Keen to combine the two approaches, Sapir insists on a thesis that was later called ‘linguistic relativity’. This had its immediate origins in a paper published by Boas in 1889 (‘On alternating sounds’) that was virtually unknown in Europe. Boas argued that certain apparently variable speech sounds reported for Native American and other ‘exotic’ languages [. . .] were actually artifacts of the observers’ own categorizations of their perceptions rather than of the subjects’ ‘primitive’ sound systems. (Fought 1994: I. 97–8) Although this links up in many ways with Saussure’s insistence on the priority of the language user’s perspective, the connexion went unnoticed for decades. For Sapir, the important conclusion from the anthropological perspective was: Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. (Sapir 1929: 162) Given this, it is little wonder that Sapir’s paper concludes with a warning to linguists against the temptation to ‘ape the methods [. . .] of the natural sciences’. For if we follow through the implications of the relativist thesis, it would seem that the language of the natural sciences is itself no more than a set of ‘language habits’ of a certain privileged ‘group’. There is no reason at all, therefore, why ‘linguistic science’ should bow the knee before the language habits of Western physicists, chemists, geologists and their confraternities.

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A different scientific perspective altogether was ushered in by influence of behaviourism on twentieth-century linguistics. This is primarily associated with the later work of Leonard Bloomfield (although earlier in his career Bloomfield was committed to Wundtian psychology). The chief methodological consequence of behaviourism was a restriction of the linguist’s ‘data’ to ‘observables’. Scientific method, for Bloomfield and his followers, embraces both the procedures for registering ‘observables’ and the procedures for deriving from the ‘observables’ systematic descriptions of a language. Verbal communication between one person and another is resolved by Bloomfield into a sequence of ‘stimuli’ and ‘responses’. By this means ‘language bridges the gap between the individual nervous systems’ (Bloomfield 1939: 15). An act of speech is a happening in the world and, as such, an object of science; the branch of science which studies it is linguistics. (Bloomfield 1939: 45) Bloomfield was greatly influenced by A. P. Weiss and also by the logical positivists. He even went as far as declaring that sentences like The world is known to me only through my perceptions are ‘meaningless’. That judgment would have been rejected by many of Bloomfield’s contemporaries in the field of linguistics. Furthermore, although the details cannot be pursued here, it is difficult to reconcile with Bloomfield’s own account of meaning. There are a number of other awkward features of Bloomfield’s theoretical position. Reference has already been made above to Bloomfield’s praise of the comparativist method as ‘one of the triumphs of nineteenth-century science’ (Bloomfield 1939: 2). But he reserves even higher praise for the Hindu grammarians of ancient India, by whom Sanskrit was described ‘completely and in scientific terms’. It was, according to Bloomfield, from the Hindu grammarians that European scholars in the nineteenth century belatedly learned how to ‘describe a language in terms of its own structure’. At the same time, Bloomfield rejects a prescriptive approach to language as unscientific, apparently overlooking the fact that the motivation of the early Hindu grammarians was nothing if not prescriptive (their intention being to specify and preserve the forms of a sacred language). For Bloomfield, as a behaviourist, a distinction between correct and incorrect speech finds no place in scientific linguistics. He even makes the remarkable assertion that the very notion ‘that there is such a thing as “correct” and “incorrect” speech [. . .] arose in the eighteenth century as an outgrowth of a peculiar social development’ (Bloomfield 1939: 5) – a statement which appar-

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ently consigns to oblivion countless examples of linguistic prescriptivism throughout the antecedent Western grammatical tradition. Although proclaiming that linguistics is a science, Bloomfield takes fellow linguists to task for abusing the notion of scientific definition. For instance, he criticizes Ries for taking ‘an unscientific approach’ to syntax because Ries had attempted to define the term sentence by reference to the units to which that term is ordinarily applied in everyday usage. To this Bloomfield objects: We do not ask a zoologist to define the term fish so as to include whales, or insist that if he will not include whales in a class with fish, he must not use the term fish. (Bloomfield 1931: 154) The procedure for scientific definition, according to Bloomfield, demands that the linguist first delimit certain classes of phenomena and only then ‘proceed to give them names’. Thus Bloomfield equates the adoption of scientific terminology with precisely the nomenclaturist approach condemned by Saussure as fallacious. Bloomfield’s restriction of linguistic data to ‘observables’ entails that his semantics cannot entertain any mentalistic or emotive constituents of meaning. Hence his much-quoted contention that we do not know what the words love and hate mean, since these terms apparently refer to emotional or mental states that have not yet been scientifically analysed (Bloomfield 1935: 139). As critics have pointed out, we carry on using words like love and hate nevertheless. Given all this, it is paradoxical that Bloomfield’s own analytic practice tacitly endorses the very same analytic method that Saussure had proposed; namely, the exhaustive matching of sound segments with their assumed meanings. For Saussure’s method relies on ‘unobservables’ throughout. There need be no observable breaks in the sound sequence corresponding to the boundaries between one linguistic sign and the next. Nor are there observable meanings which silently hover over their appropriate segments in the chain of sound. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that more rigorous methodologists who had followed Bloomfield down the behaviourist path tried to develop a scientific method which eliminated reliance on meanings altogether. The most fully worked out of these alternatives was the distributional method proposed by Zellig Harris (1951). For purposes of the present chapter what is significant about distributionalism is that it marks yet a further retreat from coming to terms with the perspective of the language user. Not only does it represent languages as structured solely in terms of distributional relations between classes of unit, but it overtly rejects the notion that the resultant structures have any

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‘psychological reality’ at all. For the distributionalist, the procedures adopted are ‘merely ways of arranging the original data’ (Harris, Z. 1951: 3) If a physicist in the 1950s had claimed that his analyses were ‘merely ways of arranging the original data’ one may doubt whether he would have been regarded by his colleagues as engaged in any serious scientific enterprise whatsoever. But such pronouncements were treated by linguists as the scientific hallmark of their subject. The extreme to which distributionalists carried deliberate dissociation from the world of the language user is perhaps best illustrated by Zellig Harris’s solemn discussion of the problem posed by the fact that a given corpus of speech might include instances of the informant coughing. How is the linguistic scientist to know objectively that the cough is not a word of English? Simply asking the informant will not do: that would presumably be unscientific. The solution proposed (Harris, Z. 1951: 19) is that the linguist must proceed to establish whether or not the cough stands in a recurrent distributional relation to any other element in the corpus. If it does, it is a linguistic unit: otherwise not. *

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Underlying much of the behaviourist rationale in linguistics was the belief that scientific method must somehow eliminate, as far as possible, any subjective bias by the linguist. The ensuing phase in the development of modern linguistics may be regarded as beginning with the attack on behaviourism in Chomsky’s (1959) review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. With the overt rejection of behaviourist methodology by the generativist school, it became scientifically respectable for linguists to appeal to their own ‘linguistic intuitions’ concerning their native language. This in turn might perhaps have been expected to lead to the introduction of a linguistics based on the viewpoint of the language user. Once again, however, this expectation was not to be fulfilled. Although ‘the language’ was conceived in neo-Saussurean terms as a cognitive system internalized in the brain of the language user, and reference not only to unobservable meanings but to unobservable rules of all kinds was relegitimized, the net effect of generative linguistics was a decontextualization of verbal communication more absolute than any introduced by previous schools. Part of the trouble was that unrestricted appeal to the intuitions of the native speaker led to theoretical stalemate between linguists in disagreement over the ‘linguistic facts’. Labov takes to task linguists who continue to use uncheckable examples and defend them by asserting that

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they are only discussing their own dialect. If ‘my dialect’ means no more than ‘people disagree with me’, it is certainly an illegitimate and unworthy escape from serious work. (Labov 1972: 106–7) This tone of scientific moralising is presumably underwritten by the assumption that any appeal to the linguist’s own dialect is either a case of dishonesty or a case of self-deception. But it is difficult to see why this should be so, and even more difficult to see why the realization that ‘people disagree with me’ should not be a fairly reliable diagnostic that there are indeed differences between ‘my dialect’ and other people’s. Furthermore, there is no theoretical reason to suppose in advance that every individual’s language does not, in at least some details, differ from every other individual’s: on the contrary, it seems quite likely. Such an assumption has been familiar in language studies at least since the time of Humboldt. Two ways of dealing with the methodological problem highlighted by Humboldt have been widely canvassed by linguists of the generativist school. The cruder way is to ignore individual differences and maintain that all the linguist need describe is the language of a hypothetical ‘ideal speaker-hearer’. This manœuvre again has the effect of interposing a decontextualized abstraction between the linguist and the linguistic activity purportedly under investigation. The less crude way is to embrace the irremediable individualism of the activity in question by claiming that the true object of description for the linguist is the idiolect. The problem with this latter move is that describing the grammar of English immediately fragments into the task of describing hundreds of millions of grammars. Linguists have not shown themselves keen to embark on this Herculean labour, which in any case threatens to postpone indefinitely the prospect of making systematic scientific generalizations about English (if indeed there are any such generalizations to be made). Again, moreover, the idiolectal approach takes linguistics further from the viewpoint of the ordinary language user, for whom there is indeed a language called ‘English’, which is recognizable as such in spite of the manifestly different ways in which it is spoken and written. A third solution available is to distinguish between a science which deals with ‘language in the mind’ and a science which deals with ‘language in society’ (Pateman 1987b). However, the language in the mind is hypothesized as a system of rules buried at a cognitive depth which is quite beyond the reach of introspection by the language user. As for the ‘language in society’, although in principle available to the scrutiny of teams of sociolinguists, it turns out to be far more diverse and complex than anything which could possibly enter into the ken of an individual who happens to be a member of a very large linguistic community. So, either way, the individual’s own

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linguistic experience fails to come into the picture, let alone coming into focus as the subject of investigation. Sociolinguists, although sometimes dismissed by generativists as being engaged in the study of ‘languages’ that are merely socio-political constructs, at least boasts methods which its practitioners claim to be scientific. The basis of this claim is that correlations can be established between linguistic variation in a community and social variables such as the age, sex, income and regional provenance of speakers. Then these correlations can be handled and described objectively, in particular with the aid of laboratory techniques and statistics, without appeal either to the views of the informants themselves or to the subjective impressions of the investigator. In this way, it is claimed, it is possible to determine ‘objective’ linguistic facts, uncontaminated by the beliefs of informants or the prejudices of investigators. But what seems open to question, precisely, is the status of the ‘linguistic facts’ which these methods yield. For example, a textbook on the use of statistics in language studies begins with the following illustration. Let us imagine that a phonetician, interested in the way that voicedvoiceless distinctions are maintained by speakers of English, begins by taking measurements of voice onset times (VOT), i.e. the time between the release of the stop and the onset of voicing, in initial stops. The first set of data consists of ten repetitions from each of 20 speakers of ten /p/-initial words. Now if there were no difference in VOT time, either between words or between speakers, there would be no need here for statistics; the single VOT value would simply be recorded. In fact, of course, very few, if any of the values will be identical. The group of speakers may produce VOT values that are all distinct on, for example, their first pronunciation of a particular word. Alternatively, the VOT values of an individual speaker may be different from word to word or, indeed, between repetitions of the same word. Thus the phonetician could have as many as 2,000 different values. The first contribution of statistics will be to provide the means of summarising the results in a meaningful and readily understandable way. (Woods, Fletcher and Hughes 1986: 2–3) The ‘meaningful and understandable way’ turns out to be – not surprisingly – calculating the mean and the standard deviation. There is a great deal that might be said about this singularly enlightening and unenlightening example. First, the two thousand values are produced not by the speakers but by the phonetician’s laboratory equipment. The problem is then presented as how to make scientific sense of this scientific finding; as if it had been discovered that what should have been a constant turned out to be

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subject to wide variation. Whereas the boot is on the other foot: for what would have been really surprising would have been the discovery that for all speakers the VOT value was absolutely uniform. Then there is the tacit assumption that the statistician, by applying scientific expertise, is able to tell the mathematically naive phonetician what the phonetician really wanted to know all the time, but could not identify for want of statistical training. The phonetician, it is assumed, is bewildered by finding ‘as many as 2,000 different values’, and does not know what to make of it. (‘How can this be?’ we are invited to imagine the puzzled phonetician asking. ‘For all these speakers are pronouncing exactly the same consonant.’) Only when the statistician shows how to calculate the mean and the standard variation is the puzzle resolved and it becomes clear to the phonetician what the finding really means. The basic problem with this scenario of the helpful statistician shedding the light of science on the investigation of speech sounds is that it is not true that the statistical calculation is, as claimed, a ‘means of summarising the results’. Nor is it true, as is strongly implied, that without the assistance of the statistician the phonetician would be able to make no ‘meaningful and readily understandable’ statement about the finding. Far from ‘summarising the results’, what the statistician’s calculation does is provide two numerical values that are compatible with this and many other quite different sets of results. But this is not all. The validity of the statistician’s scientific ‘summary’ is dependent inter alia on the phonetician’s correct identification of ten /p/-initial words in the first place, as well as the selection of twenty speakers who are speakers of ‘the same language’. Furthermore, that it is possible to calculate a mean value and a standard deviation for the VOT of twenty speakers, or even of twenty thousand speakers, does not mean that a new linguistic fact has now been scientifically established. For the calculation does not tell us whether or not the language users in this community – or even in this sample – recognize just one or more than one way of pronouncing ‘words beginning with /p/’. And it is not until this level of inquiry has been reached that there is any question of establishing ‘linguistic facts’ at all. *

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After so many generations of contentious debate, it is not surprising that many linguists retreat to a position that might be described as one of confused neutrality. They would still like linguistics to be a science, but they are far from clear about how to support such a claim. Lyons, for example, remarks that the general assertion that linguistics is the

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scientific study of language does not mean much unless the implications of the term scientific are spelled out. Lyons himself proposes to spell them out as follows: by the scientific study of language is meant its investigation by means of controlled and empirically verifiable observations and with reference to some general theory of language-structure. (Lyons 1968: 1) What is striking about this anodyne formulation is how extremely noncommittal it is. It opts for verifiable rather than verified and does not specify what counts as ‘control’ or a ‘general theory of language-structure’. This leaves a wide range of uncertainty as to how long there has in fact been any scientific study of language and by whom it has been conducted. Varro, for instance, certainly made many observations about Latin grammar that his contemporaries did not dispute and that later scholars regarded as accurate. On one interpretation, it would seem, the information Varro gives us would pass the test of ‘controlled and empirically verifiable observation’. Furthermore, if proposing a system of parts of speech counts as having ‘some general theory of language-structure’, then Varro certainly had one, and an original one to boot. So, by the standards of his day, it could be argued, Varro’s linguistics was scientific. He may have included in his writings speculations which ventured beyond either the observable or the verifiable; but then so, notoriously, have eminent linguists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But if, on the other hand, only teams of research workers with taperecorders crosschecking one another qualify as engaged in ‘controlled and empirically verifiable observation’, then Varro clearly does not come up to scratch. Likewise, if a parts-of-speech system is not enough to count as a general theory of language-structure, then Varro does not have one. Whichever way the case is argued, this definition of scientific does not provide the answer. Vagueness tends to be characteristic of claims to scientific status which are intended to serve a merely interdisciplinary function, as seems to be the case with the claim Lyons makes. It occurs right at the beginning of his Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics, a textbook for university students, and, once made, plays no further role in Lyons’ exposition of his subject. Its evident purpose is to reassure beginners about the academic respectability of the somewhat arcane and abstract study in which they are about to engage. In short, it is part of the professional publicity of the linguistics teacher touting for pupils. Into the same category falls the discussion of ‘scientificness’ in Crystal’s What is Linguistics?, which is likewise aimed at potential (British) students and ‘explains the scope, methods and applications of linguistics assuming no

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prior knowledge of the subject’. Crystal, however, is more forthright in emphasizing the difference between modern linguistics and the traditions of language study that go back to Classical Greece and ancient India. He writes: The central difference is that this older study was not, in a word, scientific; that is, it lacked the characteristics which we would nowadays associate with a science. (Crystal 1985: 26) Of these characteristics, Crystal dismisses what he calls the ‘superficial’ ones (such as using electronic equipment and mathematical symbols). More important is the way the subject relies on scientific techniques, especially on a ‘scientific method’ (Crystal 1985: 26) ‘Scientific method’ is then glossed as follows: Observation of events prior to the setting-up of a hypothesis, which is then carefully investigated via systematic description or experimentation and a theory developed – this is standard procedure in Linguistics as in other sciences. (Crystal 1985: 26) As a piece of academic propaganda this is both disingenuous and confused. The role of experimentation in linguistics is very restricted and in any case highly controversial, for laboratory conditions are far removed from the conditions under which language is ordinarily used in daily life. As for systematic description, it is impossible in linguistics to have any kind of description which is both systematic and theory-neutral. To speak of systematic description as a prerequisite for theory is to stand the logic of linguistics on its head: it is theory that is required in order to systematize description. An even odder account of the scientificness of linguistics is provided by Martinet, who writes: Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. A study is said to be scientific when it is founded on the observation of facts and refrains from picking and choosing among the facts in the light of certain moral or aesthetic principles. Thus ‘scientific’ is opposed to ‘prescriptive’. (Martinet 1964: 15) He elaborates this distinction as follows: The difficulty felt in making a clear distinction between scientific linguistics and normative grammar recalls the similar difficulties in distinguishing between morals and a true science of ethics. History teaches

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us that until a very recent date those who engaged in the study of language in general or of particular languages have done so with prescriptive intentions, whether tacit or explicit. (Martinet 1964: 16) What Martinet never tells his readers is why, in general, the study of a subject cannot be both prescriptive and scientific at the same time. (Most medical practitioners, one supposes, study their subject not simply in order to acquire knowledge but in order to prescribe treatment and practices conducive to health. Likewise, engineers study bridge construction not merely in order to understand it but in order to build better bridges.) But what in any case makes Martinet’s justification of ‘scientific linguistics’ question-begging is the fact that hypothesized systems called ‘standard English’, ‘standard French’, etc. feature prominently and persistently as objects described by contemporary linguists. The very notion of a standard language is incomprehensible except as a normative concept: it requires precisely what Martinet rejects as ‘picking and choosing among the facts’. The facts in this case are the facts of usage as manifested in the linguistic behaviour of those who speak English, French, etc. Many observable features of their usage have to be excluded as normatively unacceptable if the linguist is to have any hope of identifying a standard language. How is one to view these propagandist claims? As Nigel Love shrewdly observes, disciplines that have indisputably achieved scientific status do not need to keep reminding us of it. Is linguistics a science? [. . .] One is tempted to enter an immediate negative reply, on the ground that if linguistics were a science, the question would not need to be raised so incessantly. (Nobody bothers to ask whether chemistry is a science; nor does the chemist feel obliged ex officio to keep abreast of general developments in linguistics, as he might well do in the case of physics or biology or other undisputedly scientific inquiries.) (Love 1989: 270) Although successive generations of linguists have proclaimed linguistics to be the scientific study of language, one still searches histories of science in vain for any reference to linguistics. Likewise, dictionaries of scientific terminology do not include phoneme alongside photon. For many years now linguistics has not been the only subject scrambling to climb aboard the bandwagon of science. Students of virtually every form of human behaviour – including psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and educationists – have tried to do likewise, and in some cases have simply appropriated the title science as an official designation for their own discipline or subdiscipline. If people were shocked in 1914 when Clive Bell (1914: viii)

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spoke of a ‘science of aesthetics’, they have nowadays become accustomed to universities whose football coaches are ‘sports scientists’ and whose army instructors introduce their trainees to the study of ‘military science’. The nec plus ultra in this form of bandwagoning nowadays is ‘parascience’, the science of things that are beyond the reach of science.

6 Mathematics and the language of science

Mathematics is often said to be the language of science. But that is already two semantic confusions rolled into one. Mathematics is not a language but one kind of use of a set of signs; and science needs far more linguistic resources than mathematics could possibly supply. What is true is that the use of mathematics is often blamed as a source of opacity in the language of science. This is even acknowledged by scientists themselves. Faraday on one occasion complained to Clerk Maxwell that the latter’s equations were incomprehensible and begged him to explain what he meant ‘in common language’. What is also true, however, is that science, however we define it, would hardly have achieved what it is usually credited with having achieved without incorporating mathematics into its procedures. This was already recognized in the later nineteenth century by Oxford’s first professor of anthropology, E. B. Tylor, who wrote in the chapter on ‘Science’ in his world survey Anthropology (1881): We have to trace here in outline the rise and progress of science. And as it has been especially through counting and measuring that scientific methods have come into use, the first thing to do is to examine how men learnt to count and measure. (Tylor 1881: ii.62) The question that immediately arises is whether the ability to count and engage in other arithmetic operations is limited by the linguistic resources provided by one’s native language. Tylor begins by dismissing the old wives’ tale, still frequently heard today, that in some parts of the world people cannot count as Europeans can, because after the numerals for one, two and three their language has only a general word meaning ‘many’. Such languages are found in the continent of Australia among aboriginal peoples and in Southern Africa among the San. A crude interpretation of the notion that the limits of one’s numeral system are the limits of one’s arithmetical

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world would imply that speakers of these languages cannot count above three. Tylor gives this idea short shrift. He writes: there is no difficulty in understanding how a savage whose language has no word for a number above three will manage to reckon perhaps a list of fifteen killed and wounded, how he will check off one finger for each man, and at last hold up his hand three times to show the result. (Tylor 1881: ii. 62–3) If Tylor is right, in order to count up to fifteen no one actually needs a word for ‘fifteen’, provided the total can be expressed non-verbally. Furthermore, there is no reason, apart from memory limitations, why Tylor’s savage could not have counted a hundred dead warriors and then held up his hand twenty times, or perhaps both hands ten times. Tylor’s reasoning begs a crucial question; and that is whether what the savage does counts as counting. In order to see why, it will be useful to consider an alternative scenario. In this, what the savage does is pick up a pebble for each dead man and put it in a bag. When the time comes to deliver the total, he simply empties out the contents of his bag, in which, if he has followed the procedure consistently, the number of pebbles corresponds to the number of those dead. Here again the savage has fulfilled Tylor’s requirement, i.e. devised a non-verbal sign for expressing the total. In this case, however, we perhaps feel less compulsion to admit that he has done any counting, unless we agree that counting is just any procedure for putting two sets of objects in one-one correspondence. Some mathematicians – Dantzig, for example – deny that one-one correlation is counting. Dantzig asserts that ‘matching by itself is incapable of creating an art of reckoning’ (Dantzig 1938: 9). In his view, counting a set of objects means ‘assigning to every member a term in the natural sequence in ordered succession until the collection is exhausted’ (Dantzig 1938: 8). At least in Tylor’s original example the savage did more than establish oneone correspondences between sets: at the end he ‘translated’ the result into a sign based on three repetitions of a group of five. But even so, it seems that he did not do enough to satisfy Dantzig; for in the end he had no specific term for ‘fifteen’, in spite of being able to express by signs how many killed and wounded he had counted. So the concept of counting is not quite as unproblematic as it seems. Suppose Tylor’s savage had a primitive abacus, on which the tally was kept by moving beads along a string in two rows. When all the beads have been moved one by one along the first string, a single bead is moved along the second string, and then the beads on the first string are all moved back again

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to the starting position. The total at any given point is shown by the state of the abacus. In mathematical terms, the ‘base’ is represented by the number of beads on the first string. Such an instrument can deal with a large number of dead although requiring relatively few beads to do so. But the modus operandi is still basically one-to-one tallying, with the minor refinement of the extra bead moved occasionally along the second string. Now it is tempting to say in this case that the design of the instrument shows a grasp of mathematical concepts in the designer. But how about the user? This is unclear. Nor is it even clear that in order to make an abacus you have to have specific words for each of the beads. This is prima facie counterevidence to Dantzig’s account of counting: for it would be odd indeed to say that the inventor of the abacus could not count. An ordered sequence is one thing: a sequence ordered by increasing magnitude is a special case of this. But neither appears to require the employment of dedicated verbal signs to identify the individual items ordered. Zaslavsky quotes an interesting example relevant to a similar point. According to the British explorer Sir Francis Galton, the Damaras of Namibia were confused when dealing with a white trader who offered four sticks of tobacco for two sheep, when the going rate of exchange was two sticks of tobacco for one sheep. They resolved this problem by first exchanging one sheep for two sticks of tobacco, and then, after the first sheep had been sent away, exchanging a second sheep for two more sticks of tobacco. According to Galton, on realizing eventually that this amounted to two sheep for four sticks of tobacco, the Damara traders thought the white man had magical powers (Zaslavsky 1973: 32). We may take this anecdote with a pinch of salt, but it illustrates the same problem. The Damaras could cope with the numbers of sheep and sticks of tobacco involved, provided they were allowed to cope with them in their own way, i.e. by actually moving the relevant objects about. But they could not apparently cope by mental calculation or verbal formula. Again it is unclear whether we should say they could count or not. The fact that they thought the white man did it by magic suggests that they had not grasped the general principle. On the other hand, they evidently saw that their own way of working it out confirmed the white man’s proposal. By Western standards, the ‘poverty’ of the numeral systems of certain languages seems a striking and puzzling fact. But it should not be overlooked that there is a psycholinguistic cost for every separate non-compound numeral in the system. If, for whatever reason, I am not content with ‘one+ one+one+one’, or even with ‘two+two’, then I have to learn or devise a new word, such as ‘four’, to substitute for more sesquipedalian expressions. And there is a limit to the convenience of doing this. Thus, for instance, it would doubtless be economical to have a monosyllabic English word zog to replace

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one million, five hundred and twenty-two thousand, seven hundred and sixty-four. But the reason why there is no such word zog is that in the praxis of human communication no such need arises (or has yet arisen). If such a need were to arise, we can be sure that such a word as zog would not take long to appear. *

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Communication must not be confused (although it often is) with the successful use of a shared system of signs. And one of the prime reasons for the neglect of communication in semantics is nothing other than that confusion. This point has important implications for the study of science. Science, at least as traditionally practised in Western scientific circles, has its basis in a certain philosophy of language. It is this which dictates the linguistic limits within which the scientist is allowed to operate. The traditional philosophy of language, shared by humanists and scientists alike, has at its core a ‘fixed-code’ semantics. Languages are regarded as providing their users with a vocabulary in which words have – or should have – fixed forms and fixed meanings. For this is the linguistic property par excellence which, according to the Western language myth, enables speaker and hearer, writer and reader, to understand each other, and allows truth to be established. In the eyes of those who accept this position, a language in which words had no fixed meanings would be as absurd as a currency in which the coins had no determinate values. Under such conditions, consistent and reliable verbal communication would be impossible. Hence science would be impossible, unless it could carry on without reliance on verbal communication at all. For fixed-code theorists, the principal problem with languages is explaining on what basis the linguistic code is fixed; failing that, it is impossible to give a general account of why it is that linguistic forms have the linguistic meanings that they do, or indeed any stable meanings at all. Several types of explanation have been proposed. But the fixed-code model itself has remained unchallenged until quite recent times. Today, the most articulate challenge is that presented by integrational linguistics. My analysis of the language(s) of science is based on the adoption of an integrational model. Integrationism is a philosophy of language which rejects fixed-code semantics lock, stock and barrel. Instead it adopts a different approach to communication altogether. In this approach, meaning is treated as being radically indeterminate, whether expressed by words or by non-verbal signs. But integrationism is not just a philosophy of language. The indeterminacy of meaning is, for integrationists, one of the basic features of the human condition, and is intrinsic not only to language but to the development of all human institutions, social and political.

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There is consequently an irreconcilable conflict between the integrationist view of what scientists are doing and the traditional Western view. For the integrationist view of communication is one which reverses most of the usual assumptions that have dominated Western philosophy of language from at least the fifth century bc onwards. For integrationists, a language is not an independent system, on the basis of which communication is possible. Integrationists, in fact, recognize no autonomous systems of signs, either verbal or non-verbal. The integrationist alternative to fixed codes construes communication as a continuum of creative activities in which the participants strive to integrate their own actions and objectives with those of others, as best they may, in particular circumstances. The communicational continuum is open-ended and that is why there is no determinacy of meaning. Nor is there any guarantee in advance that a satisfactory integration is possible. In integrational semiology, signs are not prerequisites of communication, but its products. This seems at first sight to conflict with many scientists’ own conceptions of what they are doing when they write up their reports or publish their findings. They think they are conforming to the established norms of an academic communicational code accepted by their colleagues. This is the perspective championed in linguistics by Leonard Bloomfield. According to Bloomfield modern science approximates to an ideal international forum for setting up and operating a fixed code. ‘It is the task of science,’ writes Bloomfield, ‘to provide a system of responses which are independent of the habits of any person or community’ (Bloomfield 1939: 31). It thus falls to science to provide ‘clarified speech-forms’; and ‘if science had completed its task, we could accurately define the meanings of speech-forms’ (Bloomfield 1939: 31). That goal is still some way off: progress, however, is being made in the right linguistic direction. Bloomfield singles out mathematics in this respect: The scientist may construct a discourse, as in pure mathematics, in which the speech forms have no meaning beyond that which is created by the scientific agreements governing their use – a type of discourse anticipated by the natural numbers of ordinary speech and, in most instances, based upon them. Such a discourse produces a calculation, made for its own interest, or as a model, or with a view to eventual use; about the outside world it tells nothing. We may be sure of its correctness because it moves only within the verbal agreements upon which it is based. (Bloomfield 1939: 46) We are tacitly invited to conclude that the more a language approximates to

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mathematical notation, the more perfect it will be: an ideal fixed code in which misunderstanding is impossible. But there is more: We say that scientific discourse is translatable, and mean by this that not only the difference between languages but, within each language, the difference between operationally equivalent wordings has no scientific effect. (Bloomfield 1939: 47) In other words, the fixed code at which science aims is somehow able to override all linguistic diversity, because its definitions are based on universal truths that brook no denial. Those scientists who may have convinced themselves that they are operating linguistically in some such way as Bloomfield describes are, unfortunately, living in cloud-cuckoo land. For there neither is – nor could there be – any such universal linguistic code as the one they imagine. Why not? Let us go back to the issue of numbers and counting. The reason why there seems to be no satisfactory answer to the question of what constitutes counting, and hence when human numeracy began, is that when mathematicians start trying to explain the origin of mathematics, they often cease being mathematicians and try to set up as amateur semiologists. Their thinking at this level tends to be already flawed by their naive adoption of a fixedcode semantics. The paradigm case of a numerical expression they take to be a fixed-code item belonging to some language or other, such as the word three or soixante-dix. They assume that such expressions have a determinate meaning, because this is the condition on which signs are assumed to operate in a fixed code. Moreover, it fits in with their notion of mathematical truth, according to which an equation like ‘two plus two equal four’ has to be true for all times and places. It could hardly be so if its meaning were not fixed. An example of this way of thinking is provided by Raymond Wilder’s book Evolution of Mathematical Concepts (1968), where we find such pronouncements as the following: True counting is a process whereby a correspondence is set up between the objects of the collection to be counted and certain symbols, verbal or written. As practised today, the symbols used are the natural number symbols 1, 2, 3, and so on. But any other symbols will do [. . .]. Counting is, then, a symbolic process employed only by man, the sole symbolcreating animal. (Wilder 1968: 33) In a footnote, Wilder admits that some animals may be able to discriminate up to a certain point between numerically different sets of objects, but claims that ‘in the absence of a symbolic faculty, it can hardly be called counting’.

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Exactly how Wilder knows that animals have no ‘symbolic faculty’ is not clear, nor how he would explain the fact that chimpanzees can apparently be taught to count. But what is evident is that, according to Wilder’s semiology, counting presupposes a sign system and cannot by definition take place without one. Even more restrictive is the view expressed by another mathematician, Graham Flegg, for whom counting is an activity which is inseparable from speech. To be able to count, we must know a sequence of number-words and be able to relate these in their proper order to whatever is being counted. (Flegg 1983: 6) Number-words are patently envisaged by Flegg as linguistic signs and the reference to using them ‘in their proper order’ presumably means in accordance with their ‘proper’ meaning. Here again counting is being identified with the use of a fixed code. It is interesting to contrast this position with that of Lancelot Hogben, who invites us to see the beginning of mathematics in the following scenario. For my one deer you must give me three of your spearheads. The earliest men and women like ourselves lived about 25,000 years ago. They could say all this with their hands, simply by pointing one finger at the deer and three at the spearheads. The primitive way of counting with one finger for one thing and three fingers for three things was the only kind of arithmetic they knew. For thousands of years such people thought of any quantity greater than three as a heap or pile. (Hogben 1968: 7) This is a picture that does not presuppose any fixed code, and is thus somewhat more congenial to integrationist thinking. It shows how counting might have developed without the aid of words. Why so many of our ancestors apparently stopped at three and ignored their remaining fingers Hogben does not explain, and I shall come back to this problem shortly. However, the important point from an integrational perspective is that counting is seen as arising from an integration of activities between the participants. We are present at a negotiated interaction, out of which comes – if successful – an agreed exchange. This is the context in which the gestures acquire their significance and, simultaneously, their status as numerical signs. From an integrational perspective, therefore, whether a sign is a numeral and what numerical value it has depends on how it is being deployed in a particular context. The familiar forms that are commonly called ‘Arabic numerals’ do not have permanent values irrespective of the activities in which they feature semiologically. Thus, for instance, the sequence 1101 may be read

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as ‘one thousand, one hundred and one’; or it may, if we are using the binary system, be read as ‘thirteen’; or it may have no arithmetic value at all if it occurs as part of a telephone number or post code. The Arabic numerals, in short, do not constitute a script but a notation. (For discussion of this distinction, see Chapter 15 of Harris, R. 1995.) There remain two serious problems with Hogben’s story. One is that it seems to presuppose that pointing three fingers at something has a naturally determinate meaning; i.e. it means ‘three of those’. But this is questionable. The fallacy is demonstrated by the fact that, in some systems of ‘finger counting’, extending three fingers actually means ‘two’ (Dantzig 1938: 2). In other words, what is ‘counted’ is not the number of extended fingers but the number of folded fingers. This is a point of capital importance, demonstrating that there is no such thing as a ‘natural’ numerical symbolism. All counting – even finger counting – requires something more. For although the fingers of the human hand constitute an anatomical ‘given’, the order in which to count or group them is not. The biomechanical fact – having a hand with a certain complement of fingers – and the macrosocial fact – a community of people having this biomechanical fact in common – do not between them suffice to explain any known method of counting. All depends on the way the hand is used to integrate a whole range of activities. These patterns of integration are what establish finger-counting as a viable component of communication. When we realize this, the notion that counting started on the fingers begins to appear paradoxical. For identifying the first number, the cardinal ‘one’, involves subdividing a natural set of five and disregarding the anatomical differences between the members. However this is done mentally, it can only be done physically on the basis of grasping the complementarity between extension and concealment of different groups of the given five. Thus ‘one’ becomes ‘five-take-away-four’. To put the point more bluntly, in order to isolate ‘one’ you already need to be able to do the addition and substraction operations on a set of five. The cardinal numbers are integrational products of these activities, not their basis. Hogben’s brief snapshot of the interaction between his primitive traders already presupposes some prior set of activities in which the values of the cardinals were established. Integrationists would like to see the rest. But however we complete the scenario, the shibboleth about one-one correspondence has already been undermined. Pointing three fingers simultaneously at a group of objects is not the same thing as matching three separate fingers to three separate objects. Mathematicians are misled into assuming that one-toone correspondence is the basis of counting because that is how it looks from a modern point of view, when the number-words are seen primarily as part of a linguistic nomenclature. But the likelihood is that one-to-one correspondence

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is a much later and more sophisticated development, rather than the original counting procedure. Various strands of evidence point in this direction. There is, first, the evidence from children’s acquisition of number-words. The Danish linguist Otto Jespersen was perhaps the first to draw attention to the fact that often children can recite the series ‘one-two-three-four’ in the traditional order before they can actually apply it to individual objects in order to work out how many there are (Jespersen 1922: 119). What is confusing is that merely reciting the number-words is often called ‘counting’. ‘Can you count up to ten?’ is a question to which the child is expected to respond by reciting ‘One-two-three-fourfive-six-seven-eight-nine-ten’. But this performance has no arithmetic content, any more than reciting ‘A-B-C-D-E-F-G- . . .’ in response to the question ‘Do you know your alphabet?’ Second, an important clue to the origin of counting lies in the ubiquity of number-words whose morphological composition is based on addition. It is quite common, Flegg points out, to find languages in which the compositional pattern of the lower number-words is: 1. ‘one’, 2. ‘two’, 3. ‘two-one’, 4. ‘twotwo’. In English, the series above ‘twenty’ goes ‘twenty-one’, ‘twenty-two’, ‘twenty-three’, etc. in regular increments of units up to ‘thirty’. What is interesting in comparing various languages is not, as mathematicians suppose, what ‘base’ the system of number-words employs, but rather where the process of incremental addition starts. No language, it appears, has a word for ‘two’ which is ‘one-one’. And that seems significant. It points to the fact that pairs are not perceived as such through any process of one-one correlation, any more than the fact that there is only one apple in the bowl is a conclusion we arrive at by counting it, i.e. by putting the apple mentally in one-one correlation with something else. Logically, this would be a nonsense procedure, because in order to carry it out it would already be necessary to have identified the apple as a singleton in the first place. Both pairs and singletons are conspicuous in the world of Nature, but trios and quartets less so, and from five onwards the salience of specific numerical groupings diminishes rapidly. All this suggests that one-one correlation is not the basic human counting procedure, but a sophisticated analysis based on a more primitive psychology of group perception. Other linguistic evidence which points in this direction is that in some societies different sets of numerical expressions are employed, depending on what is to be counted. This exemplifies what SchmandtBesserat calls, not altogether felicitously, ‘concrete counting’. Concrete counting means that, in some cultures, the number words to render ‘one’, ‘two’, ‘three’, etc. were tied to concrete objects, resulting in sets of number words, or numerations, differing according to whether,

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for instance, men, canoes, or coconuts were being counted. (SchmandtBesserat 1992: 185) Among the examples of this phenomenon that Schmandt-Besserat cites are languages as diverse as those of the Fiji Islanders, the Tsimshians of British Columbia, and the Gilyak language of Mongolia, which ‘has no fewer than twenty-four classes of numbers’. It seems, therefore, that we are begging the question if we take one-one correlation as the universal basis for counting. On the contrary, there may be cultures in which it is by no means obvious what three canoes have in common with three coconuts. When all this is taken into account it suggests that the importance that modern mathematicians ascribe to one-one correspondence as the basis of counting rests on a double deception. The first involves looking at numeracy through the distorting lens of a semantics in which numbers are viewed as being primarily the meanings of number-words in a fixed code. The second is the ethnocentricity involved in taking the model language to be English or some other Western language, in which number-words are already geared to a counting operation which is neutral as to what is being counted. In short, ‘counting’ is already by implication decontextualized. Thus, pace Bloomfield, there is no universal basis on which mathematics is founded, nor any international scientific discourse that could be constructed upon such a foundation. Scientists who fail to see this are being blinded by their own unquestioning acceptance of the reocentric discourse with which they are professionally familiar, rather like the farmer who thought that pigs are rightly called ‘pigs’ (‘because they are such dirty animals’). The integrationist would see what is usually called ‘counting’ as being a relatively late development of a more basic communicational process. This process involves the contextualized integration of activities directed towards achieving an interactional agreement about exchange equivalences. Numerical signs are the communicational products of such activities. Numbers are the imaginary fixed-code correlates of such signs. The question of counting also touches upon a more fundamental tenet of integrational linguistics. This is the ‘principle of cotemporality’ (Harris, R. 1998: 81–5), which treats it as axiomatic that all signs are time-bound. Communication is a matter of integrating past experience with present experience and anticipated future experience. Thus a sense of time is essential to all forms of language. Without it, Homo sapiens would be an entirely different creature. And certainly a creature unable to count. Thus, depending on one’s theory of communication, there are two distinct ways of looking at the semantics of numeracy. One view is that numbers are the given meanings of certain words or other symbols. The alternative view is that number-words and numerical symbols of all kinds are the products of

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attempts to integrate various practical activities involving exchange of goods, measurement of land, purchase of objects, and similar enterprises. Which of these views we adopt makes a crucial difference to our conception of science. My view is that the second is on the right lines, while the first is an illusion fostered by a long-standing myth about language. *

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Science in the modern world presupposes precise and verifiable quantification, whether it be of time or of space, or of both. If you can go no further than saying ‘this often precedes that’, or ‘this distance is roughly equal to that’, then you cannot be a scientist. Standard chronology, standard weights and measures, are therefore seen as being essential. But few people are prepared to investigate the semiology underlying this notion. It is much easier to take standards for granted and not to question them. Twelve inches make a foot, and sixty seconds make a minute. Who dares query this orthodoxy? As an integrationist, I am prepared to entertain the subversive notion that the basis of the quantificational standards that are currently propagated in professional education and applied in every market-place in the world is a product of certain misconceptions about the way language works. For many people, this will be carrying linguistic scepticism too far; a rash excursion beyond what it is reasonable to assume. For whereas – it will be said – we may well doubt whether everyone has the same idea of what a word like democracy means, surely it beggars belief that we do not all agree about what the word three means. Is it not a powerful argument in favour of fixed-code semantics that languages do have coherently structured sets of number-words that facilitate accurate calculation? Must not anyone who casts doubt upon the very foundations of numeration be some kind of intellectual anarchist? I do not think so. On the contrary, I think that throwing up one’s hands in horror at this perceived extremism betokens a failure to come to terms with the communicational functions of numerals. Let me make it clear at this point in the discussion that I do not propose to try to convince the builders who are building an extension to my house that they need a university course in philosophy of mathematics before interpreting the figures that appear on their architectural plans. Nor shall I buttonhole my bank manager and try to persuade him of the error of his mathematical beliefs. As far as I am concerned he can entertain whatever beliefs he likes, provided he does not make a mess of my bank account. By the same token, I am not proposing some reform in the way such accounts are kept, any more than I am campaigning for a reform of the Gregorian calendar, or for changing the international date line. The issues I am concerned with are nevertheless semantic issues, and have been for centuries.

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Many eminent thinkers in the Western tradition, from Plato down to Frege, scratched their heads about how to give mathematics a philosophical basis that would ensure that statements like ‘two plus two equal four’ remained true for all time. This was because these thinkers had a certain concept of knowledge. It was intrinsic to this concept that undisputed knowledge and constant change were mutually incompatible. So whatever was constantly changing could not be known with certainty. Since they accepted that the material world was constantly changing, but wished to include mathematical truths among the eternal verities, they found themselves obliged to seek some explanation of how such truths could be established. Integrationists, by contrast, start from an entirely different assumption (sometimes called ‘Heraclitan’): namely, that such knowledge as we have is always of change. This applies to language as to everything else. A philosophy of language that fails to recognize this can only be an obstruction to knowledge. Plato’s solution was to posit a realm of ‘ideas’ or ‘forms’, lying beyond the world of ordinary human perception. Numbers were among the inhabitants of this realm. And for Plato this timeless, unchanging realm of forms contained all the eternal exemplars behind the fleeting appearances of the everyday world. In Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates argues that numbers are one thing we can never make a mistake about. This does not mean that we never make errors of addition or subtraction, or suppose there were just five people in the room when in fact there were seven. These everyday mistakes, however, are mistakes in the application of numbers to things in the external world. But when we consider numbers themselves, there is no possibility of any such error. It is impossible for anyone who mentally contemplates the numbers five and seven ‘in themselves’ to come to any other conclusion than that they add up to to twelve (Cornford 1935: 128–30). By Frege’s day, there had emerged a so-called ‘formalist’ theory of numbers. Frege, in his Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, quotes his contemporary Thomae as follows: For the formalist, arithmetic is a game with signs, which are called empty. That means they have no other content (in the calculating game) than they are assigned by their behaviour with respect to certain rules of combination (rules of the game). The chess player makes similar use of his pieces; he assigns them certain properties determining their behaviour in the game, and the pieces are only the external signs of this behaviour. (Frege 1960: 183–4) For linguists, this passage will evoke Saussure’s famous comparison between language and chess, which appeared in print a couple of decades later:

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But of all the comparisons one might think of, the most revealing is the likeness between what happens in a language and what happens in a game of chess. In both cases, we are dealing with a system of values and with modifications of the system. A game of chess is like an artificial form of what languages present in a natural form. (Saussure 1922: 125) Saussure’s chess analogy has been examined exhaustively by commentators. I shall draw attention to two points only, both of which have a bearing on the integrational interpretation of numerical signs. The first is that Saussure’s important distinction between what he calls ‘absolute arbitrariness’ and ‘relative arbitrariness’ is introduced by reference to French number-words. According to Saussure, the French word for ‘twenty’ (vingt) is an example of absolute arbitrariness. It is, to adopt Saussure’s alternative term, ‘unmotivated’. Whereas the word for ‘nineteen’ (dix-neuf) is ‘motivated’, or ‘relatively arbitrary’, because in it we recognize a combination of the words for ‘ten’ (dix) and ‘nine’ (neuf). Now it is possible to imagine a language in which all the number-words are unmotivated in Saussure’s sense. For example, let us suppose that we have a language in which (a) the words for ‘one’, ‘two’, ‘three’ and ‘four’ are morphologically simple and unrelated, (b) in which the word for any number higher than four is an unrelated term meaning ‘many’, and (c) in which the primary numberwords do not reappear in combinations like ‘two-one’ or ‘two-two’. But in reality it is difficult to find cases in which all three conditions obtain. In other words, in the great majority of languages the morphology of number-words seems to rely on the semiological phenomenon that Saussure called ‘relative arbitrariness’. Saussure, however, did not call linguistic signs ‘empty’: and this might seem at first to set his view at odds with that of the formalist mathematicians. I do not think it does, but it is important to understand why. When Frege inveighs against the formalists and claims that numerical signs are not empty but meaningful, what he is claiming is that these signs ‘express thoughts’. Frege rejects the chess analogy. He writes: an arithmetic with no thought as its content will also be without possibility of application. Why can no application be made of a configuration of chess pieces? Obviously, because it expresses no thought. If it did so and every chess move conforming to the rules corresponded to a transition from one thought to another, applications of chess would also be conceivable. Why can arithmetical equations be applied? Only because they express thoughts. [. . .] Now, it is applicability alone which elevates arithmetic from a game to the rank of a science. So applicability necessarily belongs to it. (Frege 1960: 187)

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Frege’s argument, it seems to me, does not invalidate the chess analogy. Frege’s thinking is itself shackled by one particularly influential version of fixed-code semantics. Frege conceives of meaning as something which lies outside the signs themselves and their rules of combination. He has not got as far as the Saussurean concept of valeur, which arises from the internal structure of the sign system itself. If this is right, then Saussure – and this is my second point – was, in Frege’s terms, a ‘formalist’. In fact, a formalist to the nth degree. For his formalism embraced not only the interpretation of number-words but the entire vocabulary. What the mathematicians of Frege’s day called ‘formalism’ the linguists who were the intellectual heirs of Saussure called ‘structuralism’. According to Saussure, a word gets its meaning from its contrasts with other words within the same linguistic system. This is, precisely, the point of the chess analogy. The rules hold only for, and within, the game. La langue est une forme et non une substance. For the integrationist, there are lessons of considerable significance to be drawn here. We see that the opposition between formalism and antiformalism (of which Frege was one champion) is a clash of explanations that can only arise within the framework of a fixed-code view of signs. For fixedcode theory demands determinacy of meaning: it does not matter whether we are dealing with mathematical signs, or traffic signs, or any other kind of sign. But the mathematical sign is a paradigm case if we accept, with Plato, that mathematical truths are eternal verities that cannot be affected by circumstances. *

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Let us now consider the dilemma of the fixed-code theorist in more detail. The signs of the code have to be fixed in at least two dimensions, these being what are commonly called ‘form’ and ‘meaning’. Each sign must have a fixed form because otherwise communication would break down when participants found themselves confusing one message with another. Likewise, each sign must have a fixed meaning, because otherwise, even if the message had been identified, participants would be unable to interpret it with certainty. John Stuart Mill makes semantic determinacy the first requisite for any ‘philosophical language’ (Mill 1884: IV.4.1). Numerical signs are no exception: on the contrary, they would appear to provide paradigm examples for the fixed-code theorist. Unless signs like ‘1’, ‘2’, ‘3’, ‘4’, etc. have fixed meanings, how can the scientist make sense of ‘1 + 2 = 3’, ‘4 − 2 = 2’, or any similar calculations? The question therefore arises: where does this dual fixity of form and meaning come from? Even if we can suppose that fixity of form has somehow been

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established (as many thinkers seem to have assumed without explaining how), it is by no means obvious where we are to look for fixity of meaning. The most popular answer throughout the Western tradition has been to seek fixity of meaning in the external world. According to received wisdom, a word gets its meaning by ‘standing for’ something. It is a communicational surrogate or substitute for that which it replaces (just as a traveller’s cheque functions as a replacement for a certain amount of cash, or a model of a building for the building). Thus the word butter, it is said, stands for a certain kind of fatty substance made from milk or cream, the word melt for a certain process by which solids become liquids, the word when for a certain temporal relation, the word hot for a certain condition of temperature, and so on. Combinations of words, such as Butter melts when hot, stand for certain states of affairs or events in the world. One can indeed see butter melting when it is hot. This is straightforward reocentric semantics. If reocentrism to yield fixity of meanings, it can only do so on the supposition that this world of external things, from which words derive their meanings, remains constant. Otherwise, meanings would be changing all the time. In the case of numerals, however, reocentric semantics encounters a problem; namely, that there are no obvious ‘real world’ entities which stand as their meanings in the way that butter can be regarded as designating a certain fatty substance, or melts as designating a certain kind of process. It was the search for fixed meanings that drove Plato to postulate an invisible world of eternal forms or ideas. He realized that the perceived world of everyday experience was constantly changing and concluded that behind or beyond it there must be another world of unchanging entities and relations. This invisible world was Plato’s guarantee both of the possibility of genuine knowledge and, simultaneously, of the possibility of genuine communication. This did not mean that Plato abandoned reocentrism. What he did was transfer its basis from the changing world of everyday life to a hypothetical world of changeless entities and relations. This many people regard as an unsatisfactory solution; and rightly so, because it merely invents a mythical realm to supply a fixity that our more familiar world cannot provide. What is relevant to the present discussion is this: the whole problem and Plato’s unsatisfactory solution are generated by acceptance of a fixed-code view of languages. It is a measure of the power that this idea exerts over human minds that a thinker of Plato’s ability should be driven to these expedients. It is no less a measure of that power that, today, more than two millennia after Plato’s death, his reocentric ‘solution’ to the fixed-code problem is still taken seriously by Western philosophers, and, in particular by Western mathematicians. None of them can conceive of a universe in which the basic laws of arithmetic ‘do not work’. To all intents and

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purposes they treat numerical expressions as part of a language designed by some superhuman agency. As one of them once put it, ‘God made the mathematics and man made the rest’. (The saying is attributed to Leopold Kronecker.) *

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From an integrationist perspective, the philosophy of mathematics is riddled with futile debates (logicists versus formalists, formalists versus intuitionists, etc.) that centre on trying to ‘account for’ the allegedly fundamental and indubitable status of mathematical truths. Futile not only because nothing of the slightest practical importance hinges on the outcome, but because the solutions variously offered all involve attempts to translate the problem from one fixed code into another. Accordingly, the question of how numbers relate to fixed codes in the first place is begged from the outset, as is that of the relationship between numbers and numerical signs. Thus, for example, according to one philosopher of mathematics we can clarify the concept of number by starting from our understanding of the operation of counting. In a simple case of carefully counting a collection of objects, we perhaps look at and point to each one successively, and with each of these directions of the attention we think of or pronounce one of a standard series of symbols (numerals) in its place in a standard ordering of these symbols. We are careful to reach each of these objects once and only once in the process. We thus set up a one-to-one correspondence between the objects and a certain segment of the series of numerals. (Parsons 1967: 194) However, nothing in this account can be said to clarify ‘the concept of number’. The account only raises further questions. How did we know which symbol to ‘think of or pronounce’ at each stage in the counting? Where did this ‘standard series of symbols’ come from? How did it acquire a ‘standard ordering’? The author of the above passage, Charles Parsons, evidently does not expect his readers to raise such questions, for he makes no attempt to pursue them. In short, the prior existence of a fixed code of numerical signs is taken for granted as the basis of explanation, and the proposed explanation consists of nothing more than giving an example of how to use this code. The vacuity of the clarification on offer becomes apparent on considering that it would be perfectly possible to set up a one-one correspondence between the objects in the collection and any other segment of an ordered series of symbols (e.g. letters of the alphabet and combinations thereof). So what makes the numeral series different? Answer: each symbol in the series

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corresponds to a number. But number was the concept we were trying to clarify. We are back where we started. All we have learned, if this example is to be regarded as typical and Parsons’ analysis of it correct, is that counting is impossible without a fixed code of numerical signs. Is there any enlightenment to be gleaned by considering the numerical symbols themselves? Could a numeral take any arbitrary form (provided it were different from that of other numerals in the same code)? Not according to Parsons, who rules out having a numeral series that begins with one stroke for the first number (‘one’) and then proceeds by adding a second stroke for ‘two’, a third stroke for ‘three’, and so on. A token-iconic series of symbols of this type will not do, argues Parsons, because in the case of large numbers represented by a row of strokes ‘one would have to count them to learn what the number was’. The reason adduced is odd, given that, according to Parsons’ view of the matter, counting simply is putting objects in one-one correspondence with an ordered series of numerical symbols. Furthermore, if Parsons is right, the problem with ‘reading’ the sign for a large number expressed in a token-iconic system would recur indefinitely. A second counting would need to be followed by a third, and that by a fourth, and so on. There would never be any way in which the counting operation could be completed. So numerical signs, we are invited to conclude, cannot be based on any token-iconic principle. In other words, what must be ruled out is any system in which there is a one-one correspondence between components of the symbols and items to be counted. Bizarre; because the one thing an ideal numeral system seems to need is a guaranteed one-one correspondence between the symbols and the numbers. And token-iconicity is perhaps the most obvious way of achieving that. This is bad enough, but there is worse to come when we realize that a very similar objection about countability applies at one remove to our familiar set of Arabic numerals. Parsons does not appear to notice this, but Arabic numerals operate on the structural principle that Saussure called ‘relative arbitrariness’. (‘19’ is composed of sequenced digits, ‘1’ and ‘9’, which are themselves ‘absolutely’ arbitrary). This means that for very large numbers we have very long strings of digits. To interpret those strings, we have to start at the terminal point and work backwards to assign to each digit its proper numerical value in the series. Thus, to assure ourselves that the figure ‘4’ in a given series represents four million rather than forty million, we have to count back six places from the final digit. Doubtless many of us can do this ‘at a glance’. But no one can do it ‘at a glance’ when the figure in question stands twenty-seven places back from the end. We have to resort to ‘counting’ the digits themselves. The conclusion seems clear. If checking one-one correspondence with numerical symbols is what counting is, and if symbols that themselves may

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need counting are inadmissible as numerals, then very large numbers cannot be counted either on the token-iconic or on the Arabic system. This argument could be pursued further to show that no imaginary set of numerals that relies on generating ever-longer strings of symbols with fixed place values in conformity with the Saussurean principle of relative arbitrariness will be able to survive Parson’s objection. But that, in effect, imposes an implausible universal constraint on the form of numerical signs and the codes to which they belong. So either there is something wrong with this account of counting, or else very large numbers are uncountable. In the former case, we are no nearer to elucidating ‘the concept of number’. In the latter case, modern mathematics is a discipline which claims to be able to do the impossible. What is wrong with the whole approach is very obvious from an integrationist perspective. Not only is every question about numbers posed in terms of pre-existing fixed codes, but the question of clarifying the concept of number ‘itself’ is decontextualized to a point at which abstract explanations begin to chase their own abstract tails. *

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According to John Stuart Mill, the importance of mathematics in science is its potential for transforming the nature of an inquiry: the grand agent for transforming experimental into deductive sciences is the science of number. The properties of number, alone among all known phenomena, are, in the most rigorous sense, properties of all things whatever. All things are not coloured, or ponderable, or even extended; but all things are numerable. And if we consider this science in its whole extent, from common arithmetic up to the calculus of variations, the truths already ascertained seem all but infinite, and admit of indefinite extension. These truths, though affirmable of all things whatever, of course apply to them only in respect of their quantity. But if it comes to be discovered that variations of quality in any class of phenomena correspond regularly to variations of quantity either in those same or in some other phenomena; every formula of mathematics applicable to quantities which vary in that particular manner becomes a mark of a corresponding general truth respecting the variations in quality which accompany them; and the science of quantity being (as far as any science can be) altogether deductive, the theory of that particular kind of qualities becomes, to this extent, deductive likewise. (Mill 1884: II.4.7) ‘Becoming deductive’ is for Mill a good move in any science. But it can

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hardly be supposed to be a bonus that would carry much weight with the general public. Human beings do not, on the whole, demand that propositions be arrived at deductively (even if they understand what that means), but simply that, however arrived at, they be trustworthy for all practical purposes. It is certainly unclear why anyone should trust Mill’s account of the matter. For his basic claim that ‘all things are numerable’ is itself open to obvious objections. There is no way I can count the clouds in this morning’s overcast sky, although clouds there certainly are, and many of them. There is no way anyone can tell us exactly how many crumbs there are in a loaf of bread. Is this a single corridor or a series of connected corridors? When it comes to less ‘concrete’ items than these, the problems escalate. How many ideas have I had today? How many mistakes have I made? Furthermore, what Mill holds out with his left hand is speedily withdrawn by his right. For although ‘all things are numerable’, the truths of arithmetic ‘apply to them only in respect of their quantity’; which sounds suspiciously like ‘tell us nothing whatever about them except what can be translated into numerical symbols of some kind’. But what does that information consist in? If we knew the answer, we would be in some position to judge what the ‘science of number’ can do for us and what it cannot. But here Mill, like so many others, just goes round in a circle. As regards explaining the universal applicability of arithmetic, Mill is a prisoner of his own inductivism, because he believes it is conditional on the uniformity of Nature. Of this uniformity there can be no guarantee, since according to Mill that postulate is no more than a generalization from human experience, as are all inductions. Why are mathematical certainty, and the evidence of demonstration, common phrases to express the very highest degree of assurance attainable by reason? Why are mathematics by almost all philosophers, and (by some) even those branches of natural philosophy which, through the medium of mathematics, have been converted into deductive sciences, considered to be independent of the evidence of experience and observation, and characterised as systems of Necessary Truth? The answer I conceive to be, that this character of necessity ascribed to the truths of mathematics, and even [. . .] the peculiar certainty attributed to them is an illusion. (Mill 1884: II.5.1) With that conclusion an integrationist will certainly agree. What Mill fails to see is that the illusion is specifically a semantic illusion. *

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An interesting example of the illusion in action occurred in the mid-twentieth century when scientists first became seriously interested in the question of whether there were extra-terrestrial intelligent beings, and, if so, how we should try to communicate with them. They construed this problem in accordance with their discipline’s own traditional view of communication. In other words, we had to find a ‘language’ that we shared with these extraterrestrials, who probably had no knowledge of our planet at all, let alone many of its global features such as pop music, income tax and Coca-Cola. So here the notion that a language could be based on recognition of a common environment would no longer serve. Something more basic was required. As Wilder reports in his book Evolution of Mathematical Concepts, the consensus of opinion was that one should try sending out ‘pulses to communicate prime numbers, or some simple arithmetical problems’ (Wilder 1968: 34). In a paper to the British Interplanetary Society in 1952, Lancelot Hogben assumed that numbers have properties that ‘do not vary from planet to planet’. He proposed as a first message into space the equation: ‘I plus II plus III equals IIIIII’. This was to be transmitted by a combination of dashes and flashes. Hogben thought that when the recipients of this signal had ‘heard this equation, repeated often enough, they ought to understand its meaning’ (Wilder 1968: 35). Sadly, what this first essay in the field of universal communication exposes is the poverty of terrestrial semantics. How the recipients of the signal were supposed to work out the meaning of the signs for ‘plus’ and ‘equals’ remained unexplained. Presumably by asking themselves what would make sense of the linkage between the four sets of numerals. That presupposes that the extra-terrestrials had identified the numerals from their internal structure, which is simple iteration. But there is no interplanetary reason to suppose that would be obvious. Even in human communication, incremental duplication does not invariably express addition. More fundamentally still, what could convey to the recipient on some distant planet the idea that this whole message was supposed to be an arithmetic equation? It is not, after all, the most urgent kind of message that an isolated community might wish to convey to the rest of the universe. ‘Hello. How are you?’ or ‘Is there anybody out there?’ or just ‘Help!’ might be thought to be more plausible candidates. Even on our own planet, who supposes that if there are two otherwise unexplained loud noises this means that someone somewhere is trying to convey an arithmetic message about one plus one? Underlying Hogben’s first broadcast to the rest of the universe is an unlisted set of assumptions about history. In fact, his chosen message is a sophisticated extrapolation from various communicational practices with which Hogben is acquainted. But all of those practices that Hogben is familiar with have a human history. They did not fall unaccountably out of a clear blue

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intergalactic sky. So the notion that unknown creatures somewhere out there will immediately understand the message tacitly presupposes that those creatures have a history in crucial respects comparable to ours. If numbers are the basis of science, and if numbers are somehow eternal and immutable, then it follows that there is indeed a deep and irreconcilable antithesis between science and history. For there is no way that numbers could have a history, even a transgalactic history. The notion does not make sense, if we agree that only things subject to change can have a history. Paradoxical as it may seem, this is confirmed when we look at what are called ‘histories’ of mathematics. What we find, in effect, are histories of notations. And notations are human inventions, sets of signs dependent on cultural practices, such as writing, which do indeed have a history (Harris, R. 2000). The only coherent alternative to supposing that numbers are transcendental, sempiternal realities, which preceded the first human beings and will still be real when the last human being dies, is the integrationist alternative, which treats numbers as constructs emerging from the processes of human communication. In this respect numbers are no different from many other by-products of human communication. They have no privileged status. *

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Some mathematicians are inclined to brush aside the problem of numbers as an irrelevance. It may trouble philosophers but causes no trouble for mathematicians. Thus, for example, we are told that there certainly are philosophers who take seriously the question of whether numbers exist, and this distinguishes them from mathematicians, who either find it obvious that numbers exist or do not understand what is being asked. (Gowers 2002: 17) I suspect that ‘the mathematicians’, as here described, may in the end be on the integrationist side. It may just be ‘the philosophers’ and ‘the scientists’ who provide the disgruntled opposition. For it looks as though, insofar as reocentric scientific definitions incorporate mathematical terms, including number-words such as three or nineteen, or corresponding Arabic numerals, scientists are in the awkward position of not knowing how to explain what they mean. This position, it might be said, although admittedly uncomfortable, is not an impossible one. There has in fact been a noticeable trend in philosophy of science to admit that few if any of us know ‘scientifically’ what we are talking about. It began with Quine’s excursions into the field of semantics, when he remarked that Greek astronomers had no idea what the stars ‘really were’, but

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nevertheless managed to make accurate measurements of their positions in the night sky. The inference here, presumably, is that ignorance of what the stars ‘really were’ did not invalidate the Greek measurements. And the measurements eventually contributed to a ‘true’ understanding of the stars. Subsequently something like this was elevated into a principle of scientific knowledge. Putnam calls it the ‘Principle of Reasonable Ignorance’ (Putnam 1975: 278). What it amounts to is that, in the scientist’s account of the universe, you are allowed to use a word sensibly and reasonably even if you do not fully comprehend what it stands for. According to Putnam: a speaker may ‘have’ a word, in the sense of possessing normal ability to use it in discourse, and not know the mechanism of reference of that term, explicitly or even implicitly. ‘Knowing the meaning’ of a word in the sense of being able to use it is implicitly knowing something; but it isn’t knowing nearly as much as philosophers tend to assume. I can know the meaning of the word ‘gold’ without knowing, explicitly or implicitly, the criteria for being gold (contrary to John Locke), and without having any very clear idea at all just how the word is tied to whatever it is tied to. (Putnam 1975: 278) The short answer to Putnam is that if your ideas about what the word gold is ‘tied to’ are as vague as all that, you may well end up in debt or in gaol or both. Particularly if combined with equally vague ideas about what the Arabic numerals are ‘tied to’ and the significance of the noughts at the end of figures on cheques. It would be difficult to beat Putnam’s ‘Principle of Reasonable Ignorance’ as a philosophical non-contribution to semantics. What it tells us is that reocentrism can be saved in the face of all ignorance, no matter how profound. All that remains is that the sign must somehow be ‘tied to’ something. What that something is does not seem to matter. That might pass as acceptable semantic doctrine in the philosopher’s classroom, but it will not pass in the laboratory or even in the local grocer’s shop. All these reocentric muddles can be avoided if we abandon reocentric semantics en bloc in favour of integrational semantics. A much more plausible account of numerical signs immediately becomes available. Their value depends on the context. When 554256 functions as a telephone number, it has no arithmetic value at all. But when integrated into certain types of operation it does. The basic types of operation involved are calculation and measurement (to be considered in Chapter 7); and the reason why numerical signs then acquire specific contextual values is that this is required in order that the integration of activities can proceed and be successfully completed. The social utility of these activities is thus the ultimate reason for the apparent semiological stability of this type of sign and its incorporation into pedagogic

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programmes of instruction and other traditional practices. There is no need for hypostatized entities called ‘numbers’, whether of the Platonic variety or any other, in order to provide these signs with meanings. The context of their occurrence already does that; and should it fail, then we are indeed at a loss to know what they mean.

7 Science and common sense

Arithmetic plays a key part in the thinking of the continuity theorist. For it is tempting to assume that one thing scientific language and ordinary language will always have in common is the semantics of numerical expressions, or at least those employed in elementary calculations. Thus a scientist does not have to ‘translate’ the figures in a statement such as ‘Sounds with frequencies between 1000 hertz and 5000 hertz are louder than sounds of the same intensity at higher or lower frequencies’; for they are already comprehensible to the lay reader, even though the term hertz may not be. This difference is very relevant to the thesis of those who maintain that science incurs the responsibility of making its findings available in a language the lay public can understand. There is nowadays much talk of ‘bridging the communication barrier’ (Cotgreave 2003: 134). In his book Physics and Philosophy, Sir James Jeans wrote: If we are to explain the workings of an organization or a machine in a comprehensible way, we must speak to our listeners in a language they understand, and in terms of ideas with which they are familiar – otherwise our explanation will mean nothing to them. (1942: 10) This provides a seemingly uncontroversial starting point for explicating the notion of a ‘communication barrier’. But there are actually two interrelated problems here. One, that Jeans mentions, is that explanations may be meaningless because of lack of familiarity with scientific terminology and ideas. But there is also a complementary type of barrier, which arises when the language and ideas familiar to the lay public include notions that the scientist feels obliged to call in question. First indications of serious disquiet about the semantics of science came when scientists themselves began to realize that what they reported or hypothesized about Nature conflicted with statements hitherto regarded as unassailable. This emerged with claims about matters not immediately

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noticeable to the lay observer, but only to scientists using instruments of their own devising. Two kinds of claims have to be distinguished. On the one hand, there were claims about things and events on a scale too small to be seen (by the lay observer). On the other hand, there were claims about things and events on a scale too large to be seen. The classic example, again, involves Galileo. The story that led up to Galileo’s (alleged) sotto voce pronouncement ‘Eppur si muove’ is too wellknown to be repeated here. Nor is this the occasion to delve into the more controversial aspects of Galileo’s clash with Rome. But it is worth pointing out the role which that story (doubtless fabricated) played in the rhetoric of science. Set against a magnificent backdrop of humanity’s place in the universe, it exemplifies how time-honoured linguistic usage can be called to account in the latest court of science. In the same stroke, it casts the scientist in the role of someone dedicated not only to discovering the truth but to telling it, and in public. Telling it in public requires a language the public can understand. That is the point of ‘Eppur si muove’. Galileo, even though muttering to himself, did not trot out some complicated mathematical formula based on his own astronomical observations. ‘Eppur si muove’ manifests Galileo’s commitment to semantic continuity: it was a statement that even the least educated Italian could understand. But at the same time, in making it, Galileo challenged the very definitions of terms designating the familiar heavenly bodies as bodies ‘revolving about the earth’. Here, in embryo, we have the archetypal scenario that modern science was to adopt in its dealings with the rest of the linguistic community, including society’s religious authorities. The scientist says to the non-scientist (Inquisitorial or not): ‘You can prefer to believe whatever you like, and describe it however you like; but I really know.’ This sets science on a potential collision course both with traditional authority and with lay semantics as well. If Galileo’s telescope had merely discovered a new mountain range, or even a new comet, that could easily have been accommodated linguistically by coining a new name. It would have ruffled no theological feathers. What Galileo is proposing, however, is not a new verb of motion to designate some special relationship between the earth and various celestial bodies. Far from it. ‘Eppur si muove’ states a position in which the familiar verb ‘to move’ is apparently reaffirmed in its pre-Galilean linguistic role. But that is in some sense a linguistic illusion; because if Galileo’s substantive claim is upheld, there is no way that the use of the verb in question can carry on quite as before. What is being questioned is the whole astronomical paradigm of ‘rest’ versus ‘movement’, in which the supposedly motionless earth played a key role; and, simultaneously, the way the observable universe should be described in lay language. The public may not understand the Copernican

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mathematics, but they are quite familiar with the verb ‘to move’. What is being ‘moved’, at Galileo’s insistence, is the location of human kind in relation to the rest of the cosmos and, simultaneously, human understanding of it. From the Church’s point of view, this ‘movement’ was unacceptable because it undermined the authority of the Bible. From an integrationist point of view, ‘Eppur si muove’ integrates at one stroke Galileo’s own observations with a whole complex of previous activities and speculations in the field of astronomy, and thus contributes to changing the way the solar system was discussed in Renaissance Italy and elsewhere. However, the point might be put another way. Galileo and the Church came into conflict not so much because they had different models of celestial mechanics but because they shared the same old reocentric model of semantics. Its basis was plainly Aristotelian. For if you believe that the world is the same for all observers, you cannot afford to let one person say ‘X is observably the case’ and another person to say ‘X is not observably the case’. One of them has to be wrong. That is the consequence of adopting a reocentric account of the meanings of words. Science, then, in the person of Galileo, stood ready to challenge everyday language and established usage, at least as applied to astronomical truths. Perhaps Galileo did not see it in quite that light, and perhaps no one outside the circle of ecclesiastical authorities was very worried anyway. Even if it turned out to be right that the earth did move, no one was going to fall off into space as a result. In some ways, the debate between Galileo and his adversaries provides an example avant la lettre of Saussure’s contention that languages are quite independent of any attempt to apply them to ‘reality’. You could say (with Galileo) that the earth moves, or you could say (with his adversaries) that it does not move. But that did not affect the semantic assumption that both possibilities were catered for by the language (Latin, Italian, English, as you wish) in which they were formulated. The language always lets you off the hook by allowing a distinction between what seems to be so and what is actually the case. In this sense the lay observer was always the archetypal relativist. Once you realize that, for everyday purposes, it does not matter whether science proclaims something that conflicts with your own observation and experience, you are well on the theoretical road to semantic discontinuity. You can say that your everyday ‘universe of discourse’ is not that of Galileo and his fellow scientists. Later, when you have worked out that maybe Galileo was right after all, you can always shift your semantic allegiance. Once you start doing that, however, you are on a slippery linguistic slope. You have in effect capitulated in the linguistic battle with science. As a humble lay observer, you never quite know where to draw the line at any moment between scientific hypotheses and scientific ‘facts’. As Lewis Wolpert points out in The Unnatural

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Nature of Science, it is doubtful whether even one person in 100,000 who believes that the earth goes round the sun could ‘give sound reasons for their conviction’ since ‘the evidence and the arguments for such a belief are in fact quite complex’ (Wolpert 1992: x). The particular case of the earth going round the sun is not an exception. It is difficult to disagree with Wolpert’s conclusion that ‘many people accept the ideas of science because they have been told that these ideas are true rather than because they understand them’. That has been going on for centuries: it accounts in part for the prestige of science in the modern world, as it accounted for the prestige of the Church in the Middle Ages, which likewise purveyed implausible doctrines. In neither case did people fully understand what they were told to believe. They believed it nevertheless; and in some cases all the more so because it appeared to be unbelievable. *

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The semantic perturbations caused by Galileo were minor compared to those caused by Einstein three centuries later. Galileo questioned accepted ways of talking about the location and movement of certain large bodies in space. Einstein questioned accepted ways of talking about the space-time framework itself. Writing in 1927, P. W. Bridgman, himself a distinguished physicist, described Einstein’s achievement in the following terms: Before Einstein, an ever increasing number of experimental facts concerning bodies in rapid motion required increasingly complicated modifications in our naïve notions in order to preserve self-consistency, until Einstein showed that everything could be restored again to a wonderful simplicity by a slight change in some of our fundamental concepts. (Bridgman 1927: viii) Whether the change can reasonably be called ‘slight’ is debatable. To speak of slight changes in concepts so fundamental as space and time verges on oxymoron. However, Bridgman goes on to make the point that the relevant experiments are ‘concerned with things so small as to be forever beyond the possibility of direct experience’. As a result ‘we have the problem of translating the evidence of experiment into another language’ (Bridgman 1927: viii. My italics.). Bridgman distinguishes this from ‘the problem of understanding the translated experimental evidence’. This latter problem arises because the experimental facts are so utterly different from those of our ordinary experience that not only do we apparently have to give up generalizations

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from past experience as broad as the field equations of electro-dynamics, for instance, but it is even being questioned whether our ordinary forms of thought are applicable in the new domain [. . .]. (Bridgman 1927: ix) The first point to be noted is that Bridgman’s approach to evaluating Einstein’s revolution is itself based implicitly on the assumptions of reocentric semantics. While Bridgman admits as ‘the merest truism’ that no understanding of Nature is possible without the intervention of human ‘mental processes’, and accepts that ‘the nature of our thinking mechanism essentially colors any picture that we can form of nature’, he insists on ruling out inquiry into such matters. Instead, he proposes to proceed on the basis of ‘our common sense judgment that there is a world external to us’ and to ‘limit as far as possible our inquiry to the behavior and interpretation of this “external” world’ (Bridgman 1927: xi). Here we see reocentric thinking at its most obdurate. The key problem for Bridgman is this. New experiments on what happens in realms beyond direct human observation tell us the world is not as we always thought it to be and described it (at the human, observational level). How can we reform or extend our language so as to bring language and world into alignment again? The assumption, self-evidently, is that no possibility exists of altering the world so as to make it better fit the language we already have. *

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Underlying Bridgman’s problem is a more basic difficulty that A. S. Eddington, an eminent Cambridge scientist, put trenchantly in his Gifford Lectures of 1927, when he spoke of living in a world of ‘duplicate’ objects. He prepared his lectures by sitting in two chairs, at two tables, and writing with two pens. One set of objects was long familiar to him from sense experience. Table No.1 was an object that could be seen, touched, moved and found to be coloured, hard and durable. But it was quite unlike its alter ego, Table No. 2. Table No. 2 is my scientific table. It is a more recent acquaintance and I do not feel so familiar with it. It does not belong to the world previously mentioned – that world which spontaneously appears around me when I open my eyes [. . .]. My scientific table is mostly emptiness. Sparsely scattered in that emptiness are numerous electric charges rushing about with great speed; but their combined bulk amounts to less than a billionth of the bulk of the table itself. Notwithstanding its strange construction it turns out to be an entirely efficient table. It supports my writing paper as satisfactorily as table No. 1; for when I lay the paper on it the little electric

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particles with their headlong speed keep on hitting the underside, so that the paper is maintained in shuttlecock fashion at a nearly steady level. (Eddington 1928: xii) The co-existence of Eddington’s two tables would not, perhaps, give rise to a semantic problem if they could be kept separate. But, as Eddington observes: I need not tell you that modern physics has by delicate test and remorseless logic assured me that my second scientific table is the only one which is really there – wherever “there” may be. (Eddington 1928: xiv) Could it not be that Eddington’s two tables were no more than ‘aspects’ or ‘interpretations’ of one and the same table? Eddington thought that doubtless they could be ‘identified after some fashion’. But – and the but was crucially important – any such identification was ‘outside the scope of physics’ (Eddington 1928: xiv). In other words, we cannot just assume semantic continuity. Initially, at least, semantic discontinuity has to be the working hypothesis. *

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Seen from this perspective, Bridgman’s problem is acute. If the whole vocabulary of science (or at least of physics) has to be restructured, we must first understand exactly what was wrong in toto with the old reocentric basis. Only then can we tackle the task of linguistic reform. But Einstein was not in the business of piecemeal reform. It was not a question of adding to an existing vocabulary in order to accommodate new items in Nature recently discovered (e.g. new chemical elements, new particles, new biological species). Something much more far-reaching was being proposed. The Newtonian spatio-temporal framework was being thrown out altogether. As Bridgman points out, Newton explicitly rejected everyday, commonsense conceptions of time and space, because ‘the vulgar conceive those quantities under no other notions but from the relation they bear to sensible objects’ (Bridgman 1927: 4). In their place, Newton set up ‘Absolute, True and Mathematical’ correlates. But according to the empiricist Bridgman, this will not do: it is ‘a task for experiment’ to discover whether such concepts ‘correspond to anything in nature’. In the case of Newton’s definition of absolute time, ‘we find nothing in nature with such properties’. The claim that it is ‘a task for experiment’ (i.e. for science) leaves a certain air of paradox hanging over Bridgman’s initial willingness to accept ‘our common sense judgment’ about the reality of the external world. For it is unclear how anyone could set up an experiment to determine whether the

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external world exists. Our commonsense judgment about the reality of that world – contrary to what was claimed by philosophers such as Carnap and Kuhn (discussed later) – cannot be divorced from our commonsense judgment about its particular items of natural furniture and their properties. We cannot separate out the question of whether that whole world exists from such questions as whether this particular tree exists, how tall it is, and whether its leaves are green; and whether at this moment it is or is not raining, whether rain falls or rises, makes the grass wet, etc. In short, there is no external world devoid of particular worldly contents. The commonsense view of the former is also the commonsense view of the latter. In Newton’s dismissal of the ‘vulgar’ conceptions of time and space we seem to hear echoes of Aristotle’s mistrust of the evidence of the senses. In Einstein’s thinking, where the Newtonian absolutes are rejected, a more subtle semantics emerges. For example, if we re-examine Einstein’s account of dropping a stone from a moving train, we find that two differently placed lay observers give conflicting accounts of the object’s trajectory. The assumption underlying Einstein’s narrative is that, somehow, this cannot be right. The conflict cannot be allowed to stand: there is a puzzle that must be resolved. How did it arise in the first place? Should the blame be laid at the door of the senses? To one observer’s eyes, the trajectory looked like a straight line. To another observer’s eyes, the trajectory looked like a parabola. Einstein’s way of discussing this offers an excellent example of what I described in my Introduction as a semantic ‘time-lag’. It reveals a groundbreaking scientist searching for some way of coping with the awkward fact that, for his purposes, the language of science – in his case the language of classical physics – is out of date. (I do not think he saw exactly why it was out of date: but that is a different question.) The radical move in Einstein’s treatment of the episode is this. Instead of trying to account for the differences between what the trajectory ‘looked like’ on the basis of some theory of optics, which would explain how the eye was deceived into confusing a straight line with a parabola, or vice versa, Einstein proposes that both were right. There was no deception. The human eye was not defective. So the apparently conflicting descriptions do not conflict after all. Such a proposal drives a cart and horses through traditional reocentric assumptions about language and the ‘external’ world. Pace Aristotle, the world was not identical for both observers. This solution of the puzzle has semantic implications that are very farreaching. Einstein proposes that there was no such thing as ‘an independently existing trajectory’. But in that case it makes sense to ask: ‘Was there an independently existing stone?’. Einstein draws back from inviting his reader to conclude that the stone was an illusion too. We are not asked to believe that there were actually two stones,

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one per trajectory. Nor that they were related to each other like Eddington’s two desks. In any case, if our illusion was that of believing in a single stone when in fact there were two, that would rob Einstein’s example of all its scientific weight. In other words, it is essential for Einstein’s rhetorical purposes that his reader cling to the notion of a single independent stone but question the notion of a single independent trajectory. It is at this point that semantic questions begin to demand attention. What does trajectory mean? A dictionary definition of trajectory reads: ‘the path described by a projectile flying or an object moving under the action of given forces’ (Concise Oxford Dictionary, 8th edn). The definition is manifestly reocentric: it is the actual path of the moving object that is designated by the word thus defined. But this is not how it works in Einstein’s universe of discourse, where we slide imperceptibly from a reocentric to a psychocentric semantics of trajectory. The trajectory in question is first introduced as what the observer sees or appears to see; and different observers have different visual expriences. To this Einstein then opposes the notion of what he calls ‘an independently existing trajectory’. But since there is only one stone, presumably it could not have followed two different paths from the hand to the point at which it hit the ground. When Einstein claims that there is no such thing as an independently given trajectory, what he says is false on a reocentric definition of the term trajectory. For there must have been a trajectory even if no one had been watching (unless we have to send Einstein’s stone to accompany the famous Berkeleyan tree that just ceased to be when there was no one about in the quad). What Einstein says is true only if we assume trajectory stipulated to mean something like ‘apparent path’. But then the claim falls flat. Instead of capturing some new discovery in the domain of physics, it sounds suspiciously like a tautology. For if the term trajectory is defined by reference to what it looks like to an observer, it does not require great mathematical insight to conclude that there is no such thing as an observer-independent trajectory. This is not a truth of physics but a truth of semantics. To put it in less flattering terms, Einstein is playing games of his own with the meaning of the word trajectory. Perhaps he is playing them for a good scientific reason; but he is playing games nevertheless. Was this just an isolated, atypical example? No; because we find exactly the same semantic tactics deployed on a broader scale when Einstein discusses what is meant by simultaneity. The case is worth examining in detail. Arguing for the relativity of simultaneity, Einstein proceeds as follows. First, he rejects the notion that the meaning of a statement to the effect that two events occur simultaneously is clear in itself and needs no further explanation (Einstein 1961: 21). It cannot be clear, he says, unless there is no doubt about how, in any particular case, the truth of such a statement could be ascertained. Without the

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fulfilment of this condition ‘the concept [sc. of simultaneity] does not exist’. In short, the lay discourse that speaks freely and unproblematically of simultaneous happenings is semantically flawed. Against Einstein it could be argued that the concept of simultaneity certainly exists, has long existed in the pre-Einsteinian past, and would exist even if instances of simultaneous events never occurred; that it exists for anyone who can explain or give a paraphrase of the statement ‘A and B occurred simultaneously’: that a variety of such paraphrases are readily available and have indeed been produced by generations of teachers and schoolchildren when the question arose of defining simultaneity. Now it might seem at first sight that the above simple-minded objection is beside the point, since all Einstein can be claiming is that, without explicit criteria for application (i.e. measurement), the concept of simultaneity is useless in physics. But he is certainly claiming more than that. He actually goes out of his way to make this clear. As long as this requirement [sc. an explicit method of measurement] is not satisfied, I allow myself to be deceived as a physicist (and of course the same applies if I am not a physicist), when I imagine that I am able to attach a meaning to the statement of simultaneity. (Einstein 1961: 22. My italics.) So this deception applies to physicists and non-physicists alike. That rules out the possibility that Einstein is distinguishing semantically between simultaneity in physics and simultaneity in everyday life. On the contrary, he inserts a warning at this point in the text: ‘I would ask the reader not to proceed further until he is fully convinced on this point.’ (If Einstein’s readers had taken this request seriously, few of them would ever have finished his book. For they could hardly be expected to take the semantic time-lag in their stride.) Einstein’s next move is to question the possibility of verifying simultaneity by direct observation, or an arrangement of mirrors which would allow the observer to monitor supposedly simultaneous occurrences. The trouble here, he says, is that we have no guarantee that light moves at the same speed over the relevant distances. The verification would only be possible if we already had at our disposal the means of measuring time. It would thus appear as though we were moving here in a logical circle. (Einstein 1961: 23) At this point in the exposition, Einstein allows a hypothetical objector to protest that the concept of simultaneity in itself implies nothing at all about light or its speed. Einstein concedes the point. We are free, the objector

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continues, to introduce any stipulation we like about the speed of light ‘in order to arrive at a definition of simultaneity’. Einstein accepts this suggestion with alacrity. He suggests that it opens the way for ‘a definition of “time” in physics’ (Einstein 1961: 23). This can be done by ‘supposing’ that clocks of identical construction are placed at the points where the relevant events occur, and ‘supposing’ that these clocks, being of identical construction, go at the same rate. Then, by reference to the hands of the clocks, we can arrive at an objective way of determining at what ‘time’ an event occurs. Stated more exactly: When two clocks arranged at rest in different places of a reference-body are set in such a manner that a particular position of the pointers of one clock is simultaneous (in the above sense) with the same position of the pointers of the other clock, then identical “settings” are always simultaneous (in the sense of the above definition). (Einstein 1961: 24) It does not take much reflection on Einstein’s clockwork to realize that it begs the very question it was supposed to answer. Simultaneity has now been redefined by reference to the position of hands on clock dials relative to a given ‘reference-body’. However, we are no wiser about how it was possible to synchronize the hands of the clocks in the first place. Any such synchronization already presupposes a concept of simultaneity. In short, the ‘clockwork solution’ to the problem of simultaneity turns out to be a semantic regress. Einstein then proceeds to argue on this basis that ‘every reference-body (coordinate system) has its own particular time’. At first sight this appears to be a quite banal conclusion, which had already been taken for granted when world ‘standard time’ was established by Sandford Fleming (Blaise 2000). Certainly, well before Einstein published the special theory of relativity, people were familiar with the idea that midday in one place was not necessarily ‘the same time’ as midday in another, although they might occasionally need to have their attention drawn to such matters. When the sundial was erected in the garden of the Viceregal lodge at Simla at the end of the nineteenth century it was evidently considered worth inscribing on the dial face two reminders about its limitations. One was the traditional Horas non numero nisi serenas, and the other was Madras or railway time is 12 minutes fast of Simla mean time. But before Einstein no one would have contemplated adding And on board the moving train the time will be different again. According to Einstein, a man on a train who walks up the carriage in the direction the train is travelling would, by the calculations of classical mechanics, be assumed ‘to advance relative to the embankment through a distance v

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equal numerically to the velocity of the carriage’, plus ‘an additional distance w’ due to his walking. Thus, per second, he covers the distance W = v + w. This conclusion, claims Einstein, is wrong (Einstein 1961: 16). Once we recognize the relativity of simultaneity, it becomes clear that ‘the time required by a particular occurrence with respect to the carriage must not be considered equal to the duration of the same occurrence as judged from the embankment’. In other words, ‘it cannot be contended that the man in walking travels the distance w’ in one second as judged from the embankment (Einstein 1961: 27). Presumably, in Einstein’s view, we fail to notice the difference because it is infinitesimal, our station clocks and wrist-watches being in any case mechanisms too crude to register it. But there is a simpler explanation that Einstein passes over in silence. Perhaps the ‘difference’ is an illusion generated by the Einsteinian stipulative redefinition of simultaneity. As in the case of trajectory, we are dealing with a deliberate ambivalence between psychocentric and reocentric definitions. *

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Another interesting case arises in connexion with quantum physics. Niels Bohr, one of the architects of quantum theory in its ‘Copenhagen’ version, is described as having ‘wondered how far we could even talk about the atomic world’, since it was ‘so far removed from human experience’. The same commentator says that Bohr focussed on the problem of language in his interpretation of quantum mechanics’ and quotes Bohr’s remark: It is wrong to think that the task of Physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature. (Pagels 1991: 103) The formulation is interesting, not least because that seems to make physics a branch of linguistics. Perhaps it is. The ‘problem of language’ that Bohr discerned was semantic in character, and it arose because the instruments employed to ‘observe’ the behaviour of subatomic particles physically affected the behaviour under observation. This would hardly have appeared as a ‘linguistic’ problem at all, but for the deeply reocentric assumption that there has to be a language of science that stands outside reality in order to report ‘objectively’ what ‘really’ happens. A very rough analogy on the level of ‘ordinary’ experience would be discovering that ascertaining the position of objects in a dark room was complicated by the fact that turning the light on in the room automatically rearranged the furniture. Any description of the furniture when visible would thus be immediately invalidated as an accurate account of the furniture when invisible. But the only language available is

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based on the identification of visible items. The question becomes: Is it possible to devise a complementary language for describing the position of invisible items? Bohr’s famous ‘principle of complementarity’ assumes, in effect, that all we can do in order to resolve such a problem is juggle with two languages and two kinds of description. Bohr accepts the relativistic posit that ‘the description of physical phenomena depends on the reference frame chosen by the observer’ (Bohr 1958: 802). But are the assumptions underlying classical physics applicable to the subatomic domain, or indeed to any domain where observation apparently disturbs what is observed? Bohr concedes the necessity of using as measuring instruments ‘rigid bodies sufficiently heavy to allow a completely classical account’: whereas what is measured demands an expression in ‘laws of an essentially statistical type’ (Bohr 1958: 803). There is no possibility of determining quantities ‘to the extent that would be required for the deterministic description of classical physics’. Nevertheless, Bohr insists, we must ‘recognize that the descriptions of the experimental arrangement and the recording of observations must be given in plain language, suitably refined by the usual physical terminology’ (Bohr 1958: 803. My italics.). This linguistic requirement, according to Bohr, is ‘a simple logical demand’. For by the word “experiment” we can only mean a procedure regarding which we are able to communicate to others what we have done and what we have learnt. (Bohr 1958: 803) Here we see Bohr struggling with his own semantic assumptions. The linguistic hierarchy that emerges has a three-tier structure. At the lowest level there is ‘plain language’ of some kind. Above this there is the language of classical physics, which embodies a refined version of the relevant plain terminology; while above that again there is a language for recording physical phenomena of which classical physics can give no exact account. That is what his fellow physicist Heisenberg described as ‘the paradox of quantum theory, namely, the necessity of using the classical concepts’ (Heisenberg 1989: 44). Heisenberg too accepts this paradox, and sees no way of replacing the classical concepts. He writes: Generally the dualism between two different descriptions of the same reality is no longer a difficulty since we know from the mathematical formulation of the theory that contradictions cannot arise. The dualism between the two complementary pictures – waves and particles – is also clearly brought out in the flexibility of the mathematical scheme. The formalism is normally written to resemble Newtonian mechanics, with equations of motion for the co-ordinates and the momenta of the

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particles. But by a simple transformation it can be rewritten to resemble a wave equation for an ordinary three-dimensional matter wave. Therefore, this possibility of playing with different complementary pictures has its analogy in the different transformations of the mathematical scheme; it does not lead to any difficulties in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory. A real difficulty in the understanding of this interpretation arises, however, when one asks the famous question: But what happens ‘really’ in an atomic event? (Heisenberg 1989: 38) This is the old reocentric question: how to describe what ‘really’ happened. But, according to Heisenberg, we have no language in which to describe what happens ‘between one observation and the next’. *

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What Bridgman did was propose a way out of such semantic difficulties by launching a new ‘logic of physics’. Bridgman’s ‘operationalism’, as it was called, envisaged an elaborate semantic exercise in which all scientific terms were to be redefined by reference to the exact operation(s) of measurement carried out in their application or verification. This was to start off with the very simplest terms. What does it mean, for example, to say that an object is of such-and-such a length? Bridgman’s answer is at first sight unproblematic: We start with a measuring rod, lay it on the object so that one of its ends coincides with one end of the object, mark on the object the position of the other end of the rod, then move the rod along in a straight line extension of its previous position until the first end coincides with the previous position of the second end, repeat this process as often as we can, and call the length the total number of times the rod was applied. (Bridgman 1927: 9–10) There is nothing particularly ‘scientific’ about this procedure: it seems to correspond to the way the home handyman measures the height of a door or the tailor measures a length of cloth. If such a model is applied to all forms of measurement it would seem that what we are being offered straight away is the familiar semantics of the continuity theorist. Complications begin to arise when we ask what happens if the rod does not fit the distance an exact number of times. Is, say, ‘four and a bit over’ a scientific statement of measurement? Evidently not, because ‘a bit over’ is not a precise length. So some further procedure is required. The simplest

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‘operational’ solution seems to be to find another rod exactly as long as ‘the bit over’. Then we can say that the object in question measures ‘four of the longer rod and one of the shorter’. This solution, however, has the disadvantage of requiring us to refer any assessment of measurement to the particular rods used. If those rods are mislaid, we have lost our measurement. Furthermore, if we want to make sure that the rods yield exactly the same measurements on different occasions and under different conditions there are other requirements to be met. For scientific purposes, as Bridgman points out, we must make sure that any measuring rod does not expand or contract with temperature, that it undergoes no gravitational distortion when measuring vertically, and so on. But at this point we seem to start on another semantic regress. How do we check on the stability of our measuring rod from one occasion to the next without measuring it against something else? And then how do we check on the stability of that? The only reocentric way of calling a halt to this regress requires belief in something like the following proposition: that there is some constant (i.e. objectively and permanently invariant) measure available in the ‘real world’ that supplies a foolproof criterion for judging units of measurement. But can this requirement be met? It seems that science is an enterprise that would like to be dealing with a static, unchanging universe, and describes it as if it were so; only to discover that, actually, it isn’t. We are back to Plato’s problem. According to Bridgman, there are ‘essential physical limitations’ to the operations defining concepts like ‘length’ (Bridgman 1927: 20). As the scientist proceeds to investigate the microscopic world, a point is reached where, he says, the concept of length disappears as an independent thing, and fuses in a complicated way with other concepts, all of which are themselves altered thereby, with the result that the total number of concepts used in describing nature at this level is reduced in number. (Bridgman 1927: 22) Moreover, what at first seemed to be statements about Nature turn out to be, from an operational perspective, something else. In saying that there is no such thing as absolute rest or motion we are not making a statement about nature in the sense that might be supposed, but we are merely making a statement about the character of our descriptive processes. (Bridgman 1927: 26) *

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In order to appreciate how radical Bridgman’s semantic proposal was, it may be useful to cite from a classic account of ‘measurement’ published only six years earlier in a well-known and respected work of scientific popularization. There we are told that: Measurement is one of the notions which modern science has taken over from common sense. Measurement does not appear as part of common sense until a comparatively high stage of civilization is reached; and even the common-sense conception has changed and developed enormously in historic times. [. . .] It may be defined, in general, as the assignment of numbers to represent properties. (Campbell 1921: 110) Although the ‘definition’ reads a little oddly, this is straight continuity theory, as the author makes clear with the following example: If we say that the time is 3 o’clock, that the price of coal is 56 shillings a ton, and that we have just bought 2 tons of it – in all such cases we are using numbers to convey important information about the “properties” of the day, of coal in general, of the coal in our cellar, or so on; and our statement depends somehow upon measurement. (Campbell 1921: 110) This leads on to the observation that in everyday life there are some questions to which we expect the answer to contain a number of some kind, and some questions where that expectation would be inappropriate. (For example, if we ask the grocer how much the potatoes are, we expect a numerical answer; if we ask where the potatoes were grown, we do not.) So there are some properties which are measurable and others are not. The same is true in the world of science. In order that something be measurable, a process must be set up for measuring it. This involves exact and consistent ways of judging equal quantities of it, addition and subtraction of such quantities, and so on. However, this is not always possible: ‘there are more properties, definitely recognized by science, that are not so measurable than are so measurable’ (Campbell 1921: 121. My italics.) Bridgman would have none of that. His semantic revolution was, in effect, a proposal to define all scientific terms by reference to the set of operations needed to measure something, and to expel the rest from scientific discourse as meaningless. But in pursuing measurement to the point at which ‘the concept of length disappears’ he had already left common sense behind. *

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Eddington took operational semantics one stage further in The Nature of the

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Physical World (1928), arguing that the only kind of knowledge that can be handled by ‘exact science’, as he called it, is numerical. His much-quoted example concerns the improbable case of an elephant sliding down a grassy hillside. As far as exact science is concerned, he claimed, it makes no difference at all whether it is an elephant or any other animal, provided the scientist knows that its mass is, say, two tons. Even knowing what ‘mass’ is turns out to be an irrelevance, because in practice one relies on the evidence supplied by a piece of apparatus. ‘Two tons is the reading of the pointer when the elephant was placed on a weighing machine’ (Eddington 1928: 251). Next, the slope of the hill, which turns out to be 60 degrees. The angle is important, not the hill. What is 60 degrees? ‘There is no need to struggle with mystical conception of direction.’ 60 degrees ‘is the reading of a plumb-line against the divisions of a protractor’. Then there is the co-efficient of friction. And so on; so that ‘by the time the serious application of exact science begins we are left with only pointer readings’. But that is enough to calculate exactly how long it takes the elephant to slide down the slope, and this information is again supplied by ‘a pointer reading on the seconds’ dial of our watch’. Eddington concludes: The triumph of exact science in the foregoing problem consisted in establishing a numerical connection between the pointer reading of the weighing machine in one experiment on the elephant and the pointer reading of the watch in another experiment. And when we examine critically other problems of physics we find that this is typical. The whole subject matter of exact science consists of pointer readings and similar indications. (Eddington 1928: 252) But what happened to the elephant? Eddington gives us a bland reassurance that this is an irrelevance too, even though we do of course describe the problem in everyday language by talking about the elephant. The word elephant calls up a certain association of mental impressions, but it is clear that mental impressions as such cannot be the subject handled in the physical problem. We have, for example, an impression of bulkiness. To this there is presumably some direct counterpart in the external world, but that counterpart must be of a nature beyond our apprehension, and science can make nothing of it. Bulkiness enters into exact science by yet another substitution; we replace it by a series of readings of a pair of calipers. (Eddington 1928: 253) By the time exact science has finished with Eddington’s elephant, it seems that not only has the elephant been reduced to numbers and equations, but

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the required scientific vocabulary for dealing with the animal has been drastically reduced as well. This, for Eddington, is not a disconcerting but a welcome result. The vocabulary of the physicist comprises a number of words such as length, angle, velocity, force, potential, current, etc. which we call “physical quantities”. It is now recognized as essential that these should be defined according to the way in which we actually recognize them when confronted with them, and not according to the metaphysical significance which we may have anticipated for them. (Eddington 1928: 254) This is semantic discontinuity with a vengeance. One does not usually think of defining the word elephant by citing mathematical formulae. By adopting such a ruthless programme of semantic reduction, Eddington ends up creating a problem for himself. A set of pointer readings is not eo ipso an affirmative proposition (either about an elephant or about anything else). To convert those readings into a proposition it seems that the exact scientist must go beyond the strict brief afforded by exact science. In other words, exact science itself has nothing to say, either to the scientist or to the rest of the world. *

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The whole history of ‘scientific’ measurement in modern times has consisted mainly in looking for increasingly sophisticated standards of measurement. The French standard metre, still in use today, was established on the basis of calculations by two eighteenth-century French astronomers, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre and Pierre-François-André Méchain (Alder 2002). It was supposed to be one ten-millionth of the distance between the pole and the equator. Unfortunately, there was an error in the calculations, which the two astronomers subsequently discovered, but decided to conceal. As a result, the length of the standard metre bar in Paris is some 0.2mm short of what it should be, and this deficit has been perpetuated in all subsquent specifications of the metre by other criteria, including the current criterion in scientific circles which relates it to the (assumed) speed of light. This episode calls in question the entire rationale of operational semantics. In the first place, it clearly made little difference, in practical terms, that Delambre and Méchain got their calculations wrong. Their pseudo-metre served France perfectly well for two hundred years and still does. In other words, they might just as well have produced a quite arbitrary definition, and abandoned any pretence of relating it ‘scientifically’ to the pole and the equator. In

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the second place, we see that operational definitions offer no prospect of halting any semantic regress. Every few years, a new ‘constant’ may be proposed as the nec plus ultra. This succession is set to continue ad infinitum as scientific investigations expand into previously uncharted areas. The very idea of supposing that the latest criterion is ‘superior’ already presupposes a standard for comparing one method of measurement with another. And we cannot invoke such a standard without begging precisely the semantic questions that operationalism set out to tackle (‘What do we mean by length?’, etc.) The logic of operationalism leads us by a roundabout but inevitable route back to our starting point. And in returning to ‘Go’ we have already had to accept various metaphysical propositions. What, then, is the proper operational definition of the word metre? This emerges as a nonsense question. Not because there are various lengths that might have been proposed, and could have served essentially the same purpose for the good citizens of France, but because, in true Aristotelian fashion, the way the question is put presupposes that one of these lengths must ultimately be the correct length. (Cf. Harré and Madden on the ‘correct’ definition of copper.) To assume that somewhere ‘out there’ is the real metre and we are merely searching for its correct definition is to assume, in effect, that the concept ‘metre’ is on all fours with the concept ‘copper’. Both are twin products of a reocentric semantics. But this is only the beginning of the scientist’s linguistic difficulties. For, as Bridgman himself saw, where there is more than one set of operations, then there ought to be more than one concept. Or, as he put it, ‘strictly there should be a separate name to correspond to each different set of operations’ (Bridgman 1927: 10). The way a surveyor measures with a theodolite does not correspond to the way we measure a carpet ‘directly’ with a tape-measure. Or, as an integrationist would put it, there are quite different activities to be integrated. Using a theodolite involves making very different assumptions, including the assumption that ‘the geometry of light beams is Euclidean’ (Bridgman 1927: 14). We are still worse off when we make the extension to solar and stellar distances. Here space is entirely optical in character, and we never have an opportunity of even partially comparing tactual with optical space. [. . .] We never have under observation more than two angles of a triangle, as when we measure the distance of the moon by observation from the two ends of the earth’s diameter. To extend to still greater distance our measures of length, we have to make still further assumptions, such as that inferences from the Newtonian laws of mechanics are valid. [. . .] We thus see that in the extension from terrestrial to great stellar distances the concept of length has changed completely in character. To say that a

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certain star is 105 light years distant is actually and conceptually an entire different kind of thing from saying that a certain goal post is 100 meters distant. (Bridgman 1927: 16–18) *

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Bridgman later modified his views in order to accommodate a number of pertinent criticisms; so I should make it clear that when I refer to ‘operationalism’ in this chapter I am referring to what might be called the ‘brute’ version represented in The Logic of Modern Physics. I am not concerned with Bridgman’s subsequent retreat to a more modest position, in which he admitted ‘paper and pencil’ operations alongside physical operations in determining the meaning of concepts. This retreat was forced upon him when it was pointed out that there are extremely useful concepts in physics that cannot be defined directly in the operational manner, but can hardly be discarded either. Once that concession is made, however, operationalism begins to lose its distinctive character as a theoretical position. Commentators have pointed out the parallels between brute operationalism and the verificationism associated with the Vienna Circle. Behaviourist psychology has been cited as an application of operationalism beyond the realm of physics. But these are matters that fall outside the scope of the present discussion, where I wish to focus on the semantics underlying the ‘brute’ version. For there an important and explicit objective was to expel ‘meaningless’ terms and questions from the domain of science. It is interesting to compare the brute operationalist position with some remarks of Wittgenstein on the subject of measurement. In Philosophical Investigations we are told: There is one thing of which one can say neither that it is one metre long, nor that it is not one metre long, and that is the standard metre in Paris. (Wittgenstein 2001: §50) The semantics underlying this statement seems to be, to say the least, curious; since, from a lay commonsense perspective, the claim that the metre bar in Paris provides the ultimate answer to how long a metre is depends essentially on the bar itself being no more nor less than a metre in length (and staying that length despite changes in temperature, etc.). But if, as Wittgenstein asserts, it is neither one metre long nor not one metre long, then it is difficult to see what length can be ascribed to it. And if it has no ascertainable length, then it can hardly be an exemplar of the standard metre (or any other such measurement). As a matter of fact, we now know that the metre bar in Paris is not long enough. So Wittgenstein, the lay audience will be inclined to

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say, is talking nonsense: clever philosophical nonsense perhaps, but nonsense all the same. Bridgman, for his part, is careful not to commit himself to nonsense of this order. That would be a jump from the frying pan into the fire. Operations are useful for his purposes only and insofar as they yield pragmatic determinations of determinate values. His measuring rods, theodolites, and other instruments are themselves physical objects, and as such subject to the very same measurements as any other physical object. To say otherwise would be to instal a form of mysticism at the very heart of science: the measurable would be measured by the unmeasurable. This is not what Bridgman wants at all. If pressed to explain how a selected rod can be used as a criterion for measuring length but also itself be measured, he would doubtless reply that the answer is very simple. A standard has to be essentially transferable or replicable: that is what we mean by same in expressions like the same length. It is intrinsic to the operation by which one lays down the rod several times in succession against the object to be measured. The rod cannot accomplish the whole measurement of a large object in one go, because it cannot be in two places at the same time: we measure seriatim. This means that, in effect, the position of the end of the rod after first laying it down is mentally or physically ‘transferred’ on to the object itself, and then used as the mark for executing the next move with the rod. And so on. Thus at successive stages in the operation there is actually a reciprocal relation established between object and rod, each being used to measure the other. We state the end result by reference to the rod (‘The carpet is eight rods long’). But we could also say ‘The rod is one eighth the length of the carpet’. Both statements are licensed by the single set of operations. Later in Philosophical Investigations we read: One judges the length of a rod and may look for and find some method of judging it more exactly or more reliably. So – you say – what is judged here is independent of the method of judging it. What length is cannot be defined by the method of determining length. – To think like this is to make a mistake. What mistake? – To say “The height of Mont Blanc depends on how one climbs it” would be queer. And one wants to compare ‘ever more accurate measurement of length’ with the nearer and nearer approach to an object. But in certain cases it is, and in certain cases it is not, clear what “approaching nearer to the length of an object” means. What “determining the length” means is not learnt by learning what length and determining are; the meaning of the word “length” is learnt by learning, among other things, what it is to determine length. (Wittgenstein 2001: 191e) Here Wittgenstein might seem to be more in agreement with Bridgman. For

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Bridgman certainly insists on the importance of ‘what it is to determine length’. But how does this relate to the notion that the height of Mont Blanc depends on how one climbs it? This, according to Wittgenstein, is ‘queer’ (seltsam). But it is only queer by comparison with some alternative method which ex hypothesi is independent of climbers. Climbers and hikers are nowadays familiar with notices telling them ‘how far away’ a place is in terms of how long it will take them to get there (assuming a certain rate of progress along the paths available). In some parts of the world ‘a day’s journey’ is still as reliable an indication as you are likely to get of how far one village is from the next. In Britain, a sign which reads ‘Pincher’s Peak: 2 h.’ is arguably more helpful, and certainly no less meaningful, than one that reads ‘Pincher’s peak: 584 ft’. Nor do the two meanings clash. There must have been a time when no one knew how high Pincher’s Peak was above sea level, even when it was climbable. Measurement above sea level is different but not somehow intrinsically ‘more accurate’. The genuine comparison, for the climber, is between one path along which reaching the peak takes two hours, and another along which it takes three and a half. Where an integrationist might feel inclined to take issue with Wittgenstein here is over the assumption that there is any such thing as ‘the meaning’ of ‘the word length’ that is available for learning. One might have expected Wittgenstein to reach a conclusion more in line with Bridgman’s: i.e. to the effect that what we have here is not a single word length but a set of homonyms, each corresponding both pragmatically and conceptually to a quite different operational procedure for assigning a numerical value to whatever is being measured. What remains unclear is whether there is any ‘natural’ or ‘best’ way of determining the operational procedures to apply. Bridgman’s critics pointed out that temperature can be measured ‘scientifically’ in quite different ways, depending on different theories: the mercury thermometer relies on one theory, the platinum wire thermometer on another. Why distance travelled on foot should be measured in units of length rather than units of time, or vice versa, is not immediately apparent. Nor how the two forms of measurement could possibly be reconciled except on an ad hoc basis. To be sure, for practical purposes the introduction of standard time and other standardized measurements was very useful, and no one accustomed to the conveniences of standardization would presumably wish to revert to the pre-standard era. But it does not follow from this that ‘length’ or ‘time’ or ‘heat’ are concepts that are ‘improved’ or ‘better understood’ whenever some more technically sophisticated way of defining their units is proposed. Nor that some ultimately accurate set of definitions is a goal that science could claim to be working towards. That would be not a scientific but a metaphysical goal. That, however, is exactly what Delambre and Méchain were looking for: an

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invariant in Nature by reference to which a ‘universal’ (i.e. terrestrial) system of measurement and its terminology could be established once and for all. In doing so, they were reacting against a previously chaotic state of affairs in which many local systems of measurement were in competition in France, and therefore the definition of a length might vary from one part of the country to another. The reocentric solution they adopted was to look outside human affairs altogether in order to find a non-human length that could not be altered, thereby fixing for all time (as they saw it) the meaning of metre, centimetre, kilometre and other associated terms. Given that (misguided) objective, they nevertheless chose badly for several reasons. The distance between the pole and the equator varies, depending on where and how the measurement is taken. Furthermore, neither the pole nor the equator is an observable geographical feature. Both are projections upon natural geography of a human theory about the earth. This is a paradigm example in the history of science of the hubris involved in believing that fixed correlations can be established in perpetuity between words and reality. It is an attempt to impose limits on language that language cannot tolerate. We have no reason to suppose that ‘the metre mistake’ can somehow be avoided in the future if scientists take greater care over their measurements. On the contrary, urging scientists to take greater care in that respect would indicate a failure to recognize a semantic fallacy for what it is. From an integrationist perspective, the fallacy consists, precisely, in supposing that we can find ‘scientifically’ some objective universal correlate or correlates of distance for which the word metre stands, or at least – were it not for human fallibility – should stand. *

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Where does that leave the vexed question of comprehensibility and common sense? Even if it is not true that the word metre means ‘the length of the metre bar in Paris’, the statement itself is comprehensible. Even if we do not fully understand the reasoning behind the conclusion that the earth rotates about the sun, the conclusion itself does not give rise to problems of comprehension. Furthermore, the conclusion might be right even if the reasoning behind it turned out to be faulty, or based on inaccurate observations. But how about – to take one of Jeans’ examples – a statement to the effect that space is curved and four-dimensional? Is the scientific notion of curved four-dimensional space just an extension of the ordinary, commonsense notion of space? If so, according to Jeans, it is extended ‘out of all recognition’ (Jeans 1942: 12). By this I take him to be recognizing what I have called a semantic time-lag. It is as if Einstein had proposed that in Nature there existed round, four-sided triangles. That is to say, working with the ‘old’ semantics, one could perhaps

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claim to understand the description, but only in the trivial sense of understanding that the figure in question was allegedly a triangle with a fourth side and circular as well. As regards having any clear idea of how to draw or to recognize or visualize such a figure, that is out of the question. In other words, ‘round four-sided triangle’ is not a comprehensible extension of the old notion ‘triangle’. In the same way, ‘curved four-dimensional space’ is not a comprehensible extension of the old lay notion of ‘space’ (and hence not a viable way of explaining to a lay public ‘what space really is’). Any scientists who suppose otherwise are already knee-deep themselves in semantic confusions. It does not follow from this that all talk of curved or four-dimensional space must be meaningless. That depends on the context. From an integrationist perspective, words are verbal signs that serve the communicational function of integrating human activities (including mental activities). There is no reason why speaking of the ‘curvature’ of space is debarred from being a conveniently abbreviated way of referring to a complex set of astronomical observations and mathematical calculations. If so, then what is meant can be explained by reference to the observations and calculations in question. But it also follows from this that when Tom, Dick or Harry speak glibly of the ‘curvature’ of space without that background knowledge they do not know what they are talking about, even though they may think they do. It further follows that any pre-Einsteinian physicist – let us call him Bloggs – who maintained without serious evidence or argument that space ‘really is’ curved could not have known what he was talking about either. This was not an intuition of genius on the part of Bloggs: nor could Einstein’s subsequent work be regarded as retrospectively confirming ‘Bloggs’s conjecture’.

8 Supercategory semantics

One of the weaknesses of Thomas Kuhn’s over-discussed theory of scientific revolutions (Kuhn 1970) is its inadequate treatment of the linguistic aspects of what he calls ‘scientific paradigms’. The very notion of a scientific paradigm, it hardly needs pointing out, presupposes the notion of science as the supercategory to which all such paradigms belong. Kuhn’s failure to come to terms with supercategory semantics is all the more blatant in that his account of paradigm shifts seems to require that the language of science shall always operate in a certain way: specifically, that new paradigms shall keep terminological links with the old paradigms that they replace, and in such a manner as to safeguard the scientific status of the new paradigm (however revolutionary). This preservation of scientific legitimacy is one of the main integrational functions that the language of science serves. It offers a way of dealing with the time-lag problem. Further reflection on Kuhn’s linguistic blind spot leads one to see that his theory, far from taking up an impartial position outside traditional philosophical debates about science, itself enters into those debates by proposing one particular view of science as a supercategory. His point of departure is the familiar but woolly nineteenth-century distinction between science and myth. (For discussion, v.s. Chapter 2, Gregory 1984: 7–180, and the entries myth, science and history in Williams 1983.) Kuhn argues that if out-of-date beliefs are to be called myths, then myths can be produced by the same sorts of methods and held for the same sorts of reasons that now lead to scientific knowledge. If, on the other hand, they are to be called science, then science has included bodies of belief quite incompatible with the ones we hold today. (Kuhn 1970: 2) He goes on immediately to assert: ‘Given these alternatives, the historian must choose the latter.’ But he does not explain why. Nor does he seem to see that the historian who feels that this is the only viable option is already in thrall to – and contributing to – the mystique of the supercategory.

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Kuhn’s critics have pointed out that his theory is based on the detection of a particular pattern in his own science, physics, and the generalization of this pattern across all scientific disciplines. (This way of treating one discipline as a model for all the rest is, in effect, an attempt to redefine the supercategory itself.) I shall return later to Kuhn’s linguistics. Before doing so, what I wish to draw attention to is that even disciplines that do not fit Kuhn’s model very well are seemingly reluctant to be left out in the cold. They claim inclusion by adapting supercategory rhetoric to their particular case. Geography is a good example. In his survey Geography, its History and Concepts (1980) Arild Holt-Jensen is clearly sceptical of Kuhn’s theory. He writes: Kuhn’s model fits the development of geographical science only superficially. As we have followed the development of the subject, we have seen how new paradigms have, to some extent, included ideas from the older paradigms. The paradigm concept therefore loses some of its clarity and value as a guide for research until, in the end, more and more people define geography as what geographers do. (Holt-Jensen 1980: 52) On reading this one might suppose that the author himself is content to accept such a definition. By no means. Throughout his book, Holt-Jensen insists that geography is a science, but manages to do so without ever committing himself to what exactly that means. Here we see the supercategory casting its linguistic spell over the whole discussion. At the risks of boring readers who have no interest in geography at all, I propose to examine how this is done in some detail. *

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The case of geography is interesting for a number of interconnected reasons. 1. Although it is obvious enough that investigating humanity’s terrestrial environment can be of importance for many different purposes, it is far from obvious that there is any one ‘geographical’ point of view that is common to such investigations. Only a Martian, presumably, could claim to have an entirely ‘neutral’ or ‘disinterested’ viewpoint: that is to say, a perspective totally detached from personal dependence on the terrestrial conditions that geographers take it upon themselves to study. Pending communication with Martian geographers, it would seem that geography is – at least for the time being – destined to reflect the practical concerns that arise fairly directly from human experience in trying to cope with life on this planet. This experience, it is to be expected, will vary both ‘geographically’ and over time. There is no body of pan-human geographical experience on which to draw.

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2. In geography, the role of observation and record-keeping appears to be of overriding importance, while the role of experimentation is extremely limited. It is possible to experiment, for example, with growing crops under artificially controlled conditions. All agriculture is in effect an attempt to exercise this control. But it is hardly feasible to control simultaneously all the conditions which shape the human environment. Since most of the factors operative are variable and beyond the reach of human intervention, it is questionable whether it even makes sense to envisage a full-scale ‘environmental’ experiment. Certainly it is difficult to imagine what such an experiment would consist in. 3. It is common for communities to acquire quite a detailed first-hand knowledge of at least one area of the earth’s surface; namely, the area which is their local habitat. They are in a sense forced to acquire this knowledge, because they depend upon it for their survival. This opens up the possibility of considering geography to be a collective and cumulative summa of such knowledge, wherever it may come from. Here again, however, the problem immediately arises of determining an overall viewpoint from which the compilation and organization of the summa makes sense, given the great diversity of its sources. In addition, there is the question of how to deal with geographical information that may be of little or no practical interest to communities that cannot profit by acquiring it. With the foregoing considerations in mind, it is pertinent to raise the following question. From what point of view could one claim to be able to give a general ‘history of geography’? In Holt-Jensen’s case, there is little doubt about the answer. His point of view is that of a professional teacher of geography at a modern European university. The majority of opinions that Holt-Jensen cites are likewise those of fellow academics at Western universities. The result is that geography is presented from an essentially pedagogic perspective, influenced by all the demands that modern universities impose on the admission of any subject to a place in the university curriculum. Not least among these are linguistic demands, which include the availability of a consistent terminology for the subject, of authoritative texts in which this terminology is defined and deployed, and of a supply of literate students able to sit written examinations in the subject. The geography that emerges from being passed through the sieve of these requirements of a literate society necessarily assumes a certain intellectual shape. It is both the content and the product of a certain tradition of academic teaching, institutionalized when Western universities began to establish posts in the subject during the course of the nineteenth century. There is no doubt that Holt-Jensen is fully aware of this ‘professorial’ dimension of geography. He draws his readers’ attention, for example, to the

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decision by the Prussian government in 1874 to establish permanent chairs in geography at all Prussian universities, and describes this as ‘an event of major importance’ (Holt-Jensen 1980: 21). He is also fully aware that this academic move was not made for geography’s sake, but ‘in the belief that geographical knowledge could be used to further the political expansion of the state’. But he seems reluctant to see any connexion between this motivation and the kind of geography that was taught by the newly appointed professors. I would suggest that it is precisely at this juncture that the supercategory of science steps in to provide a justification that is academically acceptable for geographers (as opposed to the politically suspect motivation that in practice was decisive). It also provides part of the answer to the question of what function a ‘history of geography’ performs: such a history can, with selective hindsight, reconstruct a geography that was already respected long before Prussian militarists or other authorities enlisted its services. The appeal to science, with its impeccable academic credentials, fills the bill admirably. It supplies a rationale for geographical studies that would otherwise be lacking. Accordingly we find that when, in his opening chapter, Holt-Jensen ostensibly addresses the question ‘What is geography?’, that question is interpreted from the start as equivalent to ‘What is scientific geography?’. The very first sentence in Holt-Jensen’s text reads: ‘Most people have very vague notions about the content of scientific geography’ (Holt-Jensen 1980: 1). Whatever ‘non-scientific’ geography may be, Holt-Jensen is wasting no time on it. He proceeds straight to the question ‘What kind of science is geography?’. Here again appeal to the supercategory provides him with what he needs. It allows him to put forward what I would call an integrational theory of geography. Although, following Richard Hartshorne, Holt-Jensen describes geography as an ‘integrative discipline’, the terms he prefers to use are ‘synthesis’ and ‘overlapping’. But the foundation of his account – as I would summarize it – is that the integration of science A with science B automatically produces an integrated subscience (a/b) which may be considered part of both. By means of this synthesis a new discourse is born, which borrows from the previously established terminologies of science A and science B. Geography is characterized by its integration of several such subsciences. For whereas sciences like geology, botany and sociology are defined by reference to the study of one distinctive type of phenomena, geographers are interested in a wide range of types that are already special objects of study in other sciences. Geography is thus, for Holt-Jensen, a ‘science of synthesis’ and its perspective is ‘multidisciplinary’. The underlying argument seems to be that, because geography integrates the findings of other sciences (in particular, geology, meteorology, biology, economics, history and sociology), geography itself automatically qualifies as a science, since its various branches already have scientific status anyway, by

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courtesy of other sciences. Thus the integration of geography with geology produces geomorphology; its integration with meteorology produces climatology; its integration with biology produces biogeography; its integration with economics produces economic geography; and its integration with sociology produces social geography. In this way, identifying what is scientific about scientific geography turns out to be no problem at all. Or rather, the problem is pre-empted by never being allowed to arise. Here, however, an awkward lacuna in supercategory logic becomes evident. On the basis of the argument just described, it would be perfectly reasonable to draw exactly the opposite conclusion and declare that geography is no science after all. In other words, if geography consists entirely of hybrid branches of the a/b variety that it shares with some independent science (geology, meteorology, etc.), there is nothing, it appears, that is ‘pure geography’. But if so, what is the case for treating the ‘geographical’ branches as products of the integration of science A with science B in the first place? Holt-Jensen is embarrassed by the problem, since he sees that if there is no branch of geography that exists independently of some other science, that reduces geographers to being ‘jacks of all trades and masters of none’ (Holt-Jensen 1980: 4). But he is reluctant to abandon the notion of geography as a ‘science of synthesis’. So, in a desperate attempt to reconcile that idea with his unwillingness to admit that geography is in any way inferior to the autonomous sciences on which it apparently depends, he stands the difficulty on its head and endorses Edward Ackerman’s rhetorical claim that geography is actually the ‘mother discipline’. The various scientific branches (geological, meteorological, etc.) can then be viewed as her offspring. This inversion of perspective, however, far from resolving the difficulty, makes it more acute. Holt-Jensen quotes with approval Ackerman’s statement that the fundamental approach in geography ‘is the differentiation of the content of space on the Earth’s surface and the analysis of space relations within the same universe’. But what guarantees that the ‘differentiation’ and ‘analysis’ are conducted scientifically by the geographer still remains unexplained. The central flaw in the ‘science of synthesis’ proposal is that what makes a certain range of phenomena of interest to geographers is presumably not just the wish to integrate with some other science which has already studied the phenomena in question. What interests geographers is that the uneven distribution of these phenomena over the earth’s surface contributes in some way to a distinctive environmental pattern that calls for explanation. But in this respect all unevenly distributed phenomena start on a par. It makes no difference whether the phenomenon per se has previously been studied by other scientists. What is needed in order to get a rational curriculum for academic geography off the drawing board is a set of criteria for establishing

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what makes a certain distribution worthy of geographical attention and why. Holt-Jensen seems uneasily aware of this when he observes that although ‘in most cases’ the distribution of Mormons living in a region would ‘have little geographical interest’, nevertheless in parts of the American West this is not so, because their distribution ‘becomes dominant or has contributed to the cultural and economic development of the area’. But this still leaves open the general question of when a given distribution of x becomes ‘significant’ (for geographers). Since Holt-Jensen devotes a later section of his book to discussing what he calls ‘the quantitative revolution’ in geography (from c.1950 onwards), it may be as well to make the point here that statistics alone cannot solve this general question of ‘significant distribution’. For significance depends on context. The absence of x may be more significant than the presence of x. To pursue the Mormon example, it would be absurd to suppose that we can start from any scientific assumptions about what the ‘normal’ distribution of Mormons ought to be. (Whether Mormons have yet been subject to proper scientific analysis by some other academic discipline we are not told.) The general problem is left untouched by Holt-Jensen’s defensive disclaimer to the effect that ‘it is impossible to say unambiguously’ which distributions are of no significance. This presumably applies as much to the distribution of pine trees as to the distribution of pencil sharpeners or paintings by Picasso. In short, the geographer can never declare ex cathedra that the distribution of x in the world is of no significance. This sounds like a very liberal philosophy of science. But, if taken seriously, it means that geography becomes completely open-ended as a form of inquiry, and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that significance – like beauty – will be in the eye of the beholder. While that might be a thesis welcomed by extreme relativists and postmodernists, it is hard to fit it in to any of the traditional academic criteria for recognizing investigations as scientific. Prominent among the traditional criteria is a requirement that a science shall seek to formulate ‘laws’ concerning the phenomena it deals with. Are there any such laws in geography? Holt-Jensen appears to be willing to tackle the question head on. ‘Here we must clarify what a scientific law is’ (HoltJensen 1980: 45). His clarification, however, consists in citing three conflicting definitions and expressing a personal preference for one of them. As he does not explain his reasons for this preference, or examine what the case might be for adopting either of the alternatives, the reader is none the wiser. This leaves the ‘science of synthesis’ in an even more parlous position than before, since it becomes clear that there has never been a consensus among geographers as to what a scientific law is, or whether geography can produce any of its own. Some geographers, it appears, have never accepted that all branches of the

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subject are amenable to scientific treatment. This line of thought goes back at least as far as Varenius, whose Geographia Generalis was published in 1650. For Varenius, an important difference between physical geography and human geography was that it was not possible to treat human geography ‘in an exact way’. Vidal de la Blache (1848–1918), regarded as ‘the founder of modern French geography’, renounced any ‘hope of discovering general laws governing the relationships between men and nature’ (Holt-Jensen 1980: 27). This scepticism about general laws was followed by those who developed ‘regional geography’. Holt-Jensen comments: The widespread hold of regional geography in the past has discouraged many geographers from seeking general relationships and theories, and has led them to decry the formulation of geographical laws and models. Rejecting the general theories of the determinists, they sought refuge in regional methodologies where each area is unique and somewhat exceptional and must be studied as such. Many still consider that geographers should continue with idiographical methods, i.e. the description of unique phenomena and unique regions. Amongst this regional school it has been suggested that geography is as much an art as science. (Holt-Jensen 1980: 35–6) While conceding all this, Holt-Jensen himself does not hesitate to refer to geography as a ‘science’ throughout its ‘history’, even going back to antiquity. In the chapter on ‘The Foundation of Scientific Geography’, Herodotus is acclaimed as ‘the founder of geography’ because ‘he placed historical events in a geographical setting’. Moreover, some of Herodotus’ writings were ‘truly geographical in character’. For example, he described the annual flow of the Nile and attempted to explain it. So Herodotus too joins the long list of honorary scientists in the ancient world. (Curiously, Holt-Jensen makes no mention of Anaximander, who is traditionally credited with drawing the first map long before Herodotus was born.) What is a non-geographer to make of it all? We end up with the apparent paradox of a science whose practitioners have long been divided about its scientific status, a church in which confessed atheists can be ordained ministers. Holt-Jensen claims to be looking at geography both as a ‘scientist’ and as a ‘politician’. The difference between the two hats is that politicians are allowed to have value judgments, whereas scientists are not. His determination, qua scientist, to drag geography into the scientific camp, come what may, is an interesting example of inverted Aristotelianism. In other words, the logic underlying his book appears superficially to be that, in order to write a history of geography ‘scientifically’, one must first define geography. Hence his

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opening chapter ‘What is geography?’, of which the title suggests the search for an Aristotelian ‘real definition’. (It is certainly not the search for a verbal definition of the term geography: the author goes out of his way to make the point that geographical inquiry predates the invention of the word.) This order of presentation implicitly rejects an alternative logic which would argue that we cannot say what geography is until we have first examined its historical development. However, when we read Holt-Jensen’s historical account we realize that the rejected logic is, after all, what dictates his approach. He has seen where the historical development eventually led, and used this historical knowledge as the basis for his initial definition. Thus history appears to confirm, mirabile dictu, the proposition that the author started with. How does he succeed in getting across this picture of a scientific geography? Not by means of explicit argument (where he is weak), nor even by dogmatic assertion (which he wisely avoids), but mainly by the dogged repetition, at every opportunity, of certain key terms in the supercategory vocabulary. Science, scientist and scientific are conspicuous among them. I counted sixty examples in the first twenty pages of text: an average of three per page. This insistent rhetoric of reiteration eventually has a certain effect on the reader, who gradually comes round to the idea that geography itself is a scientific term, and that the discussion of geographical questions belongs naturally to the discourse of science. Thus the main message is insinuated rather than stated. It appears as an invariant presupposition underlying the historical narrative, and constantly reflected in the choice of vocabulary. Each of the trio of key terms is associated with others having positive connotations. For scientific we find the collocations scientific activity, scientific advancement, scientific discipline, scientific explanation, scientific knowledge, scientific law, scientific method, scientific thought, scientific validity, and so on: an army of ‘scientific’ clichés. The antonym unscientific is deployed as a term of condemnation, but sparingly used. Even those geographers who challenge the notion of scientific laws in their field are never described as being ‘unscientific’, let alone ‘antiscientific’. Instead we find an oxymoronic subcategory has been devised to accommodate them: they are said to be practising ‘idiographic science’ (i.e. the science of describing unique states of affairs, as opposed to law-governed regularities). Everyone in the profession of academic geography, it seems, is a scientist of some kind, whether they like it or not. Thus the proposition that geography is a science ends up as a tautology. It is complemented by another tautology that emerges from Holt-Jensen’s account of the language of science. According to this account, in the natural sciences, the research that scientists do ‘is independent of their philosophical stance’. How we know this is not vouchsafed, but it seems somehow to be guaranteed by the language in which their research is conducted.

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They have been able to construct a free-standing scientific language – the ‘thing’ language – which satisfies their need for precision. This language has admittedly been established through the subjective appreciation of nature by scientists, but this creates few problems as long as there is a measure of agreement on the experiences of the senses within the scientific world. Nature can only answer in the language in which the question is put – which is the language of science. Therefore mistranslations can only occur through the faulty use of accepted methods and language. (Holt-Jensen 1980: 86) What exactly is this ‘thing’ language? Holt-Jensen offer no further explanation, and no definition of thing is supplied, but the very term suggests a reocentric semantics of some kind. Whatever it may be, this language appears to be regarded as determining the limits of scientific investigation itself (‘Nature can only answer in the language in which the question is put . . .’). So we end up with the comforting reassurance that the language of the natural sciences is scientific because it is the only language in which scientists can get answers to scientific questions. The language question is not so straightforward in the social sciences, on the other hand. This, according to Holt-Jensen, is because the social sciences have to make extensive use of ‘ordinary language’. In other words there is no assurance of semantic continuity between ordinary language and scientific language. A problem arises when we define our concepts ‘scientifically’ before embarking on a research project and later use these definitions to interpret our results without critically evaluating what happened during the investigation. The person who has been interviewed may have placed a wholly different construction on the concepts. (Holt-Jensen 1980: 87) Here Holt-Jensen ends up with his own version of Locke’s problem about communication, and is unable to resolve it. He stops short of recommending that linguistics should be a compulsory course for all students of social geography. But what the ‘scientific’ answer to the linguistic problem is we are never told. The purpose of the above remarks is not to mount an ad hominem attack on Holt-Jensen. My point is, rather, that it would not be possible to write this muddled kind of book at all unless the language of science already provided a vocabulary with the ready-made semantic profile required. All the science words have to have their haloes neatly in place before discussion begins, and the assumption that the scientist must have the last word goes without saying.

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This is quite typical of supercategory discourse in other fields. What is to be approved and disapproved has already been decided in advance. We no more expect to find science itself called in question in scientific discourse than we expect to find God condemned by theologians. *

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The semantic parallel between scientific discourse and religious discourse is pointed out by Kuhn in discussing the question of ‘authority’. It is, he writes, ‘one of the aspects of scientific work that most clearly distinguishes it from every other creative pursuit except perhaps theology’. What are the sources of authority in science? For Kuhn there are three such sources: scientific textbooks, scientific popularizations and works on philosophy of science. To function as sources of authority, such texts have to be understood, and it is here that Kuhn at last gets round to discussing questions of scientific communication. Textbooks, he claims aim to communicate the vocabulary and syntax of a contemporary scientific language. Popularizations attempt to describe these same applications in a language closer to that of everyday life. (Kuhn 1970: 136–7) Textbooks are ‘pedagogic vehicles for the perpetuation of normal science’. Consequently they have to be rewritten ‘whenever the language, problemstructure, or standards of normal science change’. Does the language change independently of ‘problem-structure’ or ‘standards’? Kuhn gives no examples, so it is difficult to assess how he envisages the relationship between these three factors. Could the language of science change for non-scientific reasons? Again, this is not clear. We begin to catch a glimpse of the latent semantics underlying Kuhn’s theory of paradigms when he discusses the relevant ‘changes in scientific perception’ and cites some examples from astronomy, adding that he has chosen astronomical examples ‘because reports of celestial observation are frequently delivered in a vocabulary consisting of relatively pure observation terms’ (Kuhn 1970: 117). What an ‘observation term’ is, and what ‘relative purity’ consists in are not further explained at this point. Later in the same chapter, however, Kuhn confesses a certain scepticism about whether there exists any such form of communication as a ‘neutral observation-language’. In particular, he doubts whether human ‘sensory experience’ is ‘fixed and neutral’. In any case, he regards attempts to treat it as such ‘through the introduction of a neutral language of observations’ as ‘hopeless’, although he does not rule out the possibility that ‘a pure observation-language will yet be devised’. This is evidently a task for the future.

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In what sounds like a wholesale rejection of Bridgman’s semantics of operationalism, Kuhn declares: The operations and measurements that a scientist undertakes in the laboratory are not “the given” of experience but rather “the collected with difficulty.” They are not what the scientist sees – at least not before his research is well advanced and his attention focused. Rather, they are concrete indices to the content of more elementary perceptions, and as such they are selected for the close scrutiny of normal research only because they promise opportunity for the fruitful elaboration of an accepted paradigm. Far more clearly than the immediate experience from which they in part derive, operations and measurements are paradigmdetermined. (Kuhn 1970: 126. My italics.) Here the opacity of Kuhnian semantics is made even more opaque by the liberal admixture of a questionable philosophy of perception. Kuhn writes as if no one other than scientists ever had occasion to count or to measure. He goes on to quote with approval a passage from Nelson Goodman’s book The Structure of Appearance: If all and only those residents of Wilmington in 1947 that weigh between 175 and 180 pounds have red hair, then ‘red-haired 1947 resident of Wilmington’ and ‘1947 resident of Wilmington weighing between 175 and 180 pounds’ may be joined in a constructional definition . . . The question whether there ‘might have been’ someone to whom one but not the other of these predicates would apply has no bearing . . . once we have determined that there is no such person . . . It is fortunate that nothing more is in question; for the notion of ‘possible’ cases, of cases that do not exist but might have existed, is far from clear. (Goodman 1951: 4–5) According to Kuhn’s reading of Goodman, the point about languages that Goodman is making here is ‘exactly’ the one Kuhn is trying to make: a language that – like those employed in the sciences – embodies a host of expectations about nature [. . .] fails to function the moment those expectations are violated. [. . .] No language thus restricted to reporting a world fully known in advance can produce mere neutral and objective reports on “the given.” Philosophical investigation has not yet provided even a hint of what a language able to do that would be like. (Kuhn 1970: 127) If that is so, then philosophers must be myopic. For there are countless

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examples of semiological systems functioning in exactly that way. Human beings are constantly inventing them. Chess notation, traffic signals and on/off switches are familiar examples. Such systems are those referred to in integrationist theory as ‘fixed codes’. They do indeed ‘break down’ or become inapplicable when the conditions in which they were designed to function do not obtain. But, as integrationists have been pointing out for the past quarter of a century, it is a misconception to think that the human language faculty operates solely on the basis of fixed codes, or that English and French are two such codes among many available for public use. If I understand Kuhn correctly, a ‘paradigm’ is constituted by the outlook and practices of a group of scientists who (1) share a certain set of assumptions and also (2) share a fixed code in which those assumptions find expression through the definition of key terms. This seems to be borne out by Kuhn’s observation that the Copernicans who denied its traditional title ‘planet’ to the sun were not only learning what ‘planet’ meant or what the sun was. Instead, they were changing the meaning of ‘planet’ so that it could continue to make useful distinctions in a world where all celestial bodies, not just the sun, were seen differently from the way they had been seen before. (Kuhn 1970: 128–9) It is evident that in Kuhnian linguistics planet is a term backed by a ‘real’ definition: planet is the name of any member of a naturally given subset of bodies in the solar system, and the meaning of the name, irrespective of whether scientists belonging to different paradigms agree about it, is determined by that fact of Nature. Even from a reocentric perspective, however, Kuhn’s account of the Copernican contribution to semantics is not very convincing. Refusing to call the sun a ‘planet’ amounts neither to learning the meaning of ‘the word planet’, nor to changing it. To see this, it suffices to consider what happens if one day I discover that the man whom I had hitherto regarded as my father is no relation of mine at all. I may henceforward refuse to call him ‘father’. This does not mean that now, at last, I have learned the ‘real’ meaning of ‘the word father’. Nor does it mean that the ‘real’ meaning has suddenly changed. On the contrary, my surprise and my refusal to continue calling this man ‘father’ make sense only if I already understood perfectly well the qualifications for fatherhood and believe they have not changed to accommodate this particular case. To be sure, there is a sense in which I ‘see’ my family tree differently from before. But only in the sense in which I substitute a new tree for the old one. Nor is it a necessary consequence that I now ‘see’ all my family members differently: what revisions I need to make in individual cases are

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consequential on exactly the same mistake that I have now discovered concerning the identity of my father. Another indication of Kuhn’s deep commitment to reocentrism is the following remark about ‘normal science’. Normal science depends on ‘the ability, acquired from exemplars, to group objects and situations into similarity sets which are primitive in the sense that the grouping is done without an answer to the question “Similar with respect to what?” ’ (Kuhn 1970: 200). In short, in ‘normal science’ similiarity is just a ‘given’: it is conceived intuitively as existing in Nature, prior to any systematic classification devised by human beings. That is why a paradigm shift is revolutionary: it alters an intuitively grasped pattern of similarity relations. This is where Kuhn’s slide from reocentric to psychocentric semantics begins. He adds: Since most objects within even the altered sets continue to be grouped together, the names of the sets are usually preserved. (Kuhn 1970: 200) This addition is revealing. Not only does it presuppose that the earlier sets had names based on the intuitive perception of similarities, but it sits uneasily with the assumption that normal science needs no answer to the question ‘Similar with respect to what?’. For if, suddenly, the sun is no longer a planet, somebody must know why: i.e. know why the earlier intuitive similarity set has been broken up in this way. That, in turn, suggests that someone must have known all along in respect of what the objects were grouped together and given a common name. Kuhn is here tripping up over his own semantic assumptions. By the time he wrote the postscript to the second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, seven years later, Kuhn had replaced Goodman by Quine as his semantic mentor. The change was necessary because Kuhn was now looking for an explanation of how to ‘translate’ from the fixed code of one paradigm to the fixed code of another. Quine currently had the reputation of being philosophy’s expert on the subject of translation, a position established by the publication of Word and Object (1960), with its elaborate parable of the missionary translator who wants to be sure that the native word gavagai really means ‘rabbit’. Quine’s semantics is basically behaviourist: establishing meanings is a matter of correlating ‘stimuli’ and ‘responses’ in the approved Bloomfieldian manner (Bloomfield 1935: 21–41, 139–57). Kuhn too takes over this behaviourist idiom. He begins to speak of ‘the stimuli that impinge’ upon scientists and their way of ‘responding to the same stimulus’. In a footnote he takes Quine to task for assuming that ‘two men receiving the same stimulus must have the same sensation’. In short, just as in Aristotelian semantics, the face-saving assumption is made that the world is ‘given’ and supplies words with their meanings.

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Why was it necessary to go fishing in the troubled waters of translation at all? Because otherwise the theory of paradigms seemed to undermine any notion of scientific progress. In the words of one commentator, It was almost as if those who lived within the old paradigm and those in the new were cut off from one another by a chasm of mutual unintelligibility. (Harré 1996) On either side of each chasm we would find different but autonomous ways of seeing the world, with no connexion between them. This seems implausible as a historical model for the development of science. Although Kuhn evidently wishes to reject the Aristotelian premise that the world is the same for all observers, he is also keen to keep Aristotle’s other premise; namely, that there is only one world out there. Indeed, ‘the scientist after a revolution is still looking at the same world’. Yet Kuhn repeatedly claims that scientists working in different paradigms see the world differently, and calls their viewpoints ‘incommensurable’. Two men who perceive the same situation differently but nevertheless employ the same vocabulary in its discussion must be using words differently. They speak, that is, from what I have called incommensurable viewpoints. (Kuhn 1970: 200) More psychocentrism. Nevertheless, Kuhn also wants to claim that ‘both their everyday and most of their scientific world and language are shared’. How can these claims be reconciled? By wheeling on the deus ex machina of translation. ‘The proponents of different theories are like the members of different language-culture communities.’ If each community insists on speaking its own language, communication between them will be impossible. But there is a way out. Briefly put, what the participants in a communication breakdown can do is recognize each other as members of different language communities and then become translators. Taking the differences between their own intra- and inter-group discourse as itself a subject for study, they can first attempt to discover the terms and locutions that, unproblematically used within each community, are nevertheless foci of trouble for inter-group discusssions. (Locutions that present no such difficulties may be homophonically translated.) Having isolated such areas of difficulty in scientific communication, they can next resort to their shared everyday vocabularies in an effort further to elucidate their troubles. Each may, that is, try to discover what the other would see and say when presented

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with a stimulus to which his own verbal response would be different. (Kuhn 1970: 202) On reading this, one expects the ghosts of Saussure and Whorf to loom up in the discussion at any moment. But Kuhn never seems to have heard of either. He also fails to see that Quine’s behaviouristic concept of ‘stimulus meaning’ is too weak as the basis for any serious account of how words acquire their semantic values. He seems to believe – mistakenly – that being able to understand two different languages automatically makes it possible to translate from one to the other. Adopting any version of holistic semantics (whether Quinean, Saussurean or Whorfian) leads inevitably to the conclusion that exact interlingual translation is an impossibility, because there are no equivalences between units from different holistic systems. But if Kuhn is aware of that philosophical problem, he resolutely turns a blind eye to it. To put it another way, Kuhn is caught in a philosophical dilemma that requires him to be both a continuity theorist and a discontinuity theorist simultaneously. He is wedded to semantic discontinuity in order to support his own thesis of separate, incommensurable ‘scientific paradigms’, but resorts to continuity when it comes to explaining how the linguistic gap between one paradigm and the next may be bridged. The penultimate sentence of his 1969 postscript assures us that ‘scientific knowledge, like language, is intrinsically the common property of a group or else nothing at all’ (Kuhn 1970: 210). Thus an old myth about language is recruited to support a modern myth about science. *

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Critics will doubtless object that in setting out my case so far I have taken the inadequacy of all forms of reocentric semantics for granted. So I have. It seems to me that, however sophisticated any version of the reocentric case may be, it is powerless to explain anything like the wide range of verbal and non-verbal communication in which we take part every day of our lives. Those who cannot see that for themselves will not be persuaded by argument. Our everyday run of communicational activities engages emotions, personal relationships, hopes, fears, obligations, attitudes and value judgments which have no plausible reocentric explanations of the kind that at least seem plausible when it is a case of talking about horses, sheep, chairs, tables or apples on a tree. In the latter cases there is no difficulty in pointing to ‘concrete’ exemplars in order to silence the sceptic. But as soon as it comes to abstractions of any kind – the invisibles, intangibles and unmeasurables in our universe of discourse – strictly reocentric theorists are already in trouble. And it is when

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they find themselves in trouble that they tend to take temporary refuge in psychocentrism. Nevertheless, it might be urged against me that there could, in theory, be a language fully explicable on the basis of reocentric definitions; and that, furthermore, what is commonly called ‘the language of science’ is in fact a candidate for that description. So in these concluding sections I wish to argue the following: that even those who seem to have taken this view of the language of science have never been able to provide – by their own criteria, not mine – a scientific justification for taking it. I shall also try to suggest what prevents them from doing so. *

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An instructive case to examine is the most uncompromisingly reocentric of all such accounts: the Vienna Circle position as expounded by Rudolf Carnap. Carnap claimed that what he and other members of the Circle were engaged in was ‘the syntactical analysis of scientific language’ (Carnap 1935: 7). The key question here is: What does Carnap mean by ‘syntactical analysis’? It seems evident that when Carnap discusses ‘syntax’ he is not referring to anything that linguists of the 1930s would have thought of as the syntax of a language – as in, for instance, the chapter on ‘Syntax’ in Bloomfield 1935, or von Ettmayer’s Analytische Syntax der französischen Sprache (1930–36). He calls it, more specifically, ‘logical syntax’, as in the title of his book The Logical Syntax of Language (1937). There he explains how syntactic analysis fits in to a far more ambitious programme: The aim of logical syntax is to provide a system of concepts, a language, by the help of which the results of logical analysis will be exactly formulable. Philosophy is to be replaced by the logic of science – that is to say, by the logical analysis of the concepts and sentences of the sciences, for the logic of science is nothing other than the logical syntax of the language of science. (Carnap 1937: xiii. Italics in the original.) In order to appreciate the full thrust of this claim, it is important to grasp that, for Carnap, logic itself is a science. The claim was by no means novel. In the nineteenth century it had already been made by Archbishop Whateley in his Elements of Logic (1826). According to Whateley, it is only insofar as reasoning is expressed in language that logic can study it. But Carnap’s reasons for regarding logic as a science are quite different from Whateley’s: it is doubtful whether Carnap would have considered logic to have qualified as a science in 1826. He writes:

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For nearly a century mathematicians and logicians have been striving hard to make logic an exact science. To a certain extent, their efforts have been crowned with success, inasmuch as the science of logistics has taught people how to manipulate with precision symbols and formulae which are similar in their nature to those used in mathematics. (Carnap 1937: xiii) Invoking this affinity between logic and mathematics, Carnap evidently regards mathematical notation as an example of how ‘symbols and formulae’ can be provided with exact (= ‘scientific’) definitions. He continues: But a book on logic must contain, in addition to the formulae, an expository context which, with the assistance of the words of ordinary language, explains the formulae and the relations between them; and this context often leaves much to be desired in the matter of clarity and exactitude. (Carnap 1937: xiii. My italics.) For Carnap ‘the essential part of logic’ is contained in this context, and ‘the important thing is to develop an exact method for the construction of these sentences about sentences’. The method of logical syntax is precisely such a method, and The Logical Syntax of Language provides a ‘systematic exposition’ of it. Here we see that Carnap accepts ab initio a distinction between ‘ordinary language’ and the language of science. That distinction lies at the heart of his enterprise, which is ultimately to construct a language of science which is free from the confusions, imprecisions and deceptions of ‘ordinary language’. It is a typically Baconian undertaking: language must exorcize ‘idols of the market’. If Carnap’s claim is to be taken at face value, the objective envisaged involves applying science to the language of science itself. But this, I contend, is exactly what Carnap and the Vienna Circle failed to do. Carnap evidently regarded his programme as fitting into a wider inquiry into language and other forms of communication. He explains this as follows. In the widest sense, logical syntax is the same thing as the construction and manipulation of a calculus; and it is only because languages are the most important examples of calculi that, as a rule, only languages are syntactically investigated. In the majority of calculi (even those which are not languages in the proper sense of the word), the elements are written characters. The term ‘symbol’ in what follows will have the same meaning as the word ‘character’. It will not be assumed that such a symbol possesses a meaning, or that it designates anything. (Carnap 1937: 5. My italics.)

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Here a distinction is drawn between languages tout court and languages ‘in the proper sense of the word’. But where we are to find that (i.e. the proper sense of the word) is not divulged. Nor does Carnap tell us what theory of writing supplies his definition of the unit he calls a ‘written character’. The stipulative equation of ‘character’ with ‘symbol’ apparently requires us to accept the notion of a meaningless symbol; but how to make sense of that notion is another matter. Carnap continues: When we maintain that logical syntax treats language as a calculus, we do not mean by that statement that language is nothing more than a calculus. We only mean that syntax is concerned with that part of language which has the attributes of a calculus – that is, it is limited to the formal aspect of language. In addition, any particular language has, apart from that aspect, others which may be investigated by other methods. For instance, its words have meaning; this is the object of investigation and study for semasiology. Then again, the words and expressions of a language have a close relation to actions and perceptions, and in that connection they are the objects of psychological study. Again, language constitutes an historically given method of communication, and thus of mutual influence, within a particular group of human beings, and as such is the object of sociology. In the widest sense, the science of language investigates language from every one of these standpoints: from the syntactical (in our sense, the formal), from the semasiological, from the psychological, and from the sociological. (Carnap 1937: 5) In spite of this, Carnap patently regards the scientific status of academic linguistics as dubious. He says of the expression logical syntax that the adjective logical ‘can be left out where there is no danger of confusion with linguistic syntax’. The latter, linguistic syntax, ‘is not pure in its method, and does not succeed in laying down an exact system of rules’ (Carnap 1937: 9). One of the reasons, doubtless, for Carnap’s reservations is that syntax in the Western tradition was never regarded as being ‘formal’ in his sense, i.e. independent of meaning. Formal analysis stopped short at the level of phonology. The units with which syntax dealt (morphemes, words, clauses, etc.) were all – by definition – meaningful units. Hence, from a traditional point of view, Carnap’s conception of formal syntax as a separate aspect or component of linguistic structure was already a misconception. It was roughly on a par with insisting that the architectural structure of a building can be analysed without reference to the function of its various parts or their interconnexion. But anyone who made that error would be confusing the viewpoint of the architect with the viewpoint of a quantity surveyor. Carnap calls languages like English and French ‘word-languages’. He

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contends that word-languages cannot be studied scientifically without first constructing artificial symbolic systems for purposes of comparison. The direct analysis of these [word-languages], which has been prevalent hitherto, must inevitably fail, just as a physicist would be frustrated were he from the outset to attempt to relate his laws to natural things – trees, stones, and so on. In the first place, the physicist relates his laws to the simplest of constructed forms; to a thin straight lever, to a simple pendulum, to punctiform masses, etc. Then, with the help of the laws relating to these constructed forms, he is later in a position to analyse into suitable elements the complicated behaviour of real bodies, and thus to control them. (Carnap 1937: 8) This incongruous comparison between the physicist and the linguist conceals, behind what a later commentator called ‘a facade of scientism’ (Katz 1966: 65), profound differences of purpose. What Carnap failed to explain was why ‘formal syntax’ which, by his own admission, ignored all those aspects of language which could not be reduced to the properties of ‘calculi’ (= fixed codes) should be regarded as constituting a scientific approach to linguistic structure at all. The quantity surveyor who is free to ignore the question of why a building is arranged as it is, is also thereby debarred from answering questions of any architectural significance. Similarly in the case of linguistic inquiry, Carnap and his colleagues, by insisting on a purely ‘formal’ approach, ensured that they were unable to take into account the multi-dimensional facets of linguistic structure. Even if the validity of their initial manœuvre were accepted, there is a no less pertinent respect in which the programme failed in any case to deliver the promised scientific results. On the philosophical front, the main objective was to develop a language from which all ‘metaphysical’ assumptions were excluded. It is typical of metaphysics, in Carnap’s view, to pose questions that are not merely unanswerable, but unanswerable because they are meaningless. Metaphysical propositions are those ‘which claim to represent knowledge about something which is over or beyond all experience’ (Carnap 1935: 15). To metaphysics belong ‘the principal doctrines of Spinoza, Schelling, Hegel and [. . .] Bergson’. Scientific or empirical propositions, by contrast, are those which admit of verification. Carnap distinguishes between two methods of verification, ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’. He gives as an example of the former: Now I see a red square on a blue ground. According to Carnap, ‘if at present I do see a red square on a blue ground, the proposition is directly verified by this seeing: if I do not see that, it is disproved’ (Carnap 1935: 10). The case of indirect verification is illustrated by This key is made of iron. Here verification involves making further

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observations or experiments, such as placing the key near a magnet and looking to see whether it is attracted. ‘If we look, we either observe the attraction or we do not’ (Carnap 1935: 12). Indirect verification can never lead to what Carnap calls ‘absolute certainty’, because in the future a ‘negative instance’ may be discovered. However, it allows ‘certainty sufficient for all practical purposes’. (From this, presumably, we should understand that absolute certainty would serve no ‘practical purpose’, except possibly the psychological satisfaction of scientists.) It is at this point that Carnap, like so many theorists before him, begins to slide from a reocentric to a psychocentric semantics. His account of direct verification leaves it unclear, for example, whether the verb see in ‘Now I see a red square on a blue ground’ covers the case where the red square on the blue ground exists only ‘in my imagination’, or as a by-product of some disturbance of the retina. Presumably the language of science would prefer a terminology from which figments of the imagination, however convincing, are excluded. It would also, we may suppose, prefer a terminology in which the temporal reference of an adverb like now is precisely specified, since red squares and blue grounds may conceivably come and go with disconcerting rapidity. Not to mention the question of whether the proposition is taken as telling the whole truth about what I see, or only part of the truth. How do things stand if I can see more than one red square on the blue ground? Or perhaps more than one red square on more than one blue ground? My point here is not that Carnap has chosen a bad example. All such examples are equally ‘bad’. If a Carnapian language of science is to operate with the backing of a fully theorized reocentric semantics, then it needs fully explicated definitions for the construction of what Carnap calls its ‘sentences’. And these will have to include definitions for whatever items and constructions the language of science borrows from ‘ordinary language’ (such as the indefinite article, the verb to be, the adjective red, and so on). Neither Carnap nor any of his Vienna Circle colleagues ever made an effort to supply what was needed. They produced no scientific lexicon of ‘ordinary language’ or even a purified version of it. They wrote no scientific grammar based on ascertainable distinctions in Nature, as John Wilkins had proposed. Nor did they put forward any detailed proposal explaining how such enterprises might be undertaken so as to meet the obvious objections or comply with the communicational requirements of the various sciences. Most of the Vienna Circle seem to have taken for granted the semantic assumption that somehow a correspondence theory of truth must be the right one to adopt, for the natural sciences at least; but they did not themselves undertake to demonstrate its adequacy. As a result, the language of science was left in a kind of semantic limbo, floating uncomfortably on the dubious support provided by ‘ordinary language’, of which no agreed scientific account was available.

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It is a striking fact that whenever we find scholars referring to ‘the language of science’ and lauding the particular virtues of this language, it turns out that what they are talking is thinly disguised metaphysics. The irony in Carnap’s case was his penchant for advancing metaphysical linguistic propositions, while condemning in the same breath the whole intellectual apparatus of metaphysics, as he conceived it. He proposed no scientific experiments to determine which, if any, metalinguistic generalizations were verifiable, even by his own standards of verifiability. As might be expected with the language of any supercategory, the language of science turns out to have an associated rhetoric which is tailored to the advantage of its own practitioners. What this rhetoric obscures, or diverts attention from, is the failure of scientists to apply their own scientific principles to the forms of communication which they in practice rely on. The task is always left to someone else, often to some ‘philosopher of science’. But the philosophers of science usually turn out to be less concerned with vindicating the language that scientists actually use than with maintaining their own credibility in the confraternity of philosophers. Whether philosophy is itself a science has been endlessly debated without reaching any conclusive outcome. But if it is not, then scientists rely mainly on non-scientists for the rationalization of their own communicational endeavours. *

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Ten years after the publication of The Logical Syntax of Language one philosopher of science, Herbert Dingle, described the confusion of prevailing ideas about science as ‘a situation fit to make the angels weep’ (Dingle 1947: 5). Not a very scientific turn of phrase, nor a claim amenable to Vienna Circle verifiability. But it could be applied with no less aptitude today. The same philosopher went on to scout two theses in particular. One was the idea that ‘the scope of science is limited to the measurable’ and the other that science is ‘the means of obtaining practical mastery over nature through understanding it’. (The former view was Eddington’s and the latter Bernal’s.) In rebuttal, Dingle pointed out, in the first case, that Darwin measured nothing. The bones of fossils could be weighed, but Darwin did not weigh them. The specific gravity of pigeons’ beaks could be estimated, but he did not estimate it. The duration of geological ages could arouse problems concerning time scales, but he gave no thought to them. (Dingle 1947: 7)

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Darwin, Dingle claimed, was a great scientist for all that. Nor, Dingle went on to argue, did scrutiny of papers currently published in scientific journals provide any solid support for the second thesis. Obtaining ‘mastery over nature’ seemed not to feature among the criteria by which the editors of scientific journals decided which papers were worth publishing and which were not. The question then arose: why did these two theses about science prove so attractive, although manifestly ‘unscientific’; that is, at odds with the evidence. Here, it seems to me, Dingle was on the verge of a plausible functional explanation of the role of science as a supercategory (although that is not how he would have put it). He suggested that people favour the idea of restricting science to the measurable because it leaves them free to indulge their own prejudices, fancies and convictions on any topic outside the domain of the measurable. Whatever views they hold on such matters, science cannot contradict them. Dingle also suggested that equating the goal of science with mastery over nature was popular because it placed science ‘in the forefront of whatever political program one favours’ and at the same time ‘determines to a large extent the view which one will take of the relation of science to the State’. These two examples, although by no means conclusive, point towards a general rationale for not inquiring further into the credentials of the supercategory. In other words, the function of the supercategory emerges as being not to define the boundaries of science more sharply but, on the contrary, to blur them; that is, to accommodate a variety of incompatible positions that become acceptable for a variety of non-scientific reasons. I hasten to add that this conclusion is not one Dingle would have welcomed. He is more likely to have regarded it with dismay. He believed firmly in a distinction between ‘true science’ and ‘false science’, together with a faith that it could be expounded to candidates for the MSc degree in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at University College London. If we survey the arguments that are commonly advanced on behalf of science, we cannot fail to be struck by their elasticity. Take the notion that science produces reliable predictions of the future. This turns up in all kinds of guises. For example, Milton Friedman claims that what he calls ‘positive economics’, like every positive science, has as its goal ‘the development of a “theory” or “hypothesis” that yields valid and meaningful (i.e., not truistic) predictions about phenomena not yet observed’ (Friedman 1953: 21). But when it turns out, as it often does, that economic forecasts are inaccurate, we do not find economists relinquishing the claim that their subject is a science. Instead, a whole battery of excuses are produced, ranging from ‘unforeseen’ events to the irrational behaviour of consumers, house-buyers, and so on. So, in the end, economics preserves its scientific status irrespective of its predictions.

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A similar brand of doublethink applies to weather forecasts. John Stuart Mill concedes: Scientific inquiry has not yet succeeded in ascertaining the order of antecedence and consequence among these phenomena [sc. rain and sunshine], so as to be able, at least in our regions of the earth, to predict them with certainty or even with any high degree of probability. (Mill 1884: VI.3.1) But instead of concluding that meteorology fails to qualify as a science, he insists that it is a science, although ‘extremely imperfect’. Its problem is simply the difficulty of discovering ‘all the antecedent circumstances’. It is evident that for those whose faith in determinism is strong enough, every branch of prediction, whether it concerns election results or horse racing, will be able to count as a science on similar grounds. As far as the general public is concerned, the credibility of any science still depends, as it always did, on its success in tackling human problems and the reliability of the information it produces: or, in Bacon’s phrase, on how it contributes to ‘the merit and emolument of life’. If public confidence in science is lower today than it perhaps was a generation or two ago, that is not because it has been shaken by Popperian doubts about verification, or Goodmanesque riddles of induction, but because of the plethora of cases (long-term effects of certain drugs, treatments, exposure to this or that) where ‘the best scientific advice’ at the time turned out to be wrong. From this the public – rightly – draws the conclusion that, whatever scientists may say, scientific methods and pronouncements are by no means infallible. Where does that leave the language of science? Nowadays we have a branch of linguistics called ‘hard-science linguistics’ (Yngve and Wasik 2004). Perhaps the full-scale engineering job on the language of science, that no one else apparently wants to tackle, belongs there. In hard-science linguistics there is much reocentric talk about language and ‘the real world’, this connexion being what makes hard science hard. But whether the ‘real world’ is ‘really’ there is a notoriously metaphysical question. It cannot be settled by any known experiment or observation. The advocates of hard-science linguistics regard present-day academic linguistics as ‘a soft science’, which ‘cannot support any scientifically testable hypotheses at all’ (Yngve and Wasik 2004: 3). So we shall have to wait a while yet. One suspects that when the ‘scientifically testable hypotheses’ are forthcoming they will have a lot to do with quantifiable aspects of the physiology of speech and writing, but little to do with advancing anyone’s understanding of language and linguistic communication. Time may not be the only thing that linguistics needs ‘to become a natural science’, as the hard-science linguists hope.

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One does not need to share that hope in order to realize that hitherto, in its various guises, the semantics of science has proved to be nothing if not unscientific. The promise implicit in John Wilkins’ ‘real character’ has yet to be fulfilled. I think it likely to remain unfulfilled, because I see no prospect of extricating a semantically sanitized language of science from the soiled tangle of non-scientific verbiage that is our linguistic inheritance. Those who regard themselves as scientists need not be unduly worried about this. Unless, perchance, they attach as much – or more – importance to being called ‘scientists’ than to the work they actually do. If there be any such, I do not think it will hinder their work, or make it less valuable, to rid themselves of the illusion that the language of science has a more scientific basis than the language of the home or the street; or to concede that it is subject to the same semantic indeterminacy and the same context-dependence as all forms of human communication that have so far been devised. That realization might even be a scientific step forward? The arguments presented in the foregoing chapters, it will doubtless be said, are those of an ignorant non-scientist, or even an anti-scientist. Or perhaps based on quibbles over words (it being assumed that words do not engage the objective ‘reality’ of scientific research). But those objections are themselves among the more obvious forensic moves that betoken commitment to what I regard, for reasons that should by now be obvious, as a questionable rhetoric of science.

9 Integrating science

Science may be seen as a long series of imperfect attempts to integrate (1) the human experience of life on Earth, and (2) an expanding knowledge of Nature, made possible largely by devising machines that act as prosthetic senses. That integration, almost certainly, still has a long way to go, as we can tell when we listen to the current Scientific Story about ‘superstrings’ and living in a universe with ‘ten dimensions’. The world has heard such tales before, and knows that their inevitable fate is to be discarded by later generations of scientists. The main point I have tried to make in the preceding chapters is that there is something odd about the way the underlying semantics of the Scientific Story nearly always turns out to be the same, no matter what the content of any currently popular version in the Laboratory. And this has to do with language, not with discoveries about Nature. The integration of human experience with knowledge of Nature could, it seems, be brought to perfection only by an omnipotent and omniscient being, whose intelligence is considerably superior to human intelligence as so far developed. Looking at scientific progress from this cosmic perspective, I shall take as my Integrator the Demiurge or Maker, of whom Plato once painted an unfinished but not unsympathetic portrait. To the Demiurge, in His creative capacity, I attribute a comprehensive grasp of the facts of Nature. There is no knowledge of Nature beyond His knowledge; and it is to this knowledge that mortal scientists aspire. In the ambitious endeavours of science, language is both a help and a hindrance. It helps because, as Bacon observed, it enables the human mind to anchor certain elusive ideas which might otherwise slip away. It is a hindrance, as Bacon also observed, because it can get in between the scientist and Nature. To Nature herself, language is extraneous. For language played no part in the Demiurge’s own creative activities: He does not belong in the company of those mythical creators whose chief creative instrument was utterance, the Word. And even if He had left us a full written account of everything He did, we should not be able to read it.

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Language of the kind human beings understand is a gift from the gods (Timaeus 47c,d). It is not designed for the purpose of understanding or documenting Nature, but to enable human beings to lead lives of human quality, fulfilling that potential for goodness which it is within their capacity to attain. Thus, once we are able to make ‘correct calculations according to nature, we should stabilize the straying revolutions within ourselves by imitating the completely unstraying revolutions of the god’. For this purpose, we do not need any very detailed or sophisticated description of the Natural world, other than the deliverances of sense perception, providently supplied for that purpose (Timaeus 45b ff.). Nature as grasped via the senses, and insofar as it can be thus grasped, is what one might call ‘anthropic’ Nature. It contains objects and creatures and events and processes that human beings can distinguish without the artificial aid of instruments of any kind. Why is the human condition thus and not otherwise? Because that is how the Demiurge arranged it in planning His world order. We do not know why human beings were biomechanically endowed with certain senses and not others. But we can be sure that if they had been, anthropic Nature would have presented a different human environment, and would accordingly have called for a different kind of language. Or perhaps none at all. Nor do we know why human beings were designed to organize themselves macrosocially into the kinds of communities that they do. We can appreciate without difficulty, nevertheless, that the preferred type of macrosocial organization is one that facilitates and perhaps calls for the kind of language we have. How it might have been in a different world we can only speculate. But as things are, language serves – biomechanically and macrosocially – exactly the integrational purposes that the Demiurge designed human beings to have in their search for fulfilment in the world as created. That is why He is the great Integrator. Now let us ask how, from His lofty position of enlightenment, the Demiurge views the imperfect accounts of scientific language offered by continuity theorists and discontinuity theorists. With a wry smile, doubtless. But He sees with relief that both have got hold of one part of the truth. The continuity theorist is right to believe that a language of science must be based on a ‘pre-scientific’ language, originally catering for communicational needs other than those of scientists; right to believe that there is no way a language of science could start from scratch, pristine in its commitment to nothing but the description of Nature as an end in itself; and right to believe that fauna and flora, their relationships and their properties, receive linguistic recognition only insofar as may be relevant for human communication. For these are the biomechanical and macrosocial conditions under which human life evolved for countless millennia, and language co-evolved along with it. The discontinuity theorist, on the other hand, is right to insist that there must come a point in the scientific investigation of Nature beyond which the

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biomechanical and macrosocial presuppositions of anthropic language are no longer valid. For the investigation is now dealing with subanthropic or extraanthropic matters. In such fields, Nature is no longer immediately recognizable. The solid table in Eddington’s study is transformed subanthropically into a whirl of electric charges rushing about inside a largely empty space. Questions have to be formulated in a new language, or else disguised in anthropic terms. (‘How fast does light travel?’ is a good example of the latter: it sounds well-formed but is actually meaningless for creatures who have never observed – and are biomechanically incapable of watching – light travelling.) Here science, the Demiurge notes, comes up against the verbal limits imposed by His creation. Thus far, neither continuity theorist nor discontinuity theorist – it seems – can be faulted. Both acknowledge the constructive work the Demiurge has done in making the world this way rather than another way. But even that – linguistic – appearance is deceptive (as Plato saw in his brief but penetrating discussion of deixis in Timaeus 49–51, a penetration matched by no Western grammarian in the centuries since). When scientists nowadays lament that superstrings are so small that it may never be possible to isolate them and thus demonstrate their ‘real’ existence, they might do well to reflect on the following passage from Timaeus. Now then, since none of these [sc. the elements] appears ever to remain the same, which one of them can one categorically assert, without embarrassment, to be some particular thing, this one, and not something else? One can’t. Rather, the safest course by far is to propose that we think about these things in the following way: what we invariably observe becoming different at different times – fire, for example – to characterize that, i.e., fire, not as “this,” but each time as “what is such,” and speak of water not as “this,” but always as “what is such.” And never to speak of anything else as “this,” as though it has some stability, of all the things at which we point and use the expressions “that” and “this” and so think we are designating something. For it gets away without abiding the charge of “that” and “this,” or any other expression that indicts them of being stable. It is in fact safest not to refer to it by any of these expressions. (Timaeus 49 d,e) Here we see the Integrator grappling with the problem of referential ephemerality, that cannot be evaded. All the more reason for condemning both continuity and discontinuity theorists if, emboldened by their success thus far, they leap to adopt a model of language which purports to explain what words mean by permanent reference to certain Natural phenomena which they purportedly designate. (As

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when we are told by scientists that, for example, the word copper is ‘the name of’ the Natural substance copper; or superstring ‘the name of’ the ultimate thread of energy.) Here the Demiurge heaves a deep sigh. For he knows what is wrong with this easy solution. It corresponds to no integrational function. It is simply a convenient peg on which to hang any number of unsolved problems. Furthermore, the Demiurge anticipates that He or the gods will be blamed for inadequate design (Timaeus 42d). He sees that explaining words in this way will not do, irrespective of whether words are applied to anthropic or extra-anthropic worlds; irrespective too of how one chooses to define ‘language’. For it turns all the basic descriptions of Nature into tautologies. This happens automatically as soon as reocentric semantics is combined with a correspondence theory of truth. The scientist who believes, for instance, that the statement ‘Copper is malleable’ is scientifically validated, conjointly and simultaneously, (1) by a fact of Nature (namely, the malleability of copper, arranged by the Demiurge) which it affirms, and (2) by its being stated in a language in which (2a) the word copper is defined as the name of the Natural substance copper, and (2b) the adjective malleable serves to predicate of a substance the Natural property of malleability, and (3) various syntactic and semantic properties of the sentence that are too tedious to be worth spelling out here – the scientist who believes all this is in effect setting up a domain of discourse from which ephemerality is banished, and in which ‘Copper is malleable’ is no less tautological than, say, ‘A triangle has three sides’. And that goes for statements about quarks, leptons, photons and all the rest of the subanthropic tribe. In other words, by this linguistic manœuvre Nature is being treated as a source of semantic axioms for the very language in which statements about Nature are formulated. Nothing could be more circular. The same goes mutatis mutandis for any such statement about Nature formulated in such a language. When ‘X is yz’ is affirmed in such a language, its truth will be guaranteed by the definitions of the terms in question. Nor will this alter if a later generation of scientists should question the ‘facts of Nature’ previously accepted. All that will happen is the substitution of a new set of tautologies, corresponding to a new set of semantic axioms. The language game of Natural science will then be resumed as before, due allowance made for the substitutions. ‘Copper is malleable’, perhaps, will no longer be tautologically true but tautologically false, given a new definition of copper. That will of course be called ‘scientific progress’ (by those who accept the changes). The discontinuity theorist will claim that progress in science inevitably involves learning a succession of new languages as Nature’s secrets are gradually revealed; while the continuity theorist will assure everybody that, nevertheless, each new language of science will partly overlap with its

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predecessor, the semantic succession being guaranteed by the stability of Nature herself. At this point the Integrator’s wry smile erupts into a chuckle, as he sees how this myopic human conception of language panders to human pretensions. Science is a supercategory whose language purports to integrate the anthropic with the superhuman. It shares this ambition with religion. In both cases, the illusion is generated by ignoring the circumstantial, time-bound dimension of communication. In superstring theory we move into a discourse where pronouncements about the supposed ‘existence’ of infinitesimally small, invisible items are not so much statements as verbal gestures towards statements that scientists might hope to be able to validate some day. They occupy approximately the same kind of place in the semantics of science as pronouncements about the afterlife occupy in the semantics of religion. *

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In the unlikely event that any scientists who have read my earlier chapters agree with the considerations there presented, and have even managed to swallow this latest mumbo-jumbo about the Demiurge, I can imagine that some of these tenacious sympathizers might nevertheless at this point wish to ask: ‘But so what? Do these peripheral semantic issues really make any difference to the solid accomplishments of science? And if not, isn’t this kind of discussion a complete waste of time? Isn’t the language of science all right as it is?’ I feel inclined to make two preliminary points in response to this last question. The first is that I am as impressed as anyone else by a science that can land a first astronaut safely on the moon. Nothing I can say, or would wish to say, can detract from that achievement. But being able to land an astronaut on the moon does not somehow validate the current language of science in toto. Rather, what it shows is that if you deliberately restrict your universe of discourse to what is anthropically quantifiable, then terrestrial mathematics works very well in regions of the solar system adjacent to Earth. That does not mean that we have discovered a semantic model applicable to language across the board. Why not? Because human experience does not reduce to the quantifiable, and human experience as a whole is what underwrites language. The second preliminary point is that practical success in the quantifiable domain does not prevent scientists from talking gobbledegook when they stray outside that domain. I referred earlier to ways in which language can ‘get in between the scientist and Nature’. Here is an example. In a recent edition of Scientific American, devoted to ‘Time’, readers are told that the flow

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of time is an ‘illusion’, that physicists are convinced that ‘time doesn’t flow at all; it merely is’ (Scientific American 2002: 24). The semantic and metaphysical confusions involved in this last statement are enough to make any first-year students of philosophy throw up their hands in despair. Matters get worse when we are told that ‘What is happening on Mars now?’ is a question that ‘has no definite answer’ (Scientific American 2002: 25). And worse still when we learn that ‘the grammatical structure of language’ revolves around the ‘fundamental distinction’ between past, present and future (Scientific American 2002: 24). This ethnocentric claim seems to ignore that fact that many languages have no future tense, and some have no tense system at all. In other words, the physicist seems quite happy to tell the linguist how language works, while being extremely reluctant to listen to what the linguist has to say on the subject. *

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According to Umberto Eco, Western civilization has long been committed to a ‘search for the perfect language’ (Eco 1995). Perhaps we should see the development of scientific language as one aspect of that commitment. But what would an ideal language of science be like? Let us try to imagine what kind of language the Demiurge might have constructed in order to reflect accurately and openly the realities of His creation. (That, I assume, is what scientists would like a ‘language of science’ to do, as distinct from concealing human ignorance or misconceptions about Nature.) The conditions such a language would have to meet might be summed up under the head of ‘semantic perspicuity’. In the first place, in this ideal language there would presumably be a one-to-one reocentric correspondence between words and what they ‘stand for’. So we would have straight away an assurance that the existence of a word entailed the existence of some item or property or relationship that the Demiurge had already put in place as part of the Universal Plan. Furthermore, there would be no ambiguous words and no ambiguous statements. Where there were no divisions in Nature, there would be no verbal distinctions. No continuum would be arbitrarily segmented, with different designations provided for the segments. And any Natural relationship between different things or properties would be reflected in a corresponding relationship between the forms of the words. For this is the ultimate test of a strictly ‘mimological’ code of designation. In a semantically perspicuous system, it would have to be clear from the form of a statement what fact of Nature was thereby being expressed. One does not need to devote a great deal of reflection to this ideal before realizing that it bears little resemblance to any kind of communication that we recognize as ‘linguistic’. Sentences like Grass is green would be inadmissible,

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since their form bears no relation at all to the Natural fact they purportedly express. In order to make His language match His created world, the Demiurge could never have chosen human speech as its form of expression; for speech is limited by the biomechanics of the human vocal apparatus, which ensures that words have to be uttered one at a time in sequence. Thus while it would possible in principle to use temporal ‘word order’ to reflect certain temporal relationships in Nature, there is no such possibility for the expression of spatial relations. In brief, the structures of human speech are at odds with the structures of the Natural world. The Demiurge would have had to build Nature along quite different – and much simpler – lines in order to stand any chance of constructing a spoken language that mirrored all the facts of Nature in any semantically perspicuous way. Nor would He have stood a much better chance by opting for writing; at least, not with any traditional form of glottic writing (Harris, R. 1995), or indeed with any writing system which has an articulation confined to the two-dimensional format of the modern ‘page’. It thus becomes apparent that if the Demiurge wanted a language of science that directly reflected the facts of Nature, he would have had to equip human beings with far richer resources for linguistic communication than they actually have. Seen in this light, the search for a perfect language of science turns out to be chasing a will-o’-the-wisp. For, as things stand, the desired ideal form of Integration between language and the world encounters problems that admit no solution. *

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What insights can a scientist derive from this? Not being a scientist, all I can do here is indulge in a thought-experiment and invite the reader to participate. If I had been an old-fashioned scientist brought up to believe in classical physics, with its old-fashioned notions of space, time, and material objects, and found no difficulty at all in reconciling this with my old-fashioned (nonscientific) experience of the world outside the Laboratory, then I think that encountering integrationist arguments might at least have made me rethink my role as a scientist. I do not suppose I would have been in the least dissuaded from carrying on with my current research. But I might have been persuaded to change my view about what I was doing. I might have been led to see that certain previous interpretations of my scientific activity were past their sell-by date; and I might have been led to take a more critical view of the relationship between classical physics and post-classical Laboratory developments. I might have come to see, for instance, that the semantics of science divides, historically, into two great periods. As one still hankering after numerical

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precision, I might be inclined to fix on the year 1900 as the watershed. I would see that before 1900, Wilkins’ Real Character was still afloat as a flagship to a noble endeavour: the attempt to set up a language of science based on common sense in a world where life-size human beings encountered other life-size creatures and life-size physical objects, and where your time corresponded to my time (and their time too). In other words, a language still designed to cope with anthropic Nature. I would see that after 1900 Planck and Einstein between them destroyed the credibility not only of Wilkins’ Real Character but of any similar linguistic project that might have been put in place since the Renaissance. I would see the old reocentric semantics already coming under strain in the late nineteenth century; for instance, by re-reading Lord Kelvin on ‘Electrical Units of Measurement’ (1883). This paper is often cited for Kelvin’s claim that ‘when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers [. . .] you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science [. . .]’. But when this quotation is restored to the context in which it appears in Kelvin’s paper, what immediately become evident is that the emphasis on numbers is not quite what it seems. Kelvin contrasts those physical inquiries in which accurate measurement is the norm with those in which it is lacking. ‘Measurement’ here stands opposed to mere ‘comparison’. The hardness of different solids, as precious stones and metals, is reckoned by a merely comparative test. Diamond cuts ruby, ruby cuts quartz, quartz I believe cuts glass-hard steel, and glass-hard steel cuts glass; hence diamond is reckoned harder that [sic] ruby; ruby, than quartz; quartz, than glass-hard steel; and glass-hard steel, than glass: but we have no numerical measure of the hardness of these, or of any other solids. We have, indeed, no knowledge of the moduluses of rigidity, or of the tensile strength, of almost any of the gems or minerals, of which the hardness is reckoned by mineralogists in their comparative scale, beginning with diamond, the hardest of known solids. We have even no reason to believe that the modulus of rigidity of diamond is greater than that of other solids; and we have no exact understanding of what this property of hardness is, nor of how it is related to moduluses of elasticity, or to tensile or shearing strength, or to the quality of the substance in respect to its bearing stresses exceeding the limit of its elasticity. It must, therefore, be admitted that the science of strength of materials, so all-important in engineering, is but little advanced, and the part of it relating to the socalled hardness of solids least of all; there being in it no step toward quantitative measurement or reckoning in terms of a definite unit. (Kelvin 1883)

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All this is unashamedly anthropic. I might ponder on the fact that Kelvin wrote this three decades after the construction of the Crystal Palace in London, and only four years before the erection of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Both buildings were acclaimed in their day as modern triumphs of the application of science. If Kelvin was right, they must both have been monuments to the ignorance of science. I would also see that Kelvin’s appeal to exact measurement was intended not to undermine but, on the contrary, to bolster public confidence in the world view of classical physics. It aimed at redeeming such commonsense, lay notions as ‘hardness’, and placing them on a sound Laboratory footing. But, having seen that, I might be inclined to wonder how things would stand if we lived in a world in which only comparative judgements mattered. Then Kelvin’s priorities would be reversed. Attaching numerical values to the relative hardness of diamond, quartz, etc. would be a superfluous exercise of erudition. Furthermore, it might be accomplished in any one of a number of ways, none of which challenged the pre-established order of hardness. Whether one chose to adopt a certain numerical value for, say, the hardness of diamond would not be open to dispute in any absolute sense. On the contrary, that linguistic decision might be treated as establishing an arbitrary standard for assigning other numerical values to the hardness of quartz, of glass, etc. How is that different from what Kelvin was proposing in 1883 as a desideratum for the science of strength of materials? The difference is that Kelvin also makes the tacit (metaphysical) assumption that Nature provides an invariant basis for calibrating such comparisons. In short, he believes in my Demiurge and all His works. Without that reocentric basis, the essay on ‘Electrical Units of Measurement’ makes no sense at all. For a scientist who thinks like Kelvin, the magical reliability of numbers depends on their having been set up in a way that corresponds exactly to the way Nature is designed to operate. But this is a metaphysical, not a ‘scientific’ proposition. I would recognize that the context of Kelvin’s essay on electrical units was the ongoing debate about establishing the value of the ohm. ‘What is the ohm?’, he asks. ‘Who can see an ohm?’ ‘Who can show what an ohm is?’ He is still living in an age where the semantics of seeing is the semantics of believing. (Cf. Timaeus 45–6 on the primacy of sight.) Electricity is invisible. What lies behind Kelvin’s altar-worship of numerical measurement is patently that this is the way to bridge the anthropic gap between the visible and the invisible. Science integrates the visible with the invisible by means of equations. Mathematics enables scientists to make electricity visible at one remove, by translating it into the movements of a pointer on a dial. (Kelvin’s way of thinking, I would realize, endorses Plato’s Timaeus and foreshadows Bridgman’s operational semantics.) I would see in retrospect that the message from late-nineteenth-century

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Laboratories was that the physical world below the level of unaided human optics works in the same way as the world above. This could not be seen, but it could be proved, if the requisite measurements were available. By relating the visible to the invisible, mathematics not only appeared to demonstrate the uniformity of Nature but, at the same time, vindicated scientific methodology as the right way to probe Nature’s secrets. All this in aid of validating a language of science in which the way one talked about anthropic objects (trees, horses, tables, chairs) held good universally at all levels of inquiry. The objects might be smaller or larger, but any difference of scale was just a difference of size. So a language of science could be envisaged which did not depart in any radical respect from the assumptions underlying the language of every day. It was still the old Adamic language in which items supplied by God were given names by a human nomenclator (preferably a scientist, because only scientists really understood what they were naming). That optimistic programme of the Adamic scientist – I would see – encountered a stumbling block in the early twentieth century, when it was discovered that, at the atomic level, there was an unexpected problem. The name of the problem was ‘quantum’. It was also deemed to be – and therein lies the rub – the name of a physical unit. It was as if God had brought one of these along to Adam, after the naming of the beasts of the field and the fowl of the air, to see what Adam would call it. (‘I call that a quantum, Lord. But I can’t see it very well. It really is quite small. And it keeps hopping about.’) As viewed by one of the most distinguished physicists of the day, the quantum problem was indeed serious: for ‘a sentence like “we cannot know both the momentum and the position of an atomic object” raises at once questions as to the physical reality of two such attributes of the object’ (Bohr 1949). What Bohr says holds, to be sure, within the confines of a certain (reocentric) interpretation of the language of science. Even then, it holds only on the supposition that the quoted statement is true (i.e. provided there are no other ways of ascertaining both momentum and position than those available to physicists of Bohr’s day). More exactly, therefore, I would see that what Bohr turns out to be claiming is that the truth of such a proposition conflicts with the semantic assumptions underlying traditional ways of talking about physical objects in the anthropic world. As for statements about happenings in the newly discovered subanthropic world, it appeared to be necessary to redefine the terms position, or momentum, or physical object, or all three. And how to set about the redefinition was by no means obvious. Clearly, a linguistic crisis. What evidently worried Bohr most about this linguistic crisis is that, in a manner more alarming than any new ways of thinking introduced by the acceptance of Einsteinian relativity, it undermines

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the whole concept of a ‘causal chain of events’ as understood in classical mechanics. He wrote: Notwithstanding all novelty of approach, causal description is upheld in relativity theory within any given frame of reference, but in quantum theory the uncontrollable interaction between the objects and the measuring instruments forces us to a renunciation even in such a respect. (Bohr 1949) Once causal chains go, scientific explanation collapses. Describing his own conversations with Einstein, Bohr quotes Einstein’s famous question about God playing dice and reports Einstein’s ‘deep concern over the extent to which causal account in space and time was abandoned in quantum mechanics’. Scientific explanation seemed destined to self-destruct. I would begin to see that neither Bohr nor Einstein seems to have realized that the quantum problem was only one possible manifestation of a more general difficulty pertaining to Adamic semantics. Let us call this more general difficulty the ‘totum’ problem. God gave no guarantee, whether to Adam, or to Einstein, or to any other scientist, that all the many parts of the universe would invariably be accountable to the same set of semantic assumptions. So there was no assurance of being able to construct a ‘theory of everything’. What both Bohr and Einstein assumed was that, however unexpected the organization of different physical parts of God’s universe might turn out to be, the mathematics was uniform and rock solid. Here we have, at the heart of science, a patently metasemantic assumption. And that takes us to the heart of the totum problem. But why – I would ask myself – should this mathematical assumption be treated as sacrosanct? It is not difficult to conceive of a world (a totum) in which the mathematics functioned in a quite different way. One such example is cited by a distinguished twentieth-century mathematician: It is perfectly possible to imagine a universe in which any act of counting by a being in it annihilated some members of the class counted during the time and only during the time of its continuance. A legend of the Council of Nicaea illustrates this point: “When the Bishops took their places on their thrones, they were 318; when they rose up to be called over, it appeared that they were 319; so that they never could make the number come right, and whenever they approached the last of the series, he immediately turned into the likeness of his next neighbour.” (Whitehead 1911) Whitehead comments dryly:

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Whatever be the historical worth of this story, it may safely be said that it cannot be disproved by deductive reasoning from the premisses of abstract logic. The most we can do is assert that a universe in which such things are liable to happen on a large scale is unfitted for the practical application of the theory of cardinal numbers. (Whitehead 1911) But this is understating the case. If the events witnessed at the Council of Nicaea happened only occasionally, that would be enough to play havoc with the familiar theory of cardinal numbers (at least, the theory accompanying the classical physics on which, in another life, I had been reared). For I would see that it is also imaginable that those accustomed to attending meetings of the Council of Nicaea might learn to develop a different method of counting from mine: a method that accommodated the alarming propensity of bishops to become indistinguishable from their immediate neighbours. For instance, in this method there might be a numeral 318/9, which was neither 318 nor 319 in my familiar system. Given this more sophisticated Nicaean system of numeration, I would see that the question ‘Are there really 319 bishops or only 318?’ becomes pointless: and perhaps meaningless, since the logic of one-to-one correlation no longer applies. Creating such a universe, with a different basis for the integration of counting, and a different mathematics, would be well within the capacities of the Demiurge. *

*

*

Thus, without altering by one jot my habitual working practices, I would nevertheless have taken an intellectual journey. If, as a rational scientist, I had taken on board the above lessons from history and imagination, I would come to see that my current research programme in the Laboratory might be better described not in terms of the old Adamic language of science, but by substituting an integrational semantics. That substitution would entail, of course, giving up any hubristic pretence of discovering through my research any ultimate truth about the totum. I would rest content with the humbler reassurance that my work and the statements issuing therefrom served the humdrum communicational function of integrating human activities (both inside the Laboratory and outside) that would otherwise remain unintegrated. It would now be clear to me that the language of science I had formerly believed in was not delivering on its promises at a very basic level. Instead of reflecting faithfully and objectively the workings of Nature, it was merely projecting back upon Nature the assumptions built into an ancient philosophy of language, dating from before the birth of science and designed to ‘explain’ a language developed to cope with merely anthropic communicational needs.

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Those tacit linguistic assumptions were responsible for building up the traditional picture of a universe filled with discrete objects of various sizes, each equipped with its own battery of properties and having its own unique position in space and time. Similarly, the binary distinctions between possibility and impossibility, truth and falsehood, observer and observed, were anchored in the linguistic operations of verbal description, not in the structure of the universe allegedly described. The discoveries of science are reflections in a linguistic mirror. With the assistance of language, scientists extrapolate from their instruments to the universe, from the part to the whole. Without that help, they would be stranded in a linguistic no-man’s-land. I would have come to see, at long last, that the limits of science are the limits of language. And that is toto caelo different from believing that the limits of language are the limits of science.

Appendix 1 Einstein on science and reality

Why is it necessary to drag down from the Olympian fields of Plato the fundamental ideas of thought in natural science, and to attempt to reveal their earthly lineage? A. Einstein

Although, or perhaps because, scientific discourse is so pervasively reocentric, one rarely finds that scientists are prepared to be explicit about its reocentric basis. They shrink from explaining how they think the terms and concepts they are working with acquired the meanings they take them to have. A remarkable exception is Einstein, who is reported as having once said that words, spoken or written, played no part in his thought processes. But in the essay on ‘Relativity and the problem of space’, added in 1952 to the fifteenth edition of his book Relativity, he sets out with admirable clarity his assumptions about the lay origins of the notions of space and time. The following observations are relevant to the discussion I have presented in earlier chapters. 1. Although Einstein discusses these matters in terms of what people think, as opposed to what people say, his analysis has obvious linguistic implications. It is difficult to imagine that what he calls ‘scientific thought’, and distinguishes from ‘pre-scientific’ thought, could have arisen without the emergence of a language of science to support it. I shall assume, therefore, that we can translate Einstein’s claims into overtly linguistic terms without misrepresenting his argument. This has the advantage that for rather nebulous questions about the relationship between scientific thought and pre-scientific thought we can substitute rather clearer questions about the relationship between scientific discourse and pre-scientific discourse. What I reconstruct as Einstein’s ‘semantic theory’ might then be described as follows. He postulates a one-way semantic relationship between scientific language and pre-scientific language: the former borrows from the latter. The language of science takes over certain terms and concepts that are already in

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use in pre-scientific language: it modifies them and makes their meanings more precise. In other words, Einstein’s position is a version of continuity theory. It is very close to that of Heisenberg, who asserts: The concepts of classical physics are just a refinement of the concepts of daily life and are an essential part of the language which forms the basis of all natural science. (Heisenberg 1989: 44) Unlike Heisenberg, however, Einstein imposes on himself the task of making it clear exactly what the ‘borrowing’ from daily life consists in and which the relevant pre-scientific concepts are. This clarification makes it possible to evaluate Einstein’s semantic theory and ask a basic question. Is it cogent? 2. Einstein holds that the concept of material objects is in some sense prior to concepts of space, time or events. Formulated in linguistic terms, this would mean that, in some corresponding sense, words for material objects similarly take priority over other words; specifically, take priority over words for events and words (or other verbal devices) designating spatial and temporal relations. The reason why Einstein wishes to establish this priority is clear enough: concepts of space, time and event can then be explained as abstractions or logical constructs from our more primitive recognition of material objects (see below). What is initially suspect about this postulate of material-object priority in human thinking can perhaps best be indicated by raising the question: Is it possible to imagine a primitive language consisting entirely of words for material objects? If so, that would prima facie be an example of a reocentric Ursprache that supports Einstein’s assumption. Someone might suggest that the language that Wittgenstein describes in §2 of Philosophical Investigations provides such an example. It is a language consisting of just four words (block, pillar, slab and beam) used by a builder and his assistant constructing a building. These four words correspond to the four types of building materials being used. When the builder needs a block he calls ‘Block!’ and the assistant fetches a block; and so on in like fashion with the other words. The plausibility of this or any similar example, an integrationist would point out, depends on construing the language reocentrically from the start; that is, treating the words as just names of various types of given material object. But that interpretation is by no means the only interpretation possible. The builder’s utterances serve to integrate the assistant’s activities with his own. They are commands rather than names, in spite of the fact that they take the form of nouns recognizable to us from acquaintance with a more ‘advanced’ form of linguistic communication.

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A similar objection can be brought against any parallel example. However primitive the language, it will never consist just of names for material objects: for unless some integration of activities is involved there is no basis for interpreting utterances or marks as verbal signs in the first place. Likewise, it is difficult to see how any pre-scientific system of thought – even pre-verbal, if that were possible – could operate just with concepts of material objects. Did our ancestors go through a stage where all they ever did mentally was to sit silently identifying and classifying material objects? Perhaps Einstein does not intend to appeal to any primitive scenario of this kind. But in that case it remains unclear wherein the alleged priority of material-object concepts lies. It can hardly be either a logical or a psychological priority, since there are better candidates for this foundational role. (To mention just one, the concept of self.) 3. Space. Einstein proposes that ‘empty space’ is an idea that arises from ‘certain primitive experiences’. We are familiar, for instance, with putting things in boxes. How many objects we can get in a box depends, we think, on how much ‘space’ there is inside the box. When we take all the objects out, this space appears to be ‘empty’ (Einstein 1961: 137). If the thickness of the walls of the box is reduced to zero, we are left with ‘the space without the box’. According to Einstein, Kant’s denial of the objectivity of space can ‘hardly be taken seriously’. For the possibilities of packing that are afforded by the space inside a box ‘are objective in the same sense as the box itself, and as the objects which can be packed inside it’ (Einstein 1961: 137). With the box dismissed, we seem to be left with ‘space thought of as an independent real thing’. The ways of packing objects into a box are ‘the subject of three-dimensional Euclidean geometry, whose axiomatic structure readily deceives us into forgetting that it refers to realisable situations’ (Einstein 1961: 138. My italics.) It is always possible, argues Einstein, to imagine a larger box enclosing any given box, however large. ‘In this way space appears as something unbounded’ (Einstein 1961: 138). Is space real? What happens when we think about a box inside another box? If a small box s is at rest inside a larger box S, then the space inside s is part of the space inside S, ‘and the same “space”, which contains both of them, belongs to each of the boxes’ (Einstein 1961: 138). I am not sure I follow what Einstein is saying here about the space ‘belonging to’ the boxes. In my crude, pre-scientific way of thinking, it would never occur to me to speak of space as ‘belonging to’ various objects. Perhaps ‘belonging to’ is just another way of talking about objects being distributed in space. However, what Einstein goes on to say causes more head-scratching. He considers what happens when s is in motion with respect to S. ‘One is then inclined to think that s encloses always the same space, but a variable part of the space S.’ I find an awkward

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tension between these two descriptions. If s in motion encloses a variable part of the space S, I do not feel inclined to say in the same breath that s always encloses the same space, unless that means no more than a space of the same size. But if that is how ‘the same space’ is to be interpreted, a deliberate ambivalence has now been introduced into the discussion. One is no longer sure whether the relevant concept is that of ‘enclosure of space’ or ‘location in space’. That ambivalence seems to me to apply to Einstein’s next claim, which is rather crucial to his whole explanation. It then becomes necessary to apportion to each box its particular space, not thought of as bounded, and to assume that these two spaces are in motion with respect to each other. (Einstein 1961: 138. My italics.) In my case, unfortunately, I feel no temptation to view the situation in this way at all. I have no difficulty with the notion of the small box moving around inside the larger box, or of the larger box moving with respect to the smaller box, or both together; but, without Einstein’s prompting, it would never occur to me to describe this as a case of independent segments of space in motion, because I do not think of space as being carried around in containers. It would make sense to me to talk about, say, the water in a small container being moved around inside the circumambient water of a larger container. But not space. That is, precisely, the difference, or one of the differences, between my pre-scientific conceptions of water and of space. Einstein goes on to tell me that I must remember (remember?) ‘that there is an infinite number of spaces, which are in motion with respect to each other [sic]’ (Einstein 1961: 139). The concept of space as something existing objectively and independent of things belongs to pre-scientific thought, but not so the idea of the existence of an infinite number of spaces in motion relatively to each other [sic]. (Einstein 1961: 139) 4. Time. Einstein also gives an account of ‘the psychological origin of the concept of time’. It has to do with ‘recollection’. What we remember is considered to be ‘earlier’ by comparison with ‘present experiences’. From this arises ‘the subjective concept of time’. This is ‘that concept of time which refers to the arrangement of the experiences of the individual’ (Einstein 1961: 139). Subjective time is to be distinguished from what Einstein calls ‘objective’ time. How do we get pre-scientifically from the former to the latter? Individual A sees a flash of lightning, also seen by B. When A grasps that B has

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seen it too, what ‘originally entered into the consciousness’ as an experience is now ‘also interpreted as an (objective) “event” ’ (Einstein 1961: 140). For Einstein, apparently, this suffices to take care of the pre-scientific notion of external reality. ‘It is just the sum total of all events that we mean when we speak of the “real external world” ’ (Einstein 1960: 140). These events are also interpreted as having a ‘temporal arrangement’. But this temporal arrangement of objective events does not coincide with that of experiences. For instance, the order of experiences when judged acoustically may not be the same if judged visually: so that ‘one cannot simply identify the time sequence of events with the time sequence of experiences’ (Einstein 1961: 140). 5. According to Einstein, the concepts of space, time and event are thus seen to be, when ‘considered logically’, ‘free creations of the human intelligence, tools of thought’ (Einstein 1961: 141). They serve the purpose of ‘bringing experiences into relation with each other, so that in this way they can be better surveyed’. The way they are formed ‘already presupposes the concept of material objects’. In the same way, persons, who had to be introduced for the formation of an objective concept of time, also play the rôle of material objects in this connection. It appears to me, therefore, that the formation of the concept of the material object must precede our concepts of time and space. (Einstein 1961: 141) For Einstein it is characteristic of thought in physics, as of thought in natural science generally, that it endeavours in principle to make do with “space-like” concepts alone, and strives to express with their aid all relations having the form of laws. (Einstein 1961: 141–2. Italics in the original.) 6. What Einstein is trying to explain, it seems to me, is how ‘scientific thought’ comes to be integrated with ‘pre-scientific’ thought, via a small number of rather important basic concepts. Presumably this applies pari passu to the language of science versus pre-scientific language. What emerges is that his reocentric ontology rests on a-prioristic armchair psychology: we think of things in a certain way because we cannot otherwise make sense of our own experience. Or, translated into the linguistic mode: we talk about our experiences in a certain way because it is only thus that others can understand what we mean. But Einstein’s explanation has various lacunae and implausibilities. It depends above all on treating ‘material object’ as the conceptual foundation

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for everything else. We are given no account of how it is possible to isolate the concept of a material object from other concepts. The most unproblematic material objects – discrete, inert, stable, tangible and visible objects, like stones, chairs and boxes – have recognizable boundaries, surfaces, by which they are separated from whatever surrounds them. When they move or are moved, they take these boundaries with them and thus retain their identity. It seems question-begging to say ab initio, as Einstein does, that space and time are more sophisticated concepts derived from the prior and primitive concept of a material object: rather, it seems that it would be difficult to grasp the kind of thing a material object was in the first place without at the same time grasping certain ideas both of space and of time which allow such an object to be identified and re-identified by the observer. Why does Einstein go to all this trouble? In order to pre-empt certain objections. In order to persuade anyone like me, with my lay, pre-scientific concepts of space and time, that it is no use relying on those crude notions to provide counter-examples to more sophisticated concepts of space and time than Einstein and science can jointly offer. For Einstein has shown – has he not? – that there is nothing about the way I think of or describe space and time that has to be accepted as gospel. My conceptions and my lay terminology are just ‘tools of thought’. So are his. My pre-scientific ways of thinking and talking about the world, with its boxes of various sizes and its occasional flashes of lightning, have no claim to being more ‘down to earth’ or in closer touch with reality: they are just – like his – ‘free creations of the human intelligence’, employed by the mind in trying to create order out of chaos. 7. Einstein’s basic concept of ‘material object’ is manifestly underdescribed. There are many examples he does not mention, including such familar features of Nature as fires, rivers, clouds and rain, where the borderline between object and event is unclear. Like Aristotle and the author of Genesis, Einstein seems to subscribe to a pre-scientific semantics in which there has to be a basic inventory of distinct kinds of object (supplied in advance of language by Nature, or human effort, or created by God) waiting first to be labelled, so that they can later be described (when the requisite linguistic equipment becomes available) by reference to their properties, or to the events in which they are involved, and so on. Here I recognize the same old reocentric scenario that always goes with one version of the language myth. I also think it worth drawing attention to an interesting asymmetry between Einstein’s accounts of pre-scientific space and time. Only in the case of time is there any appeal to what the observer thinks another observer thinks. The experience of an event, it seems, has to be confirmed by someone

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else’s experience, vicariously authenticated. Why that should suffice to effect the transformation from a subjective to an objective concept remains (to me) obscure. As does why the same requirement can be dispensed with in the case of space and material objects. The latter seem to arrive on the ontological scene with their objective passports already in order, whereas events are obliged to get visas. 8. It goes without saying that the way Einstein sets up a distinction between ‘scientific’ and ‘pre-scientific’ is itself a rhetorical manifestation of the hubris of science. (Cf. ‘literate’ vs. ‘pre-literate’, ‘Christian’ vs. ‘pre-Christian’, etc.) The very term pre-scientific parades its condemnation for all to see. Prescientific thinkers are expected to crawl away and hide, embarrassed by the realization of their own inadequacy. 9. Given that Einstein accepts that ‘science has taken over from prescientific thought the concepts space, time, and material object’, and has ‘modified’ them and ‘rendered them more precise’, rather than rejecting them altogether, one expects some kind of explanation setting out what prescientific thought ‘got right’ in this regard. How do these pre-scientific concepts, inadequate as they are, nevertheless manage to supply science with certain indispensable foundations? The answer is not clear. In particular, it is unclear why Einstein thinks that it is not until someone manages to make sense of the notion of an infinite number of spaces that are in motion relative to one another that thinking about space becomes scientific; or what exactly makes it scientific thinking even then. Do the others whose experience confirmed one’s first ‘real’ event also have to be present to confirm the mumbojumbo about infinite spaces? What does become clear is that, by this criterion, none of Einstein’s predecessors had managed to think scientifically about space at all. But that manifestly conflicts with the traditional history of the supercategory (viz. science) under whose auspices Einstein places his own thinking. 10. There is an enormous lacuna at the heart of Einstein’s account of reality and scientific thought. Nowhere are we told what role is played by communication between Scientist A and Scientist B. Einstein writes as if everyone lived in solitary confinement in a sealed communicational vacuum. Even when a second observer appears on the scene to witness a flash of lightning, this second person is immediately, according to Einstein, demoted to the status of a ‘material object’. Einstein’s science is a science which seems to require no infrastructure of contact between one human being and another. In the pre-scientific world, fortunately, we have not yet been reduced to that.

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11. If we accept, with Einstein, the relativity of simultaneity, we are obliged to accept a corresponding relativity in the domain of language. This seems at first sight to tie in with the traditional linguistic doctrine that temporal deixis is locucentric. The ‘now’ of speaker A is semantically dependent on the circumstances of speaker A at the moment of utterance, while the ‘now’ of speaker B is likewise dependent on the circumstances of speaker B. Mutatis mutandis, this will hold for tense forms and all related deictic devices. This is why, if I say that today in London it is Wednesday, then I have to agree that yesterday it was Tuesday and tomorrow will be Thursday: if – that is to say – I am telling the truth and not confused. It did not take Einstein to point this out. It had already been taken for granted for centuries by Western grammarians. Einstein merely adapted that concept for his own purposes. However, from an Einsteinian perspective there remains a difficulty about words like now. For Einstein wants to define time reocentrically; that is, by reference purely to the physics of the situation – material objects, distances between points, the speed of light, etc. The trouble is that all public events describable in terms of physics, such as flashes of lightning and falling stones, are differently viewed (and described) by different observers, depending on their situation. Einstein’s solution to the puzzle is to propose that there are many different observers’ ‘frames of reference’, the proviso being that within each such frame there are no further differences of observation to be accounted for. Thus locucentricity can, as it were, be brought under control for the purposes of doing physics, by being related strictly to physical parameters within each frame. Each frame has its own clock and its own (reocentric) definition of now. (Now means ‘what this clock says’.) In this way the general problem of defining simultaneity is circumvented by declaring simultaneity to be relative (i.e. different for different frames of reference). The use of now will thus vary from one frame to another. It follows from Einstein’s thesis concerning simultaneity that observers situated in different frames of reference have no way of agreeing on the use of temporal deictics – not even on negotiating about how to differ. For if they did, this would mean that they had access to another time-world independent of that supplied by their own frame of reference, and thus the mainstay of the doctrine of relativity would collapse. There would have to be a language in which comparisons between different time-worlds could be made. 12. It went unnoticed that there was something linguistically odd about what Einstein himself claimed to be doing; that is, formulating universal generalizations about simultaneity valid for all observers. That itself presupposes a quasi-Newtonian linguistic vantage-point which is somehow

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neutral with respect to those observers and their separate time-worlds. But how such a linguistic feat is possible, given the doctrine of relativity, remained unexplained. Einstein seems to have conferred upon himself the privilege of stepping outside his own relative time-world in order to make pronouncements about all such time-worlds. There was, then, a concealed conflict between the thesis itself and its author’s tacit linguistic assumptions. These assumptions are manifestly reocentric on a local scale: in other words, when we change our frame we change our language, because there is no panchronic frame that could act as a semantic anchor across all languages and all times. The statement ‘Today is Wednesday’, although true in one frame, is not necessarily true – or even meaningful – in a different frame. 13. How does Einsteinian semantics compare with integrational semantics? Both acknowledge the locucentricity of deictics like now and today. But the integrationist carries this further by recognizing a ‘principle of cotemporality’ governing all linguistic signs. This principle treats as axiomatic the impossibility of divorcing the meaning of a linguistic sign from the temporal sequence of events by which it is contextualized in the perception of the participants. It follows from this that there are no permanent or universal linguistic codes available for purposes of human communication. Language is made as we go along, a constant process of creative renewal. If we pay sufficient attention to our own lay use of words like now, we shall find perspicuous examples of the operation of this principle. But it underlies all forms of reference. Thus when someone speaks of ‘the Prime Minister’, this will be understood, failing any indication to the contrary, as referring to the current Prime Minister, the person ‘now’ holding that office. For integrationists, therefore, the principle of cotemporality is fundamental to understanding all forms of linguistic communication. 14. Since the principle of cotemporality applies to all verbal expressions of time-reference, including those based on clocks and calendars, it should be possible to apply it to language-using Einsteinian space travellers, at whatever speed or distance from us they may be travelling. How does this work out? In his book About Time (1995), Paul Davies undertakes to demonstrate for the benefit of non-scientists who have ‘simple arithmetic plus some imagination’ how it is possible, in accordance with the tenets of Einsteinian relativity, for a woman to fly off into space and come back younger than her twin sister on Earth. The two hypothetical twins are Ann and Betty (Davies 1995: 59–65). Betty takes off in her rocket ship in the year 2000 and returns to Earth in 2020. Ann, according to Davies’ account, ‘will have experienced twenty years

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during Betty’s absence’ and will have ‘aged twenty years as a result’. For Betty, however, travelling at 240,000 kilometres per hour, the journey will have taken only twelve years ‘in her frame of reference’. As regards the time of Betty’s departure and Betty’s return, Davies says, Ann and Betty ‘must concur on when those events happen, because they witness them together’. Let us first focus on the must in the last sentence. What kind of necessity is this? It is certainly not a psychological necessity; for there is room in this scenario for an Ann who tells Betty on her return: ‘Your clock is slow: the journey probably affected the mechanism.’ There is also room for a Betty who disagrees and declares that Ann’s clock is fast. Here there is no concurrence between the sisters ‘on when those events happen’, and certainly not because they witness them together. On the contrary, in spite of bearing common witness to the beginning and end of the trip, they may well agree that Betty set out in the year 2000, but disagree on the date of her return. It can hardly be a logical or mathematical ‘must’ either, since it is part of Davies’ case that there is no fault in the reckoning of either twin. So there is no ‘must’ about it. The ‘must’ is an invention of the narrator (i.e. Davies), designed to bear out his interpretation of the story. The narratorial trick is not difficult to spot. Davies switches in mid-narrative from talking about ‘events’ to talking about ‘duration’ and back again. He invites his reader to conclude: There is no fixed time difference between the events, no “actual” duration, only relative time differences. There is Ann’s time and Betty’s time, and they are not the same. Neither Ann nor Betty is right or wrong in her reckoning; it is just that they differ from each other. (Davies 1995: 60) At this point, the logic of Davies’ account begins to show signs of stress. Let us take Ann. If Ann is neither right nor wrong in her reckoning, that can only be because there is nothing to be right or wrong about. In supposing otherwise, she must have misconstrued the relationship between ‘telling the time’ and the realia of actual events. And she must have been doing this all her life. The adventures of her twin sister in space are thus an irrelevance. (Suppose she never had a twin sister.) The same goes for Betty. So according to Davies, they are arguing about nothing. But patently there is something to be argued about between the sisters; namely, the time of Betty’s arrival, and this point of dispute is rendered concrete beyond all shadow of doubt by the discrepancy between Ann’s clock and Betty’s clock. What is missing from Davies’ Einsteinian story is any clear account of how Betty’s language altered on the trip inside her new time-frame. But the reader is evidently meant to grasp that, due to the discrepancy between frames, her

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use of the word now no longer matches Ann’s. In this and related respects their languages are now anisomorphic. It does not follow from this, however, that all temporal correlation between events has broken down. For instance, Betty during the course of her space voyage might suddenly ask herself: ‘I wonder what Ann is doing now?’. This is not a meaningless question, even if Betty does not know what the answer is. Ann, if still alive, must be doing something (reading a book, having breakfast, playing tennis, etc.) at the very moment the question occurs to Betty. Ann has not ceased to exist simply because Betty is on a rocket ship. So, relativity or not, there is a clear sense in which the concept of simultaneous events still applies across the divide between frames and languages. But Davies seems reluctant to concede this: The fact that Ann and Betty have inconsistent “nows” or definitions of simultaneity at distant places is therefore not a cause for concern. No physically significant meaning can be attached to events happening “now” at a far-flung place, because we can never know about or affect such events in any way. Computing distant “now-events” is purely a bookkeeping exercise. (Davies 1995: 67. My italics.) A bookkeeping exercise indeed. It is the bookkeeping exercise that the rest of us call ‘language’. Pace Davies, the claim that we cannot affect what is happening in far-off places is totally irrelevant to the linguistic issue, while the claim that we can never know about such happenings is plainly wrong. It would have made perfectly good sense for Ann to wonder a fortnight ago exactly where Betty’s rocket ship was, and to try to compute her estimated time of arrival. It would also have made sense for her to say as a result: ‘It should now take Betty another two weeks to complete her journey’. Betty at the same time could have made a similar calculation, giving a rather different result, due to her reliance on a different clock. If we accept Davies’ claim, however, it would be incoherent to say that they both made their calculations ‘at the same time’ since Ann’s time and Betty’s time are quite different: there just is no time that is observer-neutral. That is the core of the thesis of the ‘relativity of simultaneity’. 15. It is worth noting that such matters as the great speed of Betty’s rocket ship and its vast distance from Earth are little more than science-fiction trimmings; for according to Einstein the relativity of simultaneity is exemplified perfectly well by the mundane example of a train travelling past an embankment. Each (train and embankment) ‘has its own particular time’ (Einstein 1961: 26). Furthermore, ‘unless we are told the reference-body to which the statement of time refers, there is no meaning in a statement of the time of an event’ (Einstein 1961: 26).

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That would have been news to most train drivers before and since. For it always seems possible to ask whether the driver sounded the whistle before or after the man threw himself off the embankment on to the track. Had witness Einstein told the coroner at the inquest that the question was meaningless until it was specified whether train-time or embankment-time was meant, he might well have ended up charged with contempt of court. And quite rightly. 16. Going back to Ann and Betty, a crucial linguistic question arises when Betty gets back to Earth. Suppose Ann greets Betty with the words ‘Now you’re back safe and sound’ and Betty responds ‘Yes, now I’m back.’ Are they still speaking the same language as when Betty left? That is, irrespective of the consideration that when Ann says ‘now’ she means the year 2020, whereas when Betty says ‘now’ she means 2012? By local terrestrial time, Betty is just wrong – eight years out, to be exact. The question is: can Betty continue to speak her rocket-ship language once back on Earth? Davies insists that it is not just that Ann’s clock is faster than Betty’s: he is looking for more convincing reocentric evidence than that. So he insists that Ann herself has aged bodily more than her sister. The apparent discrepancy between the two statements ‘I have been away twelve years’ and ‘She has been away twenty years’ cannot be reconciled just by slipping in provisos about whose clock (or calendar) we are relying on. It has a physical basis in the difference between the state of Betty’s body and the state of Ann’s body. This is a ‘real’ difference, corresponding to the time measurement. However, Davies is also committed to the view that the sisters agree on when Betty left and when she got back, ‘because’ they witness these events together. So somehow, when on return Betty stepped out of the rocket ship, she and Ann must have managed to readjust their discrepant temporal deictics by reference to the current encounter, even though the encounter itself was taking place eight years later for one sister than for the other. A curious state of affairs. Did Betty’s body rapidly age by eight years once back in its old time-world? That is not what our narrator wishes us to imagine. 17. The integrationist account of Ann’s ‘Now you’re back safe and sound’ and Betty’s ‘Yes, now I’m back’ does not encounter any linguistic puzzles of this kind. It runs as follows. Both twins understand each other’s ‘now’ as a deictic marking the integration of a present experience of reunion with a past experience of absence. But that integration is necessarily different for each, since they relate the deictic to different life narratives. So there is both a sense in which they agree and a sense in which they disagree about the temporal status and consequences of Betty’s return. This will be reflected in partially overlapping patterns of linguistic behaviour, as tested by assent and denial

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when interviewed by the press. They will doubtless both tend to assent to propositions like ‘We are twins’, ‘One of us set off on a space voyage in the year 2000’, and ‘We are back together now’; but probably differ when it comes to propositions like ‘We are both the same age’. None of this, however, provides the least reason for thinking that Ann, Betty or anyone else must agree that actual duration is an illusion, or that there is no way of identifying temporal concordances across lives lived in different time frames. 18. What has been confused, both by Einstein and in his wake by Davies, is the empirical question (1) of discovering what other events were taking place at the moment a given event took place, with the linguistic question (2) of describing the time of any event within the limits of terms supplied by a given chronological vocabulary. The answer or answers to (2) will depend on the language available. Einstein was right to insist that using the answer(s) to (2) in order to answer (1) begs the question. But he was wrong to conclude that this shows there is no observer-neutral time. In a somewhat similar way, Saussure was right to insist that languages are semantically anisomorphic, but would have been wrong to conclude from this (as some of his followers did) that communication across languages is impossible.

Appendix 2 Heisenberg on language

What we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing. W. Heisenberg

The classic exposition of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics was given in Werner Heisenberg’s Gifford lectures of 1955–56, revised under the title Physics and Philosophy, published in New York in 1962. Heisenberg is another example of a scientist who realizes that an earlier language of science is now out of date, but fails to see that his whole model of language is out of date too. I referred in Appendix 1 to Heisenberg’s view that the concepts of classical physics are just refinements of the concepts of everyday life. The parallel notion that the language of science is just a refinement of everyday language is developed in the last two chapters of Physics and Philosophy. There the questionable foundation of Heisenbergian semantics becomes all too apparent. The historical context of the question is the realization by physicists in the early twentieth century that the ‘findings’ of certain experiments could not be accommodated within the confines of what was regarded as the language of classical physics. Although they never used the term reocentric, physicists always construed classical physics as relating to the investigation of an assembly of items that were ‘given’ in Nature. The overriding requirement governing their language of science was that it should be capable of describing accurately whatever the world of Nature turned out to contain. According to Heisenberg’s version of events, it was Planck who first realized in 1900 that the formula he had produced for heat radiation had implications which, as Heisenberg puts it, ‘touched the foundations of our description of nature’. It was Einstein who took this forward by ‘interpreting Planck’s hypothesis as saying that light consists of quanta of energy traveling through space’. This led to ‘a description of light completely different from the traditional wave picture’ (Heisenberg 1989: 20–1).

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Heisenberg’s key metalinguistic notion in this account is that of ‘description’. Although he does not further explain what he takes a scientific description to be, it seems to be calqued directly on what one would call a description in everyday language about familiar anthropic objects visible to the naked eye. (For instance, ‘There is a red book on the table’.) Here one satisfies oneself as to whether the description is right or wrong, complete or incomplete, misleading or reliable, by looking to the objects in question. The description is matched to the describiendum. That is the way language is presented as operating from a reocentric perspective by those who endorse a correspondence theory of truth. How the ‘matching’ is carried out in practice is more difficult to explain, and there is no general explanation that is traditionally accepted in lay parlance. Lay metalinguistics does not analyse the process further: it is assumed that one can immediately see by visual inspection whether a description matches or not (at least, in the simplest instances like books on tables). In the kind of case Heisenberg is discussing, the problems start at this point. No one can just look and see whether or not light actually consists of quanta of energy travelling through space. The describiendum is permanently invisible; and that already poses a problem for reocentric theories of description, where the basic assumption is that typical anthropic objects are available for inspection, regardless of whether one knows what they are called or how to describe them. So, speaking of ‘description’ in the case of invisible microscopic phenomena is already stretching that metalinguistic notion somewhat beyond its typical range of application to items in the anthropic world. What Heisenberg would like, evidently, is a situation he cannot have; namely, one in which a language is available for describing atoms in just the same way as ordinary language makes it possible to describe books on the table. The difficulty is compounded when two rival descriptions confront each other, both purporting to describe the same invisible state of affairs. Could both descriptions be right? According to Heisenberg, Einstein knew, of course, that the well-known phenomena of diffraction and interference can be explained only on the basis of the wave picture. He was not able to dispute the complete contradiction between this wave picture and the idea of the light quanta; nor did he even attempt to remove the inconsistency of this interpretation. He simply took the contradiction as something which would probably be understood only much later. (Heisenberg 1989: 21) In other words, the linguistic model was retained in the face of the incompatible descriptions: the incompatibility was simply put on one side,

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rather than accept the alternatives that this model offers; namely (a) that one description must be wrong, or (b) that there must be two different describienda. This turned out not to be an isolated case in the early decades of the twentieth century. ‘Again and again one found that the attempt to describe atomic events in the traditional terms of physics led to contradictions’ (Heisenberg 1989: 23). Eventually the ‘Copenhagen’ solution was proposed. Bohr considered the two pictures – particle picture and wave picture – as two complementary descriptions of the same reality. Any of these descriptions can be only partially true, there must be limitations to the use of the particle concept as well as of the wave concept, else one could not avoid contradictions. (Heisenberg 1989: 31. My italics.) But this is quite different from ordinary descriptions of the visible world, where if there is a red book on the table, then ‘There is a red book on the table’ is true, not just ‘partially true’. Whether one can even make sense of the notion ‘partially true’ for a ‘complementarity’ description remains an open question. Here Heisenberg is struggling with his own metalanguage. Heisenberg thinks that the words and concepts of everyday language (which he sometimes refers to as ‘natural’ language) get their meanings by ‘immediate connection with reality’. They ‘represent reality’. That is why ‘any understanding must be based finally upon the natural language because it is only there that we can be certain to touch reality’ (Heisenberg 1989: 189–90). Any scepticism about ‘this natural language and its essential concepts’ is not to be tolerated. (Presumably because if it were – as postmodernists and others have pointed out – certainty would come under threat, and even the concept of knowledge itself.) How words acquire meanings by direct contact with reality is not further explained. It sounds like a Genesis story minus Adam. The only trouble with ordinary or natural language, according to Heisenberg, is that it was ‘formed during the prehistoric age’ and developed as a tool ‘for more or less unambiguous communication about events in daily life’. As a result most words are not very well defined. When they are needed for more precise purposes, definitions are called for. But definitions can only be given on the basis of other concepts, so ‘one will finally have to rely on some concepts that are taken as they are, unanalyzed and undefined’ (Heisenberg 1989: 157). This notion of a semantic hierarchy, resting in the end on a foundation of concepts ‘that are taken as they are’ shows a lack of acquaintance, or perhaps impatience, with any form of structuralist semantics. Why these ultimate concepts remain unanalysed is not explained. In Heisenbergian semantics there arises the possibility that some sentences are meaningless. But no general criterion can be given.

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A definite decision is possible only when the sentence belongs to a closed system of concepts and axioms, which in the development of natural science will be rather the exception than the rule. (Heisenberg 1989: 73) Sometimes the ‘conjecture’ that a sentence is meaningless may lead to important progress (as, for instance, in quantum theory with the sentence ‘In which orbit does the electron move around the nucleus?’). But in the main a description of Nature ‘necessarily uses words and concepts that are only vaguely defined’. It may sometimes seem that terms are well defined, even when this is not so. Thus the words position and velocity appeared to be clearly defined ‘within the mathematical framework of Newtonian mechanics’, but were found wanting when quantum theory was developed. One may say that regarding their position in Newtonian mechanics they were well defined, but in relation to nature they were not. (Heisenberg 1989: 73) So in the end, as in all reocentric theories, it is Nature that provides the ultimate basis for definition. This means that situations may arise in which the scientist is trapped into making meaningless statements: we can never know beforehand which limitations will be put on the applicability of certain concepts by the extension of our knowledge into the remote parts of nature, into which we can only penetrate with the most elaborate tools. Therefore in the process of penetration we are bound sometimes to use our concepts in a way which is not justified and which carries no meaning. (Heisenberg 1989: 73–4) It was Aristotle, in Heisenberg’s estimation, who ‘actually created the basis for the scientific language’ (Heisenberg 1989: 157). He accomplished this not by compiling a dictionary of well-defined terms, but by formalizing logic, and thus contributing to ‘the establishment of order in our methods of thought’. However – and here Heisenberg reclines into armchair psycholinguistics – this was done at the expense of ‘oversimplification’. For word-meanings have ‘associations’. The fact that every word may cause many only half-conscious movements in our mind can be used to represent some part of reality in the language much more clearly than by the use of the logical patterns. (Heisenberg 1989: 158)

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By speaking of ‘oversimplification’ Heisenberg seems to be suggesting that Aristotelian logic presupposes the availability of precisely defined words; and since we know that ordinary language does not usually have such words available, the kind of thinking reflected in the syllogism is already an idealization, where half-conscious movements in the mind and other elusive mental goings-on have been suppressed by fiat. So there is a linguistic problem that hinges on the tension between semantic precision and semantic realism. According to Heisenberg, we cannot have both at once. Nevertheless, ‘science must be based upon language’ in some form or other. This first problem of scientific language obtains even when there is no difficulty about identifying the describiendum. But there is a further linguistic problem that arises when scientists have to describe ‘aspects of nature which cannot be described in terms of the common concepts’. But in what language, then, should they be described? The first language that emerges from the process of scientific clarification is in theoretical physics usually a mathematical language, the mathematical scheme, which allows one to predict the results of experiments. (Heisenberg 1989: 156) Physicists, on the other hand, do not speak only to physicists. They must also speak to nonphysicists ‘in plain language, understandable to anybody’. Even for the physicist the description in plain language will be a criterion of the degree of understanding that has been reached. To what extent is such a description at all possible? Can one speak about the atom itself? (Heisenberg 1989: 156. My italics.) What is interesting about this is the idea that the scientist, even if successful in the practical business of conducting experiments, does not ‘understand’ them unless able to translate the mathematics into ‘plain language’. (Echoes of Faraday’s complaint to Maxwell?) In the mathematics there is something missing: it does not ‘speak about the atom itself’. In natural science we try to derive the particular from the general, to understand the particular phenomenon as caused by simple general laws. The general laws when formulated in the language can contain only a few simple concepts – else the law would not be simple and general. From these concepts are derived an infinite variety of possible phenomena, not only qualitatively but with complete precision with respect to every detail. It is obvious that the concepts of ordinary language,

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inaccurate and only vaguely defined as they are, could never allow such derivations. [. . .] Therefore, the concepts of the general laws must in natural science be defined with complete precision, and this can be achieved only by means of mathematical abstraction. (Heisenberg 1989: 159–60) Heisenberg has now created a reocentric problem for himself. For it is unclear how ‘abstraction’, which for him involves deliberately sacrificing the semantic richness of ordinary language, yields greater precision, given that ordinary language stands closer to reality itself. One wonders how ‘oversimplification’ can possibly be compatible with accuracy. Here Heisenberg introduces a metaphysical distinction between ‘facts’ and other describienda. This enables him to say that in physics the ‘facts’ can always be described in ordinary language. He claims that ‘it belongs to the concept “fact” that it can be described in ordinary language’. So to say that this is the case for the facts of physics becomes a tautology. (This seems to be a semantic rule he has invented for his own purposes.) But physics must go beyond the facts. We wish to speak in some way about the structure of the atoms and not only about the “facts” – the latter being, for instance, the black spots on a photographic plate or the water droplets in a cloud chamber. But we cannot speak about the atoms in ordinary language. (Heisenberg 1989:166–7) Why not? Because, an integrationist would say, the semantic model you have adopted makes that impossible. But Heisenberg’s answer would presumably be that, where atoms are concerned, the terminology of ordinary language lacks any ‘immediate connection’ with reality. Heisenberg contemplates two possible ways out of the impasse. The first involves a ‘wait and see’ policy: one should wait and see how physicists pragmatically go about developing a language in which it is possible to speak about the atom. (Bohr’s ‘complementarity’ offers one possibility, even though, in Heisenberg’s view, this amounts to admitting some degree of ambiguity in the relevant terms.) The other involves trying to define from scratch a precise scientific language corresponding to the mathematical scheme that has been adopted. Here it seems that one could take as a basis classical logic or a modification of it (such as Weizsäcker’s proposal for quantum logic, in which there are ‘degrees’ of truth, expressed numerically). Neither solution, patently, meets Heisenberg’s earlier demand that the physicist be able to translate what experiments reveal back into ‘plain language’ that everybody can understand. What Heisenberg concludes from all

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this is not that there is anything wrong with his linguistic assumptions, or the translatability demand, but that a revision is required of the degrees or levels of reality we recognize. In the experiments about atomic events we have to do with things and facts, with phenomena that are just as real as any phenomena in daily life. But the atoms or the elementary particles themselves are not as real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts. (Heisenberg 1989: 174) It is a case of the irresistible force meeting the immovably fossilized semantics.

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Index

Ackerman, E.A. 156 acupuncture 10 aesthetics 105 agriculture xi–xii, 8, 154 Alder, K. 145 Almaeon 32 Anaxagoras 32, 37 Anaximander 32, 158 Anaximenes 32, 37 anthropic perspective 177–80, 183–5, 187, 203 anthropology 94, 104 arbitrariness x, 13, 23, 38, 45–6, 54, 58–9, 66, 73, 118, 122–3, 184 Aristotle 1, 5–25, 27, 30, 33, 37–40, 42–5, 47–52, 54–7, 61–4, 67–8, 94, 131, 135, 146, 158–9, 164–5, 194, 205–6 Arnold, M. 29 art, -s x–xii, 8, 40–5, 57, 158 Asher, R.E. 83 astronomy 11, 30, 85, 126–7, 130–1, 151, 161 Aubrey, J. 47 Bacon, Francis 42–4, 46, 49–50, 56, 168, 174, 176 Bacon, Roger 41–2 Barnes, J. 9–10 Bazerman, C. ix behaviourism 96, 98, 147, 164, 166 Bell, C. 104–5 Bergson, H.L. 170 Berkeley, G. 136

Bernal, J.D. 172 Bible 55, 66, 131, 194, 204 biogeography 156 biology 5, 34–6, 62, 104, 155–6 Blaise, C. 138 Bloomfield, L. 89, 96–7, 110, 115, 164, 167 Boas, F. 95 Bohr, N. vii, 139–40, 185–6, 204, 207 Boltzmann, L. 81 botany 2, 11, 62, 73, 85, 87, 91, 155 Boyle, R. 50–2, 61, 78–9, 81 Bréal, M. viii, xii Bridgman, P.W. 132–4, 141–3, 146–9, 162, 184 Brugmann, K. 89–90, 92 Buffon, G.L.L. 62 Burnet, J. 29–33, 38, 80 Cameron, D. 70 Campbell, N. xiii, 143 Carnap, R. 79–80, 135, 167–72 Cassirer, E. 15 causes 7, 13, 15–16, 39, 52, 186 Chalmers, A.F. xii, 83–4 chemistry xii–xiii, 63, 65, 78, 95, 104 Cherry, C. vii Chinese 56 Chomsky, A.N. 98 Christianity 34 climatology 156 comparative philology 85–6, 88–94, 96 componential analysis 58

216

Index

convention 17–19, 21–3, 44–5, 67 Copernicus, N. 130, 163 Cornford, F.M. 117 cosmology 30 cotemporality 115, 197 Cotgreave, P. 129 counting 106–8, 111–15, 117, 121–4, 162, 186–7, 198 Cratylus 46 Crombie, A.C. 6 Crystal, D. 83, 102–3 currency 18–19 Dalgarno, G. 54 Dantzig, T. 107–8, 113 Darwin, C. 34–6, 71, 172–3 Daubenton, L.J.M. 62 Davies, P. 197–201 definition 3, 7, 15, 20–2, 25, 35–6, 38–40, 42–4, 50, 52–3, 64, 66–8, 70–1, 77, 82–3, 97, 102, 111, 136–8, 141, 143, 145–6, 149, 153, 157, 159–60, 162–3, 167–8, 171, 179, 185, 196, 199, 204, 206 Delambre, J.B.J. 145, 149 Democritus 7, 37, 42 dialect 87, 89, 99 Dingle, H. 172–3 distributionalism 97–8 earthquakes 32–3, 37–9 Eco, U. 181 economic geography 156 economics xii, 155–7, 173 Eddington, A.S. 133–4, 136, 143–4, 172, 178 education 48, 59, 79, 84, 86, 94, 104 Einstein, A. 77–9, 132–9, 150–1, 183, 185–6, 189–203 Empedocles 32 Encyclopédie 44–6, 62 Engels, F. 34 engineering 104 Esperanto 62 ethics 103 Ettmayer, K. von 167 Euclid 146, 191

Faraday, M. 106, 206 Farrington, B. 5, 31–3 fixed codes 68, 76–7, 109–12, 115–16, 119–23, 163, 170 Flegg, G. 112, 114 Fleming, S. 138 Fletcher, P. 100 Flood, W.E. xiv formalism 117–19, 121 Fought, J.G. 95 Frege, G. 117–19 French, R. 12 Friedman, M. 173 Fuller, S. ix Galileo 29, 49, 130–2 Galton, F. 108 Gauchat, L. 89 generativism 98–100 Genette, G. 45 geography 153–60 geology 2, 37–8, 85, 95, 155–6, 172 geometry 30, 41, 146, 191 geomorphology 156 Goodman, N. 162, 164, 174 Gould, S.J. 34 grammar 45, 48, 57–60, 86, 88, 96, 99, 102, 181 Gregory, R.L. 152 Grove, V. 73 Hall, H.R. 6 Halliday, M.A.K. vii, xv hard-science linguistics 174 Harré, R. 15, 64–5, 67, 146, 165 Harris, Z.S. 97–8 Hartshorne, R. 155 Harvey, W. 1, 47 Hebraism 29 Hegel, G.W.F. 170 Heisenberg, W. 140–1, 190, 202–8 Hellenism 29 Heraclitus 32, 117 Herodotus 158 Hertz, H.R. 81 history xi, 48, 71, 85–6, 88–9, 91, 126, 152, 154–5, 158–9, 165, 187, 195

Index Hogben, L. xiv, 112–13, 125 Holt-Jensen, A. 153–60 Hughes, A. 100 Humboldt, K.W. von 99 Huxley, T.H. 10, 34, 36 idiographic science 159 idiolect 99 idola fori 43–4, 49–50 imagination 43, 46, 76, 171, 187 integration, -ism ix, xi, xiv, 81, 109–10, 112–13, 115–19, 121, 123–4, 126–7, 131, 146, 149, 151–2, 155, 163, 176–9, 182, 184, 187, 190–1, 193, 197, 200–1, 207 Jeans, J.H. 129, 150 Jespersen, O. 114 Johnson, W.E. 53 Joseph, J.E. 83 Jupiter 28 Kant, I. xii–xiii, xvi, 191 Katz, J.J. 170 Keats, J. 75 Kelvin, W.T 183–4 Kronecker, L. 121 Kuhn, T.S. 135, 152–3, 161, 163–6 Labov, W. 89–90, 98–9 language myth xiv, 2–3, 13, 18, 23, 109, 116, 166, 194 Lennox, J.G. 5, 7 Leonardo da Vinci 41–2 Lewes, G.H. 34 linguistic essentialism 65–7 linguistic intuitions 98 linguistic relativity 95, 131, 140, 196, 199–201 Linnaeus, C. 62 Lloyd, G.E.R. 6, 8, 12, 16, 32, 39–40 Locke, J. 13–14, 18, 45, 127, 160 Lodge, O. vii Lodwick, F. 54 logic 13, 15, 17, 22, 28, 41, 45, 48, 70–1, 167–8, 187, 198, 205, 207 logical positivism 81, 96

217

logical syntax 167–9, 172 Losee, J. 5 Love, N. 104 Lully, R. 51 Luther, M. 78 Lyons, J. 101–2 McCloskey, D.N. xvi McKeon, R. 7 MacKie, E.W. 26–7 Madden, E.H. 64–5, 67, 146 Malthus, T.R. 34 Marduk 31–3 Martinet, A. 103–4 Marx, K. 34 material essentialism 65–7 mathematics 3, 8, 30, 41, 48, 50, 79, 106–31, 134, 136, 140–1, 145, 151, 168, 180, 184–7, 198, 205–7 Maxwell, J.C. 106, 206 measurement 106, 116, 137–151, 162, 166, 172–3, 183–5, 200 Méchain, P.F.A. 145, 149 mechanics 138–40, 146, 186, 205 Medawar, P. 5, 69–74 medicine 8, 12, 16, 23, 38, 104 memory 43, 46 metallurgy 14, 26–7, 65, 67–8 metaphysics 7, 13, 15, 18, 36–7, 46, 79–81, 145–6, 149, 170, 172, 174, 181, 184, 207 meteorology 30, 37–8, 155–6, 174 Michel, P-H. 6 Mill, J.S. 119, 123–4, 174 Müller, F.M. 85–8 Mure, G.R.G. 8 Murray, G. xi–xii, 5 music xii myth, -ology 31, 66, 80, 152 natural language, doctrine of 50, 53, 57, 59–60 natural selection 35 Neogrammarians 89–90, 94 Neurath, O. 80 Newton, I. 1, 134–5, 140, 146, 196, 205

218 nomenclaturism 53, 66, 93, 97, 113, 185 operationalism 141–3, 145–7, 149, 162, 184 Osthoff, H. 89–90, 92 Pagels, H.R. 139 painting xii, 41–2 Paracelsus, P.A. 51, 64 parascience 105 Parmenides 32 Parsons, C. 121–3 Passmore, J. 81 Pateman, T. 86, 99 Peters, F.E. 39 phonetics 100–1 physics xii, 2, 48, 95, 104, 134, 136–7, 139–41, 144–5, 147, 153, 170, 182, 184, 187, 190, 193, 196, 202, 204, 206–7 Planck, M.K.E.L. 183, 202 Plato 13, 17, 20, 30, 38, 40, 42, 45, 54, 117, 119–20, 128, 142, 176–9, 184, 189 poetry xii, 5, 41 politics xi, 8 Pollack, R. x Popper, K. 79–80, 174 Poseidon 32–3, 38 positivism 69 prescriptivism 65, 96–7, 103 principle of reasonable ignorance 127 psychocentrism 3, 13–14, 45, 104, 136, 139, 164–5, 167, 171 psychology 104, 169, 192–3 see also behaviourism Putnam, H. 127 Pythagoras 30, 32 quantum theory 139–41, 185–6, 202–3, 205, 207 Quine, W.V.O. 126, 164, 166 Quinton, A. 84 reason 27, 43, 45–6, 54 relativity, Einsteinian 77–9, 131, 136–9, 185–6, 196–200

Index religion x–xi, 5, 29–33, 36, 49, 130, 161, 180 reocentrism 3, 13–14, 16, 18, 22–4, 39, 52, 62, 64–6, 73, 81–2, 115, 120,126–7, 131, 133, 136, 139, 142, 150, 160, 163–4, 166–7, 171, 174, 179, 181, 183–5, 189– 90, 193–4, 196–7, 200, 202–3, 205, 207 Richter, I.A. 41–2 Robinson, R. 20–1 Royal Society 47–63 Sapir, E. 93–5 Saussure, F. de 46, 66, 90, 91–3, 95, 97–8, 117–19, 122–3, 131, 166, 201 Savory, T.H. vii, 73–4 Schelling, F.W.J. von 170 Schmandt-Besserat, D. 114–15 Schrödinger, E. 30–1 scientific paradigm 152–3, 161–6 sculpture 41 semantic continuity/discontinuity 75–9, 81, 129–31, 134, 141, 143, 145, 166, 177–9, 190 Skinner, B.F. 98 Smith, L.P. 73–4 social geography 156, 160 social sciences 160 sociolinguistics 99–100 sociology 104, 155–6, 169 Socrates 20, 39, 117 Spinoza, B. de 170 Sprat, T. 48–50, 53 statistics 100–1, 157 Stonehenge 26 structuralism 90–1, 119, 204 superstring 176, 178–80 surrogationism 13–14, 16, 17, 22, 65–6 symbol, -ism 17–20, 69, 76, 111–12, 115, 121–2, 168–70 Tarski, A. 70–1 Taton, R. 25–6 technology 8, 25–7, 85 telementation 2, 54 Thales 31–3, 37, 40 time-lag 1–2, 4, 135–7, 150, 152 Toolan, M.J. xiv

Index translation 111, 132, 160, 164–6 Tredennick, H. 9, 10 truth 70–1, 75, 78–9, 109, 111, 117, 119, 121, 123–4, 127, 130, 132, 136, 171, 177, 179, 185, 187–8, 196–7, 203–4 Tylor, E.B. 106–7 valeur 119 Varenius, B. 158 Varro 102 verifiability principle 81, 147, 170–2 Vico, G. 86 Vidal de la Blache, P. 158 Vienna Circle 81, 147, 167–8, 171–2 Waismann, F. 81 Wasik, Z. 174 Weiss, A.P. 96 Whateley, R. 167 Whewell, W. 28–9, 72, 76–7 Whitaker, C.W.A. 17

Whitehead, A.N. 186–7 Whorf, B.L. xv, 166 Wilberforce, S. 34 Wilder, R. 111–12, 125 Wilkins, J. 53–62, 171, 175, 183 Williams, R. 152 Wittgenstein, L. 76, 78, 147–9, 190 Wolf, S.G. viii Wolpert, L. 131–2 Woods, A. 100 writing 47, 53–6, 58, 62, 68, 88, 126, 154, 169, 174, 176, 182 Wundt, W. 96 Xenophanes 32 Yngve, V.H. 174 Zaslavsky, C. 108 Zeno 32 Zeus 28 zoology 7–8, 97

219