The Analysis of Mind, Bertrand Russell [best desktop ebook reader .txt] 📗

occurrences which is Jones. There is no LOGICAL

impossibility in walking occurring as an isolated phenomenon, not

forming part of any such series as we call a “person.”

 

We may therefore class with “eating,” “walking,” “speaking” words

such as “rain,” “sunrise,” “lightning,” which do not denote what

would commonly be called actions. These words illustrate,

incidentally, how little we can trust to the grammatical

distinction of parts of speech, since the substantive “rain” and

the verb “to rain” denote precisely the same class of

meteorological occurrences. The distinction between the class of

objects denoted by such a word and the class of objects denoted

by a general name such as “man,” “vegetable,” or “planet,” is

that the sort of object which is an instance of (say) “lightning”

is much simpler than (say) an individual man. (I am speaking of

lightning as a sensible phenomenon, not as it is described in

physics.) The distinction is one of degree, not of kind. But

there is, from the point of view of ordinary thought, a great

difference between a process which, like a flash of lightning,

can be wholly comprised within one specious present and a process

which, like the life of a man, has to be pieced together by

observation and memory and the apprehension of causal

connections. We may say broadly, therefore, that a word of the

kind we have been discussing denotes a set of similar

occurrences, each (as a rule) much more brief and less complex

than a person or thing. Words themselves, as we have seen, are

sets of similar occurrences of this kind. Thus there is more

logical affinity between a word and what it means in the case of

words of our present sort than in any other case.

 

There is no very great difference between such words as we have

just been considering and words denoting qualities, such as

“white” or “round.” The chief difference is that words of this

latter sort do not denote processes, however brief, but static

features of the world. Snow falls, and is white; the falling is a

process, the whiteness is not. Whether there is a universal,

called “whiteness,” or whether white things are to be defined as

those having a certain kind of similarity to a standard thing,

say freshly fallen snow, is a question which need not concern us,

and which I believe to be strictly insoluble. For our purposes,

we may take the word “white” as denoting a certain set of similar

particulars or collections of particulars, the similarity being

in respect of a static quality, not of a process.

 

From the logical point of view, a very important class of words

are those that express relations, such as “in,” “above,”

“before,” “greater,” and so on. The meaning of one of these words

differs very fundamentally from the meaning of one of any of our

previous classes, being more abstract and logically simpler than

any of them. If our business were logic, we should have to spend

much time on these words. But as it is psychology that concerns

us, we will merely note their special character and pass on,

since the logical classification of words is not our main

business.

 

We will consider next the question what is implied by saying that

a person “understands” a word, in the sense in which one

understands a word in one’s own language, but not in a language

of which one is ignorant. We may say that a person understands a

word when (a) suitable circumstances make him use it, (b) the

hearing of it causes suitable behaviour in him. We may call these

two active and passive understanding respectively. Dogs often

have passive understanding of some words, but not active

understanding, since they cannot use words.

 

It is not necessary, in order that a man should “understand” a

word, that he should “know what it means,” in the sense of being

able to say “this word means so-and-so.” Understanding words does

not consist in knowing their dictionary definitions, or in being

able to specify the objects to which they are appropriate. Such

understanding as this may belong to lexicographers and students,

but not to ordinary mortals in ordinary life. Understanding

language is more like understanding cricket*: it is a matter of

habits, acquired in oneself and rightly presumed in others. To

say that a word has a meaning is not to say that those who use

the word correctly have ever thought out what the meaning is: the

use of the word comes first, and the meaning is to be distilled

out of it by observation and analysis. Moreover, the meaning of a

word is not absolutely definite: there is always a greater or

less degree of vagueness. The meaning is an area, like a target:

it may have a bull’s eye, but the outlying parts of the target

are still more or less within the meaning, in a gradually

diminishing degree as we travel further from the bull’s eye. As

language grows more precise, there is less and less of the target

outside the bull’s eye, and the bull’s eye itself grows smaller

and smaller; but the bull’s eye never shrinks to a point, and

there is always a doubtful region, however small, surrounding

it.**

 

* This point of view, extended to the analysis of “thought” is

urged with great force by J. B. Watson, both in his “Behavior,”

and in “Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist”

(Lippincott. 1919), chap. ix.

 

** On the understanding of words, a very admirable little book is

Ribot’s “Evolution of General Ideas,” Open Court Co., 1899. Ribot

says (p. 131): “We learn to understand a concept as we learn to

walk, dance, fence or play a musical instrument: it is a habit,

i.e. an organized memory. General terms cover an organized,

latent knowledge which is the hidden capital without which we

should be in a state of bankruptcy, manipulating false money or

paper of no value. General ideas are habits in the intellectual

order.”

 

A word is used “correctly” when the average hearer will be

affected by it in the way intended. This is a psychological, not

a literary, definition of “correctness.” The literary definition

would substitute, for the average hearer, a person of high

education living a long time ago; the purpose of this definition

is to make it difficult to speak or write correctly.

 

The relation of a word to its meaning is of the nature of a

causal law governing our use of the word and our actions when we

hear it used. There is no more reason why a person who uses a

word correctly should be able to tell what it means than there is

why a planet which is moving correctly should know Kepler’s laws.

 

To illustrate what is meant by “understanding” words and

sentences, let us take instances of various situations.

 

Suppose you are walking in London with an absent-minded friend,

and while crossing a street you say, “Look out, there’s a motor

coming.” He will glance round and jump aside without the need of

any “mental” intermediary. There need be no “ideas,” but only a

stiffening of the muscles, followed quickly by action. He

“understands” the words, because he does the right thing. Such

“understanding” may be taken to belong to the nerves and brain,

being habits which they have acquired while the language was

being learnt. Thus understanding in this sense may be reduced to

mere physiological causal laws.

 

If you say the same thing to a Frenchman with a slight knowledge

of English he will go through some inner speech which may be

represented by “Que dit-il? Ah, oui, une automobile!” After this,

the rest follows as with the Englishman. Watson would contend

that the inner speech must be incipiently pronounced; we should

argue that it MIGHT be merely imaged. But this point is not

important in the present connection.

 

If you say the same thing to a child who does not yet know the

word “motor,” but does know the other words you are using, you

produce a feeling of anxiety and doubt you will have to point and

say, “There, that’s a motor.” After that the child will roughly

understand the word “motor,” though he may include trains and

steam-rollers If this is the first time the child has heard the

word “motor,” he may for a long time continue to recall this

scene when he hears the word.

 

So far we have found four ways of understanding words:

 

(1) On suitable occasions you use the word properly.

 

(2) When you hear it you act appropriately.

 

(3) You associate the word with another word (say in a different

language) which has the appropriate effect on behaviour.

 

(4) When the word is being first learnt, you may associate it

with an object, which is what it “means,” or a representative of

various objects that it “means.”

 

In the fourth case, the word acquires, through association, some

of the same causal efficacy as the object. The word “motor” can

make you leap aside, just as the motor can, but it cannot break

your bones. The effects which a word can share with its object

are those which proceed according to laws other than the general

laws of physics, i.e. those which, according to our terminology,

involve vital movements as opposed to merely mechanical

movements. The effects of a word that we understand are always

mnemic phenomena in the sense explained in Lecture IV, in so far

as they are identical with, or similar to, the effects which the

object itself might have.

 

So far, all the uses of words that we have considered can be

accounted for on the lines of behaviourism.

 

But so far we have only considered what may be called the

“demonstrative” use of language, to point out some feature in the

present environment. This is only one of the ways in which

language may be used. There are also its narrative and

imaginative uses, as in history and novels. Let us take as an

instance the telling of some remembered event.

 

We spoke a moment ago of a child who hears the word “motor” for

the first time when crossing a street along which a motor-car is

approaching. On a later occasion, we will suppose, the child

remembers the incident and relates it to someone else. In this

case, both the active and passive understanding of words is

different from what it is when words are used demonstratively.

The child is not seeing a motor, but only remembering one; the

hearer does not look round in expectation of seeing a motor

coming, but “understands” that a motor came at some earlier time.

The whole of this occurrence is much more difficult to account

for on behaviourist lines. It is clear that, in so far as the

child is genuinely remembering, he has a picture of the past

occurrence, and his words are chosen so as to describe the

picture; and in so far as the hearer is genuinely apprehending

what is said, the hearer is acquiring a picture more or less like

that of the child. It is true that this process may be telescoped

through the operation of the word-habit. The child may not

genuinely remember the incident, but only have the habit of the

appropriate words, as in the case of a poem which we know by

heart, though we cannot remember learning it. And the hearer also

may only pay attention to the words, and not call up any

corresponding picture. But it is, nevertheless, the possibility

of a memory-image in the child and an imagination-image in the

hearer that makes the essence of the narrative “meaning” of the

words. In so far as this is absent, the words are mere counters,

capable of meaning, but not at