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

had occasion to notice the distinction between content

and objective in the case of memory-beliefs, where the content is

“this occurred” and the objective is the past event.

 

(4) Between content and objective there is sometimes a very wide

gulf, for example in the case of “Caesar crossed the Rubicon.”

This gulf may, when it is first perceived, give us a feeling that

we cannot really ” know ” anything about the outer world. All we

can “know,” it may be said, is what is now in our thoughts. If

Caesar and the Rubicon cannot be bodily in our thoughts, it might

seem as though we must remain cut off from knowledge of them. I

shall not now deal at length with this feeling, since it is

necessary first to define “knowing,” which cannot be done yet.

But I will say, as a preliminary answer, that the feeling assumes

an ideal of knowing which I believe to be quite mistaken. ~ it

assumes, if it is thought out, something like the mystic unity of

knower and known. These two are often said to be combined into a

unity by the fact of cognition; hence when this unity is plainly

absent, it may seem as if there were no genuine cognition. For my

part, I think such theories and feelings wholly mistaken: I

believe knowing to be a very external and complicated relation,

incapable of exact definition, dependent upon causal laws, and

involving no more unity than there is between a signpost and the

town to which it points. I shall return to this question on a

later occasion; for the moment these provisional remarks must

suffice.

 

(5) The objective reference of a belief is connected with the

fact that all or some of the constituents of its content have

meaning. If I say “Caesar conquered Gaul,” a person who knows the

meaning of the three words composing my statement knows as much

as can be known about the nature of the objective which would

make my statement true. It is clear that the objective reference

of a belief is, in general, in some way derivative from the

meanings of the words or images that occur in its content. There

are, however, certain complications which must be borne in mind.

In the first place, it might be contended that a memory-image

acquires meaning only through the memory-belief, which would

seem, at least in the case of memory, to make belief more

primitive than the meaning of images. In the second place, it is

a very singular thing that meaning, which is single, should

generate objective reference, which is dual, namely true and

false. This is one of the facts which any theory of belief must

explain if it is to be satisfactory.

 

It is now time to leave these preliminary requisites, and attempt

the analysis of the contents of beliefs.

 

The first thing to notice about what is believed, i.e. about the

content of a belief, is that it is always complex: We believe

that a certain thing has a certain property, or a certain

relation to something else, or that it occurred or will occur (in

the sense discussed at the end of Lecture IX); or we may believe

that all the members of a certain class have a certain property,

or that a certain property sometimes occurs among the members of

a class; or we may believe that if one thing happens, another

will happen (for example, “if it rains I shall bring my

umbrella”), or we may believe that something does not happen, or

did not or will not happen (for example, “it won’t rain”); or

that one of two things must happen (for example, “either you

withdraw your accusation, or I shall bring a libel action”). The

catalogue of the sorts of things we may believe is infinite, but

all of them are complex.

 

Language sometimes conceals the complexity of a belief. We say

that a person believes in God, and it might seem as if God formed

the whole content of the belief. But what is really believed is

that God exists, which is very far from being simple. Similarly,

when a person has a memory-image with a memory-belief, the belief

is “this occurred,” in the sense explained in Lecture IX; and

“this occurred” is not simple. In like manner all cases where the

content of a belief seems simple at first sight will be found, on

examination, to confirm the view that the content is always

complex.

 

The content of a belief involves not merely a plurality of

constituents, but definite relations between them; it is not

determinate when its constituents alone are given. For example,

“Plato preceded Aristotle” and “Aristotle preceded Plato” are

both contents which may be believed, but, although they consist

of exactly the same constituents, they are different, and even

incompatible.

 

The content of a belief may consist of words only, or of images

only, or of a mixture of the two, or of either or both together

with one or more sensations. It must contain at least one

constituent which is a word or an image, and it may or may not

contain one or more sensations as constituents. Some examples

will make these various possibilities clear.

 

We may take first recognition, in either of the forms “this is of

such-and-such a kind” or “this has occurred before.” In either

case, present sensation is a constituent. For example, you hear a

noise, and you say to yourself “tram.” Here the noise and the

word “tram” are both constituents of your belief; there is also a

relation between them, expressed by “is” in the proposition “that

is a tram.” As soon as your act of recognition is completed by

the occurrence of the word “tram,” your actions are affected: you

hurry if you want the tram, or cease to hurry if you want a bus.

In this case the content of your belief is a sensation (the

noise) and a word (“tram”) related in a way which may be called

predication.

 

The same noise may bring into your mind the visual image of a

tram, instead of the word “tram.” In this case your belief

consists of a sensation and an image suitable related. Beliefs of

this class are what are called “judgments of perception.” As we

saw in Lecture VIII, the images associated with a sensation often

come with such spontaneity and force that the unsophisticated do

not distinguish them from the sensation; it is only the

psychologist or the skilled observer who is aware of the large

mnemic element that is added to sensation to make perception. It

may be objected that what is added consists merely of images

without belief. This is no doubt sometimes the case, but is

certainly sometimes not the case. That belief always occurs in

perception as opposed to sensation it is not necessary for us to

maintain; it is enough for our purposes to note that it sometimes

occurs, and that when it does, the content of our belief consists

of a sensation and an image suitably related.

 

In a PURE memory-belief only images occur. But a mixture of words

and images is very common in memory. You have an image of the

past occurrence, and you say to yourself: “Yes, that’s how it

was.” Here the image and the words together make up the content

of the belief. And when the remembering of an incident has become

a habit, it may be purely verbal, and the memory-belief may

consist of words alone.

 

The more complicated forms of belief tend to consist only of

words. Often images of various kinds accompany them, but they are

apt to be irrelevant, and to form no part of what is actually

believed. For example, in thinking of the Solar System, you are

likely to have vague images of pictures you have seen of the

earth surrounded by clouds, Saturn and his rings, the sun during

an eclipse, and so on; but none of these form part of your belief

that the planets revolve round the sun in elliptical orbits. The

only images that form an actual part of such beliefs are, as a

rule, images of words. And images of words, for the reasons

considered in Lecture VIII, cannot be distinguished with any

certainty from sensations, when, as is often, if not usually, the

case, they are kinaesthetic images of pronouncing the words.

 

It is impossible for a belief to consist of sensations alone,

except when, as in the case of words, the sensations have

associations which make them signs possessed of meaning. The

reason is that objective reference is of the essence of belief,

and objective reference is derived from meaning. When I speak of

a belief consisting partly of sensations and partly of words, I

do not mean to deny that the words, when they are not mere

images, are sensational, but that they occur as signs, not (so to

speak) in their own right. To revert to the noise of the tram,

when you hear it and say “tram,” the noise and the word are both

sensations (if you actually pronounce the word), but the noise is

part of the fact which makes your belief true, whereas the word

is not part of this fact. It is the MEANING of the word “tram,”

not the actual word, that forms part of the fact which is the

objective of your belief. Thus the word occurs in the belief as a

symbol, in virtue of its meaning, whereas the noise enters into

both the belief and its objective. It is this that distinguishes

the occurrence of words as symbols from the occurrence of

sensations in their own right: the objective contains the

sensations that occur in their own right, but contains only the

meanings of the words that occur as symbols.

 

For the sake of simplicity, we may ignore the cases in which

sensations in their own right form part of the content of a

belief, and confine ourselves to images and words. We may also

omit the cases in which both images and words occur in the

content of a belief. Thus we become confined to two cases: (a)

when the content consists wholly of images, (b) when it consists

wholly of words. The case of mixed images and words has no

special importance, and its omission will do no harm.

 

Let us take in illustration a case of memory. Suppose you are

thinking of some familiar room. You may call up an image of it,

and in your image the window may be to the left of the door.

Without any intrusion of words, you may believe in the

correctness of your image. You then have a belief, consisting

wholly of images, which becomes, when put into words, “the window

is to the left of the door.” You may yourself use these words and

proceed to believe them. You thus pass from an image-content to

the corresponding word-content. The content is different in the

two cases, but its objective reference is the same. This shows

the relation of image-beliefs to word-beliefs in a very simple

case. In more elaborate cases the relation becomes much less

simple.

 

It may be said that even in this very simple case the objective

reference of the word-content is not quite the same as that of

the image-content, that images have a wealth of concrete features

which are lost when words are substituted, that the window in the

image is not a mere window in the abstract, but a window of a

certain shape and size, not merely to the left of the door, but a

certain distance to the left, and so on. In reply, it may be

admitted at once that there is, as a rule, a certain amount of

truth in the objection. But two points may be urged