Brown Book: Difference between revisions

There are, on the other hand, various reasons which incline us to look at the fact of something being possible, someone being able to do something, etc., as the fact that he or it is in a particular || peculiar state. Roughly speaking, this comes to saying that “A is in the state of being able to do something” is the form of representation we are most strongly tempted to adopt, or, as one could also put it, we are strongly inclined to use the metaphor of something being in a peculiar state for saying that something can behave in a particular way. And this way of representation, or this metaphor, is embodied in the expressions, “He is capable of … ”, “He is able to multiply large numbers in his head”, “He can play chess”: in these sentences the verb is used in the ''present tense'', suggesting that the phrases are descriptions of states which exist at the moment when we speak.

Now looking back to our discussion of 43), we see that it was no final || real explanation of B's being guided by the signs when we said that B was guided if he ''could'' also have carried out orders consisting in other combinations of dots and dashes than those of 43). In fact, when we considered the question whether B in 43) was guided by the signs, we were all the time inclined to say some such thing as that we could only decide this question with certainty if we could look into the actual mechanism connecting seeing the signs with acting according to them. For we have a definite picture of what in a mechanism we should call certain parts being guided by others. In fact, the mechanism which immediately suggests itself when we wish to show what in such a case as 43) we should call “being guided by the signs” is a mechanism of the type of a pianola. Here, in the working of the pianola we have a clear case of certain actions, {{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,66}} those of the hammers of the piano, being guided by the pattern of holes in the pianola roll. We could use the expression, “The pianola is ''reading off'' the record made by the perforations in the roll”, and we might call patterns of such perforations ''complex signs'' or ''sentences'', opposing their function in a pianola to the function which similar devices have in mechanisms of a different type, e.g., the combination of notches and teeth which form a key bit. The bolt of a lock is caused to slide by this particular combination, but we should not say that the movement of the bolt was guided by the way in which we combined teeth and notches, i.e., we should not say that the bolt moved ''according'' to the pattern of the key bit. You see here the connection between the idea of being guided and the idea of being able to read new combinations of signs: for we should say that the pianola ''can'' read ''any'' pattern of perforations, of a particular kind, it is not built for one particular tune or set of tunes (like a musical box), – whereas the bolt of the lock reacts to that pattern of the key bit only which is predetermined in || by the construction of the lock. We could say that the notches and teeth forming a key bit are not comparable to the words making up a sentence but to the letters making up a word, and that the pattern of the key bit in this sense did not correspond to a complex sign, to a sentence, but to a word.