Blue Book: Difference between revisions

If we study the grammar, say, of the words, “wishing”, “thinking”, “understanding”, “meaning”, we shall not be dissatisfied when we have described various cases of wishing, thinking, etc. If someone said, “surely this is not all that one calls ‘wishing’”, we should answer, “certainly not, but you can build up more complicated cases if you like.” And after all, there is not one definite class of features which characterise all cases of wishing (at least not as the word is commonly used). If on the other hand you wish to give a definition of wishing, i.e., to draw a sharp boundary then you are free to draw it as you like; and this boundary will never entirely coincide with the actual usage, as this usage has no sharp boundary.

The idea that in order to get clear about the meaning of a general term one had to find the common element in all its applications, has shackled philosophical investigation; for it has not only led to no result, but also made the philosopher dismiss as irrelevant the concrete cases, which alone could have helped him to understand the usage of the general term. When Socrates asks the question, “what is knowledge?” he does not even regard it as a preliminary answer to enumerate cases of knowledge. If I wished to find out what sort of thing arithmetic is, I should be very content indeed to have investigated the case of a finite cardinal {{BBB TS reference|Ts-309,31}} arithmetic. For

We said in this case that we might use both expressions: “we feel a longing” (where “longing” is used intransitively) and “we feel a longing and don't know what we are longing for”. It may seem queer to say that we may correctly use either of two forms of expression which seem to contradict each other; but such cases are very frequent.

Let us use the following example to clear this up. We say that the equation x² = ‒ 1 has the solution ± √‒1. There was a time when one said that this equation had no solution. Now this statement, whether agreeing or disagreeing with the one which told us the solutions, certainly hasn't its multiplicity. But we can easily give it that multiplicity by saying that an equation x² + ax + b = 0 hasn't got a solution but comes α near to the nearest solution which is β. Analogously we can say either “A straight line always intersects a circle; sometimes in real, sometimes in complex points”, or, “A straight line either intersects a circle, or it doesn't and is α far from doing so. These two statements mean exactly the same. They will be more or less satisfactory according to the way a man wishes to look at it. He may wish to make the difference between intersecting and not intersecting as inconspicuous as possible. Or on the other hand he may wish to stress it; and either tendency may be justified, say, by his particular practical purposes. But this may not be the reason at all why he prefers one form of expression to the other. Which form he prefers, and whether he has a preference at all, often depends on general, deeply rooted {{BBB TS reference|Ts-309,48}} tendencies of his thinking.

:“to say something”

A process accompanying our words which one might call the “process of meaning them”, is the modulation of the voice in which we speak the words; or one of the processes, similar to this like the play of facial expression. These accompany the spoken words not in the way a German sentence might accompany an English sentence, or writing a sentence accompany speaking a sentence; but in the sense in which the tune of a song accompanies its words. This tune corresponds to the “feeling” with which we say the sentence. And I wish to point out that this feeling is the expression with which the sentence is said, or something similar to this expression.