Blue Book: Difference between revisions

If the definition explains the meaning of a word, surely it can't be essential that you should have heard the word before. It is the ostensive definition's business to ''give'' it a meaning. Let us then explain the word “tove” by pointing to a pencil and saying “this is tove”. (Instead of “this is tove” I could here have said “this is called ‘tove’”. I point this out to remove, once and for all, the idea that the words of the ostensive definition predicate something of the defined; the confusion between the sentence “this is red”, attributing the colour red to something, and this ostensive definition “this is called ‘red’”.) Now the ostensive definition “this is tove” can be interpreted in all sorts of ways. I will give a few such interpretations and use English words with well established usage. The definition then can be interpreted to mean: – {{Blue Book Ts reference|Ts-309,3}}

One might object to this argument that all these interpretations presuppose another word-language. And this objection is significant if by “interpretation” we only mean “Translation into a word-language”. – Let me give some hints which might make this clearer. Let us ask ourselves what is our criterion when we say that someone has interpreted the ostensive definition in a particular way. Suppose I give to an Englishman the ostensive definition “this is what the Germans call ‘Buch’”. Then, in the great majority of cases, at any rate, the English word “book” will come into the Englishman's mind. We may say he has interpreted “Buch” to mean “book”. The case will be different if e.g., we point to a thing which he has never seen before and say: “This is a banjo”. Possibly the word “guitar” will then come into his mind, possibly no word at all but the image of a similar instrument, possibly nothing at all. Supposing then I give him the order “now pick a banjo from amongst those things”. If he picks what we call a “banjo” we might say “he has given the word ‘banjo’ the correct interpretation”; if he picks some other instrument: – “he has interpreted ‘banjo’ to mean ‘string instrument’”.

Consider these cases: –

This latter case is likely to puzzle us. If you ask “what happened in this case when the man estimated the length?” the correct answer may be: “he ''looked'' at the thing and ''said'' ‘it looks one yard long’.” This may be all that has happened.

Take an example. Some one teaches me to square cardinal numbers; he writes down the row

and asks me to square them. (I will, in this case, again, replace any processes happening “in the mind” by processes of calculation on the paper). Suppose, underneath the first row of numbers, I then write: –

What I wrote is in accordance with the general rule of squaring; but it obviously is in accordance with any number of other rules also; and amongst these it is not more in accordance with one than with another. In the sense in which before we talked about a rule being involved in a process, ''no'' rule was involved in this. Supposing that in order to get to my results, I calculated 1 × 1, 2 × 2, 3 × 3, 4 × 4 (that is, in this case, wrote down the calculations); these would again be in accordance with any number of rules. Supposing, on the other hand, in order to get to my results, I had written down what you may call “the rule of squaring”, say, algebraically. In this case this rule was involved in a sense in which no other rule was.

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 {{Blue Book Ts reference|Ts-309,31}} arithmetic. For

What happens if from 4 till 4.30 A expects B to come to his room? In one sense in which the phrase “to expect something from 4 to 4.30” is used it certainly does not refer to one process or state of mind going on throughout that interval, but is a great many different activities, and states of mind. If for instance I expect B to come to tea, what happens ''may'' be this: At four o'clock I look at my diary and see the name ‘B’ against today's date; I prepare tea for two; I think for a moment “does B smoke?” and put out cigarettes; towards 4.30 I begin to feel impatient; I imagine B as he will look when he comes into my room. All this is called “expecting B from 4 to 4.30”. And there are endless variations to this process which we all describe by the same expression. If one asks what the different processes of expecting someone to tea have in common, the answer is that there is no single feature in common to all of them, though there are many common features overlapping. These cases of expectation form a family; they have family likenesses which are not clearly defined.

But what tempts us to think of the meaning of what we say as a process essentially of the kind which we have described is the analogy between the forms of expression:

{{Blue Book Ts reference|Ts-309,57}} which seem to refer to two parallel processes.