STRUCTURAL METHODOLOGY
BY NATARAJA GURU
THE INTEGRATION OF ALL SCIENCES
The need for integrating the vast body of knowledge that men have been able to accumulate into a coherent whole is a subject that has begun to engage the serious attention of educators. Practical aspects of knowledge are now being stressed at the expense of the purer branches. Advanced studies now refer mostly to technological subjects. Universities turn out more and more experts or specialists. As a result, those aspects of higher knowledge which were covered by the term 'humanities' have been by-passed and left behind.
Except in a few places such as the Collège de France, the Institute for Advanced Studies of Princeton, or perhaps also in the recently started Committee on Social Thought under the University of Chicago, attempts at any serious integration of courses seem inadequate and negligible.
There is, however, at the present time a growing feeling for a fresh synthesis of knowledge, so that the sterility of over-departmentalization and the consequent lack of the human touch in education may be effectively stemmed. Specialization at least must not be for its own sake, but must serve some tangible end to produce a better-educated man.
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Besides the UNESCO, which may be looked upon as an expression of the desire for a revised impetus to culture and science on a world-wide scale, there are at present many private foundations, both in the East and the West, standing for the same ideal. They adhere to varied programmes, some being overly scientific and others relying more on esoteric cultural values. A particular cosmology or a tacit dogmatic theology can be seen to be implied in many of them. Even the theory of evolution itself is being treated by some of them as an article of faith. They often become thus open to the objection that they tend to be dogmatic, sentimental or religiously pre-disposed. They would fall short of the requirement that any modern attempt at an integration of knowledge should be conceived on more positive or scientific lines.
NO COMMON INTELLECTUAL FORMATION
Although senior professors of universities, who may be in charge of the admission of students for the higher courses, may be heard to refer to what they call 'intellectual formation' as a necessary prerequisite for following a certain specialized course, this expression remains still a very vague one. What precisely the expression is intended to convey may not be clear even as between one professor of a certain department and another who might belong to the same university. The expression as applied to inter-university standards generally becomes still more vague, because cultural backgrounds differ widely, not only between universities of the Old and the New Worlds, but even between universities of the same
continent or even country.
Eastern and Western cultural standards may be said to still lie poles apart. German universities each have an academic reputation and tradition all their own, and certain universities specialize only in select branches. Even in England, an Oxonian is expected to have a formation different from that of a graduate of Cambridge. In France, although the situation has been somewhat mitigated by the existence of the centuries-old foundation of the Collège de France, the 'intellectual
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formation' demanded by a certain professor, even in the department of letters, may differ from the one required by another.
In India, which has no university tradition to call its own, but tries to graft Oriental culture on to the stem of Occidental classical tradition, the case for a preliminary intellectual formation for higher studies is in a sad state indeed. The influence, in itself not salubrious, of the non-idealistic and pragmatic tendency of the United States that prevails in the cultural world, as in many other departments of life at the present-day, is tending to further lower standards in cultural education. Measurement is being given primacy, and everything that does not lend itself to brass- or electronic-instrument experimentation or testing is tending to be discredited.
This influence, which is itself enough to dampen intellectual and moral enthusiasm for culture, works hand-in-hand at the present-day with that other tendency to be noticed in India, which gives primacy to localized cultural values. Linguistic preferences in the name of a pseudo-nationalism which encourages parochial loyalties and closed orthodoxies of different shades, are being allowed to compromise more or less completely the cause of the open and universal outlook necessary for any integrated education worth the name. In this connection it has been interesting to note that a group of Indian university vice-chancellors have recently been touring the United States of America seeking a formula for integrated education. From the report of their impressions, it would appear that nothing striking was discovered for adoption in India. In the United States themselves, we find a dissatisfaction which is expressing itself in the form of sporadic revolt by youth.
A UNITIVE APPROACH NEEDED
Whether we are concerned with 'basic' or 'fundamental' education for the emancipation, social or cultural, of the masses of the world; or think in terms of higher cultural
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values of an idealistic non-utilitarian programme in education for the select few; it is highly necessary at the present time to visualize the scope and methods of integrated education more clearly than hitherto. We have to be able to think of common human values in the global context of one solid humanity.
There should no longer be cultural preserves or prerogatives which try to divide humanity into sheep or goats. The myth of the primitive or inferior man has to be abandoned. The orthodox and heterodox, the conservative and the liberal, the rightist and the leftist, must be able to meet in the endeavour to preserve the best human heritage that belongs to all. A common cultural language which would enable these precious values to be referred to, irrespective of linguistic or traditional barriers, has to be evolved, Such a mathematically-precise language would pave the way for the formulation of a regular science. Values preserved through humanistic studies could then be effectively cultivated without the arbitrary and sentimental barriers that history or geography might interpose between people. An open, dynamic and positive scientific attitude must invade the closed, static and private preserves in which higher human values have hitherto remained enclosed.
In other words, the challenge involved here is to bring the humanities and the human values involved therein back into line with the other scientific values which, for no just reason,have in recent years tended to be considered as if divorced or disjunct from the former.
THE SCIENCE OF SCIENCES
In the days of Aristotle all wisdom-disciplines were more unitively understood than at the present-day. The term 'science' covered equally the whole range of subjects, starting from physics and natural history (or rather, natural philosophy), to metaphysics, ethics, economics and politics. The doctrine of the Mean which was Aristotle's contribution to thought, was a subtle underlying unitive principle which strung together branches of knowledge that have now come to be considered as different or disjunct from one another.
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From the time when writers like Mill began to arrange cultural or economic notions on a less idealistic and more 'utilitarian' basis, the firm hand of classical unitive thinking based on such bold dicta as "It is in ourselves that we are thus or thus", and the singleness of human end or purpose in life, gave way to the hesitant and wavering attitude implied in such expressions as "not expecting more from life than it is capable of bestowing". Unitive values began to be confused with non-unitive ones. The right regulative or normative principle that related ends with means through deliberation began to be compromised. Horizontal or "here-and-now" values of an ontological nature were stressed at the expense of idealistic, ideological or vertical ones. The intuitive understanding of the doctrine of the Mean was lost for ever, and thus cultural enthusiasm began to flag.
If we could again think of science as including both moral and physical sciences, the task of finding a basis for integrated education could be more easily accomplished. Knowledge can direct its search outward from the seat of the mind or soul within us. The "eye of the soul", to use Aristotle's expression, can look 'positively' and 'objectively' into the world of the 'knowables', or subjectively or introspectively into values or virtues within the personality of man.
The latter has been known as the negative way which, by the eye of the soul directed inwardly, can still conduct 'auto-experimentation' by comparing common human experience of the a priori order. While the positive sciences are and actually objective, this negative science could still be 'objective' in discipline in a virtual or conceptual sense. The strictness of scientific exactitude in thinking need not necessarily suffer in the latter case. When proper terms have been fixed to refer to aspects of knowledge, the whole range of knowledge can be made to come under one science which could be called the Science of sciences. In fact this is what the Science of the Absolute (or brahma-vidya as such is called in India) claims to be. 'Knowledge' (jnanam) and "the knowable" (jneyam) are here to be distinguished, the first as negative and the second as positive. An epistemology and methodology based on a correct contemplative scale of values is here implied.
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DESCENDING DIALECTICS
Some recent attempts at the integration of knowledge have proceeded from the variety of specialized analytic knowledge towards their synthesis. Thus there is the famous instance in which the top-ranking nuclear physicist Schroedinger makes a serious attempt to relate biology with chemistry and physics. In his booklet entitled "What is Life?" an attempt has been made to bridge the gap between inanimate and living matter. Later writers such as Andrew A. Cochran* have availed themselves of the quantum theory to establish a link between life and matter. Such attempts may be said to travel from the positive and overt aspects of reality towards the innate and subtle aspects, or from the positive pole to the negative.
DISTINCT VALUE-WORLDS
Even while we speak in terms of poles, we have to distinguish two sets of poles as belonging to two distinct aspects of values or interests in life.
Reality, it must be remembered, is to be studied for the human interest in it rather than just for its own sake, without reference to human interests or values. All attempts at integration are for man, and not for knowledge itself. When we visualize the world of values correctly, we will be able to see a vertical series of values in which the positive pole is the world of pure reason or that of the Platonic Intelligibles. The negative pole of vertical values will be the prime means to the supreme end of attaining to the world of the Intelligibles, when understood unitively and synthetically. Thus there is a vertical world of pure values, and a horizontal world of material values.
*Mr. Cochran writes a very interesting and well-documented article on "The Quantum-Physical Basis of Life", postulating a basic hylozoism, with the 'wave' phenomena as the conscious aspect of matter, in the May 1957 issue of "Main Currents in Modern Thought".
(Journal of the Foundation for Integrated Education). Mr. Cochran is attached to the US. Bureau of Mines.
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The building up of a cultural life in a person means the recognition of both these sets, while the doctrine of the Mean must constantly convert knowledge in favour of virtues. As we have elsewhere tried to develop, it is possible to bring Gold, Goodness and God to be comprised within the amplitude of a personal scale of values between the poles of which the life of man may be said to oscillate. The science of things taken in themselves, and considered without their fundamental value-import for man, is like a magnetic field, secondary to the main current along which life flows. This latter may be said to be along the vertical axis of pure deliberative values, by means of which man decides to affiliate himself to a good life. Actual physical life is of the nature merely of an epiphenomenon to the real-life interests normal and legitimate to man as Man.
THE KEY TO INTEGRATION
It is a recognized fact, tacitly understood already in the East as well as in the West, that man himself is the proper subject of study. Atmavidya (Self-knowledge) in India has been treated as the same as Brahma-vidya (the wisdom of the Absolute). Ananda (happiness), as a Supreme End or Value in life, has also been treated as in effect the same as the Self or the Absolute. Thus the key for integration of knowledge of wisdom is to be found in the human personality itself, where the subtlest aspects of wisdom find a natural home. The Self is the most precious of values for man, and the "mahavakyas" (Great Dicta) such as "Thou art That" signify this supreme point of culmination of all integrated wisdom.
With such as the target before them, it is encouraging to note that even physicists like Schroedinger have made some first efforts to bring these divergent aspects of human knowledge into integrated relationship. A contemplative Science of the Absolute, conceived in terms of Self-knowledge, could include the Chief End or the Final Good on the one hand, and the negative or prime counterparts of the same in actual life on th eother, within the range of an integrated Science of sciences combining ontological and ideological values. Aristotle's doctrine of the Mean could then be understood in terms of "samya"
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(sameness), which is the central doctrine of such Eastern texts as the Bhagavad Gita.When both are properly grasped without prejudice, culture would tend to be integrated and understood in unitive and universal terms.
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THE INTEGRATION OF ELEMENTS OF THOUGHT IN VIEW OF A LANGUAGE OF UNIFIED SCIENCE
SECTION I: OBSERVATIONAL
This study is devoted to exploring the possibility of a scientific language. To think of the whole range of science as one integrated unity is itself a task that has engaged great minds from antiquity to recent times, without much definitive result. The approach so far has been more speculative than scientific in its full sense. A language that would have such a character as to serve effectively as a common basis for the whole range of sciences, experimental or normative, physical or 'metaphysical', as we ought to understand by the term 'Unified Science', is not easy to conceive. Of all the names of thinkers of old who had the ambition of accomplishing this impossible-seeming task, that of Leibniz stands out as one who came nearest to laying the philosophical, logical and mathematical foundations of a "universal language".(1)
This was to counteract the confusion of vernacular tongues.
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Even he did not live to see the great ambition of his youthful days accomplished.
In spite of the apparent difficulty and enormity of the task, it is our contention in this study that a simple approach is still possible along the lines that Leibniz indicated. Here we are thinking in terms of normalisation and 're-normalisation' of what constitutes a 'unitive' approach to linguistic activity understood in the context to which it has properly to belong.
A scientific language that is all ready-made for use is not our aim in this study, nor even a scheme that has been worked out in detail to be considered as a blueprint for a universal language that could be adopted without further pains. This study is merely a contribution to a more fruitful discussion of this subject in which there is much interest shown, both by qualified and unqualified persons. Over-speculative, unscientific and pseudo-scientific attitudes in this alluring field have to be discountenanced.
A scientific language, in order to be truly so, must firstly be one that itself can claim scientific validity. It must not disrespect the requirements of a correct epistemology and methodology. Both science and philosophy seek truth behind appearance: both aim at serving humanity by the serious pursuit of worthwhile interests. What gives unity to science in this inclusive sense is the common human purpose that runs through its methodology, epistemology and axiology.
Language lives and moves in that axis which is concerned with reasoning which links visible realities with the rational,intelligible or the calculable, or what lies beyond its scope, understood by such terms as the 'Absolute'. Although the absolutist way of thinking does not at present enjoy much recognition by strict scientific thinkers, an expression that has necessarily to depend on this notion is taking a large place in recent scientific literature, viz. Relativity. Side-by-side with those who denounce 'metaphysics' (whatever they understand by it) as 'non-sense', opposite trends are also becoming more and more evident. (2)
Secondly, a scientific language must be suitable for communicating to others, whether scientists or common men, truthful information about the problems, methods and
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results of valid and precise knowledge of the required degree of certitude. It should not itself tend to become a closed and static jargon understood only by specialists of the same group. A certain public character and openness tend to make ordinary language more scientific. Universal communicability across geographic and linguistic frontiers is a necessary condition that should distinguish scientific language.
Thirdly, scientific language cannot afford to be merely a symbolic language of logical or mathematical abstractions. Unilaterally-applied symbolism makes language a puzzle to solve, as in the schoolboy riddle of A being the brother of B but B not being so. The fact that A and B are of two sexes is not revealed by symbolism as directly as in common language.
The 'meta-language' that some propose for a scientific language has innate defects of this kind. We shall examine the case of symbolic logic in this connection. Here we indicate in advance that, as when we name an object and call a spade a 'spade', there must be two sides that must come together and fuse before meaning can emerge. The actual thing, determined by its properties like form - and its name, which is a conceptual factor - come together to result in a meaningful event in consciousness. The elements of a symbolic meta-language have to be put in relationship with what we could with equal justice call a proto-language to result in a naturally meaningful language with validity and legitimacy.
The apodictic or other certitude on which scientific language has to be dependent, could result only when name meets form. The three desiderata of a scientific language are thus that it should be a language of science, for science and through science.
BROAD ASPECTS OF THOUGHT AND CORRESPONDING LANGUAGE
Language tallies with thought, and the requirements of thinking or reasoning in turn determine the nature of any language. Science and philosophy have much common ground between them. Instead of scientists trying in vain to
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banish metaphysics as non-sense and philosophers excluding the matter-of-fact and considering science with mistrust, the language of unified science must try and adapt itself to the requirements of science and philosophy. There could be scientific philosophy as well as philosophical science, just as there could be psycho-physics and physiological psychology.
All science, being an experimental discipline, must have much of the matter-of-fact entering into its composition, while its inductive aspects may be said to be more philosophical in character. Thus we could think serially of three kinds of subject matter comprised within what is scientific; viz.: scientific philosophy, the science of science, and philosophical science. Linguistically speaking, the first-mentioned group relies on proto-scientific aspects which call for no proof; the second group hardly depends on inference, except for the mostdirect kind, as when we say the colours of the spectrum are due to the breaking up of white light; and in the third group its apodictic quality is derived from some meta-scientific theory such as that accepted for the purposes of quantum mechanics. We should thus be justified in referring to scientific language in a manner corresponding to its subject-matter, as either proto-linguistic, normal or formal, or meta-linguistic in character. That apodictic certitude with which a man calls a spade a 'spade', and that down-to-earth certitude with which human children take for granted (whether by a priori or reasoning) that 2+2 = 4, come together in a certain manner of independence and interdependence to result in the meaning-certitude of scientific language. This subtle double, or as we shall clarity later, origin of language, forms the theoretical basis of this study it is our task to elaborate and clarify further in the pages that follow.
THE VALIDITY OF A LANGUAGE
Why a rose is called a 'rose', or by its corresponding term in any particular language, does not call for any proof. In like manner, the relation that is implied in the linguistic context between what we have tried to distinguish as the proto- and the meta- aspects of any language on which the structure of language itself is based, does not call for any proof in the
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usual sense. Validity is not to be sought through inference as is usual in syllogistic reasoning. A certain non-arbitrariness and intrinsic compatibility, when respected, shows itself directly, and conviction is already there immediately before forms of mediate inference could operate. It is to the credit of L.Wittgenstein to have worked out the implications of this statement in recent years. What he states in the context of logic and philosophy becomes all the more true in the context of the structure of linguistic thought:
"4° 121. Propositions cannot represent the logical form: this mirrors itself in the propositions.
That which mirrors itself in language, language cannot represent.
That which expresses itself in language, we cannot express by language.
The propositions show the logical form of reality.
They exhibit it." (3)
Language must correspond to the form of the thought that is implied in its expression. (4) We suggest here that the validity of the impression-aspect of language, as distinct from its overt expression, lies deep in human consciousness where axiomatic laws of thought, on which all thinking itself has finally to rely without room for contradiction, but, as it were, tautologically and always with sufficient reason, are found.
THE ARCHETYPAL MODEL OF LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE
In the familiar linguistic context of the classroom the school-master might put a dot on the blackboard and represent it, with maximum non-arbitrariness and sense of correctness possible, by the letter "p" (or any other corresponding initial of the language he is employing). A student who would stand up and ask for the proof of it would be making a fool of himself.
Although the selection of the name is arbitrary, a maximum possible attempt has been made, without disrespecting any law of thought hitherto recognized, in the direction of non-arbitrariness. If he had used a letter of the Greek alphabet
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instead of a vernacular one, it would perhaps have been more scientific in that there was a greater effort at de-Babelization. Sanskrit letters could have been used for indicating levels of contemplative consciousness with equal justice. Somehow a meta-linguistic aspect and a proto-linguistic aspect have to come together for a precise meaningful situation to emerge. What is important for us to note at this stage of our study is that, in the most primary of linguistic situations in view of a scientific language already in vogue in the scholastic world, we have a visible or perceptual aspect brought into contact with a conceptual aspect of the same reality. In the mathematics class the schoolboy might come to know, in a limited context, the meeting of algebra and geometry in the use of the language of Cartesian co-ordinates. School-room mathematics now comprises such notions as the group, the field, vector space, homomorphism, isomorphism etc.(5)
Starting from naming a point, to communication through vectors, scalars and tensors, the requirements of scientific language range between micro- and macrocosms, analytic and synthetic thought.
TWO SETS OF THOUGHT ELEMENTS ENTER INTO SCIENTIFIC LANGUAGE
Ordinary everyday language has to do mainly with observables. Linguists have used the expression 'thing-language' and the 'language of handling action' in referring to this ordinary workaday world in which linguistic intercourse among humans thrives. Then there is the world of the 'calculables', which has a more theoretical or a non-physical reference or status in reality. In the latest mathematical language these two aspects have been referred to as proper and improper elements. (6) Whatever be the full implications of this kind of mathematical language - which is still in the process of being perfected by those who want to use it for scientific purposes such as that of the relativity theory and of quantum mechanics - all we want to derive for the purposes of our study here is that science is the resultant of the summation or the multiplied product as between proper and improper elements, and that what emerges finally out of science
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generally, is something that could be stated, either in correct ordinary language of everyday life or else in terms of a verticalized version of the same which refers to improper elements. Hume, as we shall see presently, would refer to these aspects as quantity and number. (7) Just as the sum and product of mathematical elements could be said to have independence and interdependence at the same time, the two aspects of thought enter into the composition of scientific language. Three kinds of connections between ideas have been recognised by Hume when he says:
"To me there appear to be only three principles of connection among ideas, namely: resemblance, contiguity in time or place and cause or effect" (8)
If we add to this analysis of association of ideas of Hume what is more fundamental, which as he himself said, pertains to either quantity or number, we shall be able, with these factors in mind, to reconstruct for ourselves a schematic and proto-linguistic pattern of the global unit of integrated thought. This we shall attempt to do progressively after other epistemological and methodological aspects have been discussed. Here we have to note in passing that out of the four relational factors above, two could apply to the proper and improper aspects of ideas. There could be innate causes and effects as well as causes and effects that belong to the existent experimental aspect. Scientific language in the meeting place of the experimental and the theoretical, corresponding to quantity and number respectively. Resemblance of past memory with future imagination would belong to contiguity of time rather than of place. The provability of the completeness of this enumeration was doubted by Hume himself, but with the help of a schematic proto-language, the validity of the list of factors becomes at least more certain. (9)
A PRIMITIVE SCIENTIFIC ACTIVITY AND ITS LINGUISTIC SCHEME
Bertrand Russell, writing on the importance of logical form in "The Encyclopaedia of Unified Science" says: "The old view that measurement is of the essence of science would therefore seem to be erroneous." (10) This revision of an old view he
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arrives at because, as he points out:
"It follows that the laws of macroscopic physics are topological laws, and that the introduction of number through co-ordinates is only a practical convenience."
What we should note here is that mathematics has arrived at topology after many vertical stages of abstraction and generalisation and, just as the general theory of Einstein does not contradict but includes the special theory, so the idea of mathematical intrapolation and extrapolation could enable us to see that scientific activity could be understood schematically at different levels of abstraction or generalization, or both, and that the old notion that science is measurement, is fundamentally not true when quantitative as well as qualitative aspects of number are admitted into the scheme.
The primitive pattern of a simple but typical scientific activity could be derived from a simple classroom example. The length, breadth and height of a table, determined with the help of an arbitrarily fixed unit of length, results in ordinary initial knowledge about it for practical purposes of classification or communication. Here the table itself is an 'observable' and the measurement, especially with arbitrary units, in spite of a rod of platinum existing in Paris or London, is a speculative, theoretical and non-empirical operation. Language may be said to participate on one side with brute actualities and on the other with elements opposed to perception diametrically, or at least by a vectorial angle of 90°. Whether with or without measurement or reliance on number quantitatively, the principle of what number represents as an 'improper' element and what in principle again the actual table represents more 'properly', yield that apodictic certitude that belongs intrinsically to scientific language. Between observables and calculables, conceived as pure mathematical elements, all scientific activity is thus comprised.
THE LANGUAGES OF APODICTIC AND PROBABLE CERTITUDES IN SCIENCE
From the simple instance of measuring a table we could pass on to other examples of a graded order in which the two
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elements that we have tried to distinguish enter into combinations of different degrees or proportions with modalities entering in as a distinct factor. If we should take the case of the spectrum, we know that it is, in the first instance, to be understood as equated to white light. It is as good for science to say that white light is formed from spectral colours as conversely to say that spectral colours form white light. As knowledge there is reversibility, but experimental reversal implies different experimental arrangements. Here the white light and the colours belong to the same grade of psycho-physical abstraction; while if we should say that each colour of the spectrum has its wave-length of radiation indicated by different numbers, the relation is between a set of observables and a set of calculables. There was no proof needed in the conviction that white light was the same as spectral colours and vice-versa, when stated in language; but the apodictic nature of this direct conviction becomes overlaid by more complicated experimental and inferential steps in order to be able to equate and understand each colour in relation to its wave-length. The inductive and deductive abstraction as between observables and calculables becomes more complex but retains its structural identity of form. In calculated predictions, later proved experimentally, we have probabilities that sometimes tally with possibilities. Except in axiomatically-valid laws, observables and calculables can enter into the fabric of the language of science, giving threadbare or one-sided theories or hypotheses which later get revised or revalued with more calculable or observable inventions or discoveries. The falling of an apple in the garden was the only observable element on which Newton erected the theory of Universal Gravitation with calculations derived from the writings of Kepler, Copernicus and Galileo. In Darwin's Theory of Evolution we do not know whether it is life or organism that evolves. He never claims to have observed a monkey changing into a man; nor has he been able to show the process experimentally with any direct evidence other than to give instances which resemble natural selection, the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest under artificial conditions - and the rest of the evidence consists of
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museum specimens studied in the light of the theory. As there are rival theories by scientific men like Lamarck and Russell, and rival philosophical versions of evolution in the "Creative Evolution" of Bergson, besides the parallel evolution theory - the scientific status of Darwinism is not on very firm ground at all. As it presents a picture of change on quite other lines than that contained in the scriptural version in Genesis, evolutionism has attained in the popular mind the status of an anti-religious doctrine of scientism. There is a just proportion in which observables could be mixed in science with calculables; and when the balance is lost one gets pseudo-scientific literature between whose nonsensical verbalisms and the verbalisms attributed to classical metaphysics there would not be much to choose. Promiscuous mixing of the observable and the calculable elements in scientific language leads to absurdities, of which Eddington gives a striking example:
"I am standing on a threshold about to enter a room.
It is a complicated business. In the first place, I must
shove against an atmosphere pressing with a force of
fourteen pounds on every square inch of my body. I
must make sure of landing on a plank traveling at
twenty miles a second round the sun - a fraction of
a second too early or too late, the plank would be
miles away ... These are some of the minor
difficulties. I ought really to look at the problem four-
dimensionally as concerning the intersection of my
world line with that of the plank. Then again it is
necessary to determine in which direction the entropy
of the world is increasing in order to make sure that
my passage is an entrance, not an exit." (12)
It is easy to see from this extract that between the rival claims of science and common sense, instead of certitude of any kind, puzzlement results, which defeats the purpose of scientific language altogether. We have to beware as much of the false shadows of science, to use the expression of Dr.Holton cited above, as of the false doctrines of metaphysicians.
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RENORMALISATION
The Pythagoras theorem could be proved either theoretically or practically. Mixed methods could perhaps be devised by those who know how to play with mathematical axioms and postulates and rules of inference, but the mixing of methods leads to various grades of pseudo- or non-science. In such matters as determining the specific gravity of bodies, it is a relation that is established in the form of an equation based on experimental data which gain primacy; while in formulating the law regulating the increase or decrease of the entropy of the universe, the languages of science and philosophy are indistinguishable. With the canons of Mill being based on agreements and differences; agreement and difference treated together with residual and concomitant variations seem to refer to subtle laws of reasoning which give proportion, balance or harmony as between the two aspects of reality based on the observables and the calculables that we have distinguished. For the purposes of this study we prefer to think in terms of normalisation and re-normalisation (13), instead of thinking in terms of the canons of Mill which might be intended for the same purpose. Normalisation would presuppose the notion of a normative factor which it is the aim of this study to postulate in connection with a scientific language as we understand it here.
A CENTRAL NORMATIVE NOTION NECESSARY FOR SCIENTIFIC LANGUAGE
Just as in biology plants or animals are classified and named by their characteristics that are primary or secondary with reference to some central representative of a family, genus or phylum; so scientific language would require that a central, neutral and normative principle or notion should be postulated, balancing justly the two factors that, we have seen, enter into the composition of scientific thinking. Language has to concern itself with the mind and matter with which science itself is concerned, and the normative principle has to be neutral as between the mental and the material, the 'psychic' or 'physical'.
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We know in recent times of the school of scientific philosophers who called themselves Logical Atomists. Influenced perhaps by the monadology of Leibniz, atomism postulated a unit-entity as a basis for their discussions of questions of a thematical, logical or philosophical import. Precise notions about it have to be derived from the "Principia Mathematica" of Russell and Whitehead, which deals with logic and mathematics as having the same principles. Logical atomism speaks of the distinction between 'atomic sentences' and 'molecular sentences' which result from the union of a unit atomic sentence. Earlier, Wittgenstein, while still under the influence of Russell, put more order into the concept of logical atomism when he said:
"1°13 The facts in logical space are the world.
2 What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.
2°01 An atomic fact is a combination of objects (entities, things)" (14)
The unit of logical thought is an atomic sentence round which philosophy and logic was built. James and Russell also agreed in calling themselves 'neutral monists', thus attempting to formulate a normative notion which was neither mental nor material for their philosophy. (15)
The very reference by Wittgenstein above to 'logical space' postulates a psycho-physical entity in which logical activity could have its being. That the concept is not totally without reference to the bodily aspect and the purely metaphysical, is clear from the fact that it belongs to the context of logical empiricism. This double expression is expressly meant to stand for that union of the two aspects which are the same as in the expression 'neutral monism' which we have just examined. The psycho-physical character of this entity is evident from Russell's own words when he writes:
"Thus from both ends physics and psychology have
been approaching each other and making more and
more possible the doctrine of 'neutral monism'
suggested by William James' criticism of consciousness."
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He goes on to make the position of this school of thought clearer than ever when he adds in the same paragraph,
"I think that both mind and matter are merely
convenient ways of grouping events. Some single
events, I should admit, belong only to material groups,
but others belong to both kind of groups and are
therefore at once mental and material. This doctrine
effects a great simplification in our picture of the
structure of the world." (16)
Although presented in the usual dogmatic form after the manner of older metaphysicians, without reference to any experimental evidence, it is possible for us to see that logical empiricists generally are already committed to the recognition of a neutral entity which is a kind of absolutist abstraction, neither belonging wholly to any one of the two rival worlds of physics or metaphysics. While this view simplifies matters, it is still open to the charges of a priorism, solipsism and arbitrariness, insofar that it is a doctrine that is asserted. Logical or linguistic structure generally could be examined more scientifically through observational situations of experimental status such as those we are outlining below.
INTROSPECTIVE OBSERVATIONS FOR THE STUDY OF LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE
If the indirect evidence of pointer-readings is acceptable in scientific experiments proper (which themselves depend on evidence many degrees removed from the direct observation of events), we may ask legitimately why introspective experimental situations could not be relied on to give us the same degree of scientific certitude that differentiates science from speculation. If a certain botanical specimen is available as a weed it is not necessary to grow it in a special herbarium. In common human life there are common human linguistic situations which have experimental value if the method of experimentation could be applied to them, even introspectively.
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Scientific philosophers like Bergson have both relied on schematic proto-language, as understood in this study, and have also made use of the study of experimental situations to give validity to the discussion of factors of psycho-physical import. He puts the question:
"J'écoute deux personnes converser dans une langue inconnue. Cela suffit-il pour que je les entende? Les vibrations qui m'arrivent sont les mêmes qui frappent leurs oreilles. Pourtant je ne perçois qu'un bruit confus ou tous les sons se ressemblent. Je ne distingue rien et ne pourrait rien répèter. Dans cette même masse sonore, au contraire, les deux interlocuteurs démèlent des consonnes, voyelles et syllabes qui ne se ressemblent guère, enfin des mots distincts.
Entre eux et moi, où est la difference?"
(Editor's Note: what follows, is a tentative translation by us, as are similar passages below.)
("I hear two people conversing in an unknown foreign language. Is that enough for me to understand them? The vibrations which come to me are the same as strike their ears. However, I only hear a confused noise which all sounds the same. I can distinguish nothing and could repeat nothing. The two people talking, on the contrary, can hear consonants, vowels and syllables which are not alike and which make up distinct words. What is the difference between them and me?")
After tracing minutely and in detail the insurmountable difficulties that intervene between the physical fact of sound-impressions and their understanding as language Bergson states:
"Ainsi se déroulerait dans notre conscience, sous forme de sensations musculaires naissantes, ce que nous appellerons le schéma moteur de la parole entendue." (17)
("This is how what we could call the "schéma moteur" for understanding words develops within our consciousness in the form of nascent muscular sensations".)
(Note that the term 'schéma moteur', roughly translated as 'motor scheme', which is used innumerable times throughout the Guru's works, was almost always left untranslated by him and so by us, the same applies to the term 'élan vital', more or less translatable as 'vital impulse'.cf. inf. ED)
Thus we see already strict scientific philosophers employing a new kind of introspective experimentation which must be considered at least as valid as the indirect evidence of pointer readings in physical laboratories.
INTROSPECTIVE PSYCHO-PHYSICAL OBSERVATIONS OF EXPERIMENTAL STATUS
Russell's norm of logical atomism, belonging to the philosophy of neutral monism, as he calls it, and Bergson's effort to establish a 'schéma moteur' in the context of his philosophy of change and becoming of the 'élan vital', are recent attempts on the part of philosophers who are fully scientific in their outlook to arrive at a normative notion that would be free from the one-sided epistemological reference of classical speculations. Why should we not improve on this kind of approach by accentuating the experimental character more consciously and with greater scientific exactitude? By way of showing the possibilities that lie in this direction, and since language itself thrives where mind and matter meet, we shall give here an outline of experimental situations which would
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yield us a greater degree of certitude than hitherto possible about the structure of linguistic consciousness. In doing so we shall try to keep as close to that fully scientific but as yet little-favoured branch of knowledge called psycho-physics, into whose domain both the logical atom and the élan vital should belong. We shall divide our experimental situation into two phases for making two sets of observations that properly belong to the observable and calculable worlds which meet in a unitively-conceived psycho-physical event in terms of common human consciousness:
(I) FIRST PHASE
Think of two persons in a dark room. (18). Let us call them A and B. A says to B , 'Who is there?' B retorts with the same question, 'Who are you there?' The possible basic response of either or both of them would be contained in the common personal pronoun 'I', which could apply equally to anyone.
The important condition to note here is that all visual and other impressions are meant to be eliminated except the auditory linguistic link. The observables are eliminated here by the condition of darkness; and the calculables, which have their roots in the sense of hearing which leads to meanings of a conceptual order which refer to central as against peripheral objective realities, are isolated for epistemological analysis so as to arrive at a complete scheme of the structure of the thinking process that is to be understood as implied in language.
It is true that the voice of the two persons who communicate without visual impressions might contain certain physiological elements related to the past habits or tendencies of the person, giving him a certain individuality related to his memory aspect. The memory of the past might be said to determine in some indirect way the future conduct and the imaginative side of that person, giving him imaginative or futuristic orientation of the normative entity, whatever it might be called. This aspect could also give personality or individuality to A as distinct from B. But the intention of the
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experiment is to give primacy to the central, invisible, subjective aspect of the personality. Peripheral or marginal factors which belong to the visible are meant to be eliminated in this phase of the experiment. Between the persons A and B, as they carry on a conversation, different grades of pure or practical memory or imaginative factors might enter into the common consciousness of both. The ideas may be said to move in a trans-subjective axis which for taxonomic purposes (which we shall justify more fully later), we shall call the vertical axis.
(II) SECOND PHASE
Now let us change the conditions of the experimental observational situation. A neutral observer or witness, 0, may be thought of as switching on a light in the same dark room. The visible aspect of the reality of the situation now becomes added to the auditory, which had a content belonging to the world of the calculables. The auditory content is not abolished, but a new dimension, depending on the perceptual, peripheral or more 'objective', is imposed on the original stem of the trans-subjective aspect, while the trans-subjective remains intact like stars during daytime. The physical peculiarities of A and B gain primacy and prominence, and sex, complexion, stature and other particularities that are specific and empirical in content emerge into the situation. One could examine the fingerprints of A or B to accentuate their individuality to its limits. Here the specific factors happen to be overt and not innate. They may in a sense be called outer ones as opposed to the innate or subjective ones of the first phase. This we shall refer to as the inter-physical. To put the line of demarcation between the two aspects would take much more discussion than what we might at first think. We could think of different grades of conceptual, perceptual or actual factors claiming primacy in consciousness at a given time. It would be impossible to isolate them and study their characteristics and modes of combination without going still one step further into the implications of this second phase of our experimental situation. Let us suppose now that A or B or both are using telescopes or microscopes to aid their vision
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and are interested in the outer limits of space or the microscopic structure of matter as we can know it. They speak about what they are interested in to the neutral observer or witness 0. Now we are ready to extract the linguistic situation implied. In the consciousness of the neutral observer, language makes certain impressions which are events of a psycho-physical order of reality reduced into abstractions of a linguistic order. (19) It is not the actuality that matters any more but the conceptual aspect only. Between the trans-subjective concepts of the first phase and the inter-physical concepts of the second phase there is linguistic parity vertically and a 'strangeness' - if we may use a term borrowed from particle physics to express tentatively what we mean. Both these have the same status linguistically in the consciousness of the neutral observer. The inter-physical aspect thus isolated without full justification, which is to follow, we shall call the horizontal axis.
FURTHER IMPLICATIONS OF THE PSYCHO-PHYSICAL LINGUISTIC SITUATION
On the light being switched on, the specifically overt or the objectively perceptual aspects of A and B stand revealed. Their memories and imaginations give them a trans-subjective dimension; and their physical power of seeing objects as such, in true or false light, is an inter-physical or horizontal dimension, measuring along its axis tendencies to day-dreaming or eidetic peculiarities such as exaggerated colour vision, as when under the influence of drugs or colour blindness. The subjective 'I' may be said to converge into the common unity of the vertical self at its negative levels; while the arrow pointing horizontally and perceptively towards the object may be said to diverge into the plurality of conscious units, each with its specific characteristics, as against the generic characteristics of the former.
If we now think that one of the persons A or B suffered from a tooth-ache or a stomach-ache - the facts could have been communicated in words with the lights out, and with facial or other expressions or contortions of the body when the lights are on.
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If, as an alternative case, one of them said, "I have a heavy burden on my head which makes me groan under its weight", the linguistic link in a dark room would give less certitude than when the load is seen, and its weight, whether bearable or not, is appraised by the observer-witness. Between suffering from the weight of a load and that of a stomach-ache there is a change in the vertical scale as between the overt and the innate aspects. A sleepwalker or a daydreamer could have his mind at different points in the horizontal scale. When overt and innate factors enter into the situation, both vertically and horizontally, without any regulating principle involved, we have an absurd linguistic situation. All we have to note at this stage is that physical and mental factors could enter positively or negatively into the dimensions that we have distinguished.
NEUTRAL NORMATIVE APPRAISAL OF THE TWO MAIN TYPES OF LINGUISTIC EVENTS
If we think of the neutral 'observer-witness' of the above experimental situation that we have examined, and appraise the content of his consciousness with a view to arriving at primitive, atomic or elementary simple happenings therein, we could think of two typical movements which would act as references for all possible events in consciousness. The inter-physical reference may be said to move within the horizontal range of phenomenologically-represented objects or interests, whether subjective or objective in origin. An atomic sentence representing this horizontal movement in consciousness could be the thoughts implied in a sentence of the model, 'this is a pot': where the word 'this' would correspond to the negative horizontal aspect, tending to virtuality and to a general vagueness that is non-specific in character; while the word 'pot' would stand for a more specific actuality. Reversibility and irreversibility could both apply to the process or modality which depends on the degree of attention implied in each mode of thought. Likewise in the sentence, 'this is reason', we have the typical case of a vertical movement in thought: the word 'this' standing for understandable items of thought in general, implicitly understood; and 'reason' representing an element in
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thought which is more explicit in its content, though still of the order of pure thoughts. Much concentrated direction of the inner power of attention is needed before one could think of the specific content of reason. It could therefore be called a vertical-positive element in molecular thought consisting of atomic thought-events represented by the first instance.
The verb 'to be' is the link corresponding to the activity in consciousness which relates mental attention or relaxation in one sense or the other.
If we should now remember further that the neutral observer-witness in the imaginary situation does not enter into direct non-linguistic relation with either objects or with specific factors or elements of pure items in consciousness, we have within the schematically-conceived and globally- or unitively-understood personal consciousness, all the possible combinations, characteristics and modalities in which thoughts integrate themselves to form normative linguistic units. Based on such units an over-all norm is also possible to conceive.
SECTION II: EXPERIMENTAL
In the previous section we have confined our remarks to the study of the linguistic structure of thought from the point of view of what can be described as scientific philosophy. Intrinsic forms of thought, axiomatically given in the laws of thought, were taken to be our point of departure. Science is associated in the popular mind with a laboratory where brass instruments record pointer-readings to reveal verities that are unquestionable. Instead of theological belief we now have truth told to us by apparatus or appliances. These appliances verify equations experimentally. People are convinced more readily when we say that a cardiograph or encephalograph tells us the story directly or indirectly, through automatic recordings of some sort. The chain of inferences and the indirectness of the observations are easily excused. After what we have said in the previous section it is hardly necessary for us to look for further proof. Still, out
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of respect for the popular temper of our times in such matters, we are going to examine in this section the merits of a certain number of evidences throwing light on the structure of thought, whether of direct value or only of indirect significance. If the normative notion of integrated thought that we have arrived at in the last part of the previous section is kept in mind; and if the experimental evidence presented in the present section is closely examined - the resulting validity of the structure of thought will surely be enhanced, though certitude may not be totally based on them. As we have to think about thought in this section, we can call this section one belonging to a science of sciences. Observables and calculables come very close together here, one lending certitude to the other. Negative evidence becomes as
significant as positive.
LIGHT ON THE INNATE STRUCTURE OF THOUGHT FROM THE EEG
That the activity called thinking has implied within it two different kinds of processes has been made amply evident by investigations conducted with the help of the recently invented Electro-Encephalograph (EEG). There is, in the first place, what is taken to be the normal activity of the brain which produces rhythmic oscillations which have been distinguished and named as alpha rhythms. The strange phenomenon noticed with regard to the activity of the brain is that these electric rhythms tend to disappear, instead of getting augmented, as we should expect, when we know by other evidences that the brain is engaged in thinking or is really active in respect of some problem to be solved. Relaxing and shutting the eyes normally brings alpha rhythms into evidence, but with certain other types of persons they continue when the eyes are open; and some persons are without these rhythms altogether. These paradoxical effects seem to depend on deep-seated factors independent of anything physiological. Changes in the degree of attention or relaxation contribute to the appearance or disappearance of alpha-rhythms, depending on the psycho-physical personality of the individual in question rather than on any physiological factor.
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Prof. W. Grey Walter of the Burden Neurological Institute said recently in connection with the findings of the EEG as follows:
"One of the most sobering, even humiliating facts of
the whole of brain physiology is that scarcely a single
phenomenon discovered by the study of electrical
activity of the brain - the EEG - was foreseen or
predicted by physiologists…" (20)
According to the same authority, not only are the evidences of brain activity independent of physiological foundations, as taken for granted hitherto by empirical scientists, but there are deep-seated factors contributing by their elusive paradoxical expression through the language of the EEG which are of such an indeterminate nature as to indicate what may be called personality traits. He continues in the same talk as follows:
"The confusing thing is that even when the eyes are
opened, or the person thinks hard, the (alpha) rhythms
may disappear. Unfortunately for our understanding
of this effect, not everyone shows alpha rhythms,
even with the eyes shut, and in some people the
rhythms persist even with the eyes open, so we are
faced with an objective sign of a mystery that we
accept and delight in in everyday life and find hard to
fit into scientific analysis - that is, human personality."
(21)
Thus for the first time the notion of a human personality, independently of physiological factors, enters into the experimental domain of science. This fact suffices to give to the normative notion that we have outlined in the previous section sufficient status as a scientific fact for the purposes of this study.
Prof. Grey Walter has approached the same problem from another end and, when his findings in respect of brain activity are put side-by-side with the story that the EEG has to tell, tends to make clear that there are two distinct kinds of thinking or brain activities going on alternately. Prof. Walter
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points out firstly that the brain is essentially 'a problem-solving organ'. In solving problems a mental model that is either pictorial or verbal is involved. Actual seeing and visual imagination are activities that are different and even opposed in their effects. When mentally solving a problem - if the kind of model that the subject uses happens to be one of the usual variety of imagination (not vision) - the alpha rhythms, as seen through the EEG recordings, show a tendency to stop. The brain mechanism has thus two different reactions: the first is the kind that resembles the movement of the eyeballs when looking at an actual sight, and the second is when visual imagination operates at a deeper level of consciousness. The former tends to retain alpha-oscillations while the latter tends to suppress them. Looking at a whole page in reading a book is a visual activity in which "the sweep of electrical activity has implicit in it a sort of scanning process'', as Prof. Walter puts it. Scanning is different from looking at the whole page, in that one sees the words on it one after the other. One changes the steady shape of the printed lines into a series of visual signals spread out in time. In other words scanning means "turning spatial patterns into time ones''. Brain models have also been devised which have helped to reveal that they react as if they had the faculty of memory, where the time-factor rather than the space-factor counts. The relation between the scanning process of the brain and the stoppage of the alpha-rhythms which refer to the deeper or, as we might say, vertical activity of the brain as opposed to its mere spatial (horizontal) functioning, is sufficiently clear from what Prof. Walter has to say on the matter:
"When one reads a page of print one's eyes scan it
systematically line by line. The page is there all the
time, but one sees the words on it one after the other.
This means that one changes the steady shape of the
printed lines into a series of visual signals spread out
in time."
According to Prof. Walter again, scanning comes into evidence when a person looks for a word in the dictionary and finds it interesting. We can see his eyes stop moving. The Professor suggests his theory when he puts the question: "Is this the sort of thing that is going on in the brain when the alpha rhythm stops as a person thinks?" (22)
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EEG and brain-model evidences put together thus lend much experimental support to the space-time correlation of mental activities which fall into two interdependent though independent classes.
DIRECT EVIDENCE OF A PSYCHO-PHYSICAL AXIS AFFORDED BETWEEN APHASIA AND APRAXIA
Various troubles connected with speech with which doctors have had to deal, and which have been the subject of detailed experimental research in clinics and psycho-pathological laboratories in various progressive countries, have already a rich fund of accumulated data which afford us as conclusive evidence as possibly could be expected supporting the reality of a psycho-physical link along whose length various grades of speech-troubles could be located as between the psycho-physical function pertaining to one pole of linguistic habit or the other. The evidence, which is quite striking and conclusive, has been before the scientific world for more than half a century now, but the inferences that could have been made for the service of scientific knowledge about human faculties in general have not, for some reason, received the
attention or been given the importance they deserve. It is to the credit of the intuitive intelligence of Bergson to have tried to enrich metaphysics with the minute details of speech-troubles and to have made valuable inferences based on the evidence they present.
It is not necessary for us to go into all the cases that have been passed in review by Bergson over several pages with full documentation in his fully-scientific study, "Matière et Mémoire: Essai sur la Relation du Corps à l'Esprit", but scientism has, as we have said, its own prejudices - imagining, so to say, that the soul, if real, should be found at the tip of the scalpel. Bergson's fully scientific inferences have been mixed up with other verbose speculations of no value, perhaps because of the lack of a fully-developed epistemology or methodology pertaining to science as such.
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We need only two or three typical cases cited by Bergson (23) or the purposes of this study to see that - understood in terms of the schéma moteur (24) that Bergson has developed elsewhere in his studies of the élan vital, and provided that scientific physicalism is not an end in itself - there is sufficient evidence for inferring the reality of a schematically-conceived axis that is mathematically and logically valid and which could help us to get a clear idea of the structure of thought that must be at the basis of linguistic expression. Bergson writes:
"Ainsi, dans un cas observé par Lichtheim lui-même, le
sujet, à la suite d'une chute, avait perdu la mémoire de
l'articulation des mots et par consequent la faculté de
parler spontanément; il répètait pourtant avec la plus
grande correction ce qu'on lui disait. D'autre part, òu
la parole spontanée est intacte, mais òu la surdité verbale
est absolue, le malade ne comprenant plus rien de ce
qu'on lui dit, la faculté de répèter la parole d'autrui peut
encore être entièrement conservée."
("Thus, in a case observed by Lichtheim himself, the subject had, after a fall, lost the memory of articulating words and consequently the ability to speak spontaneously. However, he could repeat what was said to him perfectly correctly. Similarly, in cases of total verbal deafness where the ability to speak spontaneously is intact, the subject can still repeat what other people say to him")
After giving due consideration to all the theories that have been put forward by authorities like Bastian, Romberg, Bateman, Winslow, Kussmaul and Arnaud, besides considering the dozens of varieties of aphasia studied by Lichtheim himself ('Brain', Jan 1885, p. 447) and others, Bergson is able to reduce the phenomena in terms of the schéma moteur, with the help of which he is able to solve the mystery. He concludes by saying:
"La vérité parait être intermédiaire entre ces deux
hypothèses: il y a, dans ces divers phénomènes plus
que des actions absolument mécaniques, mais moins
qu'un appel à la mémoire voluntaire; ils témoignent
d'une tendence des impressions verbales auditives à
se prolonger en mouvements d'articulation, tendence
qui n'échappe surement pas au contrôle habituel de
notre volonté, qui implique même peut-être un
discernement rudimentaire, et qui se traduit, à l'état
normal par une répètition intérieure des traits saillants
de la parole entendue. Or, notre schéma moteur n'est
autre chose." (25)
("The truth appears to lie in an intermediate position between these two hypotheses: these various phenomena are made up of more than purely mechanical actions, but of less than a conscious calling upon memory: they signal tendency of auditory verbal impressions to prolong themselves into articulation; a tendency which surely does not escape from the usual control of our will, and which may even imply a rudimentary discernment. In the normal state it gives rise to an internal rpetition of the main points of speech as it is heard - our schéma moteur is no other than this.")
(EDITORIAL NOTE - we are well aware that these translations are not particularly clear, but Bergson is well-known for the complexity of his thought and style of writing; the original French is difficult even for an educated native speaker, and opaque to most others. We are doing our best.)
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Bergson's schematic representation of a psycho-physical unit of consciousness involved in language function is seen to emerge in clear outline in his analysis of verbalistic troubles known to medical science. That he has kept it strictly within the pragmatic frame does not affect the intrinsic and valid character of the scheme, which we can take as applicable to a more general philosophical context by extrapolation. Other cases of a related psycho-pathological order have also been studied and recorded - such as the case of a virtuoso who had lost in some way his material technique of external expression in music while his thoughts and understanding of music remained intact; as opposed to that of an eminent medical man who had retained all his knowledge about anatomy and pathology but had lost his power of fixing his will on one act that was pertinent to a situation, and instead found himself for some days helplessly cutting paper into bits, punching holes or tearing up books. (26) As between neurological and psychiatric troubles there is a psycho-physical polarity which would justify our suggestion just made that the whole series of troubles, whether strictly related to aphasia or apraxia or even dyslexia (27), can be fitted into a common scheme with the help of intrapolation or extrapolation, as known to mathematical thinking.
EVIDENCE OF PSYCHO-PATHOLOGY
That a psycho-physical normative unit, whether called by the names of libido, persona, psyche or self, has a distinct and non-metaphysical reality is brought out strikingly by a case that Prof. Pierre Janet of the Collège de France has recorded in his lectures on "La Force et Faiblesse Psychologiques". He refers to a surprising instance of loss of speech. This loss of speech was due to a certain degree of negative withdrawal into oneself rather than the result of anything that had a physical cause in the physico-pathological sense. As one whose authority is high in such matters and one fully appraised of the latest development of this subject, both practical and theoretical, his estimate of the above case would help us to clarify the scientifically valid normative notion for the purposes of our study. We shall quote from
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Janet a case in which it is neither a case of aphasia, apraxia nor dyslexia, but one of general mutism and functional hybernation or inactivity:
"Je racontais autrefois l'histoire d'une étrange malade,
soignée dans une maison de santé, qui pendant trois
ans entiers était restée sans consentir à manger un
aliment et sans prononcer un seul mot. . . Après
trois ans, un printemps cette malade se dresse sur
son lit et se met à dire à la garde la phrase suivante:
"Ah ça, on ne déjeune pas ici?" (28)
("I used to describe the strange case of a patient in a nursing home who did not eat or speak a single word for three whole years…After three years, one spring day the patient sat up in bed and said the following to the nurse: 'For goodness sake! Don't we get any breakfast here?'")
One would be fully justified in inferring from such cases that there is at least a real psychophysical entity, understandable as a mathematical unity at least, which is neither body nor mind but something intermediate between the two. When psycho-pathologists say that a certain state is opposed to certain others, as they often do in the case of the troubles connected with the will, as above; or when they oppose or contrast cases of neurasthenia and psychasthesia or reduce both more simply into asthenia, as Pierre Janet prefers to do (29), there is in their minds a vaguely-conceived scheme of interrelation of psycho-pathological conditions.
Pierre Janet further suggests that mental cases which he classifies under 'les délires' (deliria) could all be thought of as pertaining to degrees in a hierarchic scale of over-estimation and under-estimation of the self with reference to speech. He says:
"Examinez les délires et même tous les troubles de la
croyance, quels qu'ils soient, vous pourrez toujours
les résumer par l'une de ces formules: le délirant est
un individu qui place mal sa parole dans la hiérarchie
des degrés de réalité." (30)
("Examine delirium and even all problems of belief, whatever they may be, and you could always sum them up by a formula such as: 'the delirious person is an individual who has problems in placing his discourse correctly in the hierarchy of degrees of reality' ")
Certain other writers on personality problems, like F.Achelle-Delmas and Marcel Boll, go as far as to suggest the methods of interpolation and its inverse procedure of extrapolation, which latter he considers misleading in cases of dementia.
He also says:
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"D'une manière générale, nous nous efforcerons
d'appliquer ce qu'on nomme après Stuart Mill, la
méthode des variations concomitantes, qui est le
véritable centre de tout raisonnement inductif." (31)
("Generally speaking, we shall try to apply what Stuart Mill would call the method of concomitant variations, which is the true centre of inductive reasoning")
The systematic classification and nomenclature according to a correct taxonomy becomes full of problems in this domain of psycho-pathology. If a central normative notion is supplied, we could imagine how at present the vast amount of literature of a pseudo-scientific or even non-scientific status could be normalized so as to standardise language generally. What the difference between the libido and the subliminal self amounts to in precise terms, cannot even be discussed at present without taking sides with one school of thought as against another. The classification of mental troubles is at present a fecund field of unscientific statements which, however, pass for science. Normalisation with reference to a norm conceived synthetically, and re-normalisation of terms that have tended to diverge into too many specific analytic sub-divisions of the same fundamental phenomenon, with which they may happen to be basically related, could be accomplished for the language of science only when the neutral norm has been given an integrated status in respect of possible modalities, combinations and characteristics of thought and corresponding language-elements.
NORMALISATION OF PEDAGOGIC THOUGHT
Psycho-pedagogy, as it is practised experimentally in modern times, is another department of knowledge from which we could derive some useful directives in regard to the normalisation of scientific language. Teaching and learning involve that bipolar relationship in which a constant interchange of thought is taking place, like a subtle process of osmosis. 'Education' itself is an expression that is full of ambiguity and vagueness. Personal relations between the pupil and teacher are becoming recognized more and more as desirable in the process. The philosophical basis of education could be negatively conceived as with Rousseau; naturalistically conceived as with Spencer; pragmatically
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conceived as with Dewey and also idealistically or dialectically conceived as with the Pythagoreans, Platonists, Neo-Platonists or their continuators in modern times like Whitehead or Royce. Whether a stimulus-response psychology, behaviourism or adjustments to the needs of man-making or character-building are to be given primacy as against adjustment to social or citizenship needs, are all questions on which educational literature can differ widely. Normalisation in this domain, so full of possible differences of attitude, can only be expected when the norm of the persons involved in the bi-polar process is postulated scientifically, mathematically, logically, biologically or psycho-physically as the common personal factor at the basis of the process that is to take place. There are at present extant verbose volumes which are a hot-bed of confusion, and this must be reflected in the language used. We cannot do better here than to quote from the writings of one whose scientific training and acquaintance with scientific problems cannot be questioned. Dr. Alexis Carrel writes:
"The tests applied to school-children and students by
inexperienced psychologists have no great
significance. They give an illusive confidence to those
unacquainted with psychology. In fact, they should
be accorded less importance. Psychology is not yet a
science. Today individuality and its potentialities are
not measurable. But a wise observer, trained in the
study of human beings, is sometimes capable of
discovering the future in the present characteristics
of the given individual." (32)
Having in the year 1932 myself submitted a thesis to the University of Paris entitled "Le Facteur Personnel dans le Processus Educatif", and in view of the fact that my work fully answers the question of how normalisation of personal relations takes place, with a central notion of the persons involved in an educational situation as between teacher and pupil, it might be permissible in this section to pass over aspects of educational problems covered in detail and with ample documentation in that study. Since those days, however, some interesting developments have taken place in the
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educational world which deserve to be noticed here, especially as they tend to confirm the schematic norm that we have in mind in the present study. On page 25 of that thesis I had given a schematic representation, combining and correlating scientifically certain of the important aspects of educational psychology that have direct bearing on the development of the personality of the child. As most of what is represented there already is still to be considered valid and as by no means outdated; and encouraged by the fact that it has already passed through the scrutiny of an academic body, the schema has been reproduced on page 193 above (fig. 14.3), and when examined and read side-by-side with the concluding findings in the thesis, also given as the footnote below, it would give us here, for the present, a rough idea of what we mean by normalisation in the domain of psycho-pedagogics. (33)
RECENT PSYCHO-PEDAGOGIC EVIDENCE
Of the names that have made outstanding contributions of an experimental nature to the most recent developments in pedagogics, that of Prof. Jean Piaget may be mentioned as perhaps the most significant for us in this study. From the year 1921 he has been contributing serious works on such subjects, supported by experiments in every case, beginning with 'Une Forme Verbale de la Comparison chez l'Enfant' (1921) through one concerning 'Le Langage et la Pensée chez l'Enfant' (1928), and leading up to 'La Naissance de l'Intelligence (1932) and 'La Formation du Symbole' (1945). His latest publication, in collaboration with Inhelder, is devoted to the "development of two kinds of operational behaviour, which are classification and seriation, which intervene in the formation of a large number of psychological and pedagogical notions". (34) Running through the whole series of works is his most important contribution of a vertical series of stages which he calls "paliers"*, described by him as a special type of thinking pertaining to child psychology. In the last of his works there is a reference to "the development of classification and that of seriation" which constitute "two unified and synchronous processes". Further there are said to be two factors whose co-ordination assures the reversibility of the
*(A "palier" is literally a "landing", as in a flight of stairs. Perhaps the closest English translation, following Roget and the OED, would be "plateau", but with the implication of being a temporary resting place in the course of an ascent. ED)
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operations which are called retroaction and anticipation. The overall explanation is based on the notion of equilibrium. (35) It is not possible nor necessary for us to discuss here the merits of these findings. All we have to note is that they do fit into the scheme that we have so far outlined in which mental activity takes two different directions: one that could be called spatial, and the other connected with the time-axis in which anticipation and retroaction occur - with an overall notion of equilibrium marking the centre of the scheme. Expressions such as 'correspondence topologique bi-univoque et bi-continue' (36) ("bi-univocal and bi-continuous topological correspondance") which Piaget uses, make it unmistakably evident that a mathematical structure is to be understood in the scientific nature of his writings. The new kind of language with the latest terms, with a schematic pattern underlying it, can be discerned from the following summary of the import of Piaget's contributions, from the pen of another contemporary authority in scientific pedagogy. Dr. H. Wallon of the Collège de France:
"Les expériences ingénieuses de Piaget pour connaître
comment l'enfant acquiert les notions de nombre et de
quantité montrent en détail à quelles contradictions il
peut se heurter dans son cheminement pour se débarasser
des apparences purement sensibles, elles-mêmes
contradictoires, et pour les résoudre en invariants auxquels
il faudra que se superpose une vision opératoire . . .
C'est par une suite d'echelons progressifs que le dynamisme
des impressions et des réactions concrètes se fige en
invariants auxquels doit se superposer un acte unificateur
qui lui-même se fige en système stable de symboles. Et
les symboles, prenant graduellement la place des éléments
perceptifs auxquels ils se substituent dans la mesure òu ils
en expriment mieux qu'eux-mêmes les rapports de co-
existence et de devenir, deviennent chacun à son tour les
elements d'une progression nouvelle dans la réduction de
l'être à la connaissance." (37)
("Piaget's ingenious experiments, intended to discover how children acquire notions of number and quantity, show in detail what contradictions the child comes up against in the process of discarding purely sensory appearances - which are themselves contradictory - and resolving them into invariables upon which he has to superpose an operational vision…
It is through a series of progressive stages that the dynamism of impressions and concrete reactions is resolved into invariables that have themselves to be submitted to an act of unification, which in turn resolves itself into a stable system of symbols. These symbols, as they gradually take the place of the perceptual elements which they supplant to the extent that they can express, better than they can themselves, their relations of co-existence and becoming, become in turn elements in a new progression of the reduction of being into knowledge")
Elsewhere in the same work Prof. Wallon speaks of three 'moments' which come into opposition in knowledge. The \first he describes as having
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'irreversibilité absolue de l'empiricisme brut' (absolute irreversibility of basic empiricism); the second 'reversibilité totale de l'acte intellectuel (total reversibility of the intellectual act) and thirdly, 'réduction d'un irreversible en reversible.' (reduction of an irreversible into a reversible).
The number of scientific terms that have been used in the above paragraphs to represent something that could be immediately intuitively understood with the help of a schematic representation, and the difficulty for the reader to follow the trend of the transformation that takes place in the child-mind through such words as belong to a sort of meta-language of science, should be sufficient recommendation or us to think of something simpler and of the nature of a proto- rather than a meta-language, which would show these thoughts more directly. Such a language could be no other than the one that can establish a direct link between these two aspects of language. How such a relation could be established in a valid and workable manner is what we have still to make clear in the remainder of this study.
THOUGHT STRUCTURE EXAMINED FROM THE PSYCHO-PHYSICAL STANDPOINT
That branch of science known as psycho-physics may be said to take its position between what is called physiological psychology and psycho-physiology. Physiological psychology and psycho-pathology as practised in clinics may be said to be on the side of physiology rather than on that of psychology. As our purpose is to discover the structure of thought just at the point where it gets inserted into matter, psycho-physics and its findings have special interest for us in this study. We shall therefore fix our attention on certain aspects of this branch of science which is based on simple stimuli and responses. Besides the study of relations which might be greater, equal or less than either stimulus or response, we have to have in this branch of knowledge what is called the threshold or "limen". Subliminal responses, both positive and negative, and threshold or liminal ones, are likely to give different laws, such as the different laws of psycho-physics attributed to different experimenters like Weber, Fechner, Delboeuf, Breton and others. Each of them had his own mathematical formula expressing the relation between
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stimulus and response, by which the body was to be understood in terms of mind and the mind in terms of the body. Some used logarithmic language while others used the idea of geometric or arithmetic progression to relate the bodily and mental factors. Merkel's law was seen to go against the validity of the Weber formulation of the relation. It states that within the limits of the threshold, there is a simple equality of proportion between stimulus and response. If we should think of the human organism as a whole in the light of these rival and different theories called laws it would not be difficult for us to see that the innate global structure of the psycho-physical entity involved is what is at the origin of the different partial experimental findings. The limen is a notion that touches that zone of the psycho-physical entity which is nearest to the null or zero-point. Stimulus must be said to be quantitative as it is actually physical and measurable as such; and response, which varies geometrically or logarithmically, or according to more complicated mathematical laws, may be more simply looked upon by us as a qualitative factor. It is because even such terms as 'qualitative' are used in different contexts by different philosophers, and thus tend to produce ambiguities, that the need for a schematic language such as we are proposing in this study becomes a necessity. According to what we propose, the outline of which has already emerged from our discussion so far, we could call the response aspects, which are of the order of calculables rather than observables, as pertaining to the qualitative or vertical axis of reference. The stimulus aspects would legitimately belong to the quantitative or horizontal axis of reference. By using these vectorial terms of projective geometry in a certain sense that is to be understood as belonging to the context of analytical geometry and topology at once, as Spearman has already begun to discern, and as known to what is called vectorial psychology, we have the unique advantage of a language for which the languages of the various particular branches of science become merely particular instances. It is in this sense that semiotics could be made a veritable organon for all sciences. (39) Sir Russell Brain, President of the Royal College of Physicians, London, author of "Perception and Science", in a recent pronouncement pertinently puts the question:
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"If we become aware of the colour solely as a result of changes occurring in the brain, which is inside the skull, how do we come to locate the red in the book which is lying on the table?" (40)
If this book gets its colour from inside the skull and not from any primary quality in the book itself, we are witnessing in such a question put by a scientific authority a complete change of reference for science as a whole, which, from the days of Heisenberg's Uncertainty and the Relativism of Einstein, has been shifting its accent from the observed to the observer. While we are still on the subject of the light psycho-physics could shed on the schema we are developing, we could also refer to certain findings that have had a well-recognized place in science for many years, such as the phenomenon called 'retinal rivalry', which records the peculiarity of the effect of colour or form on vision by which, if the two eyes are stimulated by different colours or forms at the same time, there is an element of intelligence that enters the situation, by which both eyes together alternately see only one colour after another.
The spatial rivalry is replaced by the mind, or by some inner factor which insists on seeing one colour or form at a time without rivalry.
The very term 'retinal rivalry' retains the old prejudice in favour of physiology as against psychology within psycho-physics, which ought strictly to give equal importance to both aspects. A more correct description of the phenomenon would be to ask how the conceptual factor solves the duality of perceptions.
Sir Russell Brain refers to the phenomenon of 'referred pain', which is not actually in the part of the body to which it is attributed by the sufferer. He explains: 'many people who have had a limb amputated say that for a time it feels as though it were still there'.(41) Examples of this kind could be multiplied to show that even experimentally, mind and matter meet neutrally in psycho-physics.
The sensation of pain depends on its continuity or intensity; while that of a 'just noticeable difference' of colouris more related to space than to duration. The saturation, hues and the brilliance or darkness of colour-shades and their 'just noticeability', resemble modes of intensity characteristic of elements of thought. If we should add to these the notion of the peculiarities of combinations in which
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elements of colour integrate themselves, we arrive at the well-known 'colour-solid'. The taxonomy derived from this is now adopted by the American Standards Association and is the accepted language of colour for use by many manufacturers of paints and other products demanding a simple and accurate method of referring to colour and its innumerable shades.(42)
Vectorial space and Cartesian correlation, put together into the idea of the colour-solid, with whose help scientific precision is given to the confusion of the names of colours and their possible varieties, introduces for the first time a public and universally-understandable language - at least with respect to one domain of language where ambiguity is most possible - whether between one vernacular and another or even between those who happen to be using the same language. The vertical axis is here represented by the central achromatic scale ranging from black through grey to white at the top. The spectral colours are related according to hue, light and shade, or degree of saturation, with three distinct integrating, characteristic, combinatorial or modal dimensions or factors which, though understood at present only in the psycho-physical context, could well apply to the integration of thought and language in general, in an extended or extrapolated sense.
THE VALIDITY OF PSYCHO-PHYSICAL SPACE
If in logical atomism it is permitted for us to think of logical space as a distinct entity, the non-arbitrary status of the colour-solid must be considered to be beyond any question in respect of its validity, even by those who call themselves 'logical empiricists'. Even when a modern physicist refers to space, there are two aspects of the notion of space that meet in it which have to be distinguished. Conceptual and perceptual spaces are put together by him, consciously or unconsciously. It is a sort of neutral space that is involved, as between actual space enclosed in a bell-jar in the laboratory (if a perfect vacuum is possible), and a space conceived by the mind as a metaphysical abstraction that has been defined by Aristotle as: 'That without which bodies could not exist, but itself continuing to exist when bodies cease to exist".
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Space possesses magnitude or extension, though it is itself not a body for "in case it were a body then two bodies would exist in the same place" (Aristotle," Physics", Book IV). Colours looked at in the light of Sir Russell Brain's recent words would themselves be within the skull rather than in the object.
Putting this fact together with the structure of the colour-solid - with a vectorial psycho-physics to support it, and understood as having dimensions which schematically represent tendencies in consciousness treated topologically - we have arrived for our purposes at a rough idea of a unit-integrated norm of thought-elements. In order that the full implications of the structure of thought revealed by this analogy may be clear, we are reproducing it below with a full discussion of its possible grades of meaning. By the method of intrapolation and extrapolation we are expected to carry the pure schematic content revealed here to other departments of thought, with the confidence that not only is this method non-arbitrary and justified, but that it could claim to have that degree of apodictic or actual certitude which, as we said, is the criterion of science in general.
In passing it might be permitted to note here the slight difference that exists between this and the idea postulated by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus". (43) The following is characteristic of his normative notion of logical space:
"1°13 The facts in logical space are the world.
2°01231 In order to know an object, I must know not its
external but its internal qualities.
2°0232 Roughly speaking, objects are colourless."
The logico-philosophic world of Wittgenstein, like the Monad of Leibniz, suffers from a slight accentuation of the vertical as opposed to horizontal aspect of the global totality of reality with which a scientific language has to cope with. Colour is not to be excluded by us from our world of scientific language - for otherwise it should become suitable merely for equations.
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INTEGRATED NORM OF THOUGHT VIEWED SCHEMATICALLY
At this stage we are almost in a position to outline some of the more important ideas of this study, ideas which we were unable to clarify at the beginning. We used the expressions 'proto-language' and 'meta-language' and said that these have to come together to result in a 'scientific language' of universal understandability, utility and validity. We have also used the expression 'normalisation' and 're-normalisation', which require to be clarified. These three types of language and the important concept of normalisation have to be conceived in terms of a normative notion which must be sufficiently easy for the human mind to grasp intellectually.
What is more, it must have the advantage of easy communicability, whether through speech or writing. It has to be proof against the gradual encroachment of vernacularisms or patois which may be called broad, low or parochial. It must have an innate stability, depending on its intrinsic character. The very validity of the normative notion must be its recommendation, and the spread and acceptance of this norm must not call for any movement to propagate it, as with closed religious groups. Its open scientific status must be the basis of whatever utility or interest it might have.
As its soundness shows itself, it must get a reputation depending on its own merits, private or public. To have all these conditions fulfilled naturally it is best that it agree with nature, both human and what belongs to the environment.
Physics and psychology, as Bertrand Russell (44) said, have been approaching from both sides to meet in what he called 'neutral monism'. This process of mutual rapprochement of two natural aspects of human thinking, as represented respectively by what we call physics and metaphysics, if it has been taking place, must be intelligently promoted until these aspects of thought fuse into a normative basis, both physical and metaphysical. Mind and matter, spirit and body, physics and psychology, geometry and algebra - and many other pairs of words - refer to the same schematically-understandable aspects of human thinking. In the world of science we have already referred to them tentatively as the observables and the calculables. The distinction itself is a vertical rather than a horizontal one, to use here in advance the terminology we are still in the process of justifying. Language itself can emerge only where it could be meaningful.
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If observables refer backwards to an archetypal pattern of language within the mind of man, naturally resembling geometry - as Pascal and Bergson (45), not to speak of Descartes and later Cartesians have intuitively known and have pointed out in their writings - the calculables would also be symbolic in the sense that algebra is. Algebra by its symbolism refers to the Platonic world of the intelligibles, which are like numbers as opposed to quantity. It may be said to be a language that refers forwards and upwards to abstraction of ideas. Symbolic logic, which depends on algebra, has already been named a meta-language. By this very token it is that we have here referred to the other anterior aspect of the structure of linguistic thought as referring to a proto-language. We have to visualize the whole matter schematically in order to follow the stages by which we could pass on from what we have called the normalisation of scientific thought to what we are going to clarify as the re-normalisation of the same.
THE COLOUR-SOLID OF PSYCHO-PHYSICS AS MODEL OF PROTO-LANGUAGE
The blue of the sky, the mirage, the sky-blossom and the gleaming sky-reflection of the mirage surface, have been used by Sanskrit philosophers in speaking of the phenomenal aspect of reality as superimposed as a passing show or appearance hiding the reality which is behind. Without lapsing into oriental contemplative ways of philosophising or promoting wisdom through mere a priori solipsism, pantheism or syncretism, we could in a very matter-of-fact sense still assert with justice here that the colour-solid could be availed of, as a model at least, for representing in tangible form what we have called the proto-linguistic pattern of archetypal thinking.
If the question is put: 'What is colour?', it could be answered in different languages in the same tongue:
1)
We could say, as the dictionary first puts it: "the red of blood, the blue of the sky, the green of grass are colours". Here definition is by mere arbitrary juxtaposition of name and form or colour-aspects and nothing more. The helplessness of the lexicographer is evident. Ordinary expression in any tongue has to have this form for the sake of the apodictic certitude of the resulting knowledge, and no one says 'prove it!'.
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2 )
The second definition of the term goes further than just juxtaposing the observable or the nameable, thinkable or calculable, which are, in principle, the same as that number which Pythagoras said was the secret of the universe.
We have distinguished it as the vertical. When the vertical aspect of language is admitted into the meaning, a second degree of certitude results which is not derived from the horizontal axis of reference but from the vertical. 2 + 2 = 4 is an apodictic certitude that the normal human child learns and accepts quickly. As Piaget would say,
"Seriation and classification spatially and in time
are simultaneous operations the child is capable of through
stages of its mental development".(46)
In a higher stage of the education of the child it will be able to grasp the second dictionary meaning of "what is colour?". This time it will be put, as in Webster's New International Dictionary under 'second meaning', as follows:
"A sensation evoked as a specific response to stimulation
of the eye and its attached nervous mechanisms by radiant
energy of certain wavelengths and intensities."
We have already here two grades of language: one of the first-degree common-sense language belonging to what Carnap would call the "protocol language" level, and another which a secondary schoolboy is taught to understand in the classroom. Both of them are scientific.In fact the common-sense language, being the result of the closest union of the observables and the calculables, is valid without the intervention of syllogisms or pointer readings, which only make scientific knowledge less apodictic or certain.
The second meaning in the dictionary under the word 'colour' is less scientific in one sense and more scientific in the other. The common vernacular is easily understood by the closed group which pertains to the vernacular tongue and the certitude has that horizontal quality in which the thought moves between very real or certain factors, whether actual or virtual. In the statement 'the sky is red' the word 'sky' is an observable and 'red' is a name and thus of a conceptual order to be counted as belonging to the calculables. The mental status of the colour-sensation, which is becoming
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more confirmed, as we have seen from the findings of Sir Russell Brain above, justifies our assigning a virtual status to it which could be described as eidetic in the terminology of Rorschach's psychology. Colour-vision has its cause within the skull and not in the object outside; but the name by which a certain colour is recognised through ordinary language in any vernacular belongs to the metaphysical context rather than the physical one. A concomitant correlation between two postulated points on the positive and the negative sides of the horizontal axis would thus characterise the nature of the common-sense language. In the terminology developed in the Carnap school (47) this would correspond to the axis in which the pragmatic 'handling action' language (48), the semiotic dimension of 'thing-language', and the 'protocol language' may be said to move. We shall be considering these terms presently in their proper contexts. For the present it would suffice to recognize that within the amplitude of actuality and virtuality which the mind is capable of in its alternating perceptual or conceptual activity there is always a concomitant variation as between points that we could mark in the positive limb of the horizontal and its own negative limb.
The second meaning is removed from the 'protocol language' by its participating in less actual and more calculable aspects of knowledge, which function simultaneously to create the phenomenon of meaning in consciousness. Since the vibrations that correspond to colour and sensations are both physical facts - one treated perceptually and not actually, and the other treated conceptually and not virtually - we have to select the points of concomitant variation involved here very cautiously, without violating methodological, epistemological or axiological factors which enter into the consideration of the particular language that science might employ systematically for some utilitarian or idealistic end - to which the science is said correctly to belong. The person responsible for the discovery of the relation between vibrations and colour may also have to be taken into consideration for determining precisely the points of concomitant variations, agreements, differences or both, that may belong to the four limbs of the vertico-horizontal frame
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of reference that we have outlined. Experts of the department of knowledge concerned might have to have their say, to be finalized by an expert committee which understands what normalisation means. One thing can be said at once. While in the first common-sense meaning the two points were located apart in the total range of the amplitude, here they have to be brought together. If the knowledge is for merely serving curiosity about colours, the branch of science is to be placed neutrally, and instinctive dispositions involved in curiosity and its intellectual counterpart have to determine where two other points have to be placed in the vertical axis. Instincts are retrospective in reference and therefore negative; while the interests of scientific progress involved must find a degree marked on the positive side of the vertical axis. The relational picture involved here is quite different from that of the actual and virtual colours that were placed on the horizontal axis to begin with. The mystical joy, if any, involved in the first meaning must also be marked, if necessary on the vertical axis, to the extent that it is considered positive or negative in tone. The second case being relationally of another epistemological context, the curiosity satisfied is a more scientific one. Any number of other fractional or multiplied dimensions, qualitative or quantitative, could be added to analyse the proto-linguistic implications.
NORMALISATION OF SCIENTIFIC LANGUAGE
Out of the two ways of giving meaning to the question 'What is colour?' we have so far discussed two varieties: one conforming to common-sense requirements, and the other with a more scientific purpose. The vertical component of the psycho-physical entity which gives us the satisfaction of knowing what colour is has been slightly accentuated in the second instance, when vibrations were equated with the name-symbols standing for the different colours of the spectrum. If a colour-manufacturer interested in actual colours and not in science for its own sake was thinking of vibrations with relation to colours, these two factors would have to be put in the horizontal axis. For a scientist in the class-room thinking of the subject for its pure knowledge-content,
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a symbolic equation treating colour by letters in the abstract and vibration grades by number would bring them both into the vertical. When the relation is still of a hypothetical status, the vertical and horizontal may be put together tentatively in view of apodictic certitude, when it will be vertical, horizontal or both. What is positive-horizontal might have to be put on the negative side and primacy given to what appears otherwise. Normalisation thus has its rules derived from epistemology and methodology, with an axiological purpose as an over-all consideration. Symbolic logic can deal only with the verticalized aspects and can therefore have no utility except in the steps of mathematical inference involved. We shall be returning to this question later. All that we wish to stress at this stage is that normalisation is not easy and, as we have said already on page 280 above, promiscuous mixing-up of aspects in violation of the innate structure of thought makes the language absurd. If 'metaphysics is non-sense' we could retaliate and say pseudo-science tends to the point of absurdity.
WHAT NORMALISATION CAN DO TO THE LANGUAGE OF SCIENCE
When the vertical and the horizontal aspects of language are juxtaposed, a certain system is put into language, and it gains an apodictic character without further demonstration or syllogistic steps of inference. No better example for this could be found than the case of the colour-solid. The colour-solid is able to circumvent the difficulties of vernacular confusions of tongues, and in one domain at least succeeds in creating the possibility of a standard universal language that is scientifically valid. From it we are able to derive the theoretical basis of a universal language for all sciences, if the integration of all branches of knowledge would be possible. The over-all integration of the whole range of sciences and philosophies could be undertaken with the same model of the structure of thought. In branches of study like sound, heat or the sensation of taste we could adopt the same model so that the monadic units and the monad-of-monads unit, conceived on an absolute basis, could all adhere and organically cling together.
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The rough possibility of a language for unified science based on a scheme of integration for each minute branch of science, each having the same proto-linguistic elements as the over-all scheme, thus comes into view.
HOW TO ADAPT THE STRUCTURE OF COLOURS TO LINGUISTIC PURPOSES
Again let us put to ourselves the question 'What is colour?' A complete scientific answer is found in the second half of its second meaning as given in Webster's New International Dictionary (49), which fortunately gives us within as short a span as possible the full psycho-physical and categorical implications. We shall take the liberty of extracting from it here while expressing our gratitude to the author of the same:
"Colour may be regarded as a psychological category;
it can be described and specified in terms derivable
from introspective analysis, without any reference
whatever to wavelengths, to energy or to any physical
category; but it is also possible to state the physical
correlates of the psychologically-determined
attributes of colour and to draw up some psycho-
physical relations between them. All colours are
divisible into two classes, the chromatic colours, as
reds, greens, purples, browns and pinks, and the
achromatic or neutral colours, including black, white
and the intermediate series of greys. The latter are
found to differ from each other only in their degree of
resemblance to, or difference from black (or white),
and with each other grey differing from its intermediate
neighbours by an equal sense of differences."
This series can be made into a scale by assigning an ordinal number to each grey, either ascending towards the lighter greys from black as zero; or ascending with positive numbers and descending with negative numbers from median grey as zero. That attribute which thus measures the variation of the greys is called brilliance: dark greys have low; median grey has medium; and light greys have high brilliance.
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Chromatic colours differ from each other not only in brilliance, but also in hue and saturation. Hue is that attribute in respect to which colours may be described as red, yellow, green or blue, or as intermediate between two of these. Hues form a natural cyclic series (hue cycle, colour cycle or colour gamut). Colours of the same hue and equal brilliance may differ from each other in saturation, that is, in vividness of hue or in degree of difference from grey.
In terms of these three attributes, colours may be arranged in a symbolic tri-dimensional space (the colour-solid) having the grey series as axis, with median grey at the centre and black and white at the extremities; (fig. 18.1).
Corresponding to each grey is a plane perpendicular to the axis, in which lie the points representing all colours of equal brilliance. In each plane hue is represented cyclically in the order of the hue cycle; and saturation is represented radially with the axial points (greys) as reference points of zero saturation. Thus any colour can be specified by giving three ordinal numbers (colour constants or dimensions) which are coordinates of the corresponding point in the colour-solid.
By establishing arbitrary division points on the scales of brilliance and saturation, any colour can be described as having very low, low, medium high or very high position in these scales.
By establishing arbitrary division points on the hue cycle, hues can be classified as e.g. yellowish-red, reddish-red-yellow, red-yellow, etc.
All principal definitions in this dictionary are in introspective terms like the following: "bay: a colour red-yellow in hue, of low saturation and of low brilliance"; "carmine: a colour red in hue, of high saturation and low brilliance".
We can see here that hue is a factor that could be correlated to the horizontal axis of the scheme we have been developing in this part and that brilliance belongs to the vertical axis.
Saturation is a third radial reference depending on the degree of centralisation. This last could be described as representing the combinatorial mode in terms of thought, while the other two dimensions determine the two main categories into which characteristics of thought could exist negatively or positively in the schematic linguistic space of human consciousness.
A normative proto-linguistic basis for the correlation of thought-characteristics and modes of combination has been outlined on an experimental basis so far, and now we pass on to the re-normalisation of meta-linguistic aspects in the next section of the study.
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STRUCTURE Fig. 18.1: Figure of colour-solid treated as a non-arbitrary basis for thought integration.(50)
SECTION III : THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS
As we are leaving behind with the previous section our discussion of a language for unified science from a strictly experimental point of view; on commencing the present one, which relies on purer linguistics, logic, mathematics and more philosophical or metaphysical aspects of reality - it becomes necessary to preface it with certain preliminary remarks of methodological, epistemological and axiological import. Scientific validity depends on the apodictic certitude resulting from a methodic treatment of items of knowledge which have sufficient significance in human life. Far-off ends and means, dualistically conceived, would be less scientific to the extent that the verity in question is not certain. Too many indirect pointer-readings of observables, and too many steps of inference intervening in calculables, detract to that extent from the degree of certitude of scientific findings.
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As we are here concerned not merely with scientific certitude, but also with the language that can express this certitude derived from the various aspects of reality correctly put together to result in conviction; and as language itself is an activity belonging to a neutral trans-subjective and inter-physical order, as we have already explained - that language which is most suitable for the scientific purposes of scientists for their own sake, for the expert outside public and for the common man's edification or education, has to follow the broad lines of the structure of thought as it exists anteriorly, as it were, in the proto-physical as well as the metaphysical aspects of thought. Linguistic consciousness may be said to have a stratum that is anterior and one that is posterior. The latter is more overt than innate. Corresponding to the innate and overt levels there should be an accordance or agreement reflected in the language employed. Mathematical, symbolic or logical language, outside geometrical thinking which, though mathematical, belongs to a proto-linguistic order, leads us upward as it were, into the proper domain of the meta-language relying more on the name-aspect than on the actuality of form.
This study is based on certain fundamental notions out of which we have to keep in mind a few leading ideas, so that details may not confuse the reader. Firstly, there is the notion of the unitive norm as neutral between physics and metaphysics. Proto-language and meta-language must refer to this norm from both sides. The meaning that emerges, like all the varieties of colours in the colour-solid that we have examined in detail at the end of the previous section, could be treated globally or item by item to reveal the combinations, modes and characteristics of language. Normalized meaning would be understandable to experts, the intelligent public or to the common man, just as the definitions of colours (as explained in the last section) in the dictionary are meant to be understood by all who are capable of using a dictionary meant for common use. A standard terminology could be developed, as has been done in respect of various shades and intensities of colour.
Normalisation takes place in two opposing senses; one is when proto-language lends certitude to language, which is from the negative to the positive direction in the vertical axis.
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We have called this process 'normalisation' because it should be first understood before the downward or negative normalisation of the over-specific aspects of thought can be clearly visualized. As in psycho-physics and in the colour-solid to which we have referred, psychology and physics meet neutrally with perfect legitimacy and validity without contradicting any epistemological, logical, mathematical or linguistic thoughts. The author of the dictionary article on the colour-solid has stressed the physical side of its reality as against the aspect of science which depends on calculables.
If the measurements of a table could be said to be arbitrary, the geometrical language used in integrating colours schematically would be arbitrary. As we have explained at the beginning, if a schoolmaster puts a dot on the blackboard and called it "p", he is as non-arbitrary as language could ever permit. As the question is of an epistemological order, we are justifying the objection recorded in the footnote there in this general section, where we are considering neutrally and normatively the status of the scheme, even as a psycho-physical scheme which has its reality at the meeting point of introspection and open-eyed observation. Instead of algebra and geometry meeting in analytical geometry, the observables
and the calculables meet on neutral ground in the schema built on the analogy of the colour-solid. We claim for it full scientific status, in the name of the common epistemology which must be implied in any integrated or unified science.
OTHER EQUALLY VALID SCHEMATIC REPRESENTATIONS
In Eddington's "Space, Time and Gravitation" there is an imaginary conversation between a relativist and a mathematician in which the latter admits that the pure mathematician is not concerned with the truth of his propositions, and the relativist replies:
"Je pense que dans I'Univers réel il doit exister un
groupe d'entités liées les unes aux autres dans un
ordre quadridimensionnel bien défini et qu'elles sont
les bases de l'univers que nous percevons aussi loin
que la physique nous a permis de l'explorer. Les
lignes droites dans l'espace à trois dimensions forment
un groupe quadridimensionnel d'entités, autrement dit
elles ont un ordre quadruple. On ne peut donc pas
prévoir le nombre ultime des dimensions de l'univers,
si toutefois le mot dimensions est applicable."
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("I think that in the real universe there must exist a group of entities linked to one another in a well-defined four-dimensional order and that they are the basis of the universe we perceive, as far as physics allows us to explore it. Straight lines in three-dimensional space form a four-dimensional group of entities, in other words, they are of a quaternian order. Therefore one cannot predict the ultimate number of dimensions in the universe, if indeed the word "dimensions" is applicable.")
Earlier in the same conversation the distinction between a variable understood mathematically and a dimension understood relativistically was explained by the relativist as follows:
"Je crois qu'il-y-a une signification réelle attachée au
temps considèré comme quatrième dimension, et non
plus simplement une quatrième variable. Le terme
'dimension' me parait lié a une idée d'ordre. Mon
opinion est que l'ordre des évènements dans la nature
est un ordre quadri-dimensionel indissoluble . . . ". (51)
("I think that there is real meaning attached to Time, considered as a fourth dimension, and not simply as a fourth variable. The term "dimension" seems to me to be linked to an idea of order. My opinion is that the order of events in nature is an indissoluble four-dimensional order…")
Vectorial psychology uses the same scheme. Variables pertain to meta-language and dimensions to the proto-linguistic context. Valid science results by their fusion.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL BASIS OF THE PROTO-LANGUAGE
Besides Pascal and Bergson, who have used the schematic proto-language like the Cartesians, we have the case of Kant himself who was able to think of his categories in their primitive schematised form. The summary of his schematism is explained as follows:
"Now all the primary modes of the operations of the
understanding whereby objective unity is imparted
to perceived matter, may be reduced to one of these
four: quantity-quality, relation and modality. These,
with their subordinates, Kant denominates 'categories',
after Aristotle, as determining, in and by themselves,
what in general and antecedentally (a priori) may be
predicted of objects. The three categories of quantity
are unity, multitude and totality; those of quality,
reality, negation and limitation. Those of relation are
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double and are paired together, as substance and
accidents, cause and effect, action and reaction.
Lastly, the subordinates of modality are possibly
existence and necessity.
The process by which the categories or pure notions
of the understanding are combined with space and
time, the pure intuitions of sensation, and thereby
presented to knowledge in their possible application
to the objects of sense, Kant calls 'Schematism'
(schematismus). For instance the notion of substance
is said to be schematised when it is not conceived of
absolutely as a self-subsisting thing, but as one that
persists in time and therefore as a constant and
persisting substrate of certain variable qualities or
determinations. Notions thus rendered sensible are
called schematised, in opposition to the pure
categories." (52)
Descartes' great discovery contains the same elements of schematised correlates which belong to a proto-linguistic context. It constitutes a major event in the history of the development of scientific language. Leibniz had a monadology constructed on the same schematic basis in which he tended to verticalize reality by abolishing the value of space. He used the expression "metaphysical points and substantial forms" as applied to the "prime absolute principles of all composite things which he ultimately resolved into them".(53) The principle of occasionalism in Descartes was elaborated by Spinoza into his concept of the "thinking substance", which was to be fitted into his double-aspect theory or scheme which means,
"…that the mind and the body of an individual are
two distinguishable but inseparable aspects of a
single underlying substance or process. Spinoza,
as a consequence of his metaphysical doctrine that
'thinking substance and extended substance are one
and the same thing' ("Ethics" Part I : Prop. 7) was
committed to the two-aspect theory of the body-mind
relation." (54)
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Scientific philosophers have always adhered to this proto-linguistic pattern of thinking. We have seen how Hume has no respect for anything but number or quantity (cf. p. 277 above) and even Locke, known for his dictum that mind is a clean slate, we find adhering to the following analysis of the content of consciousness. While his doctrine of signs might refer to the metalinguistic aspects, his analysis of basic aspects of knowledge is contained in his "Essay Concerning Human Understanding". We read:
"Within the four sorts of agreement or disagreement
is, I suppose, contained all the knowledge we have, or
are capable of; for all the inquiries that we can make
concerning any of our ideas, all that we know and can
affirm concerning them is that it is or is not the
same with some other; that it does or does not always
co-exist with some other idea; or that it has a real
existence without the mind." (55)
The categories of thought are here stated in such simplicity that a schematic representation becomes necessary even to say that we follow the classification.
The idea of the quaternion from which vectorial and projective geometrical ideas have developed is a very ancient one. We shall consider the mathematical and logical implications of this ancient idea separately. Before passing from this section we are tempted to quote two lines from Milton to show how the idea has persisted in literature from ancient times:
"Ye elements of the eldest birth
Of Nature's womb that in quaternion run."
PROTO-LINGUISTIC ELEMENTS IN COMPLEX NUMBERS
Proto-linguistic elements are seen to be present in the structure of complex numbers. The imaginary number 'T'enters into the structure of complex numbers in which real and imaginary numbers enter into relations to be understood in terms of quaternions. Vectors, tensors and scalars are later outgrowths of the concept of quaternions. (56)
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PROTO-LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE IMPLICIT IN SYLLOGISTIC FORM
When Leibniz wrote, "I hold that the invention of the form of syllogisms is one of the most beautiful that the human mind has made", and asserted that "It is a kind of universal mathematics whose importance is not sufficiently known", he was undoubtedly thinking of the proto-linguistic elements that it represented. Continuing the same line of thought he wrote:
"Algebra itself is not the true characteristic of geometry,
but quite another must be found, which I am certain
will be more useful than algebra for the use of
geometry in the mechanical sciences. And I wonder
that this has hitherto been remarked by no one. For
most of all, men hold Algebra to be the true
mathematical art of discovery, and as long as they
labour under this prejudice, they will never find the
true characteristics of the other sciences." (57)
S-SUBJECT
P-PREDICATE
M-MIDDLE TERM
1, 1= 1 FIGURE
2, 2= 2...........
3, 3= 3...........
4, 4= 4...........
FIG 18.2
When he referred to the alphabet of human thoughts, as also to 'de arte combinatoria' and the 'ars characteristica', and added that by the first he had found the "means of accomplishing in all sciences what Descartes and others
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have done in arithmetic and geometry by algebra and analysis" it is not too difficult to guess what was in his mind.He had discovered a proto-linguistic element on which he could build his universal language. The four-fold structure of the form of syllogisms gave him the basis for the superstructure he was planning to erect. Syllogisms represent inferential movements in consciousness represented by the middle term which we might call the zero-point. Instead of subject and predicate we could have the signs (-) and (+). There are thus two sets of reversible movements involving the middle term. Schematically we could represent the syllogistic inferences as shown in fig. 18.2.
UN-NORMALIZED USE OF THE SCHEMATIC PROTO-LANGUAGE
The properties of a right-angled triangle as revealed by the Pythagoras Theorem hold good in two ways, referring to the two axes, vertical or horizontal or both treated together. There is the practical verification that is possible, as also the pure one through mathematical logic unaided by experimental aspects. Thought or reasoning may be said to move along the two axes, while the resultant conviction refers to a middle term which corresponds to the norm. Now that Euclidean space and Newtonian motion have been questioned, other considerations have come in to distort the certitude. The three angles of a triangle do not amount to two right-angles any more. Non-Euclidean geometry has displaced the Euclidean. Relativistic epistemology gives primacy to the observer, and there are many correct answers to the same question instead of a single right one. As Wittgenstein would put it:
"2°03 In the atomic fact the objects hang one in another like the members of a chain." (58)
Speaking about Eddington's Principle in the "Philosophy of Science" Sir Edmund Whittaker said:
"Leibniz, however, initiated a new philosophical outlook:
he advocated in his own words (Vol. VI, "Mathesis
Universalis") a subordination of a science of quantity
to the science of quality - of a science that deals with
numerical relations to that which treats of order and
similarity. This is Eddingtonianism pure and simple."
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Earlier in the same context he had said:
"Eddington's Principle depends on the distinction
between what we have called quantitative and
qualitative assertions; it may be stated thus: all the
quantitative propositions of physics, that is, the exact
value of the pure numbers that are constants of
science, may be deduced by logical reasoning from
qualitative assertions without making any use of
quantitative data derived from observation."(59)
That geometrical representations were part of the programme that Eddington had in mind when influenced by Leibniz became evident when the work of Eddington was followed up by others like S.R. Milner, F.R.S., after projective geometry was developed and adopted as a language for advanced science. It is interesting to follow Whittaker further to see with what hesitation the claims of a normal proto-language became tacitly adopted. He continues:
"The first progress in carrying out the Leibnizian
programme was achieved in the field of geometry
...The new projective geometry included old metrical
geometry as a particular case; the qualitative concept
of order was shown to lead to a greater degree of
power and generality than the quantitative concept of
measurement."(60)
"...Eddington based his theory, so far as mathematics
is concerned, on what he called e-numbers. These are
sixteen symbols on the foundations of which it is
possible to construct a non-commutative algebra.
...Milner has now formed from them a class of
expressions which he calls E-tensors which may be
regarded as a new kind of tensors, since they possess
in common with tensors the linearity and the group
property, but they are transformed by the rotations of
the axes of space and time in a different way from
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ordinary tensors, and thus he has created a new
branch of tensor analysis, which he has used as the
basis of new developments in theories of gravitation
and electromagnetism." (61)
He concludes strikingly with reference to the structure of the universe, which is to be understood in terms of number:
"...I think we are compelled to believe that there is
a number, at present of the order 10 raised to 78/1
which is fundamental in relation to the structure of
the universe. The question is whether with Eddington
we believe this number to be constant in time or
whether with Dirac and Jordan, we believe it to be
increasing." (62)
He alludes to the reciprocal interdependence between the amount of matter in the universe and the constant of gravitation. With the schema that we have developed in these pages it is not difficult to see, even without entering into the specialized mathematics that is employed by Whittaker, that gravitation, qualitatively understood, would correspond to our vertical axis; and that numbers, when referring to the quantitative aspect of the universe, must be what we call horizontal. There is a slight touch of mysticism and theology when Sir Edmund concludes:
"We stand in awe before the thought that the
intellectual framework of nature is prior to nature
herself - that it existed before the material universe
began its history - that the cosmos revealed to us by
science is only one fragment in the plan of the
eternal." (63)
It is not the mystic touch that we wish to refer to here as un-normalized use of the schematic proto-language. Leibniz minimised the importance of the horizontal aspects of reality; and monads were like the chain links that Wittgenstein speaks about. A tendency to verticalisation at the expense of the ill-understood pre-established harmony factor, as Leibniz would say, is what is not correct according to strict norms of epistemology.
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OTHER WAYS OF VIOLATING NORMATIVE RULES
Number and quantity, as representing the vertical and the horizontal aspects of thought, meet in a certain way with Eddington and Leibniz. With both they tend to be verticalized, and the harmony between the two axes of reference is to that extent marred by disproportion. Eddington uses the schematic language to show the difference between the absolutist pattern of thought and the relativistic pattern which, according to him, should be four-dimensional, as we saw above (p. 318). In discrediting the absolutist version he gives a figure which we copy below from his "Nature of the Physical World", which affords an example of the use of a schematic language violating normative rules. The time-element is reduced into a mere point, and the unrealistic pattern of a plane geometrical model is used, while for the relativist pattern he takes care to give duration a line rather than a point as here. The divergent lines are not justified when rational and axiological values are included. A present devoid of significance is what he represents. There are subtle violations of epistemological, methodological and axiological rules. (64)
STRUCTURE 18.3
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He explains in the text as follows:
"These hour-glasses (drawn through each point of the
world considered in turn as the Here-Now) embody
what we know of the absolute structure of the world
so far as space and time are concerned. They show
how the grain of the world runs."
The arbitrariness with which he treats this schematic language which should be normalized, is admitted by Eddington when he continues:
"Father Time has been pictured as an old man with a
scythe and an hour-glass. We no longer permit him to
mow instants through the world with his scythe; but
we leave him his hour-glass."
BERGSON'S SCHEMATIC LANGUAGE OF A CHANGING REALITY
After examining Eddingtonian proto-language, the philosophy of Bergson, which is both scientific and intuitionist at once, offers us a chance for making more explicit the use of the schematic proto-language in integrating different schools of philosophy. There is, as we said, a scientific philosophy, a scientific science and a philosophy of science, based on whichever aspect of reality we consider primary, whetherthe vertical or the horizontal or both.
Locke, Hume and Berkeley take their stand on values belonging to the first-mentioned category.
Eddington is a philosopher of science, which is a recent development.
In between we have philosophers or scientists, or those who are both, and who speak of the subject and the object together. Psycho-physics is at the core of such a compact central group, and language has its life in the vertical aspect of this core, referring to the trans-subjective and inter-physical common ground between the mental and the physical. As an astronomer and a physicist, Eddington thinks in numbers and quantities applicable to the universe of field-physics. Time in its pure aspects does not have such significance for him. For Bergson, change and becoming are all-important, and he takes his position, as it were, within reality rather than as a thinker outside.
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He refers to "expérience intégrale" in contradistinction to a mere generalization of experience. (65) Bergson mistrusted 'Le rêve d'une mathématique universelle' ("the dream of a universal mathematics") as a survival of Platonism, and continues:
"Kant a pris pour une réalité ce rève de quelques
philosophes modernes: bien plus, il a cru que toute
connaissance scientifique n'était qu'un fragment
détaché, ou plutôt une pierre d'attente de la
mathématique universelle. Dés lors, la principale
tâche de la critique était de fonder cette mathématique,
c'est-à-dire de determiner ce qui doit être l'intelligence
et ce que doit être l'objet, pour qu'une mathématique
ininterompue puisse les relier l'un à l'autre." (66)
("Kant takes this dream of some modern philosophers for reality: even more, he believes that all scientific knowledge was just a detached fragment, or rather, a stepping-stone to a universal mathematics. Thenceforth, the principal task of critique was to establish such a mathematics, that is, to determine what intelligence should be, and what should be its object, so that an uninterrupted mathematics could link one to the other.")
Bergson's mistrust of an integrated understanding of reality through the symbolism of mathematics - even when symbolism is made more universal - was natural for his time because the latest developments of topology, which belongs to the proto-language aspect with its geometrical schemes, were of a new kind which had not attracted much attention at the time he wrote his best works. When we find that he himself uses such a proto-language in his writings, this proves that the kind of mathematics involved in schematised explanations of reality, synthetically understood, was not repugnant to him. He should himself be classed as a psychologist rather than as a cosmologist. Just as the observer and the field of his observation went together in relativism as opposed to absolutism; so Bergson viewed the evolutionary process of reality as an inner witness rather than as an outer observer.
The proto-language employed by Bergson becomes clear to us from the following example:
"D'òu vient alors qu'une existence en dehors de la
conscience nous parait claire quand il s'agit des
objets, obscure quand nous parlons du sujet? Nos
perceptions, actuelles et virtuelles, s'étendent le
long de deux lignes, l'une horizontale AB, qui
contient tous les objets simultanés dans l'espace,
l'autre verticale CD, sur laquelle se disposent nos
souvenirs successifs échelonnés dans le temps. Le
point I, intersection des deux lignes, est ce qui est
donné actuellement à notre conscience …" (67)
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("Whence comes it that an existence outside consciousness seems clear to us when it concerns objects, and obscure when we are talking of the subject? Our actual and virtual perceptions extend along two lines: a horizontal AB, which contains all simultaneous objects in space; and another vertical line CD, along which are disposed our successive memories in time. The point I, at the intersection of the two lines, is what is given to our consciousness at the present moment")
We are not concerned directly in this study with the philosophies of Kant or Bergson. It is not therefore the question here to decide whether Eddington or Bergson are nearer to reality. From the way they give coherence to their views through a proto-linguistic schema, it is possible for us to take a position in the integrated whole which is the field of reasoning. Bergson's philosophy may be said to derive its validity and value from that zone where body and mind meet. What he calls his "schéma moteur" tallies on broad lines with our own except that its coloration with actuality is feeble. Its brilliance as referring to the vertical is high, and realities that are peripheral or actual in an empirical sense do not count for much in his writings, although colourlessly implied in the intensely active 'élan vital'. 'A verticalized type of absolutist and living psychology' could be the characterisation that we could make grosso-modo, in a mixture of the common language with the schematic language developed here. Further precision will be attempted in the pages that remain. If we add here that for Eddington, time was an abstraction and space more real; while for Bergson it was the other way about - a fair comparative appraisal of the two philosophies would be seen as possible in the light of our scheme of integration.
THE LIGHT OF SCIENTIFIC LINGUISTICS ON PRIME OR PROTO-LANGUAGE
Other experts who have been engaged in linguistic research have at last discovered that it is useless to follow that hackneyed line of investigation which looks for the origin of language in the gestures and laconic grunts of savage people. This kind of theory, which is based on a Darwinian evolutionist bias hitherto affecting the thought of many branches of science, is more and more discredited at present. How far experts are turning their backs on this kind of approach is
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marked by the interdiction officially announced by the "Société Linguistique de Paris" which says: "This society does not admit any communication concerning either the origin of language or the creation of a universal language".
In spite of this negative attitude to this aspect of the subject, however, interest in the origin of language - not necessarily evolutionist in the usual sense - has survived and progressed till modern times. Some attempts to reach backwards by extrapolation from the given in language have been undertaken both in the old and new worlds. Two theories stand out, claiming our notice here: one is based on the lyric songs and dances of primitive peoples, and the other is seeking the origin of language in verbal imperatives like 'kill!', 'smash!", 'help!', 'strike!', etc. of people of the area of the African Great Lakes. This last thesis, as with Dr. A.S. Diamond who published his "History and Origin of Language" in 1959, postulates that with imperative utterances like 'help!', 'kill!', etc., other parts of speech developed around the noun-verbs through the accretion of necessary elaboration. John L.M. Trime, who has traced these details in a recent talk on "Who Taught Me Language?" explains:
"In all languages the stock of basic significant sound-
units (phonemes) is small.... Of these, certain types,
plosives (p, t, k, b, d, g, etc.) and nasals (m, n, ng) are
particularly common. Upon this narrow basis are
constructed a large number of morphemes - simple
words, roots and affixes." (68)
After thus probing to the very bottom of the linguistic elements that combine to make language, he refers to what he characteristically calls the ascending hierarchy of units, which expression is of particular relevance in reference to our suggestion in this study that language belongs to the vertical axis. As what Mr. Trim says gives us the position of the latest of scientific linguists, we reproduce here the paragraph that would give this study completeness in respect of linguistics approached from an angle that may be said to be our own.
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"When subjected to proper methods of analysis, the
language of every community investigated has proved
to possess a fully developed 'regular structure'. The
types of structure encountered vary widely, but all
share certain fundamental characteristics. All operate
with a small repertory of basic sound units (phonemes)
which are combined together in set ways to form
morphemes, the basic meaningful unit of language,
roots and affixes. These in turn are combined together
in set ways to form an ascending hierarchy of units
(such as 'words', 'clauses', 'sentences'), each having its
own set pattern of subordinate units, each in turn
larger and more complex and with a larger inventory.
Above the word level the inventory is too extensive to
list. Instead, statements of combinability are
generalized in grammar. Above the sentence,
permitted use is so free that no attempt is made
to state the possibilities. Any substantial sequence of
sentences will probably constitute a unique utterance.
All languages are like this; the faculty of language
consists simply in the ability to acquire and operate
such a system, and all human beings possess it." (69)
We have quoted at some length from Mr. Trim and underlined those parts which concern this study closely, to show that the general lines along which modern linguistics for all human beings is being developed have much that is in the spirit of the present study. 'Extension' and 'uniqueness' in the paragraph evidently suggest the two axes; respectively, the horizontal and the vertical; the hierarchy itself being the active, living and changing zone extending horizontally at its middle and re-uniting into uniquely significant speech at the top of the vertical axis. An electro-magnetic field may be said to present this kind of structure. In modern particle physics we have the structure of strangeness and parity with right-handed and left-handed spins, which again suggests the same inner structure of the thought of man reflected in his language; making him Homo Sapiens and Homo Loquens at once.
Our search so far has been into the domain of what we have tried to distinguish as proto-linguistics, polarised as it were negatively at the bottom of the vertical axis of
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consciousness. Intellects that conform to what Pascal would call the "esprit géomètrique" are those best suited to an understanding of the structure of this aspect of language. The geometrical structure suggested is necessary to give to language its solid basis, but this does not necessarily mean that a schematised reality is the best version of neutral normative reality understood philosophically, which is quite another matter. The norm itself is something that is neither physical nor metaphysical. Between an epistemology that gives primacy to the physical aspect, and one that gives primacy to the metaphysical aspect, there is a neutral ground in which the absolute unitive norm is to be placed at the very core of our scheme. Language can result only by bringing together the proto- or geometrical aspect in relation with the meta- or algebraic aspect. If we have given importance to the geometrical aspect at this stage of our discussion it is for linguistic reasons and not for philosophical ones. These two aspects have to be kept apart in this study, which is limited to the requirements of a scientific language. We pass on to the search for a meta-language in the next section.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PROTO- AND META-LANGUAGE ASPECTS
Before we can pass from the discussion of the innate, formal and schematised basis of language, to the more open, nominalistic and symbolically calculable terminal points of linguistic expression, tending to what has been called Babelisation, we have to make this distinction more precise. Instead of entering into the merits of the three levels of semiotics (i.e., the general theory of signs): namely pragmatics, semantics and syntactics, for fear of getting lost in the tangle of theories and counter-theories about the subtler aspects of linguistics*, we are concerned with seeing what kind of link there could be between what we have called proto- and meta-languages.
*e.g. as between leaders such as C.S. Pierce, Ogden and Richards, or by Morris and Carnap himself, who differ slightly or considerably between themselves in the matter of pragmatics; and as between Aristotle's logical form, Euclidean axioms and Leibnizian calculi, not to speak of Boole's logistic, Schroeder's higher functional calculus, together with the contributions made to this body of mathematical, linguistic and logical thought in recent years, touching on the syntactical aspects, and then entering into the various secondary grades of truth-functions that belong to secondary aspects within the semantic level itself, separating L-true or L-implicate or the F-false but L-true possibilities.
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The latter term has already received the recognition of Carnap, who defines it as follows:
"Whenever an investigation is made about a language,
we call this language the object-language of the
investigation; and the language in which the results
of the investigation are formulated, the meta-
language." (70)
Even when a meta-language is employed to examine an object-language, the syntactical aspects which lie deep down on the pragmatic level have to be studied by the same aspect in the meta-language, leading to a linguistic indeterminacy, due to the instrument of observation being more delicate or elusive than the object of investigation itself. Bertrand Russell writes about Carnap:
"Carnap advanced the theory that, when errors of
syntax are avoided, a philosophical problem is thereby
either solved or shown to be insoluble. I think, and
Carnap now agrees, that this is an overstatement, but
there can be no doubt that the utility of philosophical
syntax in relation to traditional problems is very
great." (71)
Besides Carnap, Russell himself is the principal spokesman of the group of logical positivists who have behind them names with corresponding theories, as between Morris and Bloomfield. Frege thought of logical rules without designata. Hilbert developed the axiomatic aspects with geometrical and symbolic calculi together.
The three-volume "Principia Mathematica", jointly produced by Whitehead and Russell, is the one work which brings to its culminating point this kind of logico-mathematico-philosophico-linguistic thought.
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The whole domain of investigation is capable of being characterised as bristling with hair-splitting 'ifs' and 'buts', and treads certain ground only when dealing with tautologies and contradictions analysed into numbered varieties of paradoxes. After looking at its pages full of symbols, of which many other varieties exist, adding to the confusion of tongues, one asks oneself, "How then - even supposing all this is true - is this meant to serve human progress, and in what respect?"
The great Hume himself, whose scepticism is referred to as the starting point for scientific philosophising, remarked that it is clear definitions that count and not difficulties created by indeterminate meanings of words. 'Propositions are definitions' he states, and continues,
'It is the same case with all those pretended
syllogistical reasonings, which may be found
in every other branch of learning except the
sciences of quantity and number'. (72)
The attitude of Logical Empiricists in general is to give importance to signs and symbols as against schematic models or geometrical patterns. In other words, they have a meta-linguistic prejudice. This is expressed by Carnap when he writes about attempts to make intuitive models by analogy with known macro-processes. Evidently, he is referring to schematic patterns such as what we have tried to present in this study. Carnap says:
"Many attempts have been made in this direction, but
without satisfactory results. It is important to realise
that the discovery of a model has no more than an
aesthetic or didactic, or at best a heuristic value, but
is not at all essential for a successful application of
a physical theory." (73)
Further on, he makes his attitude to proto-linguistic patterns clearer still when he states:
"There the physicist could not tell us what he meant by
the symbol 'E' in Maxwell's equations. Perhaps in
order not to refuse an answer, he would tell us that 'E'
designates the electric field-vector."
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Carnap concludes characteristically in a two-faced attitude:
"An 'intuitive understanding' or a direct translation of 'E'
into terms referring to observable properties is neither
necessary nor possible." (74)
The sour-grapism implied here is evident.
The physicist is, generally speaking, not any better here.
SECTION IV : LOGISTIC TO DIALECTIC; THE ATTITUDE OF LOGICAL EMPIRICISTS
This makes the language of symbolic logic, like that of higher mathematics, suitable only in equating subtle epistemological or axiological counterparts, understood, as it were, in a dialectical context. While fighting a priorism and solipsism, the language preferred by empiricists, by a strange irony, fully admits these elements by the back door. The schoolboy riddle about A being the brother of B but B not being the brother of A needs the horizontal observable aspect - the very aspect that symbolism misses totally. Physics, above all other sciences to which the empiricist must give primacy, depends on field-dimensions referring to quantitative, experimental and observable factors which are exactly what is omitted by the meta-language of signs and symbols. Even in the domain of calculables it takes three lines of formulae containing Greek letters, with exponential signs and other special signs between them, before proving, as Wittgenstein points out (75), that 2+2=4. We cannot copy them here nor an ordinary printer print the three lines without having special types of innumerable varieties. This cannot be said to add to the simplicity of a symbolic logical language for science. That it is not tenable for other intrinsic reasons of epistemology has been strikingly pointed out and not answered effectively by Russell himself; for in Russell's own words in the Introduction to Wittgenstein's work:
"The essential business of language is to assert or
deny facts...In order that a certain sentence should
assert a certain fact there must, however the language
may be constructed, be something in common between
the structure of the sentence and structure of the
fact. This is perhaps the most fundamental thesis of
Mr. Wittgenstein's theory. That which has to be in
common between the structure of the sentence and
the fact cannot, so he contends, be itself in turn said
in language. It can, in his phraseology only be shown,
not said, for whatever we may say will still need to
have the same structure." (76)
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To the syllogistic forms of Aristotle, logistics have added their propositional calculus which, instead of being based on middle term, subject and predicate, has been further elaborated with the inclusion of words like 'is', 'are', 'not' 'and' 'or' 'if any', 'some'. 'every', 'all', which are said to correspond to signs of logic. The formalism of Aristotle is said to be superseded by the term "syntactical structure". The meta-language must further have its preferred philosophical terms replacing the more commonly understood ones. What contribution these make to an open and universal scientific language to be used by all, or by any at all, is problematic. The airy verbosity in which semiosis has to thrive is evident from one more quotation we shall take, this time from C.W Morris, whose "Foundations of the Theory of Signs" offers as consistent picture of the implications of the relation between signs and language as can be reasonably expected in any possible meta-language.
"Thus in Semiosis something takes account of
something else mediately, i.e., by means of a third
something. Semiosis is accordingly a mediated-
taking-account-of. The mediators are sign vehicles,
the taking-account-of are interpretants, the agents of
the process are interpreters, what is taken-account-
of are designates. There are several comments to be
made of this formulation." (77)
The underlying credo of the school of linguistics is given in the following:
"... it is necessary from the standpoint of behaviouristics
to deny that such (private) experiences are of central
importance, or that the fact of their existence makes the
objective study of semiosis impossible or even incomplete."
(78)
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Thus, by being affiliated to one particular outlook and by reason of preferring meta-language as against any other possible or legitimate ones, although such may be recognized as necessary; as also by reason of the circumlocutory abstractions of the sign language which shuts out one whole aspect of truth from its purview; and condemned anteriorly by Hume and posteriorly by Wittgenstein - the whole volume of effort in the direction of a language for unified science by logical empiricists seems to us to be heading towards an inevitable impasse. The later Wittgenstein has roughly indicated a way out of the blind alley, which we shall presently examine, linking it with the contributions of Leonard Bloomfield and Braithwaite's contributions to our correct understanding of what a scientific language should be.
THE INTER-PHYSICAL AND TRANS-SUBJECTIVE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE
At the beginning of this study we clarified the inter-physical and trans-subjective nature of linguistic events in the neutral consciousness of an observer-witness of a typical composite linguistic situation with four dimensions of two axes. Much experimental and theoretical evidence has been adduced to give this scheme its fullest possible status of non-arbitrariness and scientific, logical, mathematical and philosophical validity. More direct or indirect support will be derived in what we still have to say. Although avowedly affiliated to the context of Behaviourism, C.W. Morris, in his efforts to delve into the syntactic structure of logical form, depends, perhaps more than he would admit, on mental dimensions and subtle invisible processes. He uses expressions like "the dual control of linguistic structure" and is obliged to use such self-composed compound expressions as "mediated-taking-account-of", which are not fully made explicit. The later Wittgenstein may be said to step into the context at this point, and his "Philosophical Investigations" contain an analysis of the subtler aspects of linguistic structure which is not given to the tough eye of mere behaviourists. Empiricism is only one degree removed from strict behaviourism, and the pragmatists' approach is perhaps
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removed another degree. The behaviouristic aspect of language may be said to be the fraction of the iceberg that is above water. Any linguistic that refuses to take account of the subtler explicit aspects unrecognised by behaviourism may to that extent be characterised as inadequate for arriving at a scientific language which combines observables and calculables together. The limitations under which a pragmatic linguist suffers have been put together by Leonard Bloomfield, whose approach to linguistic problems is diametrically opposed to that of C.W. Morris. His linguistic credo is stated as follows:
"If language is taken into account, then we can
distinguish science from other phases of human
activity by agreeing that science shall deal only with
events that are accessible in their time and place to
any and all observers (strict behaviourism); or only
with events that are placed in co-ordinates of time
and space (mechanism); or that science shall employ
only such initial statements and predictions as lead
to definite handling operations (operationalism); or
only terms such as are derivable by rigid definition
from a set of every-day terms concerning physical
happenings (physicalism)." (79)
Bloomfield takes care to add soon after, "this delimitation does not restrict the subject-matter of science but rather characterises its method".(80) How matter and method could be separated is not easy to understand, and if the limitations were strict, the causes of negative hallucinations or pains or troubles like mutism and its etiology would be taboo to scientists. Such a closing of the frontiers of science is not in the interests of a unified science with a universal language.
Braithwaite of Cambridge has a more open attitude towards scientific language, as explained in his recent work, to which Mr. B.C. Brookes refers in his article on the "Difficulty of Interpreting Science"(81), Braithwaite distinguishes three levels of abstraction in a terminological hierarchy. The terms of the lowest level refer to simple observables. At the second level observables and theoretical terms are related;
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and finally in the third level there are formulae (like Maxwell's hypothesis). These are formulae containing theoretical terms only, which he distinguishes by the name "Campbellian hypotheses". These include the highest and the most general laws. Mr. Brookes observes relevantly in this connection,
"Any actual science robbed of its most general hypotheses would, I believe, collapse under its own weight of detail."
TERMINOLOGICAL HIERARCHIES IN LANGUAGE
This terminological hierarchy, with the first level lying at the meeting-point of the vertical and the horizontal axes but referring only to the horizontal; the second hierarchical level lying in the vertical but referring to the horizontal; and the third lying wholly in the vertical and implying the horizontal, just as a magnetic field is implicit in electricity - could be very well appreciated by us in the light of the remarks and discussions above. Mr. Brookes concludes his article saying:
" .... any language .... in a literal sense is both the
experience and the expression of it .... So those who
ask for more and better interpretations of science can
be wholly satisfied only if they join the scientist in his
laboratory and learn how to share his scientific
experience." (82)
The personality of the scientist, as in the neutral witness observer '0' of our linguistic experimental situation, is where, after all, scientific or any other language must be said to have its being.
The terminological hierarchy of Braithwaite is nothing other than the basis of the 'family resemblance' that Wittgenstein tries to reveal in his "Philosophical Investigations" through what he calls "language-games". Linguistic space, like logical, monadic, atomic or vectorical space, is an abstraction where physics and metaphysics meet and fuse into unity. The unexpected puzzlements that are possible within this meeting-point of the logos and the nous elude strict scientific analysis. It can be looked upon as a mystery or a verbal oddity according to the temperaments ranging between the scepticism of a Hume or the belief of a Kierkegaard.
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This contains variables, according to mathematicians, or dimensions, according to relativists; and the principle of the quaternion runs through it. Such are some of the passing remarks we have to make before placing Wittgenstein rightly in the linguistic context of philosophical investigation. He may be said to mark an important stage in the understanding of the nature of language in its full philosophical light, which is neither confined to observables nor calculables.
THE ENIGMA OF THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE EARLIER AND LATER WITTGENSTEIN
Ever since the publication of the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" of Wittgenstein, a feeling of discomfort has been produced in the minds of philosophers, who thought that factors like mind and self were to be discovered by scientists at the tip of the scalpel or in the space within a bell-jar. Relativist and quantum-mechanical ideas had opened a new vista for science, and empiricism and logic were put together. Mathematics and logic were married and logic was examined in a larger philosophical context. The ladder of logic itself was to be discarded, and philosophers were asked to observe silence about matters that they did not fully understand, as in the last saying of the earlier Wittgenstein, which read:
"6°54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way:
he who understands me finally recognizes
them as senseless when he has climbed out
through them, on them, over them. (He must
so to speak throw away the ladder after he
has climbed up on it.) He must surmount
these propositions; then he sees the world
rightly.
7 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be
silent." (83)
The content of this silence was meant perhaps to give the same subject a philosophical status. Philosophical puzzlement was such that language alone could finally
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penetrate into its secrets. Thus he called what he wrote "language-games" instead of entering into proof, ontological or otherwise, about philosophical verities, whether absolute or relative, pluralistic or monistic. Simple words were to divulge the subtle factors of philosophical puzzlement. The method was so novel and deturgent that intelligent thinkers in the West have not yet fully recovered from the effects of the sheer novelty of the approach to philosophy through language.
The language-games devised by Wittgenstein amply make evident that the philosophical implications of language do not stop within the limits of physicalism, mechanism or operationism. It is not so simple as the handling action - such as when someone says, 'pass me an apple' and if an apple is handy, one passes it - which is what comprises the scope of all language as understood pragmatically by Bloomfield. The lyrical origin of words, as Vico of Italy advocated; and word-origin in verbal-noun imperatives like 'Help!', 'Kill!', as we have examined already - were not sufficient. The interconnections of the structure of language went in different dimensions or as between inner variables. Under item 67 of
Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations" we read:
"67 ... And we extend our concept of number as
in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre.
And the strength of the thread does not reside
in the fact that some one fibre runs through
the whole length, but in the overlapping of
many fibres." (84)
Just as the word-games cover many kinds of games, number has kinds that have a family resemblance-factor running through all of them. Here, by the example of the fibres that go to give strength to the thread, he wants to say that individual concepts have a dovetailing series of shades of meaning which make them hang together, with a subtle import running through their whole series, giving them a vertical bond of unity. Again under 284 we read:
"Regardez une pierre et imaginez qu'elle ait des
sensations. On se dit à soi même comment pourrait-
on en venir à cette idée d'attribuer une sensation à
une chose? On pourrait aussi bien l'attribuer à un
nombre! Et maintenant, regardez une mouche se
tortiller; du coup la difficulté a disparue, et il semble
que la douleur puisse s'attaquer là ou il n'y avait, pour
ainsi dire, qu'un terrain trop lisse, trop uni pour elle et
donc défavorable." (85)
("Look at a stone and imagine that it has sensations. One can ask oneself how one could come to the idea of attributing sensation to a thing? One might as well attribute it to a number! Now look at a fly writhing in pain - suddenly the problem disappears, and it seems that pain can attack only where the terrain is not too slippery and homogenous for it, and thus unfavourable")
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He then goes on to take the case of a dead body which would appear to be completely inaccessible to pain. The difference in attitude is not to be explained by saying that there is only a difference of behaviour. He would rather say "c'est là un cas de la transition de la quantité à la qualité". ("this is a case of transition from quantity to quality") He goes on to say under item 293 that an object could itself disappear out of account if put in a certain relation:
" ... si l'on construit la grammaire des expressions de
la sensation d'après le modèle 'objet et designation',
l'objet même disparait comme hors de propos." (86)
("If one were to construct a grammar of expressions of sensation, following a model of 'object and designation', then the object itself disappears as irrelevant")
In the example given above of attributing sensation or pain to a stone, the psycho-physical or neutral status of language is brought out. Quality and quantity are treated on a par equitably, as interchangeable trans-physically and inter-subjectively. The neutrality established between object and 'designation' in the last quotation amounts linguistically to the abolition of the objective status of the thing to which the attribute is said to belong. Both the elements have to be on a par to be related at all.
The nature of the vertical relation that Wittgenstein takes all the trouble to explain, is strikingly brought out by another of his items of investigation. Under 77 he writes:
"... the degree to which the sharp picture can
resemble the blurred one depends on the latter's
degree of vagueness ...but if the colours in the
original merge without a hint of any outline, won't
it become a hopeless task to draw a sharp picture
corresponding to a blurred one? Anything and
nothing is right - and this is the position you are in
if you look for definitions corresponding to our
concepts in aesthetics and ethics." (87)
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From the standpoint of a neutral observer and witness which we have postulated earlier in this study, for experimental observations we could think of two situations arising as between two persons in the dark room. Supposing that one had a tooth-ache or stomach-ache; to appreciate his pain it would be the same if the lights are on or off. If on the other hand the suffering was due to a heavy load that one carried, it would definitely be better to have the lights on to measure the suffering involved. The age, stature, sex, complexion and other factors have to be appreciated by a rapport that is overt and inter-physical or, to use our terminology, horizontal, while the silent pain suffered without physical change in behaviour, but possibly expressed in words, would be activity that still remained within the limits of the vertical - at least from the linguistic standpoint.
After recommending silence at the end of his earlier work, Wittgenstein introduces us in his later work into the core of the philosophical substratum of all language and thought. In the last of the quotations above, he hints that a vertical psycho-physical relationship between model and imitation is the way to axiology.
PURE MATHEMATICS AND DIALECTICAL REASONING FITTED INTO THE SCHEME
Before we can treat of subjects like Aesthetics and Ethics, which imply axiology, we have to explain here a higher kind of reasoning which pure mathematics shares with what is vaguely understood in our times as dialectics. Syllogistic propositions are the rungs of the ladder with which one attains to a-syllogistic reasoning. This ladder was what Wittgenstein asked the person who followed his propositions to discard in the last item of his "Tractatus". When two pictures tallied with each other but differed in the degree of clarity of line, light or colour, there is a maximum limit and a minimal
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limit within the amplitude of which such bi-polar relation could be recognized. Beyond these upper and lower limits, as between tautology and contradiction in the prepositional calculus of symbolic logic, 'anything or nothing' is right. Ordinary syllogistic calculi refer more to the horizontal than to the vertical movement of reasoning. The distinction drawn between 'fact-truth' and 'logic-truth', is that one is independent of the other. This verity is brought out strikingly by Wittgenstein when he states "One can draw conclusions from a false proposition" (4°023) (88). Truth-functions and truth-grounds are distinguished under item 5° 101 of the 'Tractatus', and a schematic representation of sixteen truth-possibilities in symbolic and ordinary language, ranging from an upper limit of tautology and a lower limit of contradiction as between 'p' and 'q', which are related elements. The shortcomings of Frege's and Russell's way of looking at logic, giving primacy to the horizontal aspect without recognizing the vertical principle running through the whole series, are effectively pointed out in several places, such as where he says:
"Laws of inference, which - as in Frege and Russell -
are to justify the conclusions, are senseless and would
be superfluous." (5° 132)
In this vertical view of logic taken by Wittgenstein, what is important for us in this study is to note what he says in respect of relations between a theory of knowledge, a branch of natural science, and philosophy conceived as an activity.
"(The word 'philosophy' must mean something which
stands above or below, but not beside the natural
sciences)." (4° 111)
"Philosophy is not a theory but an activity" (4° 112)
"The theory of knowledge is the philosophy of
psychology" (4° 1121)"
Earlier he said:
"All philosophy is critique of language" (4°0031)
Put together in the light of his later writings, which go beyond the zone of propositions into the domain of linguistic
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structure in a purer form, irrespective of considerations of duality between 'p' and 'q', which is the subject of all the paradoxes of Russell, we have a modernized version of the age-old dialectical method of reasoning dating from Parmenides and Zeno of pre-Socratic days. It represents, according to the schematic terminology that we have developed in this study, simply a vertical way of higher reasoning. A.C. Bradley in recent years devoted a whole volume to the demolition of conventional textbook-logic and installed instead the time-honoured dialectical way of which Hegel in modern philosophy revived a version, though vitiated by historical perspectives which were extraneous to pure dialectical thinking. A horizontal bias has been given to dialectics in the version known as dialectical materialism that is meant to support politics. What Bradley says in the context of double negation would be sufficient for us to quote here just to show that there are other modern writers who understood fully the implications and the differences as between horizontal and vertical reasoning:
"It is obvious that 'duplex negatio affirmat'. To say
'It is false that A is not B' is equivalent to the positive
assertion 'A is B'. But this is not because the added
negation barely negates the original judgement. For if
that were all, we should be left with nothing. If mere
'not-A' is simply zero, then 'not-not-A' is, if possible,
less. We must not say that negation presupposes a
positive judgement which is left in possession when
the negative is negated. For we saw before (Ch. Ill
Sec. 4) that this positive judgement is not presupposed." (89)
What is important for us to gather here from the above is that logic, like language, is an activity that moves up or down a vertical scale, as implied in the familiar terms still prevailing in academic circles from most ancient times: ascending and descending dialectics. Let us hear the words of Prof. Louis Lavelle of the Collège de France who, in summarising his course said:
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".... Enfin, la question se pose de savoir comment
l'unité de l'esprit peut engendrer la multiplicité des
idées. Et si l'on remonte facilement du monde de l'idée
dans une dialectique ascendente, c'est la dialectique
descendante qui est l'objet propre de la metaphysique.
Platon ne l'a qu'esquissé.
.... il s'agit surtout pour Aristote de montrer comment
l'idée s'incarne, alors que pour Platon, il s'agissait au
contraire de montrer comment elle se désincarne".(90)
("Finally, the question arises as to how the unity of spirit can give rise to the multiplicity of ideas. And if it is easy to rise from the world of ideas by ascending dialectics, it is descending dialectics that is the proper object of metaphysics. Plato only touched upon this. … Aristotle is mainly concerned with showing how ideas are incarnated; while Plato is concerned, on the contrary, with how they disincarnate.")
Bergson himself refers to the two functions of the intelligence in terms of what he calls a latent form of geometrical or spatial intuition that is at the basis of deduction and induction in reasoning, which he qualifies as "fonctions essentielles de l'intelligence." (91) Even Charles Sanders Pierce could be quoted to support this vertical and active view that he evidently takes, even when remaining a leader of pragmatic and pluralistic thought.
He says:
"When I just said that thought is an action, and that it
consists of a relation, although a person performs an
action and not a relation, which can only be the result
of an action; yet there is no inconsistency in what I
said, but only grammatical vagueness." (92)
It is not certain if the followers of Pierce would accept that he had consciously or unconsciously something of the old-world way of dialectics in his mode of thinking, but a close scrutiny of the distinction he makes is the same as what we want to make in this study as between the vertical and horizontal aspects of language and grammar respectively.
Pure mathematics, which consists of equations, especially in the statements of the principal findings of science, is a highly-verticalized version of a common language which might be said to spread its ideas horizontally.
The quantum theory tends to abolish the concrete or the horizontal aspect of language in favour of a verticalized one.
Eddington, writing on this subject, shows us how the new
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language of physics in the context of quantum mechanics speaks the symbolic and concrete language of co-ordinates.
"... if the quantum theory condemns these images as
too concrete, and leaves us with no coherent images
at all, at least we have symbolic co-ordinates and
momenta and Hamiltonian functions devoting
themselves with single minded purpose to ensuring
that qp-pq shall equal to ih/2 7i." (93)
Every equation may be said to imply dialectical reasoning, because the concrete sensory aspect is absent and reasoning moves up or down inductively or deductively through an axis where all active thinking may be said to reside, to give clear ideas primacy over brute matter. Dialectical reasoning is most concerned with that third level of scientific terminological hierarchy that Braithwaite refers to as consisting of Campbellian hypotheses. Between what we have called the proto-linguistic and the meta-linguistic - the former resembling geometry and the latter algebra - there is a vertical line along which thought moves up and down to produce the language of Campbellian hypotheses. When translated into common language, the same findings of science become expressed in a horizontal version of the same fact, truth or value-content. All scientific language when properly normalized or re-normalized upward to the central norm, or downward from the meta-linguistic side, results in a common language, irrespective of the vernacular tongues. Such is the main line of thought that we have sustained throughout in the present study.That mathematics itself consists of an ascending or a descending hierarchy of linguistic elements is referred to graphically in the following quotation:
"All the lore of mathematics may be considered as
stored in a tall building with many floors, each having
spacious entrance halls, large rooms, closets and
cupboards of every sort. The ground floor is devoted
to arithmetic, the second floor to plane and solid
geometry, the next to algebra, then come trigonometry
and analytic geometry. Above this are successive
floors devoted to calculus, differential equations,
probability, complex function theory, mathematical
logic and so on."
There are many books in the different floors but "Few of these books, however, provide easy transition between floors". (94)
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ETHICS, AESTHETICS AND MYSTICISM UNDERSTOOD IN RELATION TO THE SCHEME
Unified science, conceived in its global totality and unity, cannot afford to leave out any aspect of wisdom, science or knowledge that, when normatively ordered, could belong to it with legitimacy. We have in our days books devoted to what is called the science of emotions. We could have similarly a study of passions such as that of Th. Ribot. Mathematics itself has its emotional repercussions, and Eddington and others have treated of dry physical calculations and mysticism side-by-side as aspects of the totality of the human world of inner or outer values or interests. We can only refer to these aspects of the science of man in order to assign them their positions in the scheme we have so far developed.
Personal taste and aesthetic appreciation go together. The creative artist stands before a painting, and what he is capable of appreciating is just what corresponds to what is in him already. The self at the negative pole of the vertical enters into a bi-polar relation with its own non-self aspect and, projecting a world from within outwards, is capable of seeing itself in terms of the object of art. Except in the appreciation of cheap multicoloured representations which can still remain in the horizontal, real art is where the self enters in relation with the non-self vertically. This applies to all other arts, based on other senses or activities than the visual.
Ethics depends on a sense of goodness or value which one admires in oneself as in others. Aristotle's "Nichomachean Ethics" is based on this principle of being specifically oneself. There are other ethics like the hedonistic where horizontal values enter.
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Mystics are those who are said to cultivate the presence of God. There are active and intellectual ones among them, as also quietists who could be classed as belonging to one or other aspect of the normative scheme we have outlined. Any further elaboration of these aspects will take us beyond the limits of our present study. Whatever space remains we shall devote to applied aspects of the theory we have developed so far.
THE ORDINARY LANGUAGE PLEA AND ITS NATURAL NORM
In a speech delivered before the British Academy as recently as the year 1956, the late Prof. J.L. Austin is reported to have had "his eye on the distant - the very distant - prospect" of what he called "a true Science of Language, the joint offspring of philosophy, grammar, linguistics, logic and many other disciplines". He was reputed to be a person who advocated the adoption of the common language because he said, among other reasons for basing a scientific language on it,
"our common stock of words embodies all the
distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the
connections they have found worth marking, in the
life-times of many generations".
Words, moreover, in the ordinary vocabulary of language, were numerous and already available material to work on. Instead of thinking up new expressions, we have to take the given and, if necessary, with ordinary language as a basis, improve on it. He thought it important that the tools that philosophers had to use should be clean ones, and words that were to be the tools of philosophers deserved to be treated not as mere facts or things, but as representing entities of a subtler order. In thinking of a true science of language he thought in terms of a detailed and patient 'anatomisation of attendant vocabularies'. When once asked if this kind of modest ambition would solve all problems, this remarkable philosopher who had devoted his long labours to this subject, terminating in his death only this year (1960), is said to have replied characteristically, "No - or if you prefer it; alas, no". (95)
We are referring here to the above report in order to indicate roughly the prevailing mood at the present moment in respect of a project such as ours in this study, which
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follows roughly the same ambitions and lines of thought as that of the professor of Oxford. It came into our hands at the same moment of challenge of this difficult subject, on which many noble minds have in the past exercised their superior intelligence in vain. We have taken care to indicate this at the very beginning, so that anyone whose expectations were raised higher than what was possible would be intimated in advance. A veritable science of language and a veritable language of science are the obverse and the reverse of the same coin. In language we touch that central core of all science or wisdom in which philosophy and science meet differencelessly. The uncertainty principle applies here as between the horizontal and vertical aspects of science. The neutral consciousness is where both the axes meet.
This is the 'age of analysis' for philosophy, as some thinkers declare, and among the analytic philosophers are included all those who do not pin much faith on the notion of the Absolute. Pragmatics and pluralism go together, and all notions that seem to refer to the Absolute are not at all in favour with those philosophers who are classed together for some subtle reason as standing against any absolutism in style as in doctrine. Anti-absolutism and 'de-Hegelisation', as Morton White would call the attitude in general, characterise the philosophy of the analytical philosophers, among whom we have names such as Pierce, Whitehead, James Dewey, Russell, Wittgenstein, Croce, Bergson, Sartre, Santayana and others.
THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ABSOLUTE
Whether Wittgenstein (especially the later) could be fitted into a common frame of philosophical reference with the others is itself doubtful. This has been expressed by Morton White himself who has grouped them together.(96) The words analytic' and 'synthetic', as applied to philosophies, are perhaps the most misleading. An analytic judgement in Kant is not the same as one used by Bradley, and Bertrand Russell has his own connotation for it in the context of Logical Atomism. The very first chapter of the compilation of analytic philosophies is entitled "The Decline and Fall of the Absolute". This distaste for anything that savours of Absolutism is a wave or vogue that affects the best of modern minds.
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Perhaps the distaste for the word, otherwise a respectable and scientifically and epistemologically strict word, has something to do with the last World War and the bitter taste that some political absolutists left behind. Dialectics and absolutism go together in the sober philosophical context, untainted by power politics, and there is no reason why it should not be re-instated after "its decline and fall". The indeterminate neutral world which we have so often indicated in this study, and without which a normative notion would be difficult and incorrect to postulate, is in fact tacitly accepted by the most extreme of pragmatists, as can be proved from the examination of select paragraphs from their writings. In fact the notion of the Absolute is at the basis of philosophising, and in thinking so we have the support of no less a philosopher than Bergson, who is otherwise referred to as the greatest of the philosophers of action or pragmatism. Speaking of the extra-intellectual element that Kant introduced into philosophical thought, Bergson writes:
".... Coincidant avec cette matière (extra-intellectuelle),
adoptant le même rhythme et le même movement, la
conscience ne pourrait-elle pas, par deux efforts de
direction inverse, se haussant et s'abaissant tour à
tour, saisir du dedans et non plus apercevoir du
dehors les deux formes de la réalité, corps et esprit?
Ce double effort ne nous ferait-il pas, dans la mesure
du possible, revivre l'absolu? Comme d'ailleurs, au
cours de cette opération, on verrait l'intelligence surgir
d'elle meme, se découper dans le tout de l'esprit, la
connaissance intellectuelle apparaîtrait alors telle
qu'elle est, limitée, mais non plus relative." (97)
("Coincidentally with this (extra-intellectual) matter, and adopting the same rhythm and motion, could not consciousness then, by two efforts in opposite directions, alternately raising and lowering itself, grasp from within and no longer perceive from without, the two forms of reality, mind and matter? Would this double effort not allow us, insofar as is possible, to re-live the Absolute? Moreover, as in the course of this operation one would see intelligence arise of itself and become distinct from the total mind, intellectual knowledge would appear as it really is, limited but no longer relative.")
This dialectically-revalued and revived notion of the absolute,laced by intrapolation, as it were, into the context of the extra-intelligent factor which is the extrapolated factor of the same principle, with the dichotomy or polarisation as between mind and body, is a complete schematic representation of what we have called the vertical axis of reference in different contexts in the course of this study. A scientific,
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normatively-understood notion of the Absolute placed at the core of life is one of the principal contributions we wish to make in the present study, as necessary and inevitable for building round it a veritable science of language and thereby laying the foundations of a veritable language of science. Just as we have seen how elements of dialectical thought are implicit in philosophers who would disavow any such description of their philosophies, the notion of the Absolute is still implicit in their writings.
THE PRIME NUCLEAR PATTERN OF INTEGRATED THOUGHT
The personal pronoun 'I' and the relative pronoun 'this': the one referring to the self, and the other referring to the object, give us the two primary directions that radiate outward from the central consciousness represented by the neutral Absolute. The horizontal may be said to refer to what is spatial, and the vertical to time or duration in consciousness. We rely on Bergsonian metaphysics to give the philosophical amplifications in these matters. Intelligence, innate instinctive dispositions and emotions could be referred to the vertical. The line that would demarcate the vertical from the horizontal would depend on the subject in which the norm is postulated. This is because, as Leibniz would put it, "The universe is in a manner multiplied as many times as there are substances". (98) Each monad is a world in itself, and, just as the political personality of a state is complete with its ruler and all other aspects temporal or spiritual; so each branch of the science of philosophy has its central norm and its other secondary aspects of the vertical and the horizontal. The unit of units is the Absolute Unit. Just as one salt-crystal is the same as another in the same matrix; so normalized thought has the same type and form. The microscopic structure in particle physics, with its 'parity' and 'strangeness', refers to the two axes within the branch of science of particle physics. The expanding universe, with its cosmic rays and galaxies influencing across axes, conforms to the same model as in quantum physics. They resemble thoughts which, between them, have the same structure. This is what made Sir Edmund Whittaker say, "the intellectual framework of nature is prior to nature herself."
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We can imagine these nuclear patterns of unitive or integrated thought themselves holding together in a pattern that is more general. Small salt crystals adhere to bigger ones with the same crystallographic form.
THE OVER-ALL PATTERN AND THE NUCLEAR STRUCTURE
Whether big or small, unique or aggregate, a single over-all framework connects the core of the psycho-physically conceived human consciousness with which we are concerned when we use language scientifically as of science, science and through science. To bring out the structure of this framework of the universe - whether anteriorly within us or posteriorly in the visible universe of quantities or calculables resembling number - we can think of no better single example than the theorem of Pythagoras. We could think of two right-angled triangles with eyes shut, or draw them on paper: one would refer to the relations between three stars in the sky; and the other would exist as a familiar notion of its schematised properties in the mind, derived from, say, earth measurement in an every-day sense. Divested of colour and form, except in the topological sense, we have a movement of reasoning or thought that could equate, with or without intermediate steps of a mathematico-logical or syllogistic order, the more familiar triangle with the less familiar one. This latter could be the object of investigation. These properties of right-angled triangles could be investigated horizontally in the way known in the classroom, by cutting out and fitting together parts that correspond to the squares of the sides. Even if Euclidean space is not what is to be investigated, some normative over-all notion with two axes of reference could be called the over-all framework.
Common-sense science lives and moves in the horizontal, while the scientist trained to use the concepts and arguments of theoretical mathematics or logic lives and moves in the vertical. Thus we are able in science to distinguish between two languages: one that is now called ordinary and the other which is called logistic. The controversy, now perhaps at its zenith, between the choice of a common language or a symbolic language for science, could be settled by saying that both have their uses. Scientific certitude is the resultant
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of the two ways of reasoning taking place simultaneously in the space of linguistic thought, neutrally conceived in the context of the Absolute.
THE OVER-ALL STRUCTURE APPLICABLE TO LINGUISTIC LEVELS
Conviction or certitude that is theoretically apodictic or practically verifiable is both admissible and at the core of the activity called scientific thought. The language of science and the science of language have their common origin in the degree of certitude, which is the essential value that science represents. This certitude can refer to existents like the earth that we measure with geometry, or to topological triangles in the mind, leading reason through higher and higher stages. Just as the turn we have to take at a certain crossing of roads in a big city is certain only when the roads and the map markings agree, so the central certitude that is a neutral value in science has to be translated into verticalized or horizontalized aspects before communicable common knowledge or calculable pure ideas could take place in the consciousness of man, neutrally or normatively understood. Scientific language can result only when the structure and peculiarities of the norm of all thought are fully respected. A common man standing in the laboratory of a specialist might need an ordinary explanation of how pointer readings are related to facts or events; in the same way, an ordinary mechanic can repair a car without being an expert engineer. What they are for, how they came to be there, or how they work, is what matters here. If the common man is interested, he might need explanations about the steps of inference that the scientist might use, sometimes aided by many black-boards on pulleys, by means of which common-sense language becomes more and more verticalized without reference to observables. From there it goes past the point where both calculables and observables are understandable to the common man, and into the region of Campbellian hypotheses that we have referred to earlier.
Thus the same vertico-horizontal structure has to be thought of as applicable at every stage of science. Indirect observables - as with stellar spectra and bands that move, showing a
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universe that expands; or galaxies moving out peripherally in space; or complicated calculables with E numbers - thus get into the scope of what is called scientific language. For clarity and the certitude that should result from the use of scientific language, what is horizontal in content should not be mixed up with what is vertical, except for the sake of a particular expert branch where one has to specialize. The dentist should not wait until he attains to the pinnacle of the theoretical secrets of the medical profession before he can ply his trade. That proportion of the calculables and observables that belongs properly to an expert specialist has to be put into an organic or global whole to serve the purposes of that central value that a scientific activity serves. A creative painter could cut himself off from the theory and conventions of painting and the imitation of Rembrandt or Picasso. He would then have his own combination of vertico-horizontal elements to make him valuable, or merely successful as a pavement artist. Language might have as many shades or possibilities as the innumerable colours that are imaginable or possible to make with paints.
PROTO-LINGUISTIC AND META-LINGUISTIC LEVELS IN SCIENTIFIC LANGUAGE
When Hume asks us categorically to "commit…then to the flames", a book that "neither contain(s) experimental reasoning concerning fact and existence, nor reasoning concerning quantity or number", he has a certain conviction which is, as it were, at the back of his mind. Hume, as a sceptic and phenomenalist, would perhaps not approve of the a priori as understood by scholastic speculation, which he mistrusts strongly. In spite of this, however, it is certain that he is thinking in terms of certain categories which he wants to make as apodictically certain as possible.
As a philosopher he is able to reach within himself, as it were,to this two-fold conception which would alone give, according to him, any value at all to scientific or scientifically-conceived literature of any kind. He may in short be said to have a proto-linguistic pattern in his mind. We have seen how Locke himself, in spite of his clean-slate doctrine of mind, had his
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categories which fitted into the same pattern. Berkeley differed from Locke, and while doing so, independently of accepting Locke's views, he still accepted the same methodological and epistemological frame of reference. His theological affiliation as a dignitary of the church was kept apart, perhaps for non-philosophical or un-philosophical reasons. As empiricists, all three gave primacy to values said to originate outside or inside some sort of mental space which they never clearly explained. Their scepticism did not amount to disbelief in God, but in the tangle of theological disputations about the nature of God. They sought a greater degree of certitude in speculative matters and, mistrusting the meta-language of theology which had gone too far in the direction of over-speculativeness, they turned to other frames of
reference on which they could feel as if standing on firmer ground. They had, in other words, a proper proto-linguistic frame of reference, scientifically conceived, upon which they could erect the superstructure of their philosophies.
The result was that their philosophy had a scientific character.
To visualize the meta-linguistic aspect of scientific language we have to choose another example. The vast body of speculative literature giving primacy to names rather than forms could be included here. A schoolboy describing how a certain salt is to be obtained from an acid and a base might go into details that have nothing to do with the scientific problem, method or value involved. Rules of epistemology might be violated. If a stone hit the head of the boy in the playground, he would have to adopt a common proto-language removed far from the meta-language of science. Weeping would not fit into the context of the science class or the laboratory. Thus within the limits of the proto- and meta-languages there are many vertico-horizontal systems proper for each level of language to adopt. In a psycho-pathological clinic even the emotional language that the boy might use could fit with more correctness or propriety. Language-games refer to the possible levels and dimensions that one has to respect in speaking correctly or scientifically. Now that there is a whole volume of language-games of philosophical, logical or linguistic import it is not necessary for us to multiply instances. We are referring here
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to the "Philosophical Investigations" of L. Wittgenstein, posthumously published in translation at Oxford in 1953.(100) The whole of that book may be treated as a meta-linguistic analysis of the science of linguistics. Normalising common language on the basis of the implications understood in its complete setting, from the point of view of every possible branch of scientific literature, is the service that the "Philosophical Investigations" could render to the cause of a common scientific language for unified science. Meta-language itself could be conceived at different levels in the vertical positive series. Thus we have the logistic formulation, in the form of tabulated matrices, to clarify the algebraic content of signs and symbols. The lines of the tabulation really belong to the proto-linguistic pole; while the letters, symbols or signs used really pertain to the opposite pole. In other schematic representations of the sixteen possibilities of propositional calculus, set out with truth- or falsehood- possibilities; with the truth-grounds which give both to truth- and falsehood-possibilities and probabilities a common basis, ranging between the limits of tautology vertically above and contradiction vertically at the zero-point, referring to the contradiction between 'p' and 'q' - we have, strictly speaking, a Platonic world of reasoning through dialectics implicitly contained vertically; and a syllogistic and Aristotelean one horizontally. The dialectics of Aristotle did not concern itself with the meta-language of ideas but was limited to the world where atter and form were the polarities involved. His dialectics was therefore more in the domain of probabilities rather than possibilities. From the zero-point of contradiction between 'p' and 'q', we could extend the reasoning by descending dialectics to another intuitive unity, reaching down to the non-relativist notion of matter itself, through such notions as the "prius nobis" that Aristotle uses, along the lines suggested in the quotation from Bergson given above in this section.
Meta-language is thus what tends to stand apart from scientific language proper in order to examine it from outside - just as proto-language is also meant to function from the negative pole of intelligence. We have, by extrapolation and by intrapolation, to visualize the three levels here involved: the meta-language above, the proto-language below, and scientific
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language proper in the central zone of the vertical axis with the 'two efforts in inverse directions' that Bergson refers to above. We come thus to the emergence of a scientific language. When correctly horizontalized at the point of intersection, where contradiction is accepted as against mere sufficient reason, we become able to interpret the purer language of any science into the scientifically-correct ordinary or common language. Common language is thus to be understood as nothing but the horizontalized version of the pure language of science, which tends to become a meta- or proto-languagein inverse senses.
Any number of compromises between the vertical series containing proto- or meta-elements of language would be possible, and experts in each science should decide for themselves where they want to fix the standard language in the scale of possible languages. They have to delimit its range and take account of the overtness or innateness involved in each branch of science. Gestalt psychology may have to be given an inner zone, while stimulus-response or behaviouristic psychology is like a colour that is less saturated. The analogy of the colour-solid with which we terminated the first part of this study should be used here for further guidance.
HORIZONTAL IMPLICATIONS OF SCIENTIFIC LANGUAGE
Before passing on in the next section to the practical steps we have to take in the direction of making a language for unified science, we have to mention where the colour-solid analogy comes in as more useful than the mere vertico-horizontal correlation of plane geometry. The solid gives us a means of integrating all strictly 'objective' sciences, such as those of heat, light, electricity, mechanics, etc., without any vertical depth involved in them. Here, instead of an axis, it would be better to think in terms of radii that diverge from a zero vectorial point through the 360°, and to assign to each branch a well-thought-out number or letter or both, to mark overtness or deflection from negative to positive. Even in this strictly horizontal psycho-physical level
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where body and mind meet, it is possible to think of an axis of reference for linguistic purposes which would be as valid as the words we use when we call a rose a 'rose'. Here we have to think of the distinction that Fechner makes between inner and outer psycho-physics, and also of the primary and secondary qualities as known to Locke and from the time of Democritus.
A colour attributed to an object would have a primary status if treated as outside the mind, and colour-vision could be accentuated by the taking of drugs like mescaline and lysergic acid, as Sir Russell Brain has pointed out. To the extent that colour is virtual, one has to take it to belong to the negative pole of the horizontal; but when it is taken to be 'outside the mind' (which possibility is questionable, according to the epistemology at the basis of psycho-physics), we have to place the colour (as if belonging to a paint that we might be using to colour-wash a wall) on the positive pole of the horizontal. The question of the delimitation of dimensions for each branch of science we shall consider in the next section. The Ladd-Franklin theory of colour-vision might also help us to fix further points or degrees in the schematic analogy of the colour-solid that we have adopted for scientifically correlating the structure of thought.
THE MISPLACED ENTHUSIASM FOR A SCIENTIFIC LANGUAGE
A misplaced enthusiasm for a scientific language is sometimes worse than no enthusiasm at all. We have seen a sample copy of the "International Language Review", from the perusal of whose pages it is amply evident that there is a world-wide interest in this question. Sanskrit and Esperanto have merits which could be compared and pronounced upon by the touchstone of our scheme here, as fitted for vertical and horizontal aspects of language communicability, respectively. One is all roots and the other has no roots yet worth speaking about. Both root and branch aspects of a language have to be considered necessary. There are others who stifle their enthusiasm and fervour in such a way that it hurts them, making for martyrs in the cause of a universal language - the dream of humanity since the days of the Biblical episode of the Tower of Babel. From the start, in writing the foregoing
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pages, we have had no illusions about the complexity and enormity of the task. But side-by-side with this sentiment, there has been the opposite feeling that even if the idea of a universal language and its accomplishment are to be separated by time and much effort, there would still be no harm in exploring its avenues and possibilities. After having made as genuine an effort in this direction as perhaps it would be possible to make on the part of one individual, isolated and not in contact with those who can really deliver the goods in such an undertaking, the following suggestions are made in the genuine hope that those who are placed in better positions of advantage may follow up further the lines on which this study has been undertaken, and we have only brought this up to a point on which more fruitful discussions could be based. Sobering though the effect has been of making an effort in this ambitious direction in which many minds have been frustrated, still there is no cause for any discouragement. Given the co-operation of cultural or scientific bodies who have an open and understanding mind in such matters, unlike some who believe in closing rather than broadening their frontiers of enquiry, there is hope that the idea of a language of science could be realized when approached with the proper attitude.
SECTION V : RETROSPECT; PRESENT POSITION; CONCRETE SUGGESTIONS MAIN FINDINGS
The reader who has taken the trouble and had the patience to go through the foregoing pages, now that we are drawing close to the termination, may be expected to put the question: "What then? Is there anything that could result in tangible form as the upshot of this whole study? What is its practical value? "
We shall begin by summarising what we have tried to establish and then make suggestions.
We have tried to supply a normative notion for a science of language. Such a norm has been approached both experimentally and merely normatively in the two parts of this study.
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We have offered some methodological and epistemological clarifications leading up to the normative notion. The experimental discipline of science is based on observations and not primarily on inference. We have tried to show that observations could be made through the indirect evidence of pointer-readings as well as by introspective experimental situations, and we have tried to make clear that one kind of certitude is as good as the other.
We have supported the central notion of this study, which pertains to the reality that we have referred to as the vertical axis of thought, as distinguished from its own horizontal counterpart, with evidence derived as far as could be from the electro-encephalograph. The study of psycho-pathology, psycho-pedagogics and psycho-physics in the light of our revised epistemology and methodology has brought us support of an experimental status to the central notion.
The colour-solid has been given a central position as representing the two kinds of certitudes on which science has to depend, viz., the observables and the calculables. The visible and the thinkable come together, as it were, from both sides of physiology or of psychology so as to yield a model of the integration of thought-characteristics, combinations and modalities after the pattern of the colour-solid. We could think of it with intrapolation or extrapolation in our minds so as to extend its applicability beyond the limits of the colour world to the larger scientific world where elements of thought have to be perceived and conceived as forming a global whole.
The abstract notion of the norm would have a neutral ground, with the help of which, what we have tried to distinguish as the proto- and meta-linguistic aspects could come together from opposite poles, as it were, to coalesce to result in a normalized common language. We then discussed the non-experimental but fully philosophical evidence of the use of a schematic proto-language by many philosophers already, who may be called scientific inasmuch as they adhere to the normative principles implied therein.
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We then passed on to examine the claims of the logical-empiricists in the cause of a unified science and a language that would correspond to it. Their failure consisted in that they had a horizontal axis of reference instead of a vertical one, the importance of which was brought out by certain members of the group who had gone beyond their point of view and left the school of thought behind.
The investigations and interest in the dimensions and implications of simple everyday expressions have been examined and fitted into the frame of our scheme. Mathematics and dialectical reasoning, which represent highly verticalized thought have much to do with scientific thought and reach beyond its ordinary limits to the domains of mysticism, aesthetics and ethics.
We have upheld the plea for a common or ordinary language for all science, provided no methodological, epistemological or axiological rules, principles or laws are violated. Normalisation ascends to the neutral, as it were from below; and re-normalisation descends to conform to the requirements of the neutral norm, as it were from above. At each level we have to delimit the vertical or horizontal factors that enter into the composition of a science as having a unitive value or significance. The notion of the modality is to be added to the integration as a dimension to be understood after the analogy of the factor called saturation in the context of the colour-solid. It could be stated meta-linguistically as that modal relation between subject and predicate, referring to the degree of concreteness or apodictic certitude as between those that are hypothetical, theoretical or problematic.(101)
NORMALISATION CALLS FOR CO-OPERATIVE EFFORT
The process of normalisation within the limits of any particular branch of science has to be conceived in the light of concomitant variations on the vertical as well as the horizontal. The canons of Mill, and many other epistemological and methodological requirements, would be respected by this principle of paired limits to be fixed round a central normative
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notion of each branch of science. Botany will have an ideal plant or a cell, depending on morphology or histology. Psychology would belong to the proper study of man, both from bodily and mental sides. In mysticism the study of man has to have the vertical aspects pronounced, as against the mechanised man who fits into a robot-world. This work of finding the central normative value; fixing the vertical amplitude and concomitant positive or negative factors, or the horizontal amplitude with its limits of agreement or disagreement with residual factors - is the task experts have to do sitting round a table, collecting, collating and organically ordering data. Such work must proceed from two ends viz.: normalisation and re-normalisation of the simplest elements of thought like words; and the normalisation and re-normalisation of whole branches such as psychology, sociology, economics etc. Then there is the overall normalisation in more comprehensive absolutist terms. This has to be tackled with a plan commonly conceived by a group of persons sufficiently interested in one language for unified science. It is not in terms of an invention by one or two individuals that this aspect of the work is to be conceived. It has to be a combined and co-operative effort, an adventure that would take forward strides by the discovery of new possibilities as the work goes on.
INEVITABILITY OF A CERTAIN VAGUENESS IN THE STUDY
Looking retrospectively for a minute over what we have been able to express with any degree of definiteness, we have to admit that in many parts, especially as we approach the middle of the study as a whole, there is a vagueness that belongs as much at least to the subject-matter as to the lack of power of expression on the part of the present writer. An uncertainty-principle seems involved here, but this is not said as an excuse for the lack of clarity which we are conscious is there.
VERTICO-HORIZONTAL MAPPING OF WORD-SYSTEMS
Just as imaginary numbers could be arranged with reference to lines that resemble latitudes and longitudes (102), it is
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suggested here that the first bit of concrete work to be undertaken - even if the above ideas are only tentatively accepted as a basis for discussion and prospective action - would naturally concern the systematic correlation of words into integrated systems conceived round the correlates. As a first step it would suffice to correlate the vertical and the horizontal aspects. The other variations based on the colour-solid analogy would serve for the establishment of a hierarchy of concrete sciences. Heat, light, electricity etc. maybe given radial positions round the base of the double-cones that meet neutrally at the zone where spectral colours of medium brilliance are located. The 360 degrees of variation radially possible will give to librarians and others a way of classifying objective or positive physical sciences. Already there are two kinds of 'objectivity': one speaks of 'real objectivity' and of 'virtual objectivity', often written within quotation marks.
A REVIEW OF RECENT EFFORTS
The confusion of tongues in the Bible, and the great dream of Leibniz which seemed to come as an answer to the need that humanity has felt for a universal scientific language, have culminated in our own times in a concerted effort on the part of leading scientists to proclaim their solidarity and singleness of purpose, as evidenced by the publication of an "International Encyclopaedia of Unified Science". It is hard to say, from a perusal of the leading articles in the first volume where the scope of the publication is indicated, whether this age-old ambition that has persisted through the centuries is actually heading to a successful climax or a mere anti-climax. The cover itself, by its blurb design, shows that the integration that is intended in the publications is nothing more than that of a mosaic where black and white are put together according to some distant, general or vaguely-understood over-all design of a common plan. We read in the very first article by Otto Neurath that the ambition of an "all-embracing vision and thought" is an "old desire of humanity"; and that an "empiristic mosaic" was the limit of the ambition of the compilers is stated as follows:
"For, since one cannot compare the historically-given science with 'the real science', the most one can achieve in integration of scientific work seems to be an encyclopaedia, constructed by scientists in co-operation."(103)
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In another context we read:
"If one prefers a comprehensive scientific attitude, this encyclopaedia tries to show him the spectrum of scientific thinking". (104)
We already notice a difference between a mere mosaic and a spectrum, the former being a more arbitrary relation between colours than the scientific and neutral relation between spectral colours. Scientism and empiricism, to which the group is committed in advance, cannot evidently permit them to go any further. Bertrand Russell speaks of the principle of a dictionary and remarks:
"Given two sets of propositions such that, by a suitable dictionary, any proposition of either set can be translated into a proposition of the other set, there is no effective difference between the two sets . . . ." (105)
Such dictionaries, which can, as a rule only be constructed by the help of modern logic, suffice to dispose of a large number of metaphysical questions, and thus facilitate concentration upon genuine scientific problems. Niels Bohr takes the view that, "science is, according to its aim of enlarging human understanding, essentially a unity". Extremes of materialism and mysticism are to be avoided, as he says, by a "never-ending endeavour to balance analysis and synthesis".(106)
All the above writers are right to the extent that they think in terms of encyclopaedias and dictionaries and, what is more, there seems to be a strange undercurrent of agreement between the different contributors, though this is not evident at the surface. In the light of what we have said in the present study, Russell's plan of two sets of propositions seems to suggest the same distinction as between the vertical and horizontal aspects of thinking or reasoning. Niels Bohr's vision, like ours, does not exclude mysticism from the scope of science, and even in the very conservative-looking attitude of Otto Neurath we notice that there is more than a mere mosaic to be understood by a non-pretentious encyclopaedia. The principle of unity or integration must be implicit rather than explicit. Thus we see that the dream of Leibniz, who is still the inspirer of the unified science movement, is far from being abandoned by his followers, although the warmth of the first enthusiasm seems to have sobered down a great deal.
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Scientism has its own affiliations and loyalties, to the exigencies of which all these writers seem to bow down too respectfully. A true scientist, according to us, should be free from all taint of 'isms', however justifiable on their own merits. Only then could the cause of unified science and of a language that is its corollary be even viewed in its proper proportion and perspective. One has to be able to stand back and look at the whole form to see, not only a mosaic and a spectrum, but a psycho-physical totality which is no other than unified science. The language of unified science has to result from the meeting of two views from opposite sides.
CONCLUSION
It is not difficult to see from the few quotations that we have taken from the leaders of the logico-empiricist school who plan a unified science and a language to go with it, that the ideas of integration and the possibility of a language do not hold before us anything of the nature of a very encouraging prospect that could rouse our enthusiasm. What we have to suggest, after discussing the same subject from a more comprehensive and global point of view, is that integration in a more cohesive sense and what we have called a unitive attitude of non-duality between body and mind would be possible as soon as the partiality for empiricism is relaxed. One has to begin at the normative core, which is neutral and which is the meeting-point of the tendencies that radiate along the two axes in which scientific thought, reasoning or interest might be said to live and move. We can only hope to elaborate what we mean in the merest of outlines here, because in an undertaking of this kind it is not the philosophy of one person that should count. At every step we take in the direction of the ambitious ideal that we set before ourselves we have to see that there is the greatest of consensus of intelligent opinion behind us.
In this connection the saying that the proper study of mankind is man would at least indicate where we have to begin. Cosmology puts the accent on the visible world, and psychology refers to the world within as given to the shut eyes. We could take to begin with such pairs of names like
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Descartes and Newton and think of them with reference to their contributions to cosmology and psychology. Voltaire has compared and contrasted these great personalities of science and philosophy. Before pronouncing any opinion on this, let us pass on to think of a pair of modern thinkers like Bergson and Eddington. How are we to give them their respective places in this psycho-physical or psycho-cosmological scheme? Eddington, as a non-experimental scientist, has to be given a place with thinkers who use the subtle dialectical language of mathematics. What is within himself when his eyes are shut he is able to equate with cosmological realities of the outer universe. Bergson, being against mathematics and still essentially dialectical in his approach, and also because he affiliates himself to a world of living activity, must be located more towards the centre of the vertical axis. The man and the world that goes with him have to be put together before the process of hierarchisation of sciences could be thought of at all.
From the beginning of this study we have broadly referred to three sections, viz. scientific philosophy, the science of science and philosophical science. If we think of the trio of British empiricists, Locke, Berkeley and Hume, as sceptics who gave primacy to the horizontal values in life, we could grade them roughly as follows:
Locke should be placed at the extreme right or plus side of the horizontal, because he went so far as to say that things could exist outside the mind. Concomitantly he made the mind blank like a clean slate. Berkeley would pertain to the negative end of the same axis, and Hume, as a phenomenologist who believed equally in number and quantity, should occupy a central place.
If we take the four rationalist philosophers from Descartes to Kant, through Spinoza and Leibniz, we could at once see that the Cartesian dictum 'cogito ergo sum' gives the key to all of them.
They fall in the vertical axis, and the body-mind duality for which Descartes is often blamed is because his zone pertained to the central core of the psycho-physical norm in a very scientific or real sense. Occasionalism touched the neutral point of the vertical axis. Kant's 'thing-in-itself" and the noumenon were a full recognition of the vertical axis and its philosophical implications. Occasionalism, elaborated a little, gives us
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the thinking substance of Spinoza, with its "natura naturans" and "natura naturata", which refer to the vertical and the horizontal respectively. The monad of Leibniz is nothing but a more elaborated version of the thinking substance, with the accent on the vertical aspects, and made into a hierarchical series. We too have put forward the view that there should be as many vertico-horizontal frames applied as there are items of scientific reality to be dealt with by a scientific language.
Now if we pass on to phenomenologists, existentialists, hylozoists of pre-Socratic times, or even to the patristic and scholastic philosophers of various grades, we have to think more in terms of a dialectics that is subtle and tends to be forgotten in modern times of mechanistic progress. Aristotelian dialectics moves only as between matter and form; while Platonic dialectics soars up and down at higher levels of the vertical axis. Existentialists, especially when they discredit essence in favour of existence and shut their eyes to the abstract notion of the Absolute, tend to place their interest at the bottom of the vertical scale of values. Post-Hegelian phenomenologists have a dynamism where thoughts meet from opposite sides to constitute events in consciousness in which the equation of the self with the non-self is implied. This kind of equation is explicit in the philosophy of Fichte. Renouvier translates the same verticalized bi-polar relation into more personalistic terms. He could be placed high up on the vertical positive side of the scale.
We do not wish to tread on these grounds in any greater detail. In order to secure the greatest volume of support for this cause of unified science and its language we cannot do better than to follow the lead given by the scientific empiricists, but on different lines. A vertico-horizontal mapping of word-systems has first to be undertaken. The usual dictionary may be conceived more on the lines of a thesaurus like Roget's, but with synonyms and antonyms of two sets, referring to the vertical and horizontal meanings. Word-system maps could be appended to usual dictionaries inspired by normalisation and re-normalisation.
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If what we have very roughly indicated is understood at all, the rest of the work may be left to a committee of experts.
NOTES
1. "Leibniz thought that a language could be constructed which would be much more efficient for reasoning and for communication than the vague, complicated and more or less parochial languages then available. This language would be completely universal in the sense that all scientific and philosophic concepts could be expressed in it, and also in that it would enable scholars in all countries to communicate over the barriers of their vernacular tongues." P.P. Wiener, "Dictionary of Philosophy", by D. Runes, Jaico Publishing, Bombay.
2. Dr. Holton, Prof. of Physics, Harvard University writes:
".. . Science advances faster and faster every day, widening the rift between science and culture.
To restore them to some kind of reciprocal contact within the concerns of most men - to bring science into an orbit about us instead of letting it escape from the field of our common culture - that is the great challenge before intellectuals to-day. And nothing better illustrates the urgency and difficulty of this task than the false images prevailing about science."
Cf., "The False Images of Science", The Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 9, 1960, p. 72.
Earlier in the same he had pointed out:
"Having destroyed absolute standards, it (science) puts nothing in their place." [Ibid., p. 70)
3. "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus", London, 1922, p. 79.
4. Leibniz himself had hinted at the importance of 'form' in logical or other reasoning when he wrote:
"I hold that the invention of the form of syllogisms is one of most beautiful which the human mind has made, and even one of the most considerable. It is a kind of universal mathematics whose importance is not sufficiently known"
Quoted from "New Essays", p. 559 in Russell's "Philosophy of Leibniz" Camb. 1900, p. 282.
5. Cf. "The New Mathematics", Irving Adler, Day and Co. New York,
1958.
6. "Pour donner, dans tous les cas possibles, une signification à la somme et au produit de deux éléments, on introduit deux éléments nouveaux: l'élément zero V (ou absence de points, de droites et de plans) et l'élément universel U (ou totalité de ces éléments, c'est-à-dire l'espace). Par définition l'élément zero V est contenu dans tout élément et l'on convient qu'il a un nombre negatif -1 de dimensions; par définition également, l'élément universel U contient tout et à trois dimensions. Ces deux éléments nouveaux sont appelés les éléments impropres, les autres sont les éléments propres. Supposons, maintenant, que A et B representent, par example, deux droites qui ne se rencontrent pas dans l'espace; on aura A + B = U et A.B. = V, et on voit que la somme et le produit de deux éléments quelconques representent toujours un élément soit propre, soit impropre."
("To give, in all possible cases, a significance to the sum and product of two elements, one introduces two new elements: the zero element V (or the absence of points, straight lines and planes), and the element U (or the totality of these elements - that is, space). By definition the zero element V, is contained in all elements and one accepts that there is a negative number, -1, of dimensions. Equally by definition, the universal element U contains everything, and that in three dimensions. These two new elements are called improper elements, the others are proper elements. Let us suppose, then, that A and B represent for example, two straight lines that do not meet in space; then we shall have A+B=U and A.B=V, and we can see that the sum and the product of any two elements will always be a proper or an improper element.")
Col. Ar. Colin, "Les Nombres et Les Espaces", Gustave Verriest; Paris 1956, pp. 180-81.
7. "When we run over libraries .... what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume, of divinity or school metaphysics for instance, let us ask, 'Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number?' No. 'Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence?' No. Commit it then to the flames; for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion." "Essays", Routledge, Lond. , pp. 384-85.
Cf. Also Ibid., p. "It seems to me that the only objects of the abstract science or of demonstration are quantity and number…"
8. Ibid., p. 321.
7. He adds :
"But that this enumeration is complete, and that there are no other principles of association except these, may be difficult to prove to the satisfaction of the reader, or even to a man's own satisfaction." Ibid., p. 321.
10. p. 41, Vol. I, Chicago University, 1955.
11. Ibid.
12. "The Nature of the Physical World", Dent. Lond. 1947, p. 328.
13. Speaking of Eddington's "Principle on the Philosophy of Science", Sir Edmund Whittaker, F.R.S., said:
"The development of quantum electro-dynamics has, in fact shown the necessity for what is called re-normalisation, which is precisely a recognition of the difference between observed and theoretical values . . . etc."
Camb. Univ. Press 1951, p. 25.
14. "History of Western Philosophy", London, 1946, p. 861.
15. "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus", London 1922, p. 31.
16. "History of Western Philosophy", London, 1946, p. 861.
17. Bergson, "Oeuvres"; Centenary Edition, Paris 1959, pp. 254-55.
18. The initial idea of the scope of such 'experiments' in philosophy is found in the Verses 10 and 11 of the "Atmopadesa Satakam" of Guru Narayana translated by me and commented, cf. "Life and Teachings of Narayana Guru", East-West University, Fernhill, S. India, 1990, pp. 488-99.
19. "If S 1 and S2 are different people, 'S 1' s protocol language refers to the content of S 1's experience. S 2's... to the content of S 2 ... 'Whatcan the inter-subjective physical language refer to?' The answer isit refers to the experiences of anyone you please." A.J. Ayer, "The Problem of Knowledge", London 1957, p. 211.
20. "The Listener", London, Oct. 1, 1959, p. 521.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., p. 522.
23. "Matière et Mémoire", ed. by Skira; Geneva 1946, pp. 117, 13 ff.
23. Bergson, "Oeuvres"; Centenary edn. Paris 1959. pp. 254 -55.
25. "Matière et Mémoire", ed. by Skira; Geneva, 1946, p. 118.
369
26. "Psychoses et Neuroses" by Henri Baruk, Paris 1946, pp. 5-6.
27. Bergson alludes to "Dyslexie" in connection with the two forms of memory that he distinguished, to which he alludes as follows:
"Ce souvenir spontané, qui se cache sans doute derrière le souvenir acquis, peut se révèler par des éclairs brusques: mais il se dérobe au moindre mouvement de la mémoire. Si le sujet voit disparaître la série de lettres dont il croyait avoir retenu l'image, c'est surtout pendant qu'il commence à les répèter que cet effort semble pousser le reste de l'image hors de la conscience."
("This spontaneous memory, which is doubtless hidden behind acquired memory, can reveal itself in sudden flashes, but it disappears at the slightest movement of memory. If the subject sees the series of letters which he thought he had memorised disappear, it is particularly when he tries to repeat them that this effort seems to push the rest of the image out of consciousness")
He adds in a footnote on the same page;
"Ne serait-ce pas quelque chose du même genre qui se passe dans cette affection que les auteurs allemends ont appelée dyslexie?"
("Would it not be something like this that occurs in the affliction that German authors call dyslexia?")
"Matière et Mémoire", Geneva 1946 pp. 89-90 and ff.
28. "La Force et la Faiblesse Psychologiques": Malone edn. Paris, 1932, p. 11.
29. Henri Baruk "Psychoses et Neuroses", Paris 1946.
30. Ibid., p. 25.
31. "La Personalité Humaine; son Analyse", Delmas et Boll, Flammarion Paris,1930,p.25.
32. "Man the Unknown". Lond. 1956, p. 231.
33. Extract from the Conclusion of "Le Facteur Personnel dans le Processus Educatif" by the present author of this study (Thesis for Univ. of Paris later published by Librarie Philosophique, Vrin Paris 1932, out of print at present. See Contents page of this website. ED.) page 171.
"Notre point de départ principal a été de considérer l'individu comme un tout, c'est-a-dire ayant une vie corporelle, avec ses comportements et ses emotions; doué d'une intelligence et d'un pouvoir de pensée reflechie. Cet examen de l' inventaire de tout ce qui appartient à l'individu nous a permis de parler de deux aspects de la personnalité: l'un qui envisage l'activité receptive, representative, symbolique et strictement individuelle; l'autre, l'activité expressive, réelle, sociale, se conformant au monde objectif qui nous entoure. Ce qui ressort tout d'abord de cette distinction, c'est le fait que nous ne pouvons pas nous baser uniquement sur l'expression des capacités mentales de l'enfant, mais qu'en le jugeant nous devons tenir compte de l'arrière-plan de la personnalité de l'enfant. Cette distinction nous a amené aussi à considérer les types d'élèves comme les expressions asymetriques de ces deuxaspects fondamentaux de la personnalité. En examinant ce processus d'éducation, nous avons constaté que les étapes de croissance de l'enfance à l'age adulte présentaient des caractères qui correspondent en même temps aux types que nous avons distingués: l'enfance, jusqu'à 8 ans environ, se présente sous ce que nous avons appelé le type négatif-subjectif, l'adulte, qui a passé la vingtaine, le type positif-subjectif; le type négatif-objectif et le type positif-objectif s'intercalant entre les deux ages mentionnés ci-dessus. Nous avons essayé de voir comment, en rapport avec chaque étape et chaque type d'élève, le maître doit se représenter le type de son influence éducative: retrospective, prospective, négative ou positive, suivant les cas.
Cette dernière nécessité implique une relation entre le maître et l'élève, qui doit avoir un caractère bipolaire, remplissant les conditions exposées plus haut. Ainsi l'éducation doit être connue comme un contact entre le maître et l'élève, dans un sens intime et personnel, ne pouvant en aucun cas etre remplacé par un système, par des règles, des programmes ou des méthodes élaborées.
Nous avons flnalement examiné les théories existentes sur l'éducation et essayé d'en voir la relation avec les différentes étapes de l'adaptatlon personnelle. Dans l'étape négative, le maître a une influence de contrôle et de sélection sur l'ambiance de l'enfant. Il n'est pas question de guider intellectuellement, mais d'établir des relations intimes entre le maître et l'élève. Dans l'étape moyenne de l'adaptation (c'est-à-dire entre 15 et 20 ans), l'enfant a besoin d'une activité sociale. La relation intime et personnelle n'est pas aussi nécessaire que dans la première et la dernière étape, comme nous l'avons dit. Dans la dernière etape, le maître devient à proprement parler un guide: il représente l'idéal subjectif qui est caché dans l'avenir. Ceci constitute l'étape idéaliste dernière dans le processus. L'idéal de vie, des attitudes mentales, les intérêts dirigeants d'une personnalité plus évoluée sont, par une méditation constante de la part de l'élève, transférès ou greffés sur lui-meme, lui donnant une vision plus profonde de la vie. Nous avons examiné d'autre part quelques concepts de la pensée hindoue qui donne depuis des temps anciens une importance particulière aux relations personnelles entre le Gourou et l'élève. Nous avons pu d'ailleurs utiliser dans notre discussion quelques-uns des concepts spéciaux appartenant à la pédagogie hindoue, à propos surtout des étapes négatives et idéalistes de l'adaptation personnelle. Ils ont suffit à démontrer amplement que cette pedagogie, dans ce qu'elle a d'essentiel, est conforme au schéma du développement personnel et des relations éducatives que nousavons presenté dans cette étude."
("Our main point of departure has been to consider the individual as a whole; that is, as having a bodily life, with its behaviour and its emotions, endowed with intelligence and reflective thought. This examination of the inventory of all that belongs to the individual allows us to speak of two aspects of the personality: one which deals with receptive, representational, symbolic and strictly indvidual activity; the other with expressive, real and social activity, according to the objective world around us. What first arises from this distinction is the fact that we cannot base ourselves only on the expression of the child's mental functions, but when we judge him we must take into account the background of the child's personality. This distinction has also led us to consider the different types of pupil as asymetric expressions of these two fundamental aspects of the personality. When we examined this educational process, we discovered that the stages of growth from child to adult reveal characteristics which also correspond to the types that we have described: childhood, up to the age of around eight, shows the characteristics that we have described as negative-subjective; the adult after twenty, the positive-subjective type; the negative-objective and positive-objective types can be inserted between the two above-mentioned types. We have tried to discover how the teacher should determine the type of educational influence corresponding to each stage and to each type of pupil; be it retrospective, prospective, negative or positive, as the case requires.
This last necessity implies a teacher-pupil relationship which must have a bi-polar character, fulfilling the above conditions. Thus, education must be conceived as an intimate and personal contact between teacher and pupil, which can in no case be be replaced by a system, by rules, programs or elaborated methods. Finally, we have examined extant theories of education and tried to distinguish their relation to the different stages of personal adaptation.
In the negative stage, the teacher has an influence of control and selection on the child's environment. There is no question of guiding him intellectually, but of establishing an intimate relation between teacher and pupil. In the middle stage of adaptation (that is between the ages of 15 and 20), the child needs social activity. An intimate and personal relation is not as necessary as in the first and last stages, as we have said. In the last stage, the teacher becomes, properly speaking, more of a guide: he represents the subjective ideal that is hidden in the future. This is the last, idealistic, phase of the process. Ideals of life, mental attitudes, the guiding interests of a more evolved personality, are by a constant mediation on the pupil's part, transferred or grafted on himself, giving him a deeper vision of life.
We have also taken into consideration some concepts from Indian thought which have, since ancient times, given particular importance to the relationship between Guru and student. We have used in our discussion some of the special concepts of Indian pedagogy, particularly as concerns the negative and idealistic stages of personal adaptation. They have served to amply demonstrate that pedagogy, in its essentials, conforms to the scheme of personal development and educational relationships that we have presented in this study.")
34. "Child Psychology": Neuchâtel and Paris, 1959.
35. We are indebted to the review of Piaget's latest work appearing in the "Bulletin of the International Bureau of Education" 4th Quarter, 1959 for the resumé and quotations of the work. cf. p. 241.
36. "Les Notions de Mouvement et de Vitesse chez l'Enfant": Paris, p. 273 ff.
37. "Les Origines de la Pensée chez l'Enfant", Paris, 1947. p. 209.
38. Ibid., p. 437.
39. C.W. Morris' "International Cyclopedia of Unified Science", Vol. I, Part I. Chicago, 1955, p. 134.
40. "The Listener", London, March 10, 1960, p. 443.
41. Ibid.
42. The classification of colours on the basis of the colour-solid as the introspective psycho-physical entity is now well-known as attributed to Albert H. Munsell (1858-1919) who, it is stated:
"Borrowing from Helmholtz … classified colours according to hue, lightness and saturation. The horizontal axis proceeds from the vertical black-grey-white".
cf. "Colliers Encyclopaedia", p. 485, Vol. 5, (More details below).
43. Kegan Paul London, 1922, pp. 31-35.
44. See pp. 280-81 above.
45. "Notre intelligence triomphe dans la géometrie, ou se révèle la parenté de la pensée logique avec la matière inerte etc . ."
("Our intelligence has triumphed in geometry, where is revealed the apparentation of logical thought with inert matter etc.")
Bergson; Ev. Cr. Cf. Pascal, "Pensées et Opuscules": Lib. Hatier Paris, p. 13; "De l'Esprit Géometrique"; "Oeuvres", Paris, 1959, p. 489.
46. See pp. 298-300 above.
47. Carnap's article, "International Cyclopedia of Unified Science", Vol. I, Part II, pp. 143 ff.
48. Bloomfield's article Ibid., p. 219 ff and p. 88, Morris,
Sec. 4 Language.
49. Unabridged Second Edition.
50. The characterisation of this scheme being introspective and arbitrary.
51. Quoted from "Panorama", Galimard Paris, 1957 extracted from trad. Rossignol Hermann, p. 575.
52. "The English Cyclopaedia", Vol. 3, London, 1856, p. 697.
53. Cf. Under Leibniz, Ibid.
54. "Dictionary of Philosophy", Runes, Jaico Bombay, 1956.
55. Quoted from p. 132, "Philosophy Made Simple", New York, 1958.
56. Cf. "Columbia Cyclopaedia" under "Quaternions". (See also Note 7, above)
57. "A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz". B. Russell, Camb. Univ. Press, 1900, p. 252 and 283-84 respectively.
58. "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus",
59. pp. 2 to 25 ff. Lecture Delivered 9th Aug. 1951, Camb. Univ. Press.
60. Ibid., pp. 5-6.
61. Ibid., pp. 14-15.
62. Ibid., p. 29.
63. Ibid., p. 31.
64. Copied from p. 57 "The Nature of the Physical World", Everyman, Lond. 1947.
65. "Oeuvres", Centenary edn. Paris, 1959, p. 1432.
66. "La Pensée et le Mouvement", Genève, 1946, pp. 211-16.
67. "Oeuvres": Centenary edn. Paris, 1959, pp. 284-85.
68. "The Listener", Lond. Feb. 25, 1960.
69. Ibid.
70. "International Encyclopaedia of Unified Science", Chicago, Vol. I Part I, p.147.
71. "The History of Western Philosophy", Lond. 1946, p. 859.
72. Hume's "Essays", Routledge, London, p. 383.
73. "International Encyclopaedia of Unified Science": Vol. I, Part I, Chicago, 1955,p.210.
74. Ibid.
75. p. 173, item 6°241 : "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus", Kegan Paul, Lond. 1922.
76. Ibid., p. 8.
77. "International Encyclopaedia of Unified Science", Chicago, 1955, p. 82, Part I Vol. I.
78. Ibid., p. 84.
79. "International Encyclopaedia of Unified Science", Vol.I, Part I, p.231.
80. Ibid.
81. The Listener, Lond. Oct. 1, 1959, p. 519.
82. Ibid.
83. "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus", Kegan Paul, Lond. 1922, p. 189.
84. "The Age of Analysis", Mentor, New York, 1956 as quoted from Philosophical Investigations, Oxford, 1953, p. 231,
85. "Les Lettres Nouvelles": Nov. 25, 1959, p. 37, Julliard Paris, Tr. from the German by Pierre Klossowskl.
86. Ibid., p. 39.
87. p. 235-6, "The Age of Analysis", Mentor New York, 1956 as quoted from item 77 of "Philosophical Investigations" by Wittgenstein, Oxford, 1953.
88. The numbers in brackets in this chapter and previous chapters refer to items of Wittgenstein's "Tractatus".
89. "Principles of Logic": A.C. Bradley: Kegan Paul, London, 1883, p. 149.
90. "Annuaire du Collège de France", 1948, p. 121.
91. "Oeuvres", Centenary edn. Paris, 1959, p. 674.
92. "The Age of Analysis", New York 1955, p. 144 quoting "Popular Science Monthly", Jan 1878.
93. "The Nature of the Physical World", Lond. 1947, p. 306.
94. "Mathematics for Science and Engineering", Philip L. Alger, New York, 1957, p. vii.
95. The report above is from "The Listener", London of April 7, 1960.
96. The passage below gives a glimpse of the contrast between the later Wittgenstein and all the three of the other 'analytic' philosophers represented in this volume : Carnap, Moore and Russell. In fact the contrast is great enough to warrant our not calling the later Wittgenstein an analytic philosopher at all. "The Age of Analysis", New York 1956, p. 229.
97. Bergson, "Oeuvres", Paris, 1959, p. 797.
98. Cf. "Encyclopaedia Britannica", under "Theory of Knowledge".
99. Hume's "Essays", Routledge, London, pp. 384-85.
100. Blackwell, Oxford. Tr. G.E.M. Anscombe.
101. "We may take for instance a content S-P, not yet asserted, and may claim for modality the power of affirming this content S-P unaltered and unqualified in several ways. S-P, it is supposed, may be asserted, for instance, either simply or problematically or apodictically and yet remain throughout S-P; and thus, though the content is unmodified, the assertion is modal." - A.C. Bradley. "Principles of Logic", p. 181 (London, 1883).
102. Explaining this method of longitude and latitude we read:
"Imaginary numbers are a particular case of what are called complex numbers, which consist of a real and an imaginary part ... a so-called complex number is actually a pair of numbers, and if one thinks of it in that way the mystery vanishes."
M.G. Kendall, Prof. Lond. Univ., cf. The Listener, Nov. 19, 1959.
103. "International Encyclopaedia of Unified Science", Vol. I, Part I, pp. 12 and 20, Chicago, 1955.
104. Ibid. p. 23.
105. Ibid., p. 41.
106. Ibid., p. 28.
375
INDEX
A
Absolute, the
dialectically revalued, 350
fall of-, 123, 158, 349
science of the, 269
surplus-value, 121
Absolutism,
Hegelian, 122
Abstraction,
levels of-, 337
Abundance, 91
the world of-, 95 f, 129
worth of-, 138
Action,
five factors of-, 244
Adoption,
mutual, 24
Advaita Vedanta
and human welfare, 3 f
and rival aspects, 4
Advisers,
economic, 83, 98
Ambivalence, 238
Anti-Absolutism, 349
Apperception,
principle of-, 173
Aristotle,
contribution of-, 266
Art,
essence of-, 347
Association of ideas
Hume on, 277
Atman, 189
analysis of-, 222
and the Absolute, 269
Atma-Vidya, 269
Axiology,
way to, 342
B
Banking,
origin of-, 56
favouring features of-, 56
Barbarity,
modern, 10
Bergson,
Henri, 169, 187 f, 190, 284, 293
and Eddington, 328
relied on, 351
Bhagavad Gita, 179, 182, 187, 195, 201, 207, 220, 231, 241, 243 f, 259,
Bloomfield,
credo of-, 337
Brahmacarin, 181, 183
Brahmavidya,
the science of sciences, 267, 269
C
Candide, 50, 114
Capital,
climate and economics, 138
defined, 134
Carrel,
Dr. Alexis, 213
Cartesian,
co-ordinates, 126
tradition, 124
Categorical imperative, 180
Certitude,
vertical, and horizontal, 312, 360
Characterology, 236
Child,
as a human, 184
Colour-solid
and psycho-physics, 304f
as a proto-linguistic model, 308, 313, 357, 360
Common language
normalized, 360
Common-sense language, 309
and science, 352
characteristic of-, 310
Communism as a religion, 252
Compte, 49, 79
failure of-, 120
Consciousness, 187
analysis by Narayana Guru, 196 ff., 222
component elements of-, 196, 218
dichotomy at the core of-, 218
directions of radiation, 351
four zones of-, 22 ff.
Kant on, 320
neutral, 348
Conflicts,
resolving of-, 16
Contemplative life in East and West, 182
Creative evolution, 188
Credit
abstract, 113
and gold, 76
and God, 76
and trust, 139
money, 56
moral aspects of-, 100 f
mysteries of-, 98
two aspects of-, 97
Culture,
flagging of-, 267
influence of pragmatism, 265
D
Das Kapital, 76, 89, 122
Definition, 308
Dewey, John, 156, 159, 179, 195 f, 221, 228 f
Dialectical approach
and sex variation, 233
and pure mathematics, 342 ff.
Bergson's, 189
in education, 184, 209
mechanism of-, 122 f, 228
personal, 20 ff., 208
superior to the rational, 219
the correct, 187
the essence of-, 4 f, 60, 220
to economics, 65, 142
to politics, 4
to values, 5, 220
Dialectical materialism, 37
Dialectical reasoning, 62
Dialectical revaluation of values, 7
Dialectical Wisdom, 23, 60, 220
in the Bible, 60
Dialectics
and Absolutism, 349
and human values, 7
and wisdom, 7
ascending and descending, 268
concern of-, 346
Hegel's, 343
in Economics, 134, 143
in World literature, 176
of Ethics, 259
of one and the many, 143
resolves disasters, 209
science of-, 7
the crowning attainment of-, 231
the greatest textbook of-, 187
Dilipa,
a just ruler, 49
Duality,
abolition of-, 219
E
East and West meet, 223
Economic activity,
four-concerned, 149
Economic crisis
sign of-, 140
Economic man at cross roads, 91 f
Economic measurement,
yardstick of-, 83, 88, 116
Economic progress
reversal of-, 102
Economic situation,
four limbs of-, 120, 126
simplified, 65
Economics
a religion, 79, 81, 131
aim of-, 73, 87, 118, 130, 132
an Absolutist approach, 48, 102 f
and ethics, 87 f, 92
and human touch, 76
and liberty, 44
and political conservatism, 75
and religion, 71, 84, 110, 112, 121 f
and statistics, 46
an enemy, 81
as a dismal science, 46, 142
as a game, 94
as a normative science, 65
as a science, 79, 109, 144
as Value-wisdom, 77, 115, 118, 125
axiologically based, 49, 131
basis of-, 43
burial of-, 82
complete theory of-, 47 f, 102, 111
comprehensive definition of-, 115
conflict in, 43, 109
dangers in, 43f
death of-, 80
double gain in, 60, 93, 134, 143
drawbacks of-, 73
dualistic, 133
ethical, 98, 101
factors in, 47 f, 11 ff.
frame of reference revised, 76
good, 130, 132
is for man, 65, 78, 87, 111, 116, 138
in Sanskrit literature, 51
Jevons on, 69, 73
Kalidasa on, 49 f
Keynes on, 73
lament for, 79
man at the core of-, 116
Mill on, 73
nature of-, 72
normal, 74, 77, 121, 130
normative approach to, 103
not a normative science, 84
present-day, 102
restated, 143
questionable practices, 44 ff.
scientific, 75, 92, 117 f
scope and limits of-, 73, 115
series of value worlds in, 75
single defect of-, 84
two poles of-, 92, 95, 127, 129
two worlds of-, 61, 75, 113, 115, 127,131
uncertainty in, 95
value and, 84f
Economic theory,
three schools of-, 64
Economic Value,
evolution of-, 112
Economists,
as charlatans, 79
good, 118
interest in, 73
Eddingtonianism, 317, 322 f, 366
Educability, 208
Educated man, 200
Education,
a bipolar process, 160, 163, 221
Absolute necessity in. 201
a dialectical situation, 165, 208
alpha and omega of-, 202
and higher values, 165
and social values, 229 f
and sex variation, 233
and values, 157
a pleasure, 210
background aspect in, 209
bipolar relation in, 164, 180 f, 207
central notion in, 199
content of-, 202 ff., 205, 207
contradiction in, 168 f
defined, 155, 200, 205
dialectical counterparts in, 163 f
dialectical way in, 220
effective, 221
ends and means, 200
for man and citizen, 158, 168 f
four stages of-, 159 f, 224 f, 298
fresh start of-, 176f
fundamental, 171
future of-, 220, 223
hesitancy today, 216
idealistic, 230
inhibitory crises in, 211
integration of-, 265
interest as basis, 173
law of equilibrium in, 205
lifetime, 159
Main plank in, 223
mind-matter duality in, 213
modern endeavour in, 170
mutual adoption in, 221
naturalistic, 227'
new orientation in, 174
normalisation of-, 298
one-sided approach in, 156
personal adjustment in, 214
personal factor in, 164f, 180
philosophical bases of-, 225, 298
positive process of-, 206 f
practical guidelines, 209 ff.
private and public, 173
public standard in, 173 f
specialisation in, 263 f
three kinds of-, 173
three laws of-, 204 f
to save humanity, 163
tragic paradoxes in, 157
well-founded, 220
Educational institutions,
four patterns of-, 235 f
Educator,
the task of-, 206
the best, 206
a gardener, 208
a midwife, 208
Elan vital, 180, 284 f, 294
Emile, 155, 158, 160, 168, 172, 175, 179, 181f, 184, 226, 242
Empiricists,
place of-, 366
Engels' law, 81
Entelechies, 204
Epistemology,
revised, 359
Ethics,
Absolutist, 259
cause of violation, 256
correct, 257
dialectical basis of-, 255, 257
dialectical counterparts of-, 256
first desideratum of-, 255
normalized, 255 ff.
normative notion in, 257
Evolution theory,
scientific status of-, 279 f
Existentialists
place of-, 367
Experimentation,
introspective, 284 f
on personality, 291
Exploiters as advisers, 58, 74, 76
F
Finance,
a dragon, 54
Fluctuation,
theories of-, 62
Forces,
horizontal and vertical, 135 f
Four-fold scheme,
justification of-, 225
Free enterprise,
limits of-, 39 ff.
Fundamental education, 166
G
Geneva declaration, 175
Geo-dialectical approach, 5
advantage of-, 24
basis of-, 17
defined, 7 f
Geo-dialectics
and dialectics, 8
and world Govt., 12
Geo-politics, 4f, 23
Gestalt psychology, 237
God,
scientifically conceived, 244
Gold,
and capital, 76
and God, 53, 112
and goodness, 6
and paper money, 54
and spirituality, 57
as an economic value, 77
a source of wickedness, 77
the best use of-, 62
the two poles of value, 59
value of-, 53 ff., 63
virtual and actual, 63, 77
Golden mean, 63
Good and bad
cancelling of-, 7
conflict between, 6
Good economic living, 91
Gods,
internal and external, 78, 87
kingdom of economical, 142
Goodwill, 138
Government,
mandate for, 17
Gresham's law, 60
Gurukula education, 181, 183 f
Guru-sisya relationship, 223, 226
H
Handling action language, 310
Happiness,
actualisation, 8, 117, 132
dialectical counterparts of-, 8, 129
of all and the general, 96
public and private, 92f
sharable and not, 96
Happy man, 39
the most desirable for, 126
as yardstick of economics, 116, 135
Heuristic method, 173
Horizontal values, 115, 127
Humanity,
lovers of-, 49
Human life,
and unitive thinking, 7
basis of-, 6 f
good and evil in, 6
Human values
and dialectics, 7
and perfect man, 200 f
necessary and contingent, 8
network of, 109 ff.
vertical scale of, 7, 269
I
Idealism,
diagnostics of-, 231
Hegelian, 126
highest limits of-, 231
in education, 230 f
Idealistic Education, 159
Incertitude in Economics, 113
Inflation, 54, 139
Integration of sciences,
clear pattern of-, 350
key to, 269
Intellectual formation, 264
Internationalism
negativism in, 15, 21
relativism in, 16
the present, 9, 15
Introversion and extroversion, 238
Intuitive approach, 186
K
Kalidasa
on Economics, 50
on stages of education, 159, 161
Kant
schematism of-, 318
L
Labour,
Positive and negative, 148
respect for, 226
vertical and horizontal, 139
Language,
and thought, 273 ff.
archetypal patterns of-, 307 f
as a vertical process, 329
basis of-, 350
basis of structure, 274, 336
business of-, 334
domain of-, 272, 284, 338
hierarchies in, 337
norm of ordinary, 347
scientific, 272 f, 307
the doorway to philosophy, 339
true science of-, 347 f
two grades of-, 309
two worlds of-, 276
link between, 302
participation with the, 276
validity of-, 274
League of Nations, 16
Leibniz, 217, 282
on universal language, 271
Lies,
three kinds of-, 61
Life tendencies, 189
problems of-, 216
Limited liability,
honesty of-, 140
Linguistic space, 338
Linguistic Structure,
archetypal model of-, 275
axes of-, 286 f
normative appraisal of-, 288
observations, 283, 285
two dimensions of-, 287 f
Logical Empiricists,
attitudes of-, 33 f
failure of-, 360
Logical tradition,
gap in, 123
Logic,
movement of-, 344
Logistics,
role of-, 334 f
M
Mahabali,
a just ruler, 49
Malthusian theory, 46, 62, 80, 86, 141
Man,
and Economics, 85, 88
as measuring rod, 87, 129
economic, double reference to, 91
economic value of-, 85 ff., 118, 129, 137
study of-, 215
Man as a whole, 220
Marshall, 64, 75 ff., 115
Marx, 64, 76, 89, 111, 118, 121, 125, 127 f
Mass re-education, 232
Mean,
doctrine of the, 266 ff.
Meaning,
two ways of giving, 311
Mechanistic approach
dangers of-, 8
to vital problems, 80
Meta-language, 118
defined, 331 f
innate defects of-, 273
nature of-, 308
Methodology,
revised, 359
Mill, J.S., 76. 98, 267
cannons of-, 281
on political economy, 73
utilitarianism of-, 156
Mind and matter, 187, 219
common ground of-, 326
Monad in Economics, 130, 134
Money
and enjoyment, 114
and wealth, 114
as wealth, 78
as measure, 78
Montessori method, 156, 173
popularity of-, 174
Myth language, 59
N
Narayana Guru, 58, 197, 218
analysis of consciousness by, 196 ff.
on Ethics, 257 f
Naturalism,
of Rousseau and Spencer, 227
Naturalistic education, 159, 227 f
Natural religion, 179
Natural resources,
economic value of-, 74
Nature,
an Absolute Value, 227
contact with-, 228
Rousseau's concept of-, 178, 180, 227
Negative education, 158 f, 173
a regulating principle, 225 f
implications of-, 179 ff., 206
meaning of-, 226
Neutral epistemology, 330 f
Neutral monism, 186, 213, 283 f, 307
New Education Movement, 171
Nivritti marga, 179
Normal economics, 74
Normalisation, 281, 297, 307, 311, 361
to accomplish, 361
two senses of-, 316
in Economics, 135
of language, 311 ff.
Normative frame of reference, 50
Normative notion,
for a science of language, 359
how to build up, 112, 119, 124, 287f
in Economics, 105
in Education, 232, 235
in Science and language, 316
in scientific language, 281, 307
need of-, 110, 121
of Russell, 282
outline features of-, 129, 134, 136, 287
proto-linguistic, 315
relation-relata complex of-, 117
scientifically valid, 296
the principal contribution, 350
Normative rules,
violation of-, 324 f
O
Objectivity,
real and virtual, 363
Observables and calculables,
balance of-, 280 f, 307, 309, 360
One-World Economics,
scope of-, 117, 143
Opportunities available, 239 ff.
Opulence and abundance
a middle of-, 63, 91
and scientific economics, 77
ascending pyramid of-, 97
as counterparts, 69, 77
distinguished, 46, 61, 69, 77, 81, 95, 129
new problems of-, 102
Original-sin economics, 120
P
Parkinsonianism, 48
Passion and person, 231
Person in education, 212
Personal factor,
a central concept, 185, 213
analytical perspective of-, 212 ff.
an organism, 188
approach to, 187
a reality, 186
a unit, 190 f
explicit traits of-, 200
functional zones of-, 191 f
grades of-. 187
important aspect of-, 221
most elementary aspect, 189 f
psycho-dynamical aspects of-, 212
reconstructed, 193
schematic representation of-, 188
synthetic perspective of-, 185 ff.
two sides of-, 185
unitively treated, 213
Personal rhythm, 210
Personality,
experiment on, 290 f, 298
Personification,
in teaching, 210 f
Phenomenologists,
place of-, 367
Phenomenology, 124
Physiocrats, 82, 87 f, 113
fundamentals of-, 103, 125
watered down, 82
Planning,
role of-, 131
Plotinus,
a meeting point, 189
Political economics,
Keynes on, 79 f
Mill on, 73
scope of-, 43
Politics,
and geo-politics, 4
and spiritual life, 4 f
dialectical approach to, 4
emergence of-, 5
Johnson on, 3
Population control, 76, 87, 140
a suicidal madness, 141
Population,
maximum, minimum and optimum, 81
Poverty,
and 'poverty', 99
hidden, 136
unhappiness and, 98
Pragmatic education, 159, 228 f
failure of-, 230
Pragmatism, revolt from, 215 f
Probability and possibility, 279
Problems,
cancelling out of-, 38
Production,
two kinds of-, 148
Project-method, 156, 228
Protocol language, 310
Proto-language
and meta-language, 273, 331
and scientific philosophers, 379
basis of-, 318
Bergson uses, 326
Carnap suggests, 333
Empiricists and, 354 f
in complex numbers, 32 f
in Leibniz, 320 f, 322 f
model of-, 308
of Eddington, 325
reconstructed, 277, 308
un-normalized, 322
Whittaker on, 322 f
Proto-linguism
in Economics, 111, 118, 123, 126, 128 f, 147 ff.
Psycho-analysis, 237
Psychology meets physics, 316
Psycho-physical axis, 293
Q
Quesnay, 49, 87, 107, 111 f, 118, 121, 125, 127, 135, 147 f
economic theory of-, 103, 105f, 125
R
Rationalists,
places of-, 366
Reaction,
personal, 209
complete, 210
Reason,
hypostatic status of-, 218
Reasoning,
horizontal and vertical, 344
Relativity,
theory of-, 123
Religion,
natural, 179
Religions,
one goal of-, 252
saving factor in, 253
two paths of-, 253
Religious groups,
classification of-, 250 f
Renormalisation, 281, 307, 361
of language, 308
Republic, The, 75, 77
Restated economics, 143
Revaluation of values, 114
of methodology, 124
Richest country, 78, 116
Rousseau, J.J., 5, 35 f, 49 f, 50, 69, 113 f
a contemplative, 175
a jagad-guru, 183
and Dewey, 229 f
and social education, 179
and Spencer, 227
an enigma, 172 f
as citizen of Geneva, 243
a yogi, 182
champion of human values, 182
developments after, 172 f
dialectical idiom of-, 176
faces paradoxes, 157 f
father of education, 155, 168, 171
laughed at, 168
mistrust in, 172
mystical note in, 182
on politics, 5, 35 f
on types of states, 63 f
secret of-, 228
Ruskin, 43, 46, 49, 54, 75, 78, 87 ff., 115, 147
protests, 88
Russell, Bertrand, 186, 213, 283, 307
on logical form, 277
S
Scarcity economics,
counterparts of-, 75
impasse created by, 45, 74 f
Scepticism and belief, 252
Scepticism,
a religion, 253
Schematism,
and aesthetics, 347
and ethics, 347
and mysticism, 347
of Bergson, 326 ff.
of Hume, 320
of Kant, 318
of Milton, 320
Scheme of correlation, 238
Science,
criterion of-, 306
distinguished, 337
falls apart, 109
results as, 276 f
vertico-horizontal structure of-, 353
Science of Sciences, 119, 257, 266 f
Sciences,
certitude in, 278, 352
integration of-, 263
positive and negative, 267
Scientific activity,
different levels of-, 278
domain of-, 278
linguistic scheme of-, 277
typical pattern of-, 278
Scientific language,
absurdities in, 280, 312
and common language, 356
and structure of thought, 315 f
calculables in, 279 f
certitude of-, 274, 278
desiderata of-, 272 f
elements in, 276 f
horizontal inclinations of-, 13, 357 f
horizontalization of-, 311 ff.
meta-linguistic levels of-, 355 f
misplaced enthusiasm for, 358
name and form in, 376
normalisation of-, 311
normative factor in, 281
observables in, 279 f
origin of-, 352
proto-linguistic levels of-, 354, 356
range of-, 276
suggestions on, 359 ff.
three levels of-, 356
thrives in, 277
Scientific thinking, 274, 352
Scientific validity, 315
Scientism, 293
two worlds of-, 365
Self,
as seat of bliss and suffering, 4
Semiosis, 335
Sensation and reaction, 191
Servitude,
ideological, 83
Sex variation,
laws of-, 233 f
Sin in economics, 116, 137
of the present age, 87
Slavery persists, 142
Smith, Adam, 58, 64, 76, 125, 135, 147
concern of-, 73
Social Contract, 5, 203
Space,
logical, 305 f
two aspect of-, 305
Spiritualism and materialism,
reconciliation of-, 37
Standard of life,
meaning of-, 132
Statistics,
a lie, 46, 61
Surplus-value. 107, 127
absolute and relative, 122, 124, 126
emergence of-, 121, 128, 133
Theory, 45
Svadharma, 207
T
Tableau Economique, 104, 112, 127, 135, 148
scrutinized, 105
Tao Teh Khing, 205
Thing-language, 310
Thinking,
two kinds of-, 292
Thought,
and colour-solid, 313 f
as a global whole, 360
divisions of-, 366
horizontal axis of-, 359
integrated norm of-, 306
outline of-, 309 f
pairs in, 307
process, 195, 290
structure of-, 290, 294, 302, 306
unit of-, 306
vertical axis of-, 359
Tariff, 140
Trust, 134, 138
Turiya, 194
Type-psychology, 239
in education, 236
unitive, 238
Types,
psychological, 237
U
UNESCO
empty content of-, 170
failure of-, 166 f
Unemployment and leisure, 140
Unified language,
and languages, 357
derived, 312, 346, 365
efforts by logical empiricists, 335
elements unified, in, 276
goal of-, 272, 274, 281
main findings on, 359
Unified science
and sciences, 357
defined, 271
United Nations, 16
negativism in, 15
relativism in, 16
Unitive approach
to language, 272
Unitive vision
in economics, 65, 121, 130
suspected, 215
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 29 f
Universities,
defeat of-, 171
Upanishads, 147, 205
Utility, 73
Utopia, 75
V
Value,
the Absolute, 109
and Economics, 84 f, 108 f, 112, 118
and price, 112
labour theory of-, 85
Value-Wisdom,
economics as, 115, 121, 131
problems of-, 110
Values,
Absolute, 132f
and personal tendencies, 204
basic conflict in, 204
circulation, 125, 130
exchangeable and not, 73 f
four aspects of-, 125, 128, 130
horizontal and vertical, 115, 127, 129, 132 f, 203 f, 218, 268
contrasted, 218
negative and positive, 118, 125,127 f
possible worlds of-, 75 f, 115
pure, 133
real and false, 58
vertical, 115, 127
Vasana, 194
Vedanta, 108, 113, 179, 189, 214
Vertical,
the, defined, 309
Virtue and Wisdom, 117
Voltaire on Economics, 50, 113 f,
172, 175,208
W
War crimes and justice, 10
Watson, J.B.,
on child, 214
Wealth,
best, 133
capital and, 74. 76
common value reference, 105
four limbs of-, 133
healthy circulation of-, 133
horizontal circulation of-, 106, 134
is not money, 114
non-mercantilist notion of-, 77
positive and negative, 110,121
the only, 78
the real, 116, 126 f
three strata of circulation, 106
vertical and horizontal, 97
Wealth of Nations. 73, 82, 125, 135
Well-being,
measure for, 135
Wells, H.G., 155. 157, 169, 172
Whittaker, 322 ff.
Winter,
a weight of poverty, 138
Wisdom,
Absolute, 163
a foster mother, 243
and dialectics, 7, 176
and good and evil, 7
and world problems, 24, 163
a perennial way, 7
components of-, 217
lack of-,
in economics, 61
method of-, 6
Wittgenstein,
enigma of-, 339
on atomic facts, 322
on logical atomism, 282
on structure of language, 274
thesis of-, 334
Word system,
mapping of-, 362 f, 367
Work and joy, 139
World Government,
active programme of-, 23 ff.
an accomplished fact, 11
and danger of exclusiveness, 24
approach to, 7
a priori basis of-, 5, 14, 20
dialectical contract in, 13
functions of-, 7, 10, 12, 20 f, 29
its power, 12
its presence, 13
jurisdiction of-, 31
justification of-, 11
revenue of-, 31 f
success of-, 24 f
the asset of-, 25, 32
to make it effective, 25 f
validity of-, 12
what it is not, 19
zero hour for, 9
World law,
and the good of all. 34
dialectical formula for, 34
dialectical Interaction in, 36
general good in, 34
guidelines for, 35
structural perspective of, 34f
World passport, 29
World politics
practising it, 26
World problems,
spiritual solutions to, 37
Wrong economics, 69
Y
Yoga, 159,184
defined, 176
Yogi,
and economist, 130, 220
perfect, 195