* This schema, which is designed to apply alike to animal behavior and to human speech, follows, in the main, that of Morris with modifications by Ogden and Richards.
* Cf. p. 259.
* And even Samuel Pepys. For, although he kept his journal for himself and in a private code, he was nevertheless formulating experience and so setting it at a distance for a someone else — himself.
* Much of the formulating and objectifying function of the symbol has been set forth by Ernst Cassirer; see in particular vol. 1, Language. But the empirical insights are so submerged by the apparatus of German idealism that they are salvaged only with difficulty. Cassirer was concerned to extend the Kantian thesis to the area of culture and symbols and so to establish that it is through symbols that one not merely knows but constitutes the world. The task of the behavioral scientist is different. He confronts symbolic behavior from the same posture with which he studies sign behavior: as events in a public domain which he shares with other scientists. He sees people using words to name things and to assert states of affairs, just as he sees rats threading their way through mazes. He is concerned to explain what he sees by the use of mechanisms and models. I confess that this posture presupposes a species of philosophical realism.
* This notion of world and environment is close to the Welt and Umwelt of the Binswanger school. See Ludwig Binswanger, “The Existential Analysis School of Thought,” in Existence. It is important to note, however, that this distinction is yielded by an empirical analysis of the language event and does not depend for its validity on the Daseinanalytik of Heidegger or on any other philosophical anthropology.
* It is characteristic of the current confusion of the behavioral sciences that theorists find themselves speaking of true myths and are even driven to the extremity of prescribing myth as such for the ills of contemporary society. (See, for example, Henry A. Murray, “A Mythology for Grownups.”) The confusion can be traced, I believe, to the failure of behavioral theory to give an account of different modes of symbolic activity, in this case that of scientists and nonscientists. Thus when psychiatrists and clinical psychologists say that people nowadays need viable myths, they seem to be saying that scientists are different from people: scientists seek the truth and people have needs. Coherent theory would not, presumably, require such a generic distinction.
†The Bororo does not intend that he is literally a parakeet (he does not try to mate with other parakeets), yet he clearly intends it in a sense more magical than ordinary factual statements. See the “mystic identification” of L. Lévy-Bruhl in How Natives Think.
* Lévy-Bruhl’s categories of “iprelogical” thought are not, in my opinion, a genetic stage of psychic evolution but simply a mode of symbolic behavior to which a denizen of Western culture is as apt to fall prey as a Bororo.
† Sonnet 73.
* Ernest Schachtel has described this “articulating and obscuring function” of language in “On Memory and Childhood Amnesia.” He gives a good example of the sterility of the conventional phrase in which one distorts the ineffable content of memory — as when one reports having an “exciting time.” He says, “No object perceived with the quality of freshness, newness, of something wonder-full, can be preserved and recalled by the conventional concept of that object as designated in its conventional name in language” (p. 9). It seems to me, however, that he is describing terms that have deteriorated in their semantic evolution rather than the entire spectrum of language itself. Symbols may conceal, distort, render commonplace, yes; but since people are not angelic intelligences, symbols are their only means of knowing anything at all.
†”Horrenjus” is borrowed from Norman A. McQuown’s linguistic analysis of an interview reported by Otto A. Will and Robert A. Cohen, but the exchange is otherwise hypothetical and is offered not as clinical evidence but only illustratively, to exemplify some traits of symbolic structure.
‡ Reading is, it is true, an event of symbolic behavior, but it must be studied as such, as an event open to an appropriate phenomenology and not as a substitute for hearing.
* What psychiatrist has not been disturbed by this penchant for “scientizing” concrete experience? When, for example, a patient reports that he has a “personality problem” at the office, the psychiatrist may pay proper respect to his patient’s knowledgeability and objectivity, but he may also have good reason for wishing that he had said instead, “Oh God, how I hate my boss!”
† A time which Jaspers has called the axial period in world history.
* Much of what the existential analysts call being-in-the-world is overlapped by the social scientist’s concept of role taking — although the former also calls into question the authenticity of a self constructed only of roles. The notion of role taking, moreover, hardly does justice to the radical placement in the world required of anyone who has crossed the symbolic threshold.
* Whitehead speaks here of the “great confusion” which the fallacy has brought to pass in science and philosophy. In my opinion, it has caused greater confusion among lay people and, what is worse, an impoverishment of the very world one lives in.
* As Sullivan pointed out, psychiatry, insofar as it is a science, must have to do with the general and not the individual. “Let me say that insofar as you are interested in your unique individuality, in contradistinction to the interpersonal activities which you or someone else can observe, to that extent you are interested in the really private mode in which you live — in which I have no interest whatever. The fact is that for any scientific inquiry, in the sense that psychiatry should be, we cannot be concerned with that which is inviolably private.”
10. CULTURE: THE ANTINOMY OF THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD
THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD issues in statements about the world. Whether one is a realist, pragmatist, operationalist, or materialist, one can hardly doubt that the various moments of the scientific enterprise — induction, hypothesis, deduction, theory, law — are all assertions of sorts.* Even observation and verification are in the final analysis not the physiological happenings in which the retina and brain of the scientist receive the image of pointer readings — a dog might do the same. They are rather the symbolic assertory acts by which one specifies that the perception, pointer on numbered line, is a significant reading.
It shall also be my contention, following Ernst Cassirer, that the main elements of cultural activity are in their most characteristic moments also assertory in nature. The central acts of language, of worship, of myth-making, of storytelling, of art, as well as of science, are assertions.
What I shall call attention to first is a remarkable difference between the sort of reality the scientific method is and the sort of reality it understands its data to be. To be specific: The most characteristic product of the scientific method is the scientific law. Perhaps the ideal form of the scientific law, the formulation to which all sciences aspire, is the constant function, the assertion of an invariant relation between variable quantities. In physics, the function takes the form of the functional equation, E = f(C), in which variable C (cause) issues in dependent variable E (effect) in a determinate ratio f. This formula is, of course, an assertion. It asserts that such a function does in fact obtain between the variables. What takes place in the phenomenon under investigation, however, is not an assertion. It is a sequence of space-time events, an energy exchange. Thus we have two different kinds of activities here: (1) a space-time event in which state A issues in state B; (2) a judgment which asserts that such is indeed the case, Thomas Aquinas called attention to the qualitative difference between the events which take place in the world and the act by which an intellect grasps these events.*