Language and Sense Perception

LANGUAGE AND SENSE PERCEPTION I MOST of the controversies in philosophy since Aristotle -as before him-have centered around the relation of sense perception to knowledge; for though the Father of Logic made the relationship incontrovertibly clear just through his shoWing of the relation of knowledge to language in its everyday use, yet his doctrine has been all too often ignored or overridden. From the nominalism of the Middle Ages (a notorious instance of misunderstanding of Aristotle's appreciation of verbal reference) through Cartesian subjectivism, we come to Kant's analysis of man's reason which represents as grave a failure as that of nominalism to take an adequate account of the way the mind acts, as shown in the way verbal symbols function in expressing and communicating ideas. But more than five hundred years before the writing of Kant's Critiques St. Thomas had defended a philosophy of mind that steers on an even and tranquil keel between the two perils which Kant strikes alternately: the Charybdis of the mind as prime lawgiver to perceptive facts, and the Scylla of the mind as powerless to report on the thingsin -themselves-the twin dangers of a priorism and solipsism, respectively. For St. Thomas' theory of knowledge accepts the limits of man's knowing faculty, limits recognized by St. Thomas after Aristotle as being evident in word-behavior when the latter is properly evaluated, and thus saves the appearances of truth in all realms, including the semantic. The subjectivism vitiating modern philosophy from Descartes onward represents in each instance a failure to appreciate language's plain witness to objectivity. More than any other philosopher who has ever lived, the 56 LANGUAGE AND SENSE PERCEPTION 57 philosopher-saint who has been called Aristotle Christianized deserves the title of " Defender of the Mind." The importance of his work should be, it would seem, written in letters of fire against the sky in this chaotic century, when blind leaders of the blind, following the revolt from the philosophia prima, have led us into foxholes. Our present confusion is not the result either of an extreme abundance of data or of the fact that attention has been paid to the truths of science rather than of metaphysics. Philosophy, too, is based on facts; and the natural scientist who refuses to acknowledge what transcends the limits of his sphere cannot be said to have a scientific mind. The confusion of our era now culminating in this Age of the Atom Bomb is rooted in the false philosophy of science with which modern philosophy began over three centuries ago and in which it continues. From Stuart Chase's inveighing against the "tyranny of words " to Harold Larrabee's scorn of the logic of Aristotle as one of deductive consistency in the use of language as opposed to the logic of things, the modern scene is littered with puerilities . The philosopher must ask, paraphrasing Emerson: " How can I hear what you say about language when what you admit in using language keeps dinning in upon me?" The current subjectivist nominalism of Bertrand Russell, the behavioristic pragmatism of John Dewey, and the inverted idealism of George Santayana are, one and all, based on false language theories, and each is as vulnerable on the semantic side as that of the most naive writer on the subject of words and things who assumes a one-to-one correspondence between them. Where is there anything in the elaboration and complexity of symbolization techniques in modern science to justify the supercilious attitude toward verbal stability and consistency that has developed? Increased sense reports through the use of index needles, revolving drums, sensitive plates, and so on have hardly obviated the need for their interpretation through verbal symbols. The fact is that there is no scientist who works on the assumption of " ever more reliable knowledge as the 58 ]d. ~HITCO~ HESS enterprise of critical exploration proceeds" in any special research who does not owe his assurance of truth's discoverability to Aristotle's substantiation of knowledge-findings by his evidence that language witnesses the universally valid character of knowledge. Aristotle's work with words was on the methodological side of language as it...