Meaning & Knowledge - Ernest Nagel (1966)

The

subject this evening that I want to talk

about is meaning and knowledge and I

suppose the first question one ought to

face or try to answer

is what

uh this topic itself means and why

anybody in particular philosophy should

be interested.

I think the answer is not too difficult

to give because after all knowledge is

one of the things that uh

is

a permanent objective of the human race.

On the other hand, if knowledge were to

come as easily

as shaking one's wrist,

there wouldn't be very much problem

connected with it.

The difficulty is that uh

men have frequently claimed to know

various sorts of things

which either themselves or their

fellow human beings at during their own

days or

perhaps only centuries later

discover that uh the claim is really not

warranted.

And it is a perennial problem of

human beings and of certainly of

philosophers to try to

find some

way of distinguishing claims to

knowledge that are sound

from those which are not.

And it is around this question that I

want to talk this evening.

But this of course only covers the

second half of my title.

Where does meaning come in?

Well, there is a very intimate

connection between

questions about the grounds for valid

claims

to knowledge

and questions about meaning.

Much of our knowledge, certainly in

science, consists in answers to

questions

and is formulated, that is the the

knowledge that we

claim to have is formulated in

statements

which belong to some language.

Underlying the quest for answers to

questions

is the assumption that the questions

that are being asked are meaningful

questions,

that they're not nonsensical.

And also that the statements which

codify alleged knowledge

are similarly meaningful.

On the other hand, as I will point out

in some detail,

many statements that appear to be

meaningful, many questions that appear

to be significant in the sense that

they are addressed to a genuine problem,

turn out on

closer inspection

to have no genuine meaning,

so that pursuit of those questions

is a hopeless race because the questions

themselves are insoluble,

not because men do not have the wit or

the intelligence to find an answer to

them,

but because the way the questions are

stated

makes it

inherently or intrinsically impossible,

no matter how wise

or how powerful a mind may be,

to deal with these questions.

Let me say, however, that

I shall be concerned in the first part

of my talk with questions of meaning,

but meaning insofar as we are addressed

to what is sometimes called cognitive

meaning,

not the kind of a meaning which we are

sometimes interested in when we look at

a picture

or hear a quartet and we ask, "Well, now

what does it mean?"

These are certainly legitimate questions

to ask,

but they are using the word meaning in a

different sense from the one

to which I shall address myself.

As a matter of fact,

the word meaning is

extremely ambiguous, and I think it'd be

well to start out with

distinguishing some senses of the word

meaning,

and then identify the one

which I would like to discuss,

not because the others

are illegitimate

or of no value, but because I have to

restrict myself

uh to dealing with a limited question

in so far as questions of meaning are

associated or connected with questions

of knowledge.

Now, in the first place, we sometimes

use the word meaning in the in the sense

of

asking, "Well, now what is the meaning

of a thing? Or what is the meaning of an

event?"

And here what we are asking for is,

"Well, what do these events or things

signify?" That is to say,

"What consequences do they have? Or what

causes them?" As for example, when we

ask

if there should be some clouds in the

sky, "Well, what does that mean?"

Or if we should see a smoke and ask,

"What does that mean?"

Or if we should hear a loud screech and

ask, "What does that mean?"

Here we are asking for, "What are the

effects of these events?" Or what are

their antecedents?

This is not the sense of meaning in

which with which I shall be concerned.

Secondly, there is a sense of meaning

when we talk about the meaning of human

actions.

And here what we rough have in mind

roughly is,

"What purposes do these actions have? or

what purposes do the individuals who

engage in those actions have?

So, for example, you might ask

when Mark Antony in antiquity

fled from the Battle of Actium,

we ask, "Well, what's the meaning of

that?"

Did he run away from the battle because

he was in love with Cleopatra and wanted

to join her?

Well, this is objective.

Or

did he run away from

the battle

in order to

establish connections in Egypt which

would enable him to feed

the Roman populace?

These are questions about

human actions and their purposes. Or you

might ask, perhaps,

like, don't have to go back as far as

2,000 years.

You might ask, "Well, what's the meaning

of Johnson's visit to Honolulu

recently?"

Uh

we want to know what the intent of that

action was.

We may not know the answer, but it's

legitimate to ask.

Now, I think it's in this sense of

meaning that we sometimes ask uh

of some of people sometimes ask,

"Does the world

or does the human history in its

entirety

have a meaning?"

And I would like to say rather flatly

and dogmatically at this point

that

in this sense the

of meaning, the question doesn't have

any clear meaning. To ask, "What's the

meaning of the world or the universe?"

If you say, "Well, I want to know what

the purpose it is."

The assumption is, of course, that there

is such a thing as a purpose to

the world or the universe.

And unless one could establish

on independent grounds that there is

such a thing as

a purpose,

the question

doesn't have any sense.

Similarly, when people say, "Well, now

you know the universe is absurd."

This, I think, is an illegitimate

characterization of the world because

you can say about a human being that

some of his actions are absurd.

And why? Because human being can at

least

at some moments be rational or have a

deliberate objective.

While at other times

he's using means which seem to be

inadequate to the objective that he has,

and so we say his actions are absurd

or without rhyme or reason.

But you cannot say of something that is

not itself

endowed with a capacity for rational

thought that its actions are absurd.

And so, while many people talk this way,

it seems to me that this is an

illegitimate way of talking, or rather

it is a senseless way of talking.

But in any case,

it is not about meaning in this sense

either that I want to talk.

I want to talk about meaning of

linguistic expressions

of either

phrases or nouns or verbs or

more

uh

uh specifically about the meaning of

statements that we make in some

language.

Now, in some cases,

when we are puzzled about the meaning of

a word or of a statement,

uh we can find a ready answer simply by

looking up a dictionary.

So, for example, if you should run

across the word obdurate

and you never heard the word and you

know what want to know what it means,

you consult a reasonably sized

dictionary and you get an answer. For

example, obdurate means inflexible.

No serious problem about that.

But very frequently,

consulting a dictionary,

or even listening to a man give an

explanation of what he means by a

certain word or phrase,

is not sufficient.

Let me give you an example.

Sir Isaac Newton, in his great book on

the mathematical principles of natural

philosophy,

introduced the notion of absolute time

and absolute space.

And he explained what he meant by

absolute time and absolute space, and I

will quote from him.

And he says,

"Absolute, true, mathematical time, of

itself,

and from its own nature, flows equably,

without regard to anything external.

Absolute space,

in its own nature, without regard to

anything external, remains always

similar

and immovable."

Now, I haven't given the exact

quotation, but I've given the essence of

his explanation of these things.

I'm not sure whether, on the basis of

the explanations, the notion of absolute

time and absolute space are clear to

you.

If they are, you're more fortunate

than have been some 200 years of

scientists over some 200 years

who tried to understand exactly what

these terms mean, what these phrases

mean.

And

it turns out that looking up

dictionaries won't help.

And it may very well be, as some many

people have claimed, that

these expressions,

though they appeared to be quite

meaningful to Newton and to some of his

contemporaries,

they were suffering from an illusion.

Many statements

look quite all right, grammatically

perfect.

But they sometimes they will strike us

as

being

puzzling because

it is because we don't know what the

individual words in it mean, but the

sentence itself

appears to have no content. Let me give

you a an example that's been often used

in some of the recent literature.

If uh

you should find that I

tend to sleep late

and I offer an apology and I say, "Well,

now look,

I do not really sleep more than other

people do.

I only sleep more slowly than they do."

Now, I think all of us understand the

constituent words in this.

But what does it mean to say that one

person sleeps more slowly than another?

I mean, this on the face of it doesn't

seem to have any content at all.

This is a trivial example.

Let's consider

more

uh important ones.

As for example, people who

subscribe to the existence of God and

credit him with all sorts of attributes

such as that

God is omnibenevolent, that is, he is

completely good.

Now, what does it mean to attribute

perfect goodness to God?

Many theologians, when they explain

this, they will say, "Well, of course,

by the goodness of God, we don't quite

mean the kind of thing that we mean when

we say that an that an individual is

good, namely that he's kind, he's

thoughtful,

he doesn't hurt people, he doesn't

commit

evil.

Well,

if God is

omnibenevolent, he's all powerful, he

can do all sorts of things, presumably.

There are a lot of things in the

universe which on the face of it look to

be cruel and wicked

and evil.

And so, many theologians in use

characterizing God in this way,

they say, "Well, you are not to

understand by the benevolence on part of

God anything like what

you mean when you use the word

benevolence in connection with

human beings."

Now, many philosophers say, "Well, this

is really impossible."

And let me quote you

a statement of a very famous philosopher

of the 19th century,

John Stuart Mill, who was criticizing

a contemporary theologian by name of

Mansel.

And in his comment

on Mansel's defense of the view that God

was an all-powerful

benevolent a creature power,

Mill said,

"Language has no meaning for the words

just, merciful, benevolent,

save that in which we predicate them of

our fellow creatures.

And unless

that is what we intend to express by

them,

we have no business to employ the words.

If in affirming them

of God, we do not mean to affirm

the very qualities

differing only as greater in degree

which we attribute to human beings,

we are neither philosophically nor

morally entitled to affirm them at all."

And then he concluded with a

a rousing conclusion which he said,

"Whatever power

God may have over me,

there's one thing

which he shall not compel me to do.

I will call being good

who is not what I mean when I apply that

epithet

to my fellow creatures.

And if such a sentence

can sentence me to hell

for not so calling him,

to hell I will go.

Let me give you one final example of

statements which uh

are often believed to be meaningful.

I'm taking these from sort of

uh general discourse, not from highly

technical discourse,

which might

uh

occur in various scientific contexts.

Take the similarly as a theological

proposition

which maintains that God exists.

Now,

surely we understand what it means to

say

that a chair

in my room exists.

Or that

there's a book on a shelf, and that this

book exists.

Or that there is a diamond buried so

many

hundred feet below the surface of the

earth.

To say that these things exist makes

sense, whether the statements are true

or false. We understand what they mean.

Namely, the things that are said to

exist are located in space, located in

time. You can see them, you can smell

them, you can touch them, you can feel

them,

you can taste them, and so on.

But what does it mean to assert God's

existence?

A contemporary English philosopher

offered the following parable to

indicate

what a problematic statement it is

to affirm God's existence

if you do not think of God as sort of an

nice old man with a long beard

who's located in a certain part of the

heavens.

If you say, "Well, no, this is not what

you mean by God's existence.

God is something altogether different."

He offered the following parable. He

said, "And I'm quoting from him.

Once upon a time, two explorers came

upon a clearing in the jungle.

In the clearing were growing many

flowers and many weeds.

One explorer says,

'Some gardener must tend this plot.'

The other explorer disagrees. 'There is

no gardener.'

So, they pitched their tents and set a

watch.

No gardener is ever seen.

'But perhaps he's an invisible

gardener.'

So, they set up

a barbed wire fence.

They electrify it.

They patrol with bloodhounds.

But no shrieks ever suggest that some

intruder

has received a shock.

No movements of the wire betray an

invisible intruder.

The bloodhounds never give a cry.

Yet still the believer is not convinced.

'But there is a gardener,

invisible, intangible, insensible to

electric shocks,

a gardener who has no scent

and makes no sound,

a gardener who comes secretly to look

after the garden which he loves.'

At last the skeptic, the other explorer,

despairs.

'But what remains of your original

assertion that a gardener exists?

Just how does what you call an

invisible,

intangible,

eternally elusive gardener differ

from an imaginary gardener

or even from no gardener at all?'

And the parable ends.

And the question that remains is,

is the statement that God exists a

meaningful statement.

If no evidence apparently can either

serve to

support the claim,

no evidence can be used to

make the claim doubtful,

then is the statement itself meaningful?

At any rate,

it is because

throughout the history of

the human race,

statements have been made, questions

have been asked, and proposed answers to

them have been given,

which

in the minds at least of some

careful students turn out to be

without any clear sense.

That

many people have thought, "Well, how

wonderful it would be

if we could find

some

rule, some criteria on the basis of

which

we could decide

whether a statement or a question is a

meaningful

utterance."

To take a

more technical example,

one of the great achievements of modern

physics

took place when

Einstein

examined statements that were made by

Newton and physicists for some 2,000

years who talked about

two events being simultaneous.

And everybody assumed it's perfectly

clear what is meant by saying that two

events are simultaneous.

I suppose most of us,

until we are brought to a halt

by reading

the writings of a first-class mind like

Einstein,

would have said, "Well, of course it's

it's clear what we mean when we say that

two events are simultaneous."

And yet it turned out that

physicists didn't have the vaguest idea

of what they meant when they talked

about events being simultaneous.

And that Einstein had to really offer a

new definition

of the conditions under which

physicists could establish

the fact that two events were

simultaneous or not.

And this introduced really the whole

uh

revolt against the Newtonian mechanics,

I mean the development of what is called

the special theory of relativity.

And as a consequence of

this uh what seemed like a very naive

approach of Einstein to ask

of statements that were made by

highly placed and influential

physicists, well, what do they mean?

What criteria

do they satisfy or must they satisfy if

they're to be meaningful?

As a consequence of this important

innovation in

physical theory, a great number number

of people in our own day

have become concerned with the problem

of developing criteria of meaning.

Now, there are two

main reasons for doing this.

The first is that

well, if we're going to

think about questions or try to find

answer to them answer to them,

let's not waste our energies, let's not

waste human effort

by occupying ourselves with questions

that are not meaningful.

And the second, which I think is uh also

a very

uh

fundamental drive behind this quest for

meaning is

people do not want to live

in illusions.

We don't want to claim to have knowledge

when we express our formulations

in language which turns out not to be

meaningful.

So much by way of general introduction

to this problem.

Let me

give a very quick survey of some of the

proposed criteria

that have been given for distinguishing

meaningful statements

or meaningful linguistic expressions

from those that are not.

One of the earliest in modern times

was proposed by an 18th century

philosopher, David Hume,

who was criticizing

some of the philosophy and the theology

of his own day

as well as of the tradition.

He thought that much of the metaphysical

philosophy

wasn't worth the paper that it was

written on

on the ground that the statement that it

made

really didn't have any content.

And therefore he was trying to

find some way

of

deciding

on what conditions

our ideas were genuine ideas, that they

really had a substantial content,

and when did they did not.

His approach was essentially

psychological.

He said, "Look,

people have ideas. How do they get these

ideas?"

According to Hume,

we are not born with ideas, we obtain

them

as a result of having various kinds of

experiences, sensory experiences, for

example,

we have experiences of colors, of

sounds, of smells, of shapes.

We have also introspective experiences.

We have experiences of pain, of sorrow,

of rejoicing.

And he made a distinction then between

the result of these these experiences

which he called impressions. They might

be either external impressions

through the organs of sense or internal

impressions which are obtained by

reflection upon our so-called inner

states.

And he said, "Well, look, many of our

ideas

do not

correspond to any impression. For

example, you might have an idea or an

image of a golden mountain.

Nobody's ever seen a golden mountain.

There may be no golden mountains.

And yet I think we would say, "Well,

yes, I mean this notion of a golden

mountain

uh this does we we understand what it

means."

Well, why? According to you? Because he

said,

"The idea of a golden mountain is a

complex idea.

It can be broken up into component

ideas, namely the idea of a mountain,

the idea of gold.

Now,

to the idea of mountain there

corresponds an impression.

We have seen

or perhaps felt

a mountain.

We have seen or perhaps felt or smelled

or tasted or touched gold. Then we

combine these two elementary or simple

ideas and build up a larger one,

a complex one."

And so,

Hume's

proposed criterion was this.

If you are in doubt whether an idea is a

genuine idea or pseudo idea, you have to

ask,

"From what impressions

is the supposed idea derived?"

And then,

using this criterion, he said,

"And this is the way in which he

concluded one of his important works. He

said,

"If we take in our hand any volume, any

book,

for example, of divinity or of

metaphysics,

let us ask,

does it contain any abstract reasoning

concerning quantity or number?

Now, if you deal with quantities and

numbers, this is all right because the

ideas corresponding to them I mean

the the ideas of quantity and number,

these correspond to impressions.

So,

does it contain any reasoning about

quantity or number?

No.

Well, does it contain any experimental

reasoning concerning matter of fact and

existence? That is, does it contain

ideas which are reducible, which are

correspond to impressions?

No.

If the answer is no in both cases, then

Hume says,

"Commit the book to the flames,

for it can contain nothing but sophistry

and illusion."

And so, his criterion is you want to

have a cri- you want to know what you

want to have a rule

for deciding whether a statement or an

idea or an expression is meaningful,

see whether it can be reduced to some

elementary ideas which correspond

to certain simple impressions.

Now,

this looks very promising.

Unfortunately, it's not an adequate

criterion.

It's not an adequate criterion for at

least two reasons.

In the first place,

the psychology upon which this criterion

is based

is a very dubious psychology indeed.

It assumes

that the way we our experience is to

start with simple ideas

and then build them up.

For example, if we have an idea of a

an apple, well, an apple is colored, it

has a certain smell, a certain taste.

According to Hume, what we start out

with is an elementary sensation of a

shape, another elementary sensation

of a color, another elementary sensation

of a taste, another element elementary

sensation of a

uh

uh

of a uh

liquid,

and then we put these somehow together,

and then out of these elementary things

we build up the complex.

Now, we know today that this is an

inadequate psychology, and to the extent

that Hume's criterion

depends upon the assumption that

we build up our experience out of atoms,

to that extent the entire approach that

he's taking

is untenable. Certainly,

the so-called Gestalt psychologists have

established beyond any possibility of

reasonable doubt that this is not how

experience

is acquired. This is not a true account

of the way men really do acquire their

ideas and their knowledge. This is one

reason

why the Humean criterion is inadequate.

The second one, which is perhaps more

important, at least I would think it's

more important,

that there are in point of fact many

ideas

that I think most people would regard as

being

quite intelligible and meaningful,

that it would be extremely difficult,

and as as far as I know, nobody has

shown

that it's possible to do this,

to analyze into simple ideas,

each of which corresponds to an

impression.

For example,

we use in relatively elementary

mathematics such notions as

an irrational number like the square

root of two.

Now,

in order to give an explication, in

order to give a definition of an

irrational number,

it turns out that we have to introduce

the notion of an

infinite series,

an infinite sequence of

other kinds of numbers like the whole

numbers or the the rational numbers,

1/2, 1/3, and so on.

We know that the square root of two is

not equal to

a rational number.

If it's going to be defined at all, it

has to be defined in terms of a an

infinite series

of

rational numbers.

But an infinite series, now, where do we

find an experience

something that corresponds to this idea

of infinity?

At least no one has, to the satisfaction

of students, been able to give an

explication of the notion of infinity in

terms of simple impressions.

Or take something

that's

uh more familiar to most of us.

When we say that a certain person has a

disposition,

for example,

when we say of a certain person that he

is lovable,

or when we say of

a piece of metal that it is malleable,

not that he is

not that that person is being loved,

but that he's lovable, that he has a

certain capacity.

Or when we say of a piece of metal that

it is malleable, not that it is being

pounded and you can shape it,

but that is capable of such things.

The dispositional property of this

object is not something that you can

see.

If I say of a piece of sugar that it is

soluble,

surely I can put the sugar into water

and see it dissolve.

And what I can see is the process of

dissolution.

But I cannot see the property of

solubility.

And how can you then explicate or define

the notion of solubility if you insist,

as Hume does, that you must somehow

reduce it

to simple ideas which correspond to

certain elementary impressions.

And so for these reasons,

the Humean

uh

the criterion

turns out not to be satisfactory.

Now,

there are a great number of other

proposals that have been made. I'd like

to perhaps mention two others

and then offer some sort of concluding

remarks about this part of my talk.

A second view, which has been

uh

uh has received a great deal of

attention, particularly in this country,

because

it is the foundation of what is known as

American pragmatism.

A second criterion was proposed

some 80 years ago

by

Charles Peirce, p e i r c e, who is

perhaps

the greatest philosopher

who America has ever produced.

In a very famous essay of Peirce,

which has the title How to Make Our

Ideas Clear,

Peirce offered the the following maxim,

which is

known as the pragmatic

which influenced William James and John

Dewey and a number of other writers and

then

this

uh school of philosophy that is known as

pragmatism had its beginning from this

and has been a very influential and

flourishing school

at least for a great number of years.

Peirce formulated his maxim as follows.

When you say

starting with an example, when you say

that

a piece of diamond which is at the

bottom of the sea

is hard

what do you mean? What do you mean when

you say that it is hard rather than

soft?

And Peirce says

consider what effects

that might conceivably have practical

bearings

we conceive the object of our conception

to have, that is

consider what practical consequences

would follow

from saying that the diamond is hard.

What practical consequences? How they

will affect

our behavior, our conduct.

Then he says, our conception

of these

practical effects

is the whole of our conception of the

object.

That is

if there is no difference in the

practical consequence of saying that the

diamond is hard rather than soft then

you might just as well say that it is

soft rather than hard.

Now, this has been a very fruitful

principle.

In short, it says

uh

a difference without a difference is no

difference.

And the difference must lie in some

consequence which will affect human

behavior and practical conduct.

Now, the difficulty with the person

maximum

is that it is very difficult to

formulate precisely.

You see, I've quoted his words exactly,

and people have tried to reinstate it

very carefully.

Consider what effects that might

conceivably have practical bearings.

Well, what is it really?

The

What do we mean when we say,

"Conceivably have practical bearing?"

This might conceivable What What is

conceivable to you

may be not conceivable to me or vice

versa. What is conceivable depends so

often upon

limitations of our imagination.

It's certainly a very loose criterion.

And in many cases, we don't know what

the practical consequences What the

practical effects are.

If, for example,

Democritus introduced

the notion of the atomic constitution of

all things some 2,000 years ago.

And if you We had asked Democritus,

"Well, now,

what practical consequences do you

envisage from the supposition

that this apparently solid thing is made

up of little particles which are

invisible?"

He might have said, "I have no notion

what practical consequences follow from

this."

Or take a an example closer at hand when

Faraday was studying electricity,

allegedly,

uh Gladstone, British Prime Minister,

visited his laboratory once

and said, "Well, now, what's the use of

all of this?"

And then Faraday is supposed to have

said, "Well, eventually, eventually,

something will come of this. You'll be

able to tax it."

Now, this is certainly a practical

consequence of this, but surely to say,

"Well, now, what we mean by electricity

is

something that is capable of being taxed

and which will affect our lives.

This is really not quite what ordinary

will be understood by

saying that there's electricity flowing

in the wire.

And so because of this type of

difficulty,

the person maximum while it will

do in certain context in many areas, it

leaves us

really helpless.

Let me turn to one more

uh proposed

criterion which was

introduced uh

both in this country

and abroad pretty much independently of

one another and which is sometimes

associated

with a certain philosophical school

known as logical empiricism.

But it's also associated in this country

with

the thought of the late uh Nobel Prize

winning physicist

Percy Bridgman.

According to which

uh the meaning of a statement has to be

specified

in terms of

the operations

that are used to verify.

So that the meaning of a statement

in one formulation

is synonymous with the modes of its

verification

or synonymous with the operations used

to verify.

So to say for example that

a certain object is 2 ft long,

on this proposal,

the meaning of the statement consists in

the operation that you use, for example,

taking a yardstick and placing it end to

end.

And then if you have to do this just

twice,

then that's what it means to say

that the yardstick that that the object

is 2 ft long.

Now again, this looks extremely

plausible and in many cases this is a

very illuminating approach.

But the difficulty with this is that

we very frequently use very different

methods

for verifying

what appears to be the same statement or

statements that

are analogous in using the same term.

For example, if I

say that the distance of the sun

to the earth is 93 million miles away.

Or

or the the length of the distance is 93

million miles away.

How would you verify this?

What are the operations used?

Well, certainly we don't use a yardstick

in placing it end to end.

We couldn't get to the sun in this way.

The methods here are very different.

We use telescopes.

We measure angles of parallax. We make

calculations.

We use geometry in all this.

The operations are extremely different.

But I think most of us would want to

say, well, when you talk about the

length of the distance from

the earth to the sun, you're using the

word length

in the same sense as you're using the

word length when you say an object is 2

ft long.

And yet on this criterion

it seems as if you are using the word in

a different way.

And so the outcome of this

proposal is really to atomize our

language to the point where in each

context that a term occurs, it really

acquires a brand new meaning if the

operations used to confirm the statement

uh happen to be different.

Now, I could go on recounting various

proposals,

and it turns out that

every one of these proposals that has

been recommended,

while it has shown limited advantages,

suffers from certain difficulties.

And

unfortunate though it is,

we have to come to the conclusion

that there is no wholesale

ironclad rule

which will offer

an automatic answer to the question

whether

any given statement is meaningful.

There's no way of doing this.

Particularly since we have to remember

that many statements,

if they are meaningful, acquire part of

their meaning not because the statement

is taken in isolation.

And of course, the statement itself

is part of a

very much larger system of statements.

For example,

if one were to take a statement from the

writings of some philosopher such as

Heidegger,

and this is by now a classical example

that's been used by some of my fellow

philosophical colleagues.

Heidegger makes a statement

which in English translation says,

"The nothing nothings."

"The nothing nothings."

Now, if you look at that statement, take

it out of the context in which it

occurs, and say, "Well, look, nothing

Heidegger is using this as a verb.

How can nothing noth- How can How can it

act? The nothing is now acting."

And since nothing is itself something

that has no substantiality, apparently,

something that has no existence itself

is engaging in action.

And so grammatically this is a very

curious statement indeed. And so some

philosophers said, "Well, this is an

utterly meaningless

Now, they may be right.

I will not

uh

argue the point one way or another.

I will only say that this criteria of

taking the statement in isolation

from the rest of Heidegger's writing

is not the way to decide whether the

statement is meaningful or meaningless.

And that you have to consider

everything else that it is

uh said in this particular work of

Heidegger.

And so any simple criteria such as is

proposed by some of the great thinkers

throughout the ages

of offering a rule

for deciding one way or another whether

a statement or a question is meaningless

turns out not to give us what we really

want.

Nevertheless, in spite of all of the

difficulties, some of which I've

mentioned, many of which I'm passing by

of course time is is is limited.

Uh

there's one thing that comes out.

There is one useful

result

uh

it can be retained from these various

proposals despite their limitations,

despite the weaknesses of of of some of

them.

Namely that

to be cognitively meaningful, namely for

a statement to make an assertion which

for which claims of truth or falsity

or probable truth or probable falsity

can be made

that such statements

must be capable of being supported

by

evidence which is obtained

from observation. That is, whether the

observation is sensory observation,

whether the ob observation is

introspection,

that is, no statement is

cognitively meaningful

which is such that in principle

it is impossible to bring to bear upon

it either affirmatively or negatively

evidence obtained from observation,

whether sensory or introspective.

So, for example, if a historian says

there's a finger of providence in

history,

you can see you you you can you can

present history in such a way that you

see that providence is at work.

If this statement is of such a kind

that it is incapable of being either

confirmed or refuted by some evidence,

that is, if no matter what happens, no

matter what happens, the historian can

always say, "Aha, of course it is. We

didn't know this, but now that it's

happened, we know that it's the work of

providence."

So, it's it would be impossible to find

any evidence whatsoever

which would indicate that this statement

is not in conformity with the facts,

then such a statement is

cognitively

meaningless. It might have all sorts of

imaginary imaginative values, but it's

cognitively meaningless.

Or to take one other example,

if a psychoanalyst

maintains that all children

suffer from an Oedipus complex.

And if it should turn out that no matter

how a child behaves, that is, if a male

child

happens to like its father,

or a female child always likes its

mother,

and if an analyst would say, "Well, you

see, this doesn't disprove the existence

of an Oedipus complex, it simply means

that the child is repressing.

Then you see the statement has no

content. It's incapable of being

challenged by experiences, incapable of

being disconfirmed by experiences.

You may be interested in

a story that I I had from a colleague of

mine at uh

at the medical center 168th Street.

He's a professor of psychiatry and

many years ago he performed some

experiments with children in order to

see whether in point of fact he could

detect uh

an Oedipus complex in them.

And he tried he he gave questions he

gave children questionnaires.

Uh

the experiment ran something like this.

He told them a story, your father and

mother going on a rowboat

and then a storm comes up and uh rowboat

sinks and now there's a chance only to

save one of them.

Uh what would who would you like to have

saved, your father or your mother?

And boy said uh they would like to have

their mother saved.

At least many boys said this and

uh many boy many girls said they would

like to have their father saved and this

held true more or less

up to the age of eight.

After eight the children respond this

way.

And uh my colleague uh wrote this to uh

Freud who was then still alive. He

thought he would be pleased.

Uh

at least some evidence to indicate that

at least up to the age of eight

there was good evidence to indicate that

there was an Oedipus complex.

All he got back

for his pains from Freud was a postcard

which said

how American.

What do you think you can prove by such

figures.

Well,

you see, if this is the attitude, then

one would have to say

the assertion that children suffer from

Oedipus complexes

is not cognitively meaningful.

I'm not now maintaining that it is not

because certainly

uh my colleague took it as a cognitively

meaningful since he put it to a test

and found that it held in some cases but

not in others.

But the point is that

the only criterion that it seems to me

is workable

even though it is a rough criterion is

that no statement i- either in everyday

conversation or in the sciences

which is such that it is in principle

incapable of putting it to a test

so that in some cases the test might

confirm the statement in some cases, if

we are out of luck

the test might disconfirm it, tend to

refute it

unless this is the case, then the

statement has no cognitive meaning.

Now, so much for the general problem of

meaning.

I must be even briefer in discussing

questions of knowledge.

The problem

as I've indicated the outset with

to which philosophers have addressed

themselves and certainly this has been

a concern to all reflective men is

whether

we could find some

criteria for distinguishing sound claims

to knowledge

from those that are not sound.

And I will restrict myself now to those

claims to knowledge which are about

matters of fact, not matters of

mathematical truth. I mean, for example,

I suppose we all believe that 7 + 5 is

equal to 12

and a statement like 7 + 5 = 12 is a

necessary truth

while the statement that I have five

fingers on my right hand,

or that I have $2 in my pocket,

these are not necessary truths. These

are, as as they sometimes called,

contingent truths. They could be

otherwise.

I mean, I might have an accident and

only have four fingers.

Uh I might have found an extra dollar,

so I might have three rather than two,

or might have lost one.

Uh things are

these aren't necessary, so I'm going to

address myself entirely to knowledge of

contingent truths.

Now,

the question

uh which I want to

uh touch upon is really this.

Can we have absolute certainty about

uh can we have absolutely certain

knowledge

about statements concerning what I take

it to be matters of contingent fact?

Now, there are different views on this

matter.

And there's one

ancient and still influential tradition,

I mean, that's continued to influence

the thoughts of men through the

centuries and perhaps dominated

uh the development of modern science

almost down to our own days, it's a

tradition that goes back to Aristotle,

according to which

it is possible to have absolutely

certain knowledge

of certain matters.

And that is, as a matter of fact, you do

not have a genuine science

until you have arrived at some

fundamental

principles which can be known with

complete and infallible certainty.

Aristotle, who developed this idea, had

in mind the kind of knowledge that we

have in geometry. Remember,

as we studied, at least as I studied,

Euclidean geometry, there were a great

number of propositions,

they're called theorems. How do you know

that these theorems were true? How do

you know that the Pythagorean theorem

which says that the square on the

hypotenuse equal to the sum of the

square of the other two sides, or that

the base angles of an isosceles triangle

equal. How do you know that these are

true? Well,

we've established them by proving them.

And how do we prove them?

We show that they followed logically

from certain fundamental propositions.

These were called the axioms.

How about the axioms?

How could you prove those? By

experiment? Oh, no.

At least I I was taught geometry, and

this is of course was

long, long ago, and things have changed,

I think, somewhat in this respect.

We told them, "Well, these are

self-evident truths."

You just consider what the statement is

that

two points uniquely determine a line.

Or that from a point outside of a line,

only one line can be drawn parallel to

the given line. These are self-evident

statements.

Since they're self-evident, then

and and they're self-evident, obviously

they must be true.

Then every statement that can be derived

from them must also be true.

And so this view of knowledge, this view

of science says, "Yes, we can have

absolute certainty

with respect to certain fundamental

principles which the mind can grasp

fully, completely,

infallibly,

without the possibility of error."

To be sure, you might have to have a few

observations

in order to provide a kind of a

scaffolding

from which you can then somehow

seize these principles. But once you've

had a certain elementary experience,

sensory experience, then you can see in

these

observational facts the validity of

these general principles.

This is the Aristotelian rationalistic

conception of knowledge.

Now, unfortunately, this is not adequate

because many of the assumptions that

were taken to be self-evident truths by

Aristotle and his successors

turned out not only to be not

self-evident, but they weren't true at

all.

And the history of

human thought of human science is full

of claims of self-evidence, which have

repeatedly have had to be revised in the

light of fresh experience and fresh

critical thinking.

So, the assumption that there are

certain first principles which are

infallibly known as true

has has to be abandoned.

Although some people still believe that

in some areas, for example, in ethics

there are certain self-evident

principles, though I think

the

argument for first for self-evident

first principles of ethics

is no better than it is for self-evident

first principles

in physics or in other domain of

inquiry.

As against this view

there is a second important school in

the history of thought

and this is associated with

English philosophy, particularly the

views of influential thinkers like

John Locke Bishop Berkeley and David

Hume, whose name I've already mentioned.

According to which we can have certainty

but not about first principles, not

about these

comprehensive generalizations

but about things that are immediately

apprehended through the senses.

For example

that this is

a dark blue patch

was believed by

many philosophers to be not only true,

which I can establish by looking at it

but that

it is absolutely true and that there can

be no mistake about it.

And the view was that we build up our

knowledge

by first establishing with complete

certitude the truth of certain

elementary propositions about matters of

observation.

And that the rest of our knowledge

somehow is built upon this kind of a

foundation.

Now,

I think we would have to say two things

about this.

In the first place,

though we are very often

very much tempted to say that

the thing that we observe

through our senses can

can be established as true

beyond any reasonable doubt, it turns

out that people are really mistaken

about this.

We see somebody at a distance and we

say, "Aha, there goes my friend."

When you come close by, you find that

it was no no friend at all, it's a

complete stranger or perhaps even an

inanimate object.

You look into the heavens and you say,

"Well, look,

the moon is larger when it comes to the

horizon than it when it's at the

zenith."

This is the way it looks to you.

And if you were to rely entirely on

matters of observation,

uh you would say, "Well, look, the the

moon is changing its size."

And yet we have good grounds for

believing that the report of observation

in this case is just wrong.

And that you cannot rely simply upon

matters of observation,

that you have to check and control what

is a matter of observation by assuming

all sorts of general propositions.

Now,

neither of these views seems to me to be

tenable.

And so the question is, well, how can we

really establish reliable knowledge?

And here I can be only

very hasty and say,

"Well,

what we call reliable knowledge or

knowledge which is the outcome

of a certain kind of an inquiry.

Uh which uses

certain methods.

Not any method, but certain methods.

Surely there are some methods by means

of which beliefs could be established.

For example,

if you have an authoritarian society

which lays down

as a matter of command certain beliefs

which population is supposed to accept.

And if the population is kept in

isolation with conflicting views,

these beliefs will be held.

The trouble is that it's extremely

difficult, certainly in modern times,

to establish society of this kind, and

the doubts begin to arise.

And the method of authority

does not provide for any way of settling

a doubt.