The Message in the Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos

by Walker Percy

  The Antinomy of Language

  Examples of the linguistic assertion S is P.

  Dr. Itard writes in The Savage of Aveyron that he tried to teach Victor the wild boy the word for milk, lait, as a sign of a biological need, by withholding the milk and uttering the word in its absence. This failed: After the milk was given to Victor, however, and the word lait uttered by chance, to Dr. Itard’s astonishment, Victor understood at once that lait was the name of the milk.

  What is this?

  Milk.

  What color is it?

  White.

  Did you drink some?

  This morning I drank some milk.

  tl ‘imshya ’isita ’itlma

  (He invites people to a feast)

  (A sentence in the Nootka language)

  (1) What the scientist thinks of the assertion S is P when the assertion is proposed to him as a true-or-false-or-nonsense claim:

  I receive your statement S is P as a true-or-false-or-nonsense claim. I shall accept it as more or less true or false or as nonsense according to my criteria of verification.

  If you wish to call this white liquid milk, then I will agree to the semantic rule by which the symbol “milk” shall henceforth be applied to this white liquid.

  If you say that milk is a liquid, or that milk is a gas, or that milk is upside down, I shall accept your statement as asserting a state of affairs which is open to verification and otherwise is nonsense.

  (2) What the scientist thinks of the assertion S is P when the assertion is itself a phenomenon under investigation, to be ordered with other phenomena in the general corpus of scientific knowledge:

  An interchange of language is not the uttering and receiving of sentences which assert or deny a state of affairs in the world; it is rather a space-time sequence of stimuli and responses which are meaningful only in the sociobiological sense of learned behavior. A language symbol and the understanding of it are not qualitatively different from the signal and response of animal behavior (Morris, Mead). “In its biophysical aspect language consists of sound-producing movements and of the resultant sound waves and of the vibration of the hearer’s eardrums. The biosocial aspect of language consists in the fact that the persons in a community have been trained to produce these sounds in certain situations and to respond to them by appropriate actions” (Bloomfield). Human meaning is a context of stimulus and response (Ogden and Richards). Only causal sequential relations between signs and organisms are real; denotative relationships are not real but semantical (Ogden and Richards, Chase). The relation of identification between word and thing, subject and predicate is “wrong” (Korzybski). Human meaning and mind itself is a product of responses and responses to responses (Mead). A symbol and the idea associated with it cannot possibly refer to a real state of affairs in the world; if it did, it could only be a copy; a realistic metaphysic must always end in skepticism (Cassirer).

  In summary, the sentence you speak is not, after all, a true-or-false-or-nonsense claim referring to a state of affairs in the world. It is instead a biological signal mediating an adjustment between organisms and the organisms’ response to an environment. It is impossible for me to take your meaning intersubjectively; I can only respond to your behavior.

  (3) Comment. The source of the antinomy and the central phenomenon of language is a relationship which the scientific method cannot construe by its functional schema and hence must disqualify as “wrong.” It is the peculiar relationship of denotation between name and thing and the relationship of identity between subject and predicate.

  The antinomy is found in its most characteristic form in the current discipline of “semiotic,” which attempts to bring together pragmatics, syntax, and semantics into the unity of a single science. Semiotic is basically incoherent because it tries to unite the corpus of natural science (organic and inorganic matter in functional interaction) with the corpus of semantics and syntax (naming and asserting and calculus formation by rule) without showing how one discipline is related to the other.

  Thus semanticists find themselves in the position of protesting as objective scientists against the very subject matter of their science, the relation of denotation. The science of semantics is the study of the rules by which symbols are assigned to their designata. Yet the science of responding organisms (behavioristics) does not explain how organisms can “assign” names to things in the first place. The relation of denotation is said to be only a “semantical relation,” but its status is never settled from the point of view of the scientific method beyond saying that it is not a “real” relation. One simply speaks in one breath of organisms responding to an environment and in the next of organisms assigning names and making propositions about the world (Reichenbach).

  The central act of language, both of naming-classificatory sentences and predicate sentences, is an intentional act of identity. It is essentially a pairing of elements which amounts to an is-saying. In a naming sentence, This is grass, a symbol and a thing are paired and the pairing is the means by which the namer intends that this green blade is one of a group. The basic sentence Grass is green is an identification brought about by a dividing and a composing, a union of the thing with what the thing is. The identity in either case is not real—no one believes that word is the grass or that the grass is the same as its color—but intentional. The identity is the instrument with which the knowing subject affirms the object to be what it is.

  The stumbling block to a scientific philosophy of language is the pairing of elements in the assertory act. The scientific method can only grasp elements ordered in a functional or dependent relation, the causal order of the function E =f (C).* The assertory act cannot be grasped in a scientist-data framework in which the scientist practices an activity which he disallows in the data. A scientist will accept the statement S is P as a proposition open to verification or disproof. He pays attention to sentences and for himself accepts them as stating a possible fact about the world. When he hears this sound in the air, “A gas expands in direct proportion to temperature increases,” he receives the sound as an intending instrument, an assertion open to verification. But if one asked the scientist to study the sound-sentence not as an assertion to be proved or disproved, not as a phonetic phenomenon subject to Grimm’s law of consonantal change, but as an assertory phenomenon to be grasped as such by his method, the scientist cannot reply coherently. The functional method of the sciences cannot construe the assertory act of language. The only alternative open to the positivist philosopher of language is to accept the peculiar assertory relation of language as a “semantical phenomenon” but to disqualify it as a real “scientific” phenomenon. The upshot is not merely an incoherent exposition of language but a contradictory one, an antinomy.

  The Antinomy of Science

  Examples of the scientific assertion S is P:

  The square of the time of revolution of any planet is proportional to the cube of the mean distance from the sun. T2 =KD3

  (Kepler’s third law of planetary orbits)

  The force of attraction between two bodies is in direct proportion to the product of the masses of the two bodies and varies inversely as the square of the distance between them. F =GM1M2/d2

  (Newton’s law of gravitation)

  The inertia of a system necessarily depends on its energy content…inert mass is simply latent energy. E =mc2

  (Einstein)

  In isolated historical systems tribal organization precedes the beginnings of the state.

  (Zilsel: a “temporal historico-sociological law”)

  (1) What the scientist thinks of the assertion S is P when the assertion is proposed to him as a true-or-false-or-nonsense claim:

  The scientific assertion, observation, correlation, hypothesis, theory, deduction, law, is accepted as a true-or-false, or at least as a more or less probable, claim. The claim is assumed to refer to a state of affairs other than the claim and the scientist, and to be open to techniques of verification, pointer
readings, and so on. The scientific method presupposes that there is something to be known, that a degree of knowledge is possible, that this knowledge can be expressed as assertions and reliably transmitted from teller to hearer.

  (2) What the scientist thinks of the assertion S is P when the assertion is itself a phenomenon under investigation to be ordered with other phenomena in the general corpus of scientific knowledge:

  What does the scientist think of science as a phenomenon, not, what does he do as a scientist as he practices his science, assembles his data, sets up a controlled experiment, makes pointer readings, puzzles over discrepancies, gets a hunch, tries a new hypothesis, etc.—but what does he think of science as a happening in the world which takes its place along with other happenings?

  If he is to understand science as a phenomenon to be ordered to other phenomena in a general functional scheme, he is obliged to disqualify the major assumptions which he has made in the practice of his science: that valid scientific knowledge is possible and that it can be transmitted from teller to hearer by means of assertions.

  The dilemma of the modern philosopher of science has these two horns. It appears to him that he may pursue only one of two alternatives without betraying the rigor of the scientific method. Yet in each case the consequence is an antinomy in which his explanation of science as an activity stands in contradiction to his assumptions about science if he is a practicing scientist.

  First, he may proceed according to the realistic assumptions of science, that here we are with a real happening between us which we must try to understand—and study science as a phenomenon which happens to real organisms in a world, just as metabolism and bee dances and dog salivation are real happenings. It seems reasonable to approach the organisms who are scientists with the same objectivity with which he approaches organisms who are searching for food or organisms who are making a myth. Thus he is obliged to understand science as an instrumentality, as either a mode of biological behavior or of cultural behavior and meaningful only as gauged by biological or cultural needs. Thus Dewey sought to understand science and knowledge as but one of many social instrumentalities whose validity and adequacy are measured in terms of the degree to which they make possible an adjustment between the individual organism on the one hand and the social and physical environment on the other. A kindred view of science as a phenomenon-to-be-explained is that of dialectical materialism, which sees research not as an enterprise freely undertaken and specified by the subject to be known but as itself determined by the economic organization and needs of society. In each case, instrumentalism and dialectical materialism, the theorist appears to be following the legitimate procedure of the scientific method; he is looking upon science as a phenomenon to be explained by a functional principle. In one case the principle is sociobiological, in the other dialectical.

  Second, the theorist may elect to remain altogether on the cogito side of the mind-body split. He may view the problem simply as a semantico-logical one, stipulating a natural law as a “syntactical rule,” a free convention for the manipulation of symbols, refusing to deal with the problems of knowledge and induction and intersubjectivity (Carnap).* Or he may adopt the operationalism of Bridgman, who is frank to admit the consequence of solipsism: “…it is obvious that I can never get outside myself…there is no such thing as a public consciousness…in the last analysis science is only my private science.” In this case, the antinomy is overt: a practicing scientist who reports his findings in journals and his theories in books—and who denies the possibility of a public realm of intersubjectivity. A kindred approach is a neo-Kantian one, which seeks scientific validity entirely within the forms and categories of consciousness: “The validity of the physical concept does not rest upon its content of real elements of existence, such as can be directly pointed out, but upon the strictness of connection, which makes it possible” (Cassirer).

  (3) Comment. Einstein once wrote, “If you want to find out anything from the theoretical physicists about the methods they use, I advise you to stick closely to one principle: don’t listen to their words, fix your attention on their deeds.”

  Whitehead once remarked that it was a matter for astonishment that while scientists have succeeded in learning a great deal about the world in the past two hundred years, philosophers of science seem equally determined to deny that such knowledge is possible.

  Both men allude to the antinomy which the functional method of the sciences encounters when it tries to grasp itself as a phenomenon among other phenomena in the world. The antinomy has been noticed often enough but it is usually attributed to the bad faith or bad philosophizing of the theorist. It seems to be a case, however, of too much good faith rather than too little—that is, an uncritical acceptance of the scientific method of physics as a total organon of reality. The antinomy has come to pass precisely because of the faithfulness and rigor with which the theorist tries to grasp the scientific enterprise in particular, assertory activity in general, by his superb instrument, the functional method of the sciences.

  The ineluctable reality upon which the scientific method founders and splits into an antinomy is nothing else than the central act of science, “sciencing,” the assertions of science. From the primitive observation to the most exact mathematical deduction, science is a tissue of assertions. It is ironical but perhaps not unfitting that science, undertaken as a total organon of reality, should break down not at the microcosmic or macrocosmic limits of the universe but in the attempt to grasp itself. Heisenberg’s uncertainty relations seem to be a material difficulty resulting from an interference of measuring instrument with particle to be measured.* But the antinomy into which the scientific method falls in treating as-sertory behavior is a formal methodological impasse. It lies beyond the power of the functional method to grasp the scientific, the mythic, the linguistic assertion as such. It will succeed in grasping itself according to its mode—as a functional space-time linkage—but in so doing it must overlook its most important characteristic, that science is an assertory phenomenon, a real phenomenon but not a causal space-time event. Science may seek to understand itself as a social instrumentality or as an intracultural activity, and to a degree no doubt correctly so; but it must remain silent in the face of the true-or-false claim, S is P, considered as such.

  Here, as in the other antinomies, it is the assertory act itself which is refractory to the scientific method. Since an assertion—mythic, linguistic, mathematical—is an immaterial act in virtue of which two elements are paired or identified, and since the scientific method requires that elements be ordered serially, according to dependent functional ratios, the two are not commensurate. The corpus of scientific knowledge ascending in a continuum from inorganic energy exchanges to organic responses is not in principle coterminous with assertory behavior. To speak of culture as an “emergent” or a “superorganic level” is only to erect a semantical bridge across the abyss, when the need is to explore the abyss, not to ignore it.

  Different as are the various scientific philosophies mentioned above, they share one conviction about the subject matter of science and it is this conviction which gives rise to the antinomy. It is the antirealist and antimetaphysical dogma that there is no lawful reality to be known apart from the activity of the knower. This tenet is usually expressed in an exaggerated language: “Knowledge conceived in the fashion of an infallible grasp of final truths without the mediation of overt organic activity is not something which modern science supplies.” What should be pointed out, however, is that it is not the claim to “infallible knowledge” which gives scandal to positivist philosophers of science; it is the claim to any valid knowledge whatsoever, however modest the claim of the knower. A realist would be the first to admit, would in fact insist upon, “the mediation of overt organic activity” in the knowing act. But this is not the real point at issue. The issue is the validity of knowledge and the providing for this validity in one’s scientific world view. The difficulty is that knowledge en
tails assertions and assertions are beyond the grasp of the functional method.*

  THE SOURCE OF THE ANTINOMY

  The general source of the antinomy is not to be found, as is sometimes alleged, in the nature of the subject, man, the culture member who practices science but needs myths. Such an anthropology is in the last analysis incoherent because it requires two sorts of men, scientists who observe and tell the truth, culture members who respond and have mythic needs.

  The source is rather to be found in the structure and limitations of the scientific method itself. For the antinomy comes about at that very moment when that sort of activity of which the scientific method is a mode, assertory activity, enters the scientific situation, not as the customary activity of the scientist, but as a phenomenon under investigation.