SOME SOCIAL USES AND ABUSES
OF SEMANTICS
Sidney Hook
R ECENT
philosophy has been increasingly concerned with the
nature of words, meaning and communication. The work of Peirce,
James and Dewey in America, of Russell and Wittgenstein in Eng–
land, and of the logical empiricists everywhere, has resulted in a kind
of minor intellectual revolution. Scientific minded philosophers have
become self-conscious about their verbal habits and as a consequence
have largely changed their conception of the nature of philosophy.
Even philosophers who think of themselves in "the grand tradition"
betray by their defensive mannerisms a growing uneasiness before the
new movements which assert not merely that metaphysics is useless
but meaningless. And the disquieting thing to those who are opposed
to this new movement is that its proponents actually offer to demon–
strate it.
As
was to be expected this new tendency in philosophy has found
its popularizers. And in the land of easy popularization, some of the
general conclusions are being hawked about in the market-place as
revelations direct from the working-laboratory of philosophic scientists
and scientific philosophers. In fact, so much emotional fervor has
been worked up over semantics that it has led to effusions that are
barely distinguishable from the alleged verbiage it would eliminate.
Now I am convinced that a concern with the nature of mean–
ing, communication and scientific method is of immense importance
for the development of the social sciences; and, more particularly,
that modern semantic theory constitutes a fruitful and much needed
approach to some crucial problems in present day socialist thought.
In indicating why this is so, it is necessary to clear up a number of
misconceptions directly attributable to the more uncritical popularizers
of semantic analysis.
First of all, enthusiasts of semantics have made the most ex–
travagant claims concerning the
effects
of the failure to distinguish
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