16
PARTISAN REVIEW
many traditional positions in philosophy and politics, around which
furious controversy has raged, literally make no sense on any em–
pirical theory of meaning. But it is utterly fantastic to infer from this
that there are
no
genuine issues or problems involved, and that men
have lived, fought and died because of a tropismatic response to non–
sense syllables. For Thurman Arnold, for example, the clash of social
philosophies is merely the juxtaposition of one form of nonsense over
against another. And he does not hesitate to say: "Most of the interest–
ing and picturesque wars have been fought not over practical interests
but over pure metaphysics." Pure metaphysics may be nonsense but I
know of no important conflict in the history of its expression, whether
it be between realism and nominalism, idealism and materialism,
which cannot be significantly associated with conflicts of a more con–
crete social and historical kind. And if this can be shown in the field
of pure metaphysics, and sometimes even in theology, it is the sheerest
dogmatism to maintain that there are no genuine issues and problems
behind the strife of political and social ideologies. To be sure, the
controversy over state's rights, the doctrin_al opposition between demo–
cracy and Kaiserism, and between fascisms of various hues,
may
be
unintelligible if we critically examine the sloganized assertions and the
verbal
behavior of the protagonists of the different sides. Both sides
may be saying the same thing in different language, or talking about
different things which logically have no connection with each other,
or giving vent to intense emotion about terms they cannot for the
world define to themselves or others. In none of these cases can a
genuine controversy be sustained by argument or settled by evidence;
but to imagine that this therefore precludes the existence of a genuine
conflict is extremely naive.*
Perhaps the most widespread and insidious misinterpretation of
modern semantic theory is that all assertions which purport to convey
knowledge about the world or even to make meaningful remarks
about it, must contain only those expressions that are ultimately defin–
able in terms of immediately given sense-data. A variant of this view
demands that the basic concepts of the science of physics, whatever
they may at the moment be, serve as the set of ultimate terms. The
test, then, of whether or not our statements have genuine referents
is
the possibility of eliminating all non-physical (or non-perceptual)
terms and replacing them by their defined equivalents in physical (or
perceptual) terms. The basic or end terms into which all concepts are
*
"The Supreme Court crisis of 193 7," says one writer, "was due chiefly
to the creation by judges and lawyers of verbal monsters in the interpretation of
the constitution." Even the semantically unsophisticated "man on the street" had
truer insight into the nature of the conflict.
