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PARTISAN REVIEW
pirical world, there must correspond some empirical (non-formal)
operation capable of testing the truth of the proposition. It is the
explicit aim of experimental sciences to observe this principle. It is,
however, frequently neglected in philosophy, criticism, and, in some
cases, in social science. According to this principle, the statement,
"This poem is good" must be accompanied, explicitly or implicitly,
by a description of the operations and specific observations whereby
the statement may be confirmed.
If
no such confirming operations are
possible, the statement is without reference to any empricial thing;
in other words, it says nothing about the poem. For this theory of
meaning no statement is inherently empirical. It is
made
empirical by
the indication of the empirical procedure for testing it.
An
expression
which is neither empirical nor formal is meaningless.
Metaphors and Metaphysics
The foregoing remarks are made with special reference to the
formal and empirical sciences. It appears, however, that there is a
large and important class of propositions which make meaningful
statement without being scientific. These are the
fictive
assertions
which form the major content of poetry and literary fiction. Fictive
statements, although in grammatical form they may be identical with
cognitive statements, are nevertheless different from them, for they
are not subject to belief, disbelief or doubt. They are merely
consid–
ered
or noted. While they make assertions about apparently empirical
matters, they are nevertheless fictions, and hence the confirmation
criterion of meaning is inapplicable to them. It is easy to see, however,
that the meaning of fictions is determined by criteria similar to con–
firmation. Within the complex of relations instituted by the premises
of the fiction, fictive statements have determinable consequences.
A
statement which has no such consequences has no meaning in that
fiction. /
Most fictions have not merely fictive meaning. Since many of the
relational complexes within the fiction are similar to the relations
in
the empirical world, some of the statements of the fiction by analogy
acquire cognitive meaning. The "truth content" of literary fiction
rests, therefore, on the logical relation of similarity. The fiction there·
hy becomes a cognitive meaning metaphorically expressed. When
several metaphorical expressions have the same cognitive content,
they are logically equivalent. Such metaphorical statements are not
peculiar to literature or to everyday speech. They are employed quite
frequently in the language of science. Many scientific hypotheses
in–
clude operationally indeterminate elements. For example, the concept
of a perfectly elastic, imponderable ether in Maxwell's theory of the
