WHO ARE THE FRIENDS OF SEMANTICS?
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3.
Infinite-valued politics.
This distortion of a seemingly narrow technical discovery has
its political uses. Mr. Chase and his colleagues have drawn some
amazing political inferences from the existence of the n-valued
logics. They seem to think that this logistic invention has estab–
lished the error of asserting an 'either-or' sentence where only two
alternatives are presented. No one would deny that there are
instances where more than two alternatives occur. You frequently
can swim, fly, walk, or roller-skate home. But this does not imply,
as Hayakawa would have us believe, that there are never circum–
stances where only two alternatives face us. Sometimes we either
sink or swim. This confusion makes a very handsome facade for
the well-worn political beliefs of Chase, Hayakawa, et al. The
correctness of these beliefs is not in question here. What interests
us is the attempt to justify them on purely logical grounds and
similarly to reject opposing views. Whether communism and f as–
cism are the only alternatives facing us today, or whether there are
many other alternatives, are matters which can he determined only
by empirical investigation. They cannot he settled by a high–
handed appeal to then-valued calculus. One cannot refute·the so–
called extremists of either the left or right merely because they
claim that there are less than three alternatives. In the case of Mr.
Hayakawa the "multi-valued orientation" is a fancy name for his
inability to say 'yes' or 'no.'
4.
The Emotive and the Scientific.
The distinction between the emotive and scientific aspects of
a symbol is a valid one. It has done good service in discussions of
language and is generally accepted today. However, some of our
semantic friends have converted the distinction into a divorce; also
into a device for fleeing serious controversy. They have assumed
that if a symbol is emotive it is not scientific, and vice-versa. Thur–
man Arnold has made a profession of this confusion. And this is
taken as the last word on the subject in many contemporary
jour~
nals. But perfectly scientific statements like "Streptococcus
infections frequently result in deaths" may have powerful affective
consequences. The purely descriptive word 'fire' when uttered in a
jammed theatre can, as has been celebrated by semanticists, panic
an audience. It is also true, and equally familiar, that two words
