322
PARTISAN REVIEW
of values by the participants, a "supra-empirical" unity of mind or
self;
accordingly, intelligible communication can he understood only in te11111
of "transcendental presuppositions." In contrast to the naturalistic account,
his idealistic theory maintains the "primacy of spirit which lives in human
discourse working as a totality."
To the extent that Mr. Urban's "underlying unity of spirit" can
be
interpreted as referring to the cultural context of language (a context
which must itself he specified hehavioristically), his account is undoubt·
edly superior to those views which attempt to explain communication
in
terms of alleged similarities between the sensations of socially isolated
individuals. But he does not countenance such an interpretation, and the
conditions of communication are for him "supra-empirical." In that
case,
however, has he done anything more than to give a fancy name for the
hare
fact
that there is such a thing as communication?
If
conditions can·
not he specified in such a way that empirical evidence becomes relevant
for determining whether those conditions exist, are we not merely saying
the same thing twice over when we assert that a transcendental unity of
self is the condition for communication? To say that
A
can exist
if
and
only
if
B
exists, makes good sense only if there is a possibility of identify–
ing the existence of
B
without having first to establish the existence of
A.
Failure to conform to this simple canon of procedure leaves the gate wide
open for every sort of
deus ex machina
to save us from the embarrassment
of ignorance; and Mr. Urban does not hesitate to drive boldly through
such a breach. It may indeed he a fact that human speech is an "emergent"
in the sense that it cannot
he
explicitly
defined in terms of something that
is not human speech. But such a fact would provide no more reason for
denying that the conditions for its occurrence can he specified in behavior·
istic terms, than does the fact that economic wars or chemical atoms are
not definable in terms of perceptible qualities prevent the occurrence of
wars or electrons from being specified in terms of such qualities.
The second issue Mr. Urban raises is that of the criteria of linguistic
validity or meaningful discourse. There is a formula, made fashionable
by current popularizers of "semantics'' and designated by Mr. Urban as
the criterion of "empirical verifiability," according to which a statement
is meaningless if its referend is incapable of direct observation. This
formula he rightly dismisses as unduly narrow, since on its basis most
statements would have to he declared as without sense. Hs therefore pro·
poses a more suitable criterion, called "verifiability by authentication."
It
is not easy to grasp what Mr. Urban has in mind. He declares, how·
ever, that although we cannot empirically verify such statements as that
a given poem conveys the truth of life, or that an act is a proud one, or
that a fellow-creature is in pain, or that atoms have certain properties, we
can nevertheless "authenticate" such statements as being significant. We
can authenticate them in so far as we can apprehend in some way the
truth of the poem, or emotionally intuit the quality of the proud act, or
mutually acknowledge the pains of others, or recognize the reasonableness
