NEW DIRECTIONS IN MODERN THOUGHT
THE TURN TO INTERPRETATION:
AN INTRODUCTION
by
Daniel Bell
Jean Piaget remarked many years ago, "It is not that chil–
dren can't speak; they try many languages until they find one their
parents can understand." Noam Chomsky might counter by saying
this is not the way children learn-or, one might say, express-lan–
guage; children have the capacity to understand rules, and once an
underlying rule is grasped, children can then speak in tongues they
did not even "know" they had. This is one division in a theory of
mind. Hume made a distinction between matters of fact and matters
of relation, the one empirical, the other logical. For William James,
following this distinction, the world is double-storied in that we seek
to impose a logical order on a factual disorder. But is there "one"
logical order, or many different ones on that same "disorder?" And
may not "logic" itself be a "fuzzy set" rather than a precisely defined
set of inferences? From Leibniz to Carnap, philosophers thought of
creating a "constructed" language, with its own notation and a clearly
defined set of referents, in order to be precise about the relations be–
tween words and things . ("What can "Das Nichts selbst nichtet [the
nothing itself nothings]" mean?" said Carnap contemptuously of
Heidegger.) But constructed languages were found to be too con–
stricting, and philosophers returned to "natural" language as the
ongoing laboratory of human experience.
But in the return to language, does knowledge precede our ex–
perience, and shape or select what we see, as in the conceptual struc–
tures of Kant; or does knowledge follow from experience, so that
truth or meaning has to be based on the correspondence of our
words to the world "out there." In the contemporary effort to thread
one's way through these ancient, clashing rocks, we see the effort to
define speech acts as performances or, more broadly, a surprising
return to pragmatism, yet more finely honed, in which words or
propositions are seen as guides to action, and beliefs are revised in
the light of experience . But if experience, again, is the touchstone of
knowledge, is there any fixity in the world, or are there "many
