Philosophy

by Bertrand Russell

It is possible to be a little more precise as to the class of effects concerned. A physical object is a centre from which a variety of causal chains emanate. If the object is visible to John Smith, one of the causal chains emanating from it consists first of light-waves (or light-quanta) which travel from the object to John Smith’s eye, then of events in his eye and optic nerve, then of events in his brain, and then (perhaps) of a reaction on his part. Now mnemic effects belong only to events in living tissue; therefore only those effects of the bottle which happen either inside John Smith’s body, or as a result of his reaction to the bottle, can become associated with his hearing the word “bottle”. And even then only certain events can be associated: nourishment happens in the body, yet the word “bottle” cannot nourish. The law of conditioned reflexes is subject to ascertainable limitations, but within its limits it supplies what is wanted to explain the understanding of words. The child becomes excited when he sees the bottle; this is already a conditioned reflex, due to experience that this sight precedes a meal. One further stage in conditioning makes the child grow excited when he hears the word “bottle”. He is then said to “understand” the word.

We may say, then, that a person understands a word which he hears if, so far as the law of conditioned reflexes is applicable, the effects of the word are the same as those of what it is said to “mean”. This of course only applies to words like “bottle”, which denote some concrete object or some class of concrete objects. To understand a word such as “reciprocity” or “republicanism” is a more complicated matter, and cannot be considered until we have dealt with sentences. But before considering sentences we have to examine the circumstances which make us use a word, as opposed to the consequences of hearing it used.

Saying a word is more difficult than using it, except in the case of a few simple sounds which infants make before they know that they are words, such as “ma-ma” and “da-da.” These two are among the many random sounds that all babies make. When a child says “ma-ma” in the presence of his mother by chance she thinks he knows what this noise means, and she shows pleasure in ways that are agreeable to the infant. Gradually, in accordance with Thorndike’s law of effect, he acquires the habit of making this noise in the presence of his mother, because in these circumstances the consequences are pleasant. But it is only a very small number of words that are acquired in this way. The great majority of words are acquired by imitation, combined with the association between thing and word which the parents deliberately establish in the early stages (after the very first stage). It is obvious that using words oneself involves something over and above the association between the sound of the word and its meaning. Dogs understand many words, and infants understand far more than they can say. The infant has to discover that it is possible and profitable to make noises like those which he hears. (This statement must not be taken quite literally, or it would be too intellectualistic.) He would never discover this if he did not make noises at random, without the intention of talking. He then gradually finds that he can make noises like those which he hears, and in general the consequences of doing so are pleasant. Parents are pleased, desired objects can be obtained, and—perhaps most important of all—there is a sense of power in making intended instead of accidental noises. But in this whole process there is nothing essentially different from the learning of mazes by rats. It resembles this form of learning, rather than that of Köhler apes, because no amount of intelligence could enable the child to find out the names of things—as in the case of the mazes, experience is the only possible guide.

When a person knows how to speak, the conditioning proceeds in the opposite direction to that which operates in understanding what others say. The reaction of a person who knows how to speak, when he notices a cat, is naturally to utter the word “cat”; he may not actually do so, but he will have a reaction leading towards this act, even if for some reason the overt act does not take place. It is true that he may utter the word “cat” because he is “thinking” about a cat, not actually seeing one. This, however, as we shall see in a moment, is merely one further stage in the process of conditioning. The use of single words, as opposed to sentences, is wholly explicable, so far as I can see, by the principles which apply to animals in mazes.

Certain philosophers who have a prejudice against analysis contend that the sentence comes first and the single word later. In this connection they always allude to the language of the Patagonians, which their opponents, of course, do not know. We are given to understand that a Patagonian can understand you if you say “I am going to fish in the lake behind the western hill”, but that he cannot understand the word “fish” by itself. (This instance is imaginary, but it represents the sort of thing that is asserted.) Now it may be that Patagonians are peculiar—indeed they must be, or they would not choose to live in Patagonia. But certainly infants in civilized countries do not behave in this way, with the exception of Thomas Carlyle and Lord Macaulay. The former never spoke before the age of three, when, hearing his younger brother cry, he said, “What ails wee Jock?” Lord Macaulay “learned in suffering what he taught in song”, for, having spilt a cup of hot tea over himself at a party, he began his career as a talker by saying to his hostess, after a time, “Thank you, Madam, the agony is abated”. These, however, are facts about biographers, not about the beginnings of speech in infancy. In all children that have been carefully observed, sentences come much later than single words.

Children, at first, are limited as to their power of producing sounds, and also by the paucity of their learned associations. I am sure the reason why “ma-ma” and “da-da” have the meaning they have is that they are sounds which infants make spontaneously at an early age, and are therefore convenient as sounds to which the elders can attach meaning. In the very beginning of speech there is not imitation of grownups, but the discovery that sounds made spontaneously have agreeable results. Imitation comes later, after the child has discovered that sounds can have this quality of “meaning”. The type of skill involved is throughout exactly similar to that involved in learning to play a game or ride a bicycle.

We may sum up this theory of meaning in a simple formula. When through the law of conditioned reflexes, A has come to be a cause of C, we will call A an “associative” cause of C, and C an “associative” effect of A. We shall say that, to a given person, the word A, when he hears it, “means” C, if the associative effects of A are closely similar to those of C; and we shall say that the word A, when he utters it, “means” C, if the utterance of A is an associative effect of C, or of something previously associated with C. To put the matter more concretely, the word “Peter” means a certain person if the associated effects of hearing the word “Peter” are closely similar to those of seeing Peter, and the associative causes of uttering the word “Peter” are occurrences previously associated with Peter. Of course as our experience increases in complexity this simple schema becomes obscured and overlaid, but I think it remains fundamentally true.

There is an interesting and valuable book by Messrs. C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, called The Meaning of Meaning. This book, owing to the fact that it concentrates on the causes of uttering words, not on the effects of hearing them, gives only half the above theory, and that in a somewhat incomplete form. It says that a word and its meaning have the same causes. I should distinguish between active meaning, that of the man uttering the word, and passive meaning, that of the man hearing the word. In active meaning the word is associatively caused by what it means or something associated with this; in passive meaning, the associative effects of the word are approximately the same as those of what it means.

On behaviourist lines, there is no important difference between proper names and what are called “abstract” or “generic” words. A child learns to use the word “cat”, which is general, just as he learns to use the word “Peter”, which is a proper name. But in actual fact “Peter” really covers a number of different occurrences, and is in a sense general. Peter may be near or far, walking or standing or sitting, laughing or frowning. All these produce different stimuli, but the stimuli have enough in common to produce the reaction consisting of the word “Peter”. Thus there is no essential difference, from a behaviourist point of view, between “Peter” and “man”. There are more resemblances between the various stimuli to the word “Peter” than between those to the word “man”, but this is only a difference of degree. We have not names for the fleeting particular occurrences which make up the several appearances of Peter, because they are not of much practical importance; their importance, in fact, is purely theoretic and philosophical. As such, we shall have a good deal to say about them at a later stage. For the present, we notice that there are many occurrences of Peter, and many occurrences of the word “Peter”; each, to the man who sees Peter, is a set of events having certain similarities. More exactly, the occurrences of Peter are causally connected, whereas the occurrences of the word “Peter” are connected by similarity. But this is a distinction which need not concern us yet.

General words such as “man” or “cat” or “triangle” are said to denote “universals”, concerning which, from the time of Plato to the present day, philosophers have never ceased to debate. Whether there are universals, and, if so, in what sense, is a metaphysical question, which need not be raised in connection with the use of language. The only point about universals that needs to be raised at this point is that the correct use of general words is no evidence that a man can think about universals. It has often been supposed that, because we can use a word like “man” correctly, we must be capable of a corresponding “abstract” idea of man, but this is quite a mistake. Some reactions are appropriate to one man, some to another, but all have certain elements in common. If the word “man” produces in us the reactions which are common but no others, we may be said to understand the word “man”. In learning geometry, one acquires the habit of avoiding special interpretations of such a word as “triangle”. We know that, when we have a proposition about triangles in general, we must not think specially of a right-angled triangle or any one kind of triangle. This is essentially the process of learning to associate with the word what is associated with all triangles; when we have learnt this, we understand the word “triangle”. Consequently there is no need to suppose that we ever apprehend universals, although we use general words correctly.