the need for something for which one may love and work has created for thousands of workingmen a personified Socialism: Socialism, a winged goddess with stern eyes and a drawn sword, to be the hope of the world, and the protector of those that suffer.[2]
[Footnote 2: Ibid., p. 93.]
Political leaders and advertising experts, no less than poets, have recognized the importance of the suggestive power of words. Half the power of propaganda lies in its arousing of emotions through suggestion, rather than in its effectiveness as an instrument of intellectual conversion.[3]
[Footnote 3: During the recent Liberty Loan campaigns, for example, when it was of the most crucial practical importance that bonds be bought, the stimuli used were not in the form of reasoned briefs, but rather emotional admonition: "Finish the lob," "Every miser helps the Kaiser," "If you were out in No Man's Land.">[
Language and logic. Even where words are freed from irrelevant emotional associations, they are still far from being adequate instruments of thought. To be effectively representative, words must be clean-cut and definitive; they must stand for one object, quality, or idea. Words, if they are to be genuine instruments of communication, must convey the same intent or meaning to the listener as they do to the speaker. If the significance attached to words is so vague and pulpy that they mean different things to different men, they are no more useful in inquiry and communication than the shock of random noise or the vague stir and flutter of music. Words must have their boundaries fixed, they must be terms, fixed and stable meanings, or they will remain instruments of confusion rather than communication. Francis Bacon stated succinctly the dangers involved in the use of words:
For men imagine that their reason governs words, whilst in fact words react upon the understanding; and this has rendered philosophy and the sciences sophistical and inactive. Words are generally formed in a popular sense, and define things by those broad lines which are most obvious to the vulgar mind; but when a more acute understanding or more diligent observation is anxious to vary these lines, and adapt them more accurately to nature, words oppose it. Hence the great and solemn disputes of learned men terminate frequently in mere disputes about words and names, in regard to which it would be better to proceed more advisedly in the first instance, and to bring such disputes to a regular issue by definitions. Such definitions, however, cannot remedy the evil ... for they consist themselves of words, and these words produce others....
[Footnote 1: Novum Organum. bk. I, aphorism 59.]
If, to take an extreme case, a speaker said the word "chair," and by "chair" his listener understood what we commonly mean by the word "table," communication would be impossible. There must be some common agreement in the words used. In the case of simple terms referring to concrete objects there are continual concrete reminders of the meaning of a word. We do not make mistakes as to the meaning of words such as chair, river, stone, stove, books, forks, knives, because we so continually meet and use them. We are continually checked up, and the meanings we attach to these cannot go far astray.
But the further terms are removed from physical objects, the more opportunity is there for ambiguity. In the realm of politics and morals, as Socrates was fond of pointing out, the chief difficulties and misunderstandings of men have come from the ambiguities of the terms they use. "Justice," "liberty," "democracy," "good," "true," "beautiful," these have been immemorial bones of contention among philosophers. They are accepted, taken for granted, without any question as to their meaning by the individual, until he finds, perhaps, in discussion that his acceptation of the term is entirely different from that of his opponent. Thus many an argument ends with "if that's what you mean, I agree with you." Intellectual inquiry and discussion to be fruitful must have certain definitive terms to start with.
Discussion ... needs to have the ground or basis of its various component statements brought to consciousness in such a way as to define the exact value of each. The Socratic contention is the need compelling the common denominator, the common subject, underlying the diversity of views to exhibit itself. It alone gives a sure standard by which the claims of all assertions may be measured. Until this need is met, discussion is a self-deceiving play with unjudged, unexamined matters, which, confused and shifting, impose themselves upon us.[1]