Lecture IX
Memory



Memory, which we are to consider to-day, introduces us to

knowledge in one of its forms. The analysis of knowledge will

occupy us until the end of the thirteenth lecture, and is the

most difficult part of our whole enterprise.



I do not myself believe that the analysis of knowledge can be

effected entirely by means of purely external observation, such

as behaviourists employ. I shall discuss this question in later

lectures. In the present lecture I shall attempt the analysis of

memory-knowledge, both as an introduction to the problem of

knowledge in general, and because memory, in some form, is

presupposed in almost all other knowledge. Sensation, we decided,

is not a form of knowledge. It might, however, have been expected

that we should begin our discussion of knowledge with PERCEPTION,

i.e. with that integral experience of things in the environment,

out of which sensation is extracted by psychological analysis.

What is called perception differs from sensation by the fact that

the sensational ingredients bring up habitual associates--images

and expectations of their usual correlates--all of which are

subjectively indistinguishable from the sensation. The FACT of

past experience is essential in producing this filling-out of

sensation, but not the RECOLLECTION of past experience. The

non-sensational elements in perception can be wholly explained as

the result of habit, produced by frequent correlations.

Perception, according to our definition in Lecture VII, is no

more a form of knowledge than sensation is, except in so far as

it involves expectations. The purely psychological problems which

it raises are not very difficult, though they have sometimes been

rendered artificially obscure by unwillingness to admit the

fallibility of the non-sensational elements of perception. On the

other hand, memory raises many difficult and very important

problems, which it is necessary to consider at the first possible

moment.



One reason for treating memory at this early stage is that it

seems to be involved in the fact that images are recognized as

"copies" of past sensible experience. In the preceding lecture I

alluded to Hume's principle "that all our simple ideas in their

first appearance are derived from simple impressions, which are

correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent." Whether

or not this principle is liable to exceptions, everyone would

agree that is has a broad measure of truth, though the word

"exactly" might seem an overstatement, and it might seem more

correct to say that ideas APPROXIMATELY represent impressions.

Such modifications of Hume's principle, however, do not affect

the problem which I wish to present for your consideration,

namely: Why do we believe that images are, sometimes or always,

approximately or exactly, copies of sensations? What sort of

evidence is there? And what sort of evidence is logically

possible? The difficulty of this question arises through the fact

that the sensation which an image is supposed to copy is in the

past when the image exists, and can therefore only be known by

memory, while, on the other hand, memory of past sensations seems

only possible by means of present images. How, then, are we to

find any way of comparing the present image and the past

sensation? The problem is just as acute if we say that images

differ from their prototypes as if we say that they resemble

them; it is the very possibility of comparison that is hard to

understand.* We think we can know that they are alike or

different, but we cannot bring them together in one experience

and compare them. To deal with this problem, we must have a

theory of memory. In this way the whole status of images as

"copies" is bound up with the analysis of memory.



* How, for example, can we obtain such knowledge as the

following: "If we look at, say, a red nose and perceive it, and

after a little while ekphore, its memory-image, we note

immediately how unlike, in its likeness, this memory-image is to

the original perception" (A. Wohlgemuth, "On the Feelings and

their Neural Correlate with an Examination of the Nature of

Pain," "Journal of Psychology," vol. viii, part iv, June, 1917).





In investigating memory-beliefs, there are certain points which

must be borne in mind. In the first place, everything

constituting a memory-belief is happening now, not in that past

time to which the belief is said to refer. It is not logically

necessary to the existence of a memory-belief that the event

remembered should have occurred, or even that the past should

have existed at all. There is no logical impossibility in the

hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago,

exactly as it then was, with a population that "remembered" a

wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection

between events at different times; therefore nothing that is

happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the

hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago. Hence the

occurrences which are CALLED knowledge of the past are logically

independent of the past; they are wholly analysable into present

contents, which might, theoretically, be just what they are even

if no past had existed.



I am not suggesting that the non-existence of the past should be

entertained as a serious hypothesis. Like all sceptical

hypotheses, it is logically tenable, but uninteresting. All that

I am doing is to use its logical tenability as a help in the

analysis of what occurs when we remember.



In the second place, images without beliefs are insufficient to

constitute memory; and habits are still more insufficient. The

behaviourist, who attempts to make psychology a record of

behaviour, has to trust his memory in making the record. "Habit"

is a concept involving the occurrence of similar events at

different times; if the behaviourist feels confident that there

is such a phenomenon as habit, that can only be because he trusts

his memory, when it assures him that there have been other times.

And the same applies to images. If we are to know as it is

supposed we do--that images are "copies," accurate or inaccurate,

of past events, something more than the mere occurrence of images

must go to constitute this knowledge. For their mere occurrence,

by itself, would not suggest any connection with anything that

had happened before.



Can we constitute memory out of images together with suitable

beliefs? We may take it that memory-images, when they occur in

true memory, are (a) known to be copies, (b) sometimes known to

be imperfect copies (cf. footnote on previous page). How is it

possible to know that a memory-image is an imperfect copy,

without having a more accurate copy by which to replace it? This

would SEEM to suggest that we have a way of knowing the past

which is independent of images, by means of which we can

criticize image-memories. But I do not think such an inference is

warranted.



What results, formally, from our knowledge of the past through

images of which we recognize the inaccuracy, is that such images

must have two characteristics by which we can arrange them in two

series, of which one corresponds to the more or less remote

period in the past to which they refer, and the other to our

greater or less confidence in their accuracy. We will take the

second of these points first.



Our confidence or lack of confidence in the accuracy of a

memory-image must, in fundamental cases, be based upon a

characteristic of the image itself, since we cannot evoke the

past bodily and compare it with the present image. It might be

suggested that vagueness is the required characteristic, but I do

not think this is the case. We sometimes have images that are by

no means peculiarly vague, which yet we do not trust--for

example, under the influence of fatigue we may see a friend's

face vividly and clearly, but horribly distorted. In such a case

we distrust our image in spite of its being unusually clear. I

think the characteristic by which we distinguish the images we

trust is the feeling of FAMILIARITY that accompanies them. Some

images, like some sensations, feel very familiar, while others

feel strange. Familiarity is a feeling capable of degrees. In an

image of a well-known face, for example, some parts may feel more

familiar than others; when this happens, we have more belief in

the accuracy of the familiar parts than in that of the unfamiliar

parts. I think it is by this means that we become critical of

images, not by some imageless memory with which we compare them.

I shall return to the consideration of familiarity shortly.



I come now to the other characteristic which memory-images must

have in order to account for our knowledge of the past. They must

have some characteristic which makes us regard them as referring

to more or less remote portions of the past. That is to say if we

suppose that A is the event remembered, B the remembering, and t

the interval of time between A and B, there must be some

characteristic of B which is capable of degrees, and which, in

accurately dated memories, varies as t varies. It may increase as

t increases, or diminish as t increases. The question which of

these occurs is not of any importance for the theoretic

serviceability of the characteristic in question.



In actual fact, there are doubtless various factors that concur

in giving us the feeling of greater or less remoteness in some

remembered event. There may be a specific feeling which could be

called the feeling of "pastness," especially where immediate

memory is concerned. But apart from this, there are other marks.

One of these is context. A recent memory has, usually, more

context than a more distant one. When a remembered event has a

remembered context, this may occur in two ways, either (a) by

successive images in the same order as their prototypes, or (b)

by remembering a whole process simultaneously, in the same way in

which a present process may be apprehended, through akoluthic

sensations which, by fading, acquire the mark of just-pastness in

an increasing degree as they fade, and are thus placed in a

series while all sensibly present. It will be context in this

second sense, more specially, that will give us a sense of the

nearness or remoteness of a remembered event.



There is, of course, a difference between knowing the temporal

relation of a remembered event to the present, and knowing the

time-order of two remembered events. Very often our knowledge of

the temporal relation of a remembered event to the present is

inferred from its temporal relations to other remembered events.

It would seem that only rather recent events can be placed at all

accurately by means of feelings giving their temporal relation to

the present, but it is clear that such feelings must play an

essential part in the process of dating remembered events.



We may say, then, that images are regarded by us as more or less

accurate copies of past occurrences because they come to us with

two sorts of feelings: (1) Those that may be called feelings of

familiarity; (2) those that may be collected together as feelings

giving a sense of pastness. The first lead us to trust our

memories, the second to assign places to them in the time-order.



We have now to analyse the memory-belief, as opposed to the

characteristics of images which lead us to base memory-beliefs

upon them.



If we had retained the "subject" or "act" in knowledge, the whole

problem of memory would have been comparatively simple. We could

then have said that remembering is a direct relation between the

present act or subject and the past occurrence remembered: the

act of remembering is present, though its object is past. But the

rejection of the subject renders some more complicated theory

necessary. Remembering has to be a present occurrence in some way

resembling, or related to, what is remembered. And it is

difficult to find any ground, except a pragmatic one, for

supposing that memory is not sheer delusion, if, as seems to be

the case, there is not, apart from memory, any way of

ascertaining that there really was a past occurrence having the

required relation to our present remembering. What, if we

followed Meinong's terminology, we should call the "object" in

memory, i.e. the past event which we are said to be remembering,

is unpleasantly remote from the "content," i.e. the present

mental occurrence in remembering. There is an awkward gulf

between the two, which raises difficulties for the theory of

knowledge. But we must not falsify observation to avoid

theoretical difficulties. For the present, therefore, let us

forget these problems, and try to discover what actually occurs

in memory.



Some points may be taken as fixed, and such as any theory of

memory must arrive at. In this case, as in most others, what may

be taken as certain in advance is rather vague. The study of any

topic is like the continued observation of an object which is

approaching us along a road: what is certain to begin with is the

quite vague knowledge that there is SOME object on the road. If

you attempt to be less vague, and to assert that the object is an

elephant, or a man, or a mad dog, you run a risk of error; but

the purpose of continued observation is to enable you to arrive

at such more precise knowledge. In like manner, in the study of

memory, the certainties with which you begin are very vague, and

the more precise propositions at which you try to arrive are less

certain than the hazy data from which you set out. Nevertheless,

in spite of the risk of error, precision is the goal at which we

must aim.



The first of our vague but indubitable data is that there is

knowledge of the past. We do not yet know with any precision what

we mean by "knowledge," and we must admit that in any given

instance our memory may be at fault. Nevertheless, whatever a

sceptic might urge in theory, we cannot practically doubt that we

got up this morning, that we did various things yesterday, that a

great war has been taking place, and so on. How far our knowledge

of the past is due to memory, and how far to other sources, is of

course a matter to be investigated, but there can be no doubt

that memory forms an indispensable part of our knowledge of the

past.



The second datum is that we certainly have more capacity for

knowing the past than for knowing the future. We know some things

about the future, for example what eclipses there will be; but

this knowledge is a matter of elaborate calculation and

inference, whereas some of our knowledge of the past comes to us

without effort, in the same sort of immediate way in which we

acquire knowledge of occurrences in our present environment. We

might provisionally, though perhaps not quite correctly, define

"memory" as that way of knowing about the past which has no

analogue in our knowledge of the future; such a definition would

at least serve to mark the problem with which we are concerned,

though some expectations may deserve to rank with memory as

regards immediacy.



A third point, perhaps not quite so certain as our previous two,

is that the truth of memory cannot be wholly practical, as

pragmatists wish all truth to be. It seems clear that some of the

things I remember are trivial and without any visible importance

for the future, but that my memory is true (or false) in virtue

of a past event, not in virtue of any future consequences of my

belief. The definition of truth as the correspondence between

beliefs and facts seems peculiarly evident in the case of memory,

as against not only the pragmatist definition but also the

idealist definition by means of coherence. These considerations,

however, are taking us away from psychology, to which we must now

return.



It is important not to confuse the two forms of memory which

Bergson distinguishes in the second chapter of his "Matter and

Memory," namely the sort that consists of habit, and the sort

that consists of independent recollection. He gives the instance

of learning a lesson by heart: when I know it by heart I am said

to "remember" it, but this merely means that I have acquired

certain habits; on the other hand, my recollection of (say) the

second time I read the lesson while I was learning it is the

recollection of a unique event, which occurred only once. The

recollection of a unique event cannot, so Bergson contends, be

wholly constituted by habit, and is in fact something radically

different from the memory which is habit. The recollection alone

is true memory. This distinction is vital to the understanding of

memory. But it is not so easy to carry out in practice as it is

to draw in theory. Habit is a very intrusive feature of our

mental life, and is often present where at first sight it seems

not to be. There is, for example, a habit of remembering a unique

event. When we have once described the event, the words we have

used easily become habitual. We may even have used words to

describe it to ourselves while it was happening; in that case,

the habit of these words may fulfil the function of Bergson's

true memory, while in reality it is nothing but habit-memory. A

gramophone, by the help of suitable records, might relate to us

the incidents of its past; and people are not so different from

gramophones as they like to believe.



In spite, however, of a difficulty in distinguishing the two

forms of memory in practice, there can be no doubt that both

forms exist. I can set to work now to remember things I never

remembered before, such as what I had to eat for breakfast this

morning, and it can hardly be wholly habit that enables me to do

this. It is this sort of occurrence that constitutes the essence

of memory Until we have analysed what happens in such a case as

this, we have not succeeded in understanding memory.



The sort of memory with which we are here concerned is the sort

which is a form of knowledge. Whether knowledge itself is

reducible to habit is a question to which I shall return in a

later lecture; for the present I am only anxious to point out

that, whatever the true analysis of knowledge may be, knowledge

of past occurrences is not proved by behaviour which is due to

past experience. The fact that a man can recite a poem does not

show that he remembers any previous occasion on which he has

recited or read it. Similarly, the performances of animals in

getting out of cages or mazes to which they are accustomed do not

prove that they remember having been in the same situation

before. Arguments in favour of (for example) memory in plants are

only arguments in favour of habit-memory, not of knowledge-

memory. Samuel Butler's arguments in favour of the view that an

animal remembers something of the lives of its ancestors* are,

when examined, only arguments in favour of habit-memory. Semon's

two books, mentioned in an earlier lecture, do not touch

knowledge-memory at all closely. They give laws according to

which images of past occurrences come into our minds, but do not

discuss our belief that these images refer to past occurrences,

which is what constitutes knowledge-memory. It is this that is of

interest to theory of knowledge. I shall speak of it as "true"

memory, to distinguish it from mere habit acquired through past

experience. Before considering true memory, it will be well to

consider two things which are on the way towards memory, namely

the feeling of familiarity and recognition.



* See his "Life and Habit and Unconscious Memory."





We often feel that something in our sensible environment is

familiar, without having any definite recollection of previous

occasions on which we have seen it. We have this feeling normally

in places where we have often been before--at home, or in

well-known streets. Most people and animals find it essential to

their happiness to spend a good deal of their time in familiar

surroundings, which are especially comforting when any danger

threatens. The feeling of familiarity has all sorts of degrees,

down to the stage where we dimly feel that we have seen a person

before. It is by no means always reliable; almost everybody has

at some time experienced the well-known illusion that all that is

happening now happened before at some time. There are occasions

when familiarity does not attach itself to any definite object,

when there is merely a vague feeling that SOMETHING is familiar.

This is illustrated by Turgenev's "Smoke," where the hero is long

puzzled by a haunting sense that something in his present is

recalling something in his past, and at last traces it to the

smell of heliotrope. Whenever the sense of familiarity occurs

without a definite object, it leads us to search the environment

until we are satisfied that we have found the appropriate object,

which leads us to the judgment: "THIS is familiar." I think we

may regard familiarity as a definite feeling, capable of existing

without an object, but normally standing in a specific relation

to some feature of the environment, the relation being that which

we express in words by saying that the feature in question is

familiar. The judgment that what is familiar has been experienced

before is a product of reflection, and is no part of the feeling

of familiarity, such as a horse may be supposed to have when he

returns to his stable. Thus no knowledge as to the past is to be

derived from the feeling of familiarity alone.



A further stage is RECOGNITION. This may be taken in two senses,

the first when a thing not merely feels familiar, but we know it

is such-and-such. We recognize our friend Jones, we know cats and

dogs when we see them, and so on. Here we have a definite

influence of past experience, but not necessarily any actual

knowledge of the past. When we see a cat, we know it is a cat

because of previous cats we have seen, but we do not, as a rule,

recollect at the moment any particular occasion when we have seen

a cat. Recognition in this sense does not necessarily involve

more than a habit of association: the kind of object we are

seeing at the moment is associated with the word "cat," or with

an auditory image of purring, or whatever other characteristic we

may happen to recognize in. the cat of the moment. We are, of

course, in fact able to judge, when we recognize an object, that

we have seen it before, but this judgment is something over and

above recognition in this first sense, and may very probably be

impossible to animals that nevertheless have the experience of

recognition in this first sense of the word.



There is, however, another sense of the word, in which we mean by

recognition, not knowing the name of a thing or some other

property of it, but knowing that we have seen it before In this

sense recognition does involve knowledge about the Fast. This

knowledge is memory in one sense, though in another it is not. It

does not involve a definite memory of a definite past event, but

only the knowledge that something happening now is similar to

something that happened before. It differs from the sense of

familiarity by being cognitive; it is a belief or judgment, which

the sense of familiarity is not. I do not wish to undertake the

analysis of belief at present, since it will be the subject of

the twelfth lecture; for the present I merely wish to emphasize

the fact that recognition, in our second sense, consists in a

belief, which we may express approximately in the words: "This

has existed before."



There are, however, several points in which such an account of

recognition is inadequate. To begin with, it might seem at first

sight more correct to define recognition as "I have seen this

before" than as "this has existed before." We recognize a thing

(it may be urged) as having been in our experience before,

whatever that may mean; we do not recognize it as merely having

been in the world before. I am not sure that there is anything

substantial in this point. The definition of "my experience" is

difficult; broadly speaking, it is everything that is connected

with what I am experiencing now by certain links, of which the

various forms of memory are among the most important. Thus, if I

recognize a thing, the occasion of its previous existence in

virtue of which I recognize it forms part of "my experience" by

DEFINITION: recognition will be one of the marks by which my

experience is singled out from the rest of the world. Of course,

the words "this has existed before" are a very inadequate

translation of what actually happens when we form a judgment of

recognition, but that is unavoidable: words are framed to express

a level of thought which is by no means primitive, and are quite

incapable of expressing such an elementary occurrence as

recognition. I shall return to what is virtually the same

question in connection with true memory, which raises exactly

similar problems.



A second point is that, when we recognize something, it was not

in fact the very same thing, but only something similar, that we

experienced on a former occasion. Suppose the object in question

is a friend's face. A person's face is always changing, and is

not exactly the same on any two occasions. Common sense treats it

as one face with varying expressions; but the varying expressions

actually exist, each at its proper time, while the one face is

merely a logical construction. We regard two objects as the same,

for common-sense purposes, when the reaction they call for is

practically the same. Two visual appearances, to both of which it

is appropriate to say: "Hullo, Jones!" are treated as appearances

of one identical object, namely Jones. The name "Jones" is

applicable to both, and it is only reflection that shows us that

many diverse particulars are collected together to form the

meaning of the name "Jones." What we see on any one occasion is

not the whole series of particulars that make up Jones, but only

one of them (or a few in quick succession). On another occasion

we see another member of the series, but it is sufficiently

similar to count as the same from the standpoint of common sense.

Accordingly, when we judge "I have seen THIS before," we judge

falsely if "this" is taken as applying to the actual constituent

of the world that we are seeing at the moment. The word "this"

must be interpreted vaguely so as to include anything

sufficiently like what we are seeing at the moment. Here, again,

we shall find a similar point as regards true memory; and in

connection with true memory we will consider the point again. It

is sometimes suggested, by those who favour behaviourist views,

that recognition consists in behaving in the same way when a

stimulus is repeated as we behaved on the first occasion when it

occurred. This seems to be the exact opposite of the truth. The

essence of recognition is in the DIFFERENCE between a repeated

stimulus and a new one. On the first occasion there is no

recognition; on the second occasion there is. In fact,

recognition is another instance of the peculiarity of causal laws

in psychology, namely, that the causal unit is not a single

event, but two or more events Habit is the great instance of

this, but recognition is another. A stimulus occurring once has a

certain effect; occurring twice, it has the further effect of

recognition. Thus the phenomenon of recognition has as its cause

the two occasions when the stimulus has occurred; either alone is

insufficient. This complexity of causes in psychology might be

connected with Bergson's arguments against repetition in the

mental world. It does not prove that there are no causal laws in

psychology, as Bergson suggests; but it does prove that the

causal laws of psychology are Prima facie very different from

those of physics. On the possibility of explaining away the

difference as due to the peculiarities of nervous tissue I have

spoken before, but this possibility must not be forgotten if we

are tempted to draw unwarranted metaphysical deductions.



True memory, which we must now endeavour to understand, consists

of knowledge of past events, but not of all such knowledge. Some

knowledge of past events, for example what we learn through

reading history, is on a par with the knowledge we can acquire

concerning the future: it is obtained by inference, not (so to

speak) spontaneously. There is a similar distinction in our

knowledge of the present: some of it is obtained through the

senses, some in more indirect ways. I know that there are at this

moment a number of people in the streets of New York, but I do

not know this in the immediate way in which I know of the people

whom I see by looking out of my window. It is not easy to state

precisely wherein the difference between these two sorts of

knowledge consists, but it is easy to feel the difference. For

the moment, I shall not stop to analyse it, but shall content

myself with saying that, in this respect, memory resembles the

knowledge derived from the senses. It is immediate, not inferred,

not abstract; it differs from perception mainly by being referred

to the past.



In regard to memory, as throughout the analysis of knowledge,

there are two very distinct problems, namely (1) as to the nature

of the present occurrence in knowing; (2) as to the relation of

this occurrence to what is known. When we remember, the knowing

is now, while what is known is in the past. Our two questions

are, in the case of memory



(1) What is the present occurrence when we remember?



(2) What is the relation of this present occurrence to the past

event which is remembered?



Of these two questions, only the first concerns the psychologist;

the second belongs to theory of knowledge. At the same time, if

we accept the vague datum with which we began, to the effect

that, in some sense, there is knowledge of the past, we shall

have to find, if we can, such an account of the present

occurrence in remembering as will make it not impossible for

remembering to give us knowledge of the past. For the present,

however, we shall do well to forget the problems concerning

theory of knowledge, and concentrate upon the purely

psychological problem of memory.



Between memory-image and sensation there is an intermediate

experience concerning the immediate past. For example, a sound

that we have just heard is present to us in a way which differs

both from the sensation while we are hearing the sound and from

the memory-image of something heard days or weeks ago. James

states that it is this way of apprehending the immediate past

that is "the ORIGINAL of our experience of pastness, from whence

we get the meaning of the term"("Psychology," i, p. 604).

Everyone knows the experience of noticing (say) that the clock

HAS BEEN striking, when we did not notice it while it was

striking. And when we hear a remark spoken, we are conscious of

the earlier words while the later ones are being uttered, and

this retention feels different from recollection of something

definitely past. A sensation fades gradually, passing by

continuous gradations to the status of an image. This retention

of the immediate past in a condition intermediate between

sensation and image may be called "immediate memory." Everything

belonging to it is included with sensation in what is called the

"specious present." The specious present includes elements at all

stages on the journey from sensation to image. It is this fact

that enables us to apprehend such things as movements, or the

order of the words in a spoken sentence. Succession can occur

within the specious present, of which we can distinguish some

parts as earlier and others as later. It is to be supposed that

the earliest parts are those that have faded most from their

original force, while the latest parts are those that retain

their full sensational character. At the beginning of a stimulus

we have a sensation; then a gradual transition; and at the end an

image. Sensations while they are fading are called "akoluthic"

sensations.* When the process of fading is completed (which

happens very quickly), we arrive at the image, which is capable

of being revived on subsequent occasions with very little change.

True memory, as opposed to "immediate memory," applies only to

events sufficiently distant to have come to an end of the period

of fading. Such events, if they are represented by anything

present, can only be represented by images, not by those

intermediate stages, between sensations and images, which occur

during the period of fading.



* See Semon, "Die mnemischen Empfindungen," chap. vi.





Immediate memory is important both because it provides experience

of succession, and because it bridges the gulf between sensations

and the images which are their copies. But it is now time to

resume the consideration of true memory.



Suppose you ask me what I ate for breakfast this morning.

Suppose, further, that I have not thought about my breakfast in

the meantime, and that I did not, while I was eating it, put into

words what it consisted of. In this case my recollection will be

true memory, not habit-memory. The process of remembering will

consist of calling up images of my breakfast, which will come to

me with a feeling of belief such as distinguishes memory-images

from mere imagination-images. Or sometimes words may come without

the intermediary of images; but in this case equally the feeling

of belief is essential.



Let us omit from our consideration, for the present, the memories

in which words replace images. These are always, I think, really

habit-memories, the memories that use images being the typical

true memories.



Memory-images and imagination-images do not differ in their

intrinsic qualities, so far as we can discover. They differ by

the fact that the images that constitute memories, unlike those

that constitute imagination, are accompanied by a feeling of

belief which may be expressed in the words "this happened." The

mere occurrence of images, without this feeling of belief,

constitutes imagination; it is the element of belief that is the

distinctive thing in memory.*



* For belief of a specific kind, cf. Dorothy Wrinch "On the

Nature of Memory," "Mind," January, 1920.





There are, if I am not mistaken, at least three different kinds

of belief-feeling, which we may call respectively memory,

expectation and bare assent. In what I call bare assent, there is

no time-element in the feeling of belief, though there may be in

the content of what is believed. If I believe that Caesar landed

in Britain in B.C. 55, the time-determination lies, not in the

feeling of belief, but in what is believed. I do not remember the

occurrence, but have the same feeling towards it as towards the

announcement of an eclipse next year. But when I have seen a

flash of lightning and am waiting for the thunder, I have a

belief-feeling analogous to memory, except that it refers to the

future: I have an image of thunder, combined with a feeling which

may be expressed in the words: "this will happen." So, in memory,

the pastness lies, not in the content of what is believed, but in

the nature of the belief-feeling. I might have just the same

images and expect their realization; I might entertain them

without any belief, as in reading a novel; or I might entertain

them together with a time-determination, and give bare assent, as

in reading history. I shall return to this subject in a later

lecture, when we come to the analysis of belief. For the present,

I wish to make it clear that a certain special kind of belief is

the distinctive characteristic of memory.





The problem as to whether memory can be explained as habit or

association requires to be considered afresh in connection with

the causes of our remembering something. Let us take again the

case of my being asked what I had for breakfast this morning. In

this case the question leads to my setting to work to recollect.

It is a little strange that the question should instruct me as to

what it is that I am to recall. This has to do with understanding

words, which will be the topic of the next lecture; but something

must be said about it now. Our understanding of the words

"breakfast this morning" is a habit, in spite of the fact that on

each fresh day they point to a different occasion. "This morning"

does not, whenever it is used, mean the same thing, as "John" or

"St. Paul's" does; it means a different period of time on each

different day. It follows that the habit which constitutes our

understanding of the words "this morning" is not the habit of

associating the words with a fixed object, but the habit of

associating them with something having a fixed time-relation to

our present. This morning has, to-day, the same time-relation to

my present that yesterday morning had yesterday. In order to

understand the phrase "this morning" it is necessary that we

should have a way of feeling time-intervals, and that this

feeling should give what is constant in the meaning of the words

"this morning." This appreciation of time-intervals is, however,

obviously a product of memory, not a presupposition of it. It

will be better, therefore, if we wish to analyse the causation of

memory by something not presupposing memory, to take some other

instance than that of a question about "this morning."



Let us take the case of coming into a familiar room where

something has been changed--say a new picture hung on the wall.

We may at first have only a sense that SOMETHING is unfamiliar,

but presently we shall remember, and say "that picture was not on

the wall before." In order to make the case definite, we will

suppose that we were only in the room on one former occasion. In

this case it seems fairly clear what happens. The other objects

in the room are associated, through the former occasion, with a

blank space of wall where now there is a picture. They call up an

image of a blank wall, which clashes with perception of the

picture. The image is associated with the belief-feeling which we

found to be distinctive of memory, since it can neither be

abolished nor harmonized with perception. If the room had

remained unchanged, we might have had only the feeling of

familiarity without the definite remembering; it is the change

that drives us from the present to memory of the past.



We may generalize this instance so as to cover the causes of many

memories. Some present feature of the environment is associated,

through past experiences, with something now absent; this absent

something comes before us as an image, and is contrasted with

present sensation. In cases of this sort, habit (or association)

explains why the present feature of the environment brings up the

memory-image, but it does not explain the memory-belief. Perhaps

a more complete analysis could explain the memory-belief also on

lines of association and habit, but the causes of beliefs are

obscure, and we cannot investigate them yet. For the present we

must content ourselves with the fact that the memory-image can be

explained by habit. As regards the memory-belief, we must, at

least provisionally, accept Bergson's view that it cannot be

brought under the head of habit, at any rate when it first

occurs, i.e. when we remember something we never remembered

before.



We must now consider somewhat more closely the content of a

memory-belief. The memory-belief confers upon the memory-image

something which we may call "meaning;" it makes us feel that the

image points to an object which existed in the past. In order to

deal with this topic we must consider the verbal expression of

the memory-belief. We might be tempted to put the memory-belief

into the words: "Something like this image occurred." But such

words would be very far from an accurate translation of the

simplest kind of memory-belief. "Something like this image" is a

very complicated conception. In the simplest kind of memory we

are not aware of the difference between an image and the

sensation which it copies, which may be called its "prototype."

When the image is before us, we judge rather "this occurred." The

image is not distinguished from the object which existed in the

past: the word "this" covers both, and enables us to have a

memory-belief which does not introduce the complicated notion

"something like this."



It might be objected that, if we judge "this occurred" when in

fact "this" is a present image, we judge falsely, and the

memory-belief, so interpreted, becomes deceptive. This, however,

would be a mistake, produced by attempting to give to words a

precision which they do not possess when used by unsophisticated

people. It is true that the image is not absolutely identical

with its prototype, and if the word "this" meant the image to the

exclusion of everything else, the judgment "this occurred" would

be false. But identity is a precise conception, and no word, in

ordinary speech, stands for anything precise. Ordinary speech

does not distinguish between identity and close similarity. A

word always applies, not only to one particular, but to a group

of associated particulars, which are not recognized as multiple

in common thought or speech. Thus primitive memory, when it

judges that "this occurred," is vague, but not false.

Vague identity, which is really close similarity, has been a

source of many of the confusions by which philosophy has lived.

Of a vague subject, such as a "this," which is both an image and

its prototype, contradictory predicates are true simultaneously:

this existed and does not exist, since it is a thing remembered,

but also this exists and did not exist, since it is a present

image. Hence Bergson's interpenetration of the present by the

past, Hegelian continuity and identity-in-diversity, and a host

of other notions which are thought to be profound because they

are obscure and confused. The contradictions resulting from

confounding image and prototype in memory force us to precision.

But when we become precise, our remembering becomes different

from that of ordinary life, and if we forget this we shall go

wrong in the analysis of ordinary memory.



Vagueness and accuracy are important notions, which it is very

necessary to understand. Both are a matter of degree. All

thinking is vague to some extent, and complete accuracy is a

theoretical ideal not practically attainable. To understand what

is meant by accuracy, it will be well to consider first

instruments of measurement, such as a balance or a thermometer.

These are said to be accurate when they give different results

for very slightly different stimuli.* A clinical thermometer is

accurate when it enables us to detect very slight differences in

the temperature of the blood. We may say generally that an

instrument is accurate in proportion as it reacts differently to

very slightly different stimuli. When a small difference of

stimulus produces a great difference of reaction, the instrument

is accurate; in the contrary case it is not.



* This is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. The subject

of accuracy and vagueness will be considered again in Lecture

XIII.





Exactly the same thing applies in defining accuracy of thought or

perception. A musician will respond differently to very minute

differences in playing which would be quite imperceptible to the

ordinary mortal. A negro can see the difference between one negro

and another one is his friend, another his enemy. But to us such

different responses are impossible: we can merely apply the word

"negro" indiscriminately. Accuracy of response in regard to any

particular kind of stimulus is improved by practice.

Understanding a language is a case in point. Few Frenchmen can

hear any difference between the sounds "hall" and "hole," which

produce quite different impressions upon us. The two statements

"the hall is full of water" and "the hole is full of water" call

for different responses, and a hearing which cannot distinguish

between them is inaccurate or vague in this respect.



Precision and vagueness in thought, as in perception, depend upon

the degree of difference between responses to more or less

similar stimuli. In the case of thought, the response does not

follow immediately upon the sensational stimulus, but that makes

no difference as regards our present question. Thus to revert to

memory: A memory is "vague" when it is appropriate to many

different occurrences: for instance, "I met a man" is vague,

since any man would verify it. A memory is "precise" when the

occurrences that would verify it are narrowly circumscribed: for

instance, "I met Jones" is precise as compared to "I met a man."

A memory is "accurate" when it is both precise and true, i.e. in

the above instance, if it was Jones I met. It is precise even if

it is false, provided some very definite occurrence would have

been required to make it true.



It follows from what has been said that a vague thought has more

likelihood of being true than a precise one. To try and hit an

object with a vague thought is like trying to hit the bull's eye

with a lump of putty: when the putty reaches the target, it

flattens out all over it, and probably covers the bull's eye

along with the rest. To try and hit an object with a precise

thought is like trying to hit the bull's eye with a bullet. The

advantage of the precise thought is that it distinguishes between

the bull's eye and the rest of the target. For example, if the

whole target is represented by the fungus family and the bull's

eye by mushrooms, a vague thought which can only hit the target

as a whole is not much use from a culinary point of view. And

when I merely remember that I met a man, my memory may be very

inadequate to my practical requirements, since it may make a

great difference whether I met Brown or Jones. The memory "I met

Jones" is relatively precise. It is accurate if I met Jones,

inaccurate if I met Brown, but precise in either case as against

the mere recollection that I met a man.



The distinction between accuracy and precision is however, not

fundamental. We may omit precision from out thoughts and confine

ourselves to the distinction between accuracy and vagueness. We

may then set up the following definitions:



An instrument is "reliable" with respect to a given set of

stimuli when to stimuli which are not relevantly different it

gives always responses which are not relevantly different.



An instrument is a "measure" of a set of stimuli which are

serially ordered when its responses, in all cases where they are

relevantly different, are arranged in a series in the same order.



The "degree of accuracy" of an instrument which is a reliable

measurer is the ratio of the difference of response to the

difference of stimulus in cases where the difference of stimulus

is small.* That is to say, if a small difference of stimulus

produces a great difference of response, the instrument is very

accurate; in the contrary case, very inaccurate.



* Strictly speaking, the limit of this, i.e. the derivative of

the response with respect to the stimulus.





A mental response is called "vague" in proportion to its lack of

accuracy, or rather precision.



These definitions will be found useful, not only in the case of

memory, but in almost all questions concerned with knowledge.



It should be observed that vague beliefs, so far from being

necessarily false, have a better chance of truth than precise

ones, though their truth is less valuable than that of precise

beliefs, since they do not distinguish between occurrences which

may differ in important ways.



The whole of the above discussion of vagueness and accuracy was

occasioned by the attempt to interpret the word "this" when we

judge in verbal memory that "this occurred." The word "this," in

such a judgment, is a vague word, equally applicable to the

present memory-image and to the past occurrence which is its

prototype. A vague word is not to be identified with a general

word, though in practice the distinction may often be blurred. A

word is general when it is understood to be applicable to a

number of different objects in virtue of some common property. A

word is vague when it is in fact applicable to a number of

different objects because, in virtue of some common property,

they have not appeared, to the person using the word, to be

distinct. I emphatically do not mean that he has judged them to

be identical, but merely that he has made the same response to

them all and has not judged them to be different. We may compare

a vague word to a jelly and a general word to a heap of shot.

Vague words precede judgments of identity and difference; both

general and particular words are subsequent to such judgments.

The word "this" in the primitive memory-belief is a vague word,

not a general word; it covers both the image and its prototype

because the two are not distinguished.*



* On the vague and the general cf. Ribot: "Evolution of General

Ideas," Open Court Co., 1899, p. 32: "The sole permissible

formula is this: Intelligence progresses from the indefinite to

the definite. If 'indefinite' is taken as synonymous with

general, it may be said that the particular does not appear at

the outset, but neither does the general in any exact sense: the

vague would be more appropriate. In other words, no sooner has

the intellect progressed beyond the moment of perception and of

its immediate reproduction in memory, than the generic image

makes its appearance, i.e. a state intermediate between the

particular and the general, participating in the nature of the

one and of the other--a confused simplification."





But we have not yet finished our analysis of the memory-belief.

The tense in the belief that "this occurred" is provided by the

nature of the belief-feeling involved in memory; the word "this,"

as we have seen, has a vagueness which we have tried to describe.

But we must still ask what we mean by "occurred." The image is,

in one sense, occurring now; and therefore we must find some

other sense in which the past event occurred but the image does

not occur.



There are two distinct questions to be asked: (1) What causes us

to say that a thing occurs? (2) What are we feeling when we say

this? As to the first question, in the crude use of the word,

which is what concerns us, memory-images would not be said to

occur; they would not be noticed in themselves, but merely used

as signs of the past event. Images are "merely imaginary"; they

have not, in crude thought, the sort of reality that belongs to

outside bodies. Roughly speaking, "real" things would be those

that can cause sensations, those that have correlations of the

sort that constitute physical objects. A thing is said to be

"real" or to "occur" when it fits into a context of such

correlations. The prototype of our memory-image did fit into a

physical context, while our memory-image does not. This causes us

to feel that the prototype was "real," while the image is

"imaginary."



But the answer to our second question, namely as to what we are

feeling when we say a thing "occurs" or is "real," must be

somewhat different. We do not, unless we are unusually

reflective, think about the presence or absence of correlations:

we merely have different feelings which, intellectualized, may be

represented as expectations of the presence or absence of

correlations. A thing which "feels real" inspires us with hopes

or fears, expectations or curiosities, which are wholly absent

when a thing "feels imaginary." The feeling of reality is a

feeling akin to respect: it belongs PRIMARILY to whatever can do

things to us without our voluntary co-operation. This feeling of

reality, related to the memory-image, and referred to the past by

the specific kind of belief-feeling that is characteristic of

memory, seems to be what constitutes the act of remembering in

its pure form.



We may now summarize our analysis of pure memory.



Memory demands (a) an image, (b) a belief in past existence. The

belief may be expressed in the words "this existed."



The belief, like every other, may be analysed into (1) the

believing, (2) what is believed. The believing is a specific

feeling or sensation or complex of sensations, different from

expectation or bare assent in a way that makes the belief refer

to the past; the reference to the past lies in the

belief-feeling, not in the content believed. There is a relation

between the belief-feeling and the content, making the

belief-feeling refer to the content, and expressed by saying that

the content is what is believed.



The content believed may or may not be expressed in words. Let us

take first the case when it is not. In that case, if we are

merely remembering that something of which we now have an image

occurred, the content consists of (a) the image, (b) the feeling,

analogous to respect, which we translate by saying that something

is "real" as opposed to "imaginary," (c) a relation between the

image and the feeling of reality, of the sort expressed when we

say that the feeling refers to the image. This content does not

contain in itself any time-determination



the time-determination lies in the nature of the belief feeling,

which is that called "remembering" or (better) "recollecting." It

is only subsequent reflection upon this reference to the past

that makes us realize the distinction between the image and the

event recollected. When we have made this distinction, we can say

that the image "means" the past event.



The content expressed in words is best represented by the words

"the existence of this," since these words do not involve tense,

which belongs to the belief-feeling, not to the content.  Here

"this" is a vague term, covering the memory-image and anything

very like it, including its prototype. "Existence" expresses the

feeling of a "reality" aroused primarily by whatever can have

effects upon us without our voluntary co-operation. The word "of"

in the phrase "the existence of this" represents the relation

which subsists between the feeling of reality and the "this."



This analysis of memory is probably extremely faulty, but I do

not know how to improve it.



NOTE.-When I speak of a FEELING of belief, I use the word

"feeling" in a popular sense, to cover a sensation or an image or

a complex of sensations or images or both; I use this word

because I do not wish to commit myself to any special analysis of

the belief-feeling.

Lecture X
Words and Meaning



The problem with which we shall be concerned in this lecture is

the problem of determining what is the relation called "meaning."

The word "Napoleon," we say, "means" a certain person. In saying

this, we are asserting a relation between the word "Napoleon" and

the person so designated. It is this relation that we must now

investigate.



Let us first consider what sort of object a word is when

considered simply as a physical thing, apart from its meaning. To

begin with, there are many instances of a word, namely all the

different occasions when it is employed. Thus a word is not

something unique and particular, but a set of occurrences. If we

confine ourselves to spoken words, a word has two aspects,

according as we regard it from the point of view of the speaker

or from that of the hearer. From the point of view of the

speaker, a single instance of the use of a word consists of a

certain set of movements in the throat and mouth, combined with

breath. From the point of view of the hearer, a single instance

of the use of a word consists of a certain series of sounds, each

being approximately represented by a single letter in writing,

though in practice a letter may represent several sounds, or

several letters may represent one sound. The connection between

the spoken word and the word as it reaches the hearer is causal.

Let us confine ourselves to the spoken word, which is the more

important for the analysis of what is called "thought." Then we

may say that a single instance of the spoken word consists of a

series of movements, and the word consists of a whole set of such

series, each member of the set being very similar to each other

member. That is to say, any two instances of the word "Napoleon"

are very similar, and each instance consists of a series of

movements in the mouth.



A single word, accordingly, is by no means simple it is a class

of similar series of movements (confining ourselves still to the

spoken word). The degree of similarity required cannot be

precisely defined: a man may pronounce the word "Napoleon" so

badly that it can hardly be determined whether he has really

pronounced it or not. The instances of a word shade off into

other movements by imperceptible degrees. And exactly analogous

observations apply to words heard or written or read. But in what

has been said so far we have not even broached the question of

the DEFINITION of a word, since "meaning" is clearly what

distinguishes a word from other sets of similar movements, and

"meaning" remains to be defined.



It is natural to think of the meaning of a word as something

conventional. This, however, is only true with great limitations.

A new word can be added to an existing language by a mere

convention, as is done, for instance, with new scientific terms.

But the basis of a language is not conventional, either from the

point of view of the individual or from that of the community. A

child learning to speak is learning habits and associations which

are just as much determined by the environment as the habit of

expecting dogs to bark and cocks to crow. The community that

speaks a language has learnt it, and modified it by processes

almost all of which are not deliberate, but the results of causes

operating according to more or less ascertainable laws. If we

trace any Indo-European language back far enough, we arrive

hypothetically (at any rate according to some authorities) at the

stage when language consisted only of the roots out of which

subsequent words have grown. How these roots acquired their

meanings is not known, but a conventional origin is clearly just

as mythical as the social contract by which Hobbes and Rousseau

supposed civil government to have been established. We can hardly

suppose a parliament of hitherto speechless elders meeting

together and agreeing to call a cow a cow and a wolf a wolf. The

association of words with their meanings must have grown up by

some natural process, though at present the nature of the process

is unknown.



Spoken and written words are, of course, not the only way of


conveying meaning. A large part of one of Wundt's two vast

volumes on language in his "Volkerpsychologie" is concerned with

gesture-language. Ants appear to be able to communicate a certain

amount of information by means of their antennae. Probably

writing itself, which we now regard as merely a way of

representing speech, was originally an independent language, as

it has remained to this day in China. Writing seems to have

consisted originally of pictures, which gradually became

conventionalized, coming in time to represent syllables, and

finally letters on the telephone principle of "T for Tommy." But

it would seem that writing nowhere began as an attempt to

represent speech it began as a direct pictorial representation of

what was to be expressed. The essence of language lies, not in

the use of this or that special means of communication, but in

the employment of fixed associations (however these may have

originated) in order that something now sensible--a spoken word,

a picture, a gesture, or what not--may call up the "idea" of

something else. Whenever this is done, what is now sensible may

be called a "sign"  or "symbol," and that of which it is intended

to call up the "idea" may be called its "meaning." This is a

rough outline of what constitutes "meaning." But we must fill in

the outline in various ways. And, since we are concerned with

what is called "thought," we must pay more attention than we

otherwise should do to the private as opposed to the social use

of language. Language profoundly affects our thoughts, and it is

this aspect of language that is of most importance to us in our

present inquiry. We are almost more concerned with the internal

speech that is never uttered than we are with the things said out

loud to other people.



When we ask what constitutes meaning, we are not asking what is

the meaning of this or that particular word. The word "Napoleon"

means a certain individual; but we are asking, not who is the

individual meant, but what is the relation of the word to the

individual which makes the one mean the other. But just as it is

useful to realize the nature of a word as part of the physical

world, so it is useful to realize the sort of thing that a word

may mean. When we are clear both as to what a word is in its

physical aspect, and as to what sort of thing it can mean, we are

in a better position to discover the relation of the two which is

meaning.



The things that words mean differ more than words do. There are

different sorts of words, distinguished by the grammarians; and

there are logical distinctions, which are connected to some

extent, though not so closely as was formerly supposed, with the

grammatical distinctions of parts of speech. It is easy, however,

to be misled by grammar, particularly if all the languages we

know belong to one family. In some languages, according to some

authorities, the distinction of parts of speech does not exist;

in many languages it is widely different from that to which we

are accustomed in the Indo-European languages. These facts have

to be borne in mind if we are to avoid giving metaphysical

importance to mere accidents of our own speech.



In considering what words mean, it is natural to start with

proper names, and we will again take "Napoleon" as our instance.

We commonly imagine, when we use a proper name, that we mean one

definite entity, the particular individual who was called

"Napoleon." But what we know as a person is not simple. There MAY

be a single simple ego which was Napoleon, and remained strictly

identical from his birth to his death. There is no way of proving

that this cannot be the case, but there is also not the slightest

reason to suppose that it is the case. Napoleon as he was

empirically known consisted of a series of gradually changing

appearances: first a squalling baby, then a boy, then a slim and

beautiful youth, then a fat and slothful person very

magnificently dressed This series of appearances, and various

occurrences having certain kinds of causal connections with them,

constitute Napoleon as empirically known, and therefore are

Napoleon in so far as he forms part of the experienced world.

Napoleon is a complicated series of occurrences, bound together

by causal laws, not, like instances of a word, by similarities.

For although a person changes gradually, and presents similar

appearances on two nearly contemporaneous occasions, it is not

these similarities that constitute the person, as appears from

the "Comedy of Errors" for example.



Thus in the case of a proper name, while the word is a set of

similar series of movements, what it means is a series of

occurrences bound together by causal laws of that special kind

that makes the occurrences taken together constitute what we call

one person, or one animal or thing, in case the name applies to

an animal or thing instead of to a person. Neither the word nor

what it names is one of the ultimate indivisible constituents of

the world. In language there is no direct way of designating one

of the ultimate brief existents that go to make up the

collections we call things or persons. If we want to speak of

such existentswhich hardly happens except in philosophy-we have

to do it by means of some elaborate phrase, such as "the visual

sensation which occupied the centre of my field of vision at noon

on January 1, 1919." Such ultimate simples I call "particulars."

Particulars MIGHT have proper names, and no doubt would have if

language had been invented by scientifically trained observers

for purposes of philosophy and logic. But as language was

invented for practical ends, particulars have remained one and


all without a name.



We are not, in practice, much concerned with the actual

particulars that come into our experience in sensation; we are

concerned rather with whole systems to which the particulars

belong and of which they are signs. What we see makes us say

"Hullo, there's Jones," and the fact that what we see is a sign

of Jones (which is the case because it is one of the particulars

that make up Jones) is more interesting to us than the actual

particular itself. Hence we give the name "Jones" to the whole

set of particulars, but do not trouble to give separate names to

the separate particulars that make up the set.



Passing on from proper names, we come next to general names, such

as "man," "cat," "triangle." A word such as "man" means a whole

class of such collections of particulars as have proper names.

The several members of the class are assembled together in virtue

of some similarity or common property. All men resemble each

other in certain important respects; hence we want a word which

shall be equally applicable to all of them. We only give proper

names to the individuals of a species when they differ inter se

in practically important respects. In other cases we do not do

this. A poker, for instance, is just a poker; we do not call one

"John" and another "Peter."



There is a large class of words, such as "eating," "walking,"

"speaking," which mean a set of similar occurrences. Two

instances of walking have the same name because they resemble

each other, whereas two instances of Jones have the same name

because they are causally connected. In practice, however, it is

difficult to make any precise distinction between a word such as

"walking" and a general name such as "man." One instance of

walking cannot be concentrated into an instant: it is a process

in time, in which there is a causal connection between the

earlier and later parts, as between the earlier and later parts

of Jones. Thus an instance of walking differs from an instance of

man solely by the fact that it has a shorter life. There is a

notion that an instance of walking, as compared with Jones, is

unsubstantial, but this seems to be a mistake. We think that

Jones walks, and that there could not be any walking unless there

were somebody like Jones to perform the walking. But it is

equally true that there could be no Jones unless there were

something like walking for him to do. The notion that actions are

performed by an agent is liable to the same kind of criticism as

the notion that thinking needs a subject or ego, which we

rejected in Lecture I. To say that it is Jones who is walking is

merely to say that the walking in question is part of the whole

series of occurrences which is Jones. There is no LOGICAL

impossibility in walking occurring as an isolated phenomenon, not

forming part of any such series as we call a "person."



We may therefore class with "eating," "walking," "speaking" words

such as "rain," "sunrise," "lightning," which do not denote what

would commonly be called actions. These words illustrate,

incidentally, how little we can trust to the grammatical

distinction of parts of speech, since the substantive "rain" and

the verb "to rain" denote precisely the same class of

meteorological occurrences. The distinction between the class of

objects denoted by such a word and the class of objects denoted

by a general name such as "man," "vegetable," or "planet," is

that the sort of object which is an instance of (say) "lightning"

is much simpler than (say) an individual man. (I am speaking of

lightning as a sensible phenomenon, not as it is described in

physics.) The distinction is one of degree, not of kind. But

there is, from the point of view of ordinary thought, a great

difference between a process which, like a flash of lightning,

can be wholly comprised within one specious present and a process

which, like the life of a man, has to be pieced together by

observation and memory and the apprehension of causal

connections. We may say broadly, therefore, that a word of the

kind we have been discussing denotes a set of similar

occurrences, each (as a rule) much more brief and less complex

than a person or thing. Words themselves, as we have seen, are

sets of similar occurrences of this kind. Thus there is more

logical affinity between a word and what it means in the case of

words of our present sort than in any other case.



There is no very great difference between such words as we have

just been considering and words denoting qualities, such as

"white" or "round." The chief difference is that words of this

latter sort do not denote processes, however brief, but static

features of the world. Snow falls, and is white; the falling is a

process, the whiteness is not. Whether there is a universal,

called "whiteness," or whether white things are to be defined as

those having a certain kind of similarity to a standard thing,

say freshly fallen snow, is a question which need not concern us,

and which I believe to be strictly insoluble. For our purposes,

we may take the word "white" as denoting a certain set of similar

particulars or collections of particulars, the similarity being

in respect of a static quality, not of a process.



From the logical point of view, a very important class of words

are those that express relations, such as "in," "above,"

"before," "greater," and so on. The meaning of one of these words

differs very fundamentally from the meaning of one of any of our

previous classes, being more abstract and logically simpler than

any of them. If our business were logic, we should have to spend

much time on these words. But as it is psychology that concerns

us, we will merely note their special character and pass on,

since the logical classification of words is not our main

business.



We will consider next the question what is implied by saying that

a person "understands" a word, in the sense in which one

understands a word in one's own language, but not in a language

of which one is ignorant. We may say that a person understands a

word when (a) suitable circumstances make him use it, (b) the

hearing of it causes suitable behaviour in him. We may call these

two active and passive understanding respectively. Dogs often

have passive understanding of some words, but not active

understanding, since they cannot use words.



It is not necessary, in order that a man should "understand" a

word, that he should "know what it means," in the sense of being

able to say "this word means so-and-so." Understanding words does

not consist in knowing their dictionary definitions, or in being

able to specify the objects to which they are appropriate. Such

understanding as this may belong to lexicographers and students,

but not to ordinary mortals in ordinary life. Understanding

language is more like understanding cricket*: it is a matter of

habits, acquired in oneself and rightly presumed in others. To

say that a word has a meaning is not to say that those who use

the word correctly have ever thought out what the meaning is: the

use of the word comes first, and the meaning is to be distilled

out of it by observation and analysis. Moreover, the meaning of a

word is not absolutely definite: there is always a greater or

less degree of vagueness. The meaning is an area, like a target:

it may have a bull's eye, but the outlying parts of the target

are still more or less within the meaning, in a gradually

diminishing degree as we travel further from the bull's eye. As

language grows more precise, there is less and less of the target

outside the bull's eye, and the bull's eye itself grows smaller

and smaller; but the bull's eye never shrinks to a point, and

there is always a doubtful region, however small, surrounding

it.**



* This point of view, extended to the analysis of "thought" is

urged with great force by J. B. Watson, both in his "Behavior,"

and in "Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist"

(Lippincott. 1919), chap. ix.



** On the understanding of words, a very admirable little book is

Ribot's "Evolution of General Ideas," Open Court Co., 1899. Ribot

says (p. 131): "We learn to understand a concept as we learn to

walk, dance, fence or play a musical instrument: it is a habit,

i.e. an organized memory. General terms cover an organized,

latent knowledge which is the hidden capital without which we

should be in a state of bankruptcy, manipulating false money or

paper of no value. General ideas are habits in the intellectual

order."





A word is used "correctly" when the average hearer will be

affected by it in the way intended. This is a psychological, not

a literary, definition of "correctness." The literary definition

would substitute, for the average hearer, a person of high

education living a long time ago; the purpose of this definition

is to make it difficult to speak or write correctly.



The relation of a word to its meaning is of the nature of a

causal law governing our use of the word and our actions when we

hear it used. There is no more reason why a person who uses a

word correctly should be able to tell what it means than there is

why a planet which is moving correctly should know Kepler's laws.



To illustrate what is meant by "understanding" words and

sentences, let us take instances of various situations.



Suppose you are walking in London with an absent-minded friend,

and while crossing a street you say, "Look out, there's a motor

coming." He will glance round and jump aside without the need of

any "mental" intermediary. There need be no "ideas," but only a

stiffening of the muscles, followed quickly by action. He

"understands" the words, because he does the right thing. Such

"understanding" may be taken to belong to the nerves and brain,

being habits which they have acquired while the language was

being learnt. Thus understanding in this sense may be reduced to

mere physiological causal laws.



If you say the same thing to a Frenchman with a slight knowledge

of English he will go through some inner speech which may be

represented by "Que dit-il? Ah, oui, une automobile!" After this,

the rest follows as with the Englishman. Watson would contend

that the inner speech must be incipiently pronounced; we should

argue that it MIGHT be merely imaged. But this point is not

important in the present connection.



If you say the same thing to a child who does not yet know the

word "motor," but does know the other words you are using, you

produce a feeling of anxiety and doubt you will have to point and

say, "There, that's a motor." After that the child will roughly

understand the word "motor," though he may include trains and

steam-rollers If this is the first time the child has heard the

word "motor," he may for a long time continue to recall this

scene when he hears the word.



So far we have found four ways of understanding words:



(1) On suitable occasions you use the word properly.



(2) When you hear it you act appropriately.



(3) You associate the word with another word (say in a different

language) which has the appropriate effect on behaviour.



(4) When the word is being first learnt, you may associate it

with an object, which is what it "means," or a representative of

various objects that it "means."



In the fourth case, the word acquires, through association, some

of the same causal efficacy as the object. The word "motor" can

make you leap aside, just as the motor can, but it cannot break

your bones. The effects which a word can share with its object

are those which proceed according to laws other than the general

laws of physics, i.e. those which, according to our terminology,

involve vital movements as opposed to merely mechanical

movements. The effects of a word that we understand are always

mnemic phenomena in the sense explained in Lecture IV, in so far

as they are identical with, or similar to, the effects which the

object itself might have.



So far, all the uses of words that we have considered can be

accounted for on the lines of behaviourism.



But so far we have only considered what may be called the

"demonstrative" use of language, to point out some feature in the

present environment. This is only one of the ways in which

language may be used. There are also its narrative and

imaginative uses, as in history and novels. Let us take as an

instance the telling of some remembered event.



We spoke a moment ago of a child who hears the word "motor" for

the first time when crossing a street along which a motor-car is

approaching. On a later occasion, we will suppose, the child

remembers the incident and relates it to someone else. In this

case, both the active and passive understanding of words is

different from what it is when words are used demonstratively.

The child is not seeing a motor, but only remembering one; the

hearer does not look round in expectation of seeing a motor

coming, but "understands" that a motor came at some earlier time.

The whole of this occurrence is much more difficult to account

for on behaviourist lines. It is clear that, in so far as the

child is genuinely remembering, he has a picture of the past

occurrence, and his words are chosen so as to describe the

picture; and in so far as the hearer is genuinely apprehending

what is said, the hearer is acquiring a picture more or less like

that of the child. It is true that this process may be telescoped

through the operation of the word-habit. The child may not

genuinely remember the incident, but only have the habit of the

appropriate words, as in the case of a poem which we know by

heart, though we cannot remember learning it. And the hearer also

may only pay attention to the words, and not call up any

corresponding picture. But it is, nevertheless, the possibility

of a memory-image in the child and an imagination-image in the

hearer that makes the essence of the narrative "meaning" of the

words. In so far as this is absent, the words are mere counters,

capable of meaning, but not at the moment possessing it.



Yet this might perhaps be regarded as something of an

overstatement. The words alone, without the use of images, may

cause appropriate emotions and appropriate behaviour. The words

have been used in an environment which produced certain

emotions;. by a telescoped process, the words alone are now

capable of producing similar emotions. On these lines it might be

sought to show that images are unnecessary. I do not believe,

however, that we could account on these lines for the entirely

different response produced by a narrative and by a description

of present facts. Images, as contrasted with sensations, are the

response expected during a narrative; it is understood that

present action is not called for. Thus it seems that we must

maintain our distinction words used demonstratively describe and

are intended to lead to sensations, while the same words used in

narrative describe and are only intended to lead to images.



We have thus, in addition to our four previous ways in which

words can mean, two new ways, namely the way of memory and the

way of imagination. That is to say:



(5) Words may be used to describe or recall a memory-image: to

describe it when it already exists, or to recall it when the

words exist as a habit and are known to be descriptive of some

past experience.



(6) Words may be used to describe or create an imagination-image:

to describe it, for example, in the case of a poet or novelist,

or to create it in the ordinary case for giving

information-though, in the latter case, it is intended that the

imagination-image, when created, shall be accompanied by belief

that something of the sort occurred.



These two ways of using words, including their occurrence in

inner speech, may be spoken of together as the use of words in

"thinking." If we are right, the use of words in thinking

depends, at least in its origin, upon images, and cannot be fully

dealt with on behaviourist lines. And this is really the most

essential function of words, namely that, originally through

their connection with images, they bring us into touch with what

is remote in time or space. When they operate without the medium

of images, this seems to be a telescoped process. Thus the

problem of the meaning of words is brought into connection with

the problem of the meaning of images.



To understand the function that words perform in what is called

"thinking," we must understand both the causes and the effects of

their occurrence. The causes of the occurrence of words require

somewhat different treatment according as the object designated

by the word is sensibly present or absent. When the object is

present, it may itself be taken as the cause of the word, through

association. But when it is absent there is more difficulty in

obtaining a behaviourist theory of the occurrence of the word.

The language-habit consists not merely in the use of words

demonstratively, but also in their use to express narrative or

desire. Professor Watson, in his account of the acquisition of

the language-habit, pays very little attention to the use of

words in narrative and desire. He says ("Behavior," pp. 329-330):



"The stimulus (object) to which the child often responds, a box,

e.g. by movements such as opening and closing and putting objects

into it, may serve to illustrate our argument. The nurse,

observing that the child reacts with his hands, feet, etc., to

the box, begins to say 'box' when the child is handed the box,

'open box' when the child opens it, 'close box' when he closes

it, and 'put doll in box ' when that act is executed. This is

repeated over and over again. In the process of time it comes

about that without any other stimulus than that of the box which

originally called out the bodily habits, he begins to say 'box'

when he sees it, 'open box' when he opens it, etc. The visible

box now becomes a stimulus capable of releasing either the bodily

habits or the word-habit, i.e. development has brought about two

things : (1) a series of functional connections among arcs which

run from visual receptor to muscles of throat, and (2) a series

of already earlier connected arcs which run from the same

receptor to the bodily muscles.... The object meets the child's

vision. He runs to it and tries to reach it and says 'box.'...

Finally the word is uttered without the movement of going towards

the box being executed.... Habits are formed of going to the box

when the arms are full of toys. The child has been taught to

deposit them there. When his arms are laden with toys and no box

is there, the word-habit arises and he calls 'box'; it is handed

to him, and he opens it and deposits the toys therein. This

roughly marks what we would call the genesis of a true

language-habit."(pp. 329-330).*



* Just the same account of language is given in Professor

Watson's more recent book (reference above).





We need not linger over what is said in the above passage as to

the use of the word "box" in the presence of the box. But as to

its use in the absence of the box, there is only one brief

sentence, namely: "When his arms are laden with toys and no box

is there, the word-habit arises and he calls 'box.' " This is

inadequate as it stands, since the habit has been to use the word

when the box is present, and we have to explain its extension to

cases in which the box is absent.



Having admitted images, we may say that the word "box," in the

absence of the box, is caused by an image of the box. This may or

may not be true--in fact, it is true in some cases but not in

others. Even, however, if it were true in all cases, it would

only slightly shift our problem: we should now have to ask what

causes an image of the box to arise. We might be inclined to say

that desire for the box is the cause. But when this view is

investigated, it is found that it compels us to suppose that the

box can be desired without the child's having either an image of

the box or the word "box." This will require a theory of desire

which may be, and I think is, in the main true, but which removes

desire from among things that actually occur, and makes it merely

a convenient fiction, like force in mechanics.* With such a view,

desire is no longer a true cause, but merely a short way of

describing certain processes.



* See Lecture III, above.





In order to explain the occurrence of either the word or the

image in the absence of the box, we have to assume that there is

something, either in the environment or in our own sensations,

which has frequently occurred at about the same time as the word

"box." One of the laws which distinguish psychology (or

nerve-physiology?) from physics is the law that, when two things

have frequently existed in close temporal contiguity, either

comes in time to cause the other.* This is the basis both of

habit and of association. Thus, in our case, the arms full of

toys have frequently been followed quickly by the box, and the

box in turn by the word "box." The box itself is subject to

physical laws, and does not tend to be caused by the arms full of

toys, however often it may in the past have followed them--always

provided that, in the case in question, its physical position is

such that voluntary movements cannot lead to it. But the word

"box" and the image of the box are subject to the law of habit;

hence it is possible for either to be caused by the arms full of

toys. And we may lay it down generally that, whenever we use a

word, either aloud or in inner speech, there is some sensation or

image (either of which may be itself a word) which has frequently

occurred at about the same time as the word, and now, through

habit, causes the word. It follows that the law of habit is

adequate to account for the use of words in the absence of their

objects; moreover, it would be adequate even without introducing

images. Although, therefore, images seem undeniable, we cannot

derive an additional argument in their favour from the use of

words, which could, theoretically, be explained without

introducing images.



 *For a more exact statement of this law, with the limitations

suggested by experiment, see A. Wohlgemuth, "On Memory and the

Direction of Associations," "British Journal of Psychology," vol.

v, part iv (March, 1913).





When we understand a word, there is a reciprocal association

between it and the images of what it "means." Images may cause us

to use words which mean them, and these words, heard or read, may

in turn cause the appropriate images. Thus speech is a means of

producing in our hearers the images which are in us. Also, by a

telescoped process, words come in time to produce directly the

effects which would have been produced by the images with which

they were associated. The general law of telescoped processes is

that, if A causes B and B causes C, it will happen in time that A

will cause C directly, without the intermediary of B. This is a

characteristic of psychological and neural causation. In virtue

of this law, the effects of images upon our actions come to be

produced by words, even when the words do not call up appropriate

images. The more familiar we are with words, the more our

"thinking" goes on in words instead of images. We may, for

example, be able to describe a person's appearance correctly

without having at any time had any image of him, provided, when

we saw him, we thought of words which fitted him; the words alone

may remain with us as a habit, and enable us to speak as if we

could recall a visual image of the man. In this and other ways

the understanding of a word often comes to be quite free from

imagery; but in first learning the use of language it would seem

that imagery always plays a very important part.



Images as well as words may be said to have "meaning"; indeed,

the meaning of images seems more primitive than the meaning of

words. What we call (say) an image of St. Paul's may be said to

"mean" St. Paul's. But it is not at all easy to say exactly what

constitutes the meaning of an image. A memory-image of a

particular occurrence, when accompanied by a memory-belief, may

be said to mean the occurrence of which it is an image. But most

actual images do not have this degree of definiteness. If we call

up an image of a dog, we are very likely to have a vague image,

which is not representative of some one special dog, but of dogs

in general. When we call up an image of a friend's face, we are

not likely to reproduce the expression he had on some one

particular occasion, but rather a compromise expression derived

from many occasions. And there is hardly any limit to the

vagueness of which images are capable. In such cases, the meaning

of the image, if defined by relation to the prototype, is vague:

there is not one definite prototype, but a number, none of which

is copied exactly.*



* Cf. Semon, Mnemische Empfindungen, chap. xvi, especially pp.

301-308.





There is, however, another way of approaching the meaning of

images, namely through their causal efficacy. What is called an

image "of" some definite object, say St. Paul's, has some of the

effects which the object would have. This applies especially to

the effects that depend upon association. The emotional effects,

also, are often similar: images may stimulate desire almost as

strongly as do the objects they represent. And conversely desire

may cause images*: a hungry man will have images of food, and so

on. In all these ways the causal laws concerning images are

connected with the causal laws concerning the objects which the

images "mean." An image may thus come to fulfil the function of a

general idea. The vague image of a dog, which we spoke of a

moment ago, will have effects which are only connected with dogs

in general, not the more special effects which would be produced

by some dogs but not by others. Berkeley and Hume, in their

attack on general ideas, do not allow for the vagueness of

images: they assume that every image has the definiteness that a

physical object would have This is not the case, and a vague

image may well have a meaning which is general.



* This phrase is in need of interpretation, as appears from the

analysis of desire. But the reader can easily supply the

interpretation for himself.





In order to define the "meaning" of an image, we have to take

account both of its resemblance to one or more prototypes, and of

its causal efficacy. If there were such a thing as a pure

imagination-image, without any prototype whatever, it would be

destitute of meaning. But according to Hume's principle, the

simple elements in an image, at least, are derived from

prototypes-except possibly in very rare exceptional cases. Often,

in such instances as our image of a friend's face or of a

nondescript dog, an image is not derived from one prototype, but

from many; when this happens, the image is vague, and blurs the

features in which the various prototypes differ. To arrive at the

meaning of the image in such a case, we observe that there are

certain respects, notably associations, in which the effects of

images resemble those of their prototypes. If we find, in a given

case, that our vague image, say, of a nondescript dog, has those

associative effects which all dogs would have, but not those

belonging to any special dog or kind of dog, we may say that our

image means "dog" in general. If it has all the associations

appropriate to spaniels but no others, we shall say it means

"spaniel"; while if it has all the associations appropriate to

one particular dog, it will mean that dog, however vague it may

be as a picture. The meaning of an image, according to this

analysis, is constituted by a combination of likeness and

associations. It is not a sharp or definite conception, and in

many cases it will be impossible to decide with any certainty

what an image means. I think this lies in the nature of things,

and not in defective analysis.



We may give somewhat more precision to the above account of the

meaning of images, and extend it to meaning in general. We find

sometimes that, IN MNEMIC CAUSATION, an image or word, as

stimulus, has the same effect (or very nearly the same effect) as

would belong to some object, say, a certain dog. In that case we

say that the image or word means that object. In other cases the

mnemic effects are not all those of one object, but only those

shared by objects of a certain kind, e.g. by all dogs. In this

case the meaning of the image or word is general: it means the

whole kind. Generality and particularity are a matter of degree.

If two particulars differ sufficiently little, their mnemic

effects will be the same; therefore no image or word can mean the

one as opposed to the other; this sets a bound to the

particularity of meaning. On the other hand, the mnemic effects

of a number of sufficiently dissimilar objects will have nothing

discoverable in common; hence a word which aims at complete

generality, such as "entity" for example, will have to be devoid

of mnemic effects, and therefore of meaning. In practice, this is

not the case: such words have VERBAL associations, the learning

of which constitutes the study of metaphysics.



The meaning of a word, unlike that of an image, is wholly

constituted by mnemic causal laws, and not in any degree by

likeness (except in exceptional cases). The word "dog" bears no

resemblance to a dog, but its effects, like those of an image of

a dog, resemble the effects of an actual dog in certain respects.

It is much easier to say definitely what a word means than what

an image means, since words, however they originated, have been

framed in later times for the purpose of having meaning, and men

have been engaged for ages in giving increased precision to the


meanings of words. But although it is easier to say what a word

means than what an image means, the relation which constitutes

meaning is much the same in both cases. A word, like an image,

has the same associations as its meaning has. In addition to

other associations, it is associated with images of its meaning,

so that the word tends to call up the image and the image tends

to call up the word., But this association is not essential to

the intelligent use of words. If a word has the right

associations with other objects, we shall be able to use it

correctly, and understand its use by others, even if it evokes no

image. The theoretical understanding of words involves only the

power of associating them correctly with other words; the

practical understanding involves associations with other bodily

movements.



The use of words is, of course, primarily social, for the purpose

of suggesting to others ideas which we entertain or at least wish

them to entertain. But the aspect of words that specially

concerns us is their power of promoting our own thought. Almost

all higher intellectual activity is a matter of words, to the

nearly total exclusion of everything else. The advantages of

words for purposes of thought are so great that I should never

end if I were to enumerate them. But a few of them deserve to be

mentioned.



In the first place, there is no difficulty in producing a word,

whereas an image cannot always be brought into existence at will,

and when it comes it often contains much irrelevant detail. In

the second place, much of our thinking is concerned with abstract

matters which do not readily lend themselves to imagery, and are

apt to be falsely conceived if we insist upon finding images that

may be supposed to represent them. The word is always concrete

and sensible, however abstract its meaning may be, and thus by

the help of words we are able to dwell on abstractions in a way

which would otherwise be impossible. In the third place, two

instances of the same word are so similar that neither has

associations not capable of being shared by the other. Two

instances of the word "dog" are much more alike than (say) a pug

and a great dane; hence the word "dog" makes it much easier to

think about dogs in general. When a number of objects have a

common property which is important but not obvious, the invention

of a name for the common property helps us to remember it and to

think of the whole set of objects that possess it. But it is

unnecessary to prolong the catalogue of the uses of language in

thought.



At the same time, it is possible to conduct rudimentary thought

by means of images, and it is important, sometimes, to check

purely verbal thought by reference to what it means. In

philosophy especially the tyranny of traditional words is

dangerous, and we have to be on our guard against assuming that

grammar is the key to metaphysics, or that the structure of a

sentence corresponds at all accurately with the structure of the

fact that it asserts. Sayce maintained that all European

philosophy since Aristotle has been dominated by the fact that

the philosophers spoke Indo-European languages, and therefore

supposed the world, like the sentences they were used to,

necessarily divisible into subjects and predicates. When we come

to the consideration of truth and falsehood, we shall see how

necessary it is to avoid assuming too close a parallelism between

facts and the sentences which assert them. Against such errors,

the only safeguard is to be able, once in a way, to discard words

for a moment and contemplate facts more directly through images.

Most serious advances in philosophic thought result from some

such comparatively direct contemplation of facts. But the outcome

has to be expressed in words if it is to be communicable. Those

who have a relatively direct vision of facts are often incapable

of translating their vision into words, while those who possess

the words have usually lost the vision. It is partly for this

reason that the highest philosophical capacity is so rare: it

requires a combination of vision with abstract words which is

hard to achieve, and too quickly lost in the few who have for a

moment achieved it.

Lecture XI
General Ideas and Thought



It is said to be one of the merits of the human mind that it is

capable of framing abstract ideas, and of conducting

nonsensational thought. In this it is supposed to differ from the

mind of animals. From Plato onward the "idea" has played a great

part in the systems of idealizing philosophers. The "idea" has

been, in their hands, always something noble and abstract, the

apprehension and use of which by man confers upon him a quite

special dignity.



The thing we have to consider to-day is this: seeing that there

certainly are words of which the meaning is abstract, and seeing

that we can use these words intelligently, what must be assumed

or inferred, or what can be discovered by observation, in the way

of mental content to account for the intelligent use of abstract

words?



Taken as a problem in logic, the answer is, of course, that

absolutely nothing in the way of abstract mental content is

inferable from the mere fact that we can use intelligently words

of which the meaning is abstract. It is clear that a sufficiently

ingenious person could manufacture a machine moved by olfactory

stimuli which, whenever a dog appeared in its neighbourhood,

would say, "There is a dog," and when a cat appeared would throw

stones at it. The act of saying "There is a dog," and the act of

throwing stones, would in such a case be equally mechanical.

Correct speech does not of itself afford any better evidence of

mental content than the performance of any other set of

biologically useful movements, such as those of flight or combat.

All that is inferable from language is that two instances of a

universal, even when they differ very greatly, may cause the

utterance of two instances of the same word which only differ

very slightly. As we saw in the preceding lecture, the word "dog"

is useful, partly, because two instances of this word are much

more similar than (say) a pug and a great dane. The use of words

is thus a method of substituting for two particulars which differ

widely, in spite of being instances of the same universal, two

other particulars which differ very little, and which are also

instances of a universal, namely the name of the previous

universal. Thus, so far as logic is concerned, we are entirely

free to adopt any theory as to general ideas which empirical

observation may recommend.



Berkeley and Hume made a vigorous onslaught on "abstract ideas."

They meant by an idea approximately what we should call an image.

Locke having maintained that he could form an idea of triangle in

general, without deciding what sort of triangle it was to be,

Berkeley contended that this was impossible. He says:



"Whether others,have this wonderful faculty of abstracting their

ideas, they best can tell: for myself, I dare be confident I have

it not. I find, indeed, I have indeed a faculty of imagining, or

representing to myself, the ideas of those particular things I

have perceived, and of variously compounding and dividing them. I

can imagine a man with two heads, or the upper parts of a man

joined to the body of a horse. I can consider the hand, the eye,

the nose, each by itself abstracted or separated from the rest of

the body. But, then, whatever hand or eye I imagine, it must have

some particular shape and colour. Likewise the idea of a man that

I frame to myself must be either of a white, or a black, or a

tawny, a straight, or a crooked, a tall, or a low, or a

middle-sized man. I cannot by any effort of thought conceive the

abstract idea above described. And it is equally impossible for

me to form the abstract idea of motion distinct from the body

moving, and which is neither swift nor slow, curvilinear nor

rectilinear; and the like may be said of all other abstract

general ideas whatsoever. To be plain, I own myself able to

abstract in one sense, as when I consider some particular parts

of qualities separated from others, with which, though they are

united in some object, yet it is possible they may really exist

without them. But I deny that I can abstract from one another, or

conceive separately, those qualities which it is impossible

should exist so separated; or that I can frame a general notion,

by abstracting from particulars in the manner aforesaid--which

last are the two proper acceptations of ABSTRACTION. And there is

ground to think most men will acknowledge themselves to be in my

case. The generality of men which are simple and illiterate never

pretend to ABSTRACT NOTIONS. It is said they are difficult and

not to be attained without pains and study; we may therefore

reasonably conclude that, if such there be, they are confined

only to the learned.



"I proceed to examine what can be alleged in defence of the

doctrine of abstraction, and try if I can discover what it is

that inclines the men of speculation to embrace an opinion so

remote from common sense as that seems to be. There has been a

late excellent and deservedly esteemed philosopher who, no doubt,

has given it very much countenance, by seeming to think the

having abstract general ideas is what puts the widest difference

in point of understanding betwixt man and beast. 'The having of

general ideas,' saith he, 'is that which puts a perfect

distinction betwixt man and brutes, and is an excellency which

the faculties of brutes do by no means attain unto. For, it is

evident we observe no footsteps in them of making use of general

signs for universal ideas; from which we have reason to imagine

that they have not the faculty of abstracting, or making general

ideas, since they have no use of words or any other general

signs.' And a little after: 'Therefore, I think, we may suppose

that it is in this that the species of brutes are discriminated

from men, and it is that proper difference wherein they are

wholly separated, and which at last widens to so wide a distance.

For, if they have any ideas at all, and are not bare machines (as

some would have them), we cannot deny them to have some reason.

It seems as evident to me that they do, some of them, in certain

instances reason as that they have sense; but it is only in

particular ideas, just as they receive them from their senses.

They are the best of them tied up within those narrow bounds, and

have not (as I think) the faculty to enlarge them by any kind of

abstraction.* ("Essay on Human Understanding," Bk. II, chap. xi,

paragraphs 10 and 11.) I readily agree with this learned author,

that the faculties of brutes can by no means attain to

abstraction. But, then, if this be made the distinguishing

property of that sort of animals, I fear a great many of those

that pass for men must be reckoned into their number. The reason

that is here assigned why we have no grounds to think brutes have

abstract general ideas is, that we observe in them no use of

words or any other general signs; which is built on this

supposition-that the making use of words implies the having

general ideas. From which it follows that men who use language

are able to abstract or generalize their ideas. That this is the

sense and arguing of the author will further appear by his

answering the question he in another place puts: 'Since all

things that exist are only particulars, how come we by general

terms?' His answer is: 'Words become general by being made the

signs of general ideas.' ("Essay on Human Understanding," Bk.

III, chap. III, paragraph 6.) But it seems that a word becomes

general by being made the sign, not of an abstract general idea,

but of several particular ideas, any one of which it

indifferently suggests to the mind. For example, when it is said

'the change of motion is proportional to the impressed force,' or

that 'whatever has extension is divisible,' these propositions

are to be understood of motion and extension in general; and

nevertheless it will not follow that they suggest to my thoughts

an idea of motion without a body moved, or any determinate

direction and velocity, or that I must conceive an abstract

general idea of extension, which is neither line, surface, nor

solid, neither great nor small, black, white, nor red, nor of any

other determinate colour. It is only implied that whatever

particular motion I consider, whether it be swift or slow,

perpendicular, horizontal, or oblique, or in whatever object, the

axiom concerning it holds equally true. As does the other of

every particular extension, it matters not whether line, surface,

or solid, whether of this or that magnitude or figure.



"By observing how ideas become general, we may the better judge

how words are made so. And here it is to be noted that I do not

deny absolutely there are general ideas, but only that there are

any ABSTRACT general ideas; for, in the passages we have quoted

wherein there is mention of general ideas, it is always supposed

that they are formed by abstraction, after the manner set forth

in sections 8 and 9. Now, if we will annex a meaning to our

words, and speak only of what we can conceive, I believe we shall

acknowledge that an idea which, considered in itself, is

particular, becomes general by being made to represent or stand

for all other particular ideas of the same sort. To make this

plain by an example, suppose a geometrician is demonstrating the

method of cutting a line in two equal parts. He draws, for

instance, a black line of an inch in length: this, which in

itself is a particular line, is nevertheless with regard to its

signification general, since, as it is there used, it represents

all particular lines whatsoever; so that what is demonstrated of

it is demonstrated of all lines, or, in other words, of a line in

general. And, as THAT PARTICULAR LINE becomes general by being

made a sign, so the NAME 'line,' which taken absolutely is

particular, by being a sign is made general. And as the former

owes its generality not to its being the sign of an abstract or

general line, but of all particular right lines that may possibly

exist, so the latter must be thought to derive its generality

from the same cause, namely, the various particular lines which

it indifferently denotes." *



* Introduction to "A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human

Knowledge," paragraphs 10, 11, and 12.





Berkeley's view in the above passage, which is essentially the

same as Hume's, does not wholly agree with modern psychology,

although it comes nearer to agreement than does the view of those

who believe that there are in the mind single contents which can

be called abstract ideas. The way in which Berkeley's view is

inadequate is chiefly in the fact that images are as a rule not

of one definite prototype, but of a number of related similar

prototypes. On this subject Semon has written well. In "Die

Mneme," pp. 217 ff., discussing the effect of repeated similar

stimuli in producing and modifying our images, he says: "We

choose a case of mnemic excitement whose existence we can

perceive for ourselves by introspection, and seek to ekphore the

bodily picture of our nearest relation in his absence, and have

thus a pure mnemic excitement before us. At first it may seem to

us that a determinate quite concrete picture becomes manifest in

us, but just when we are concerned with a person with whom we are

in constant contact, we shall find that the ekphored picture has

something so to speak generalized. It is something like those

American photographs which seek to display what is general about

a type by combining a great number of photographs of different

heads over each other on one plate. In our opinion, the

generalizations happen by the homophonic working of different

pictures of the same face which we have come across in the most

different conditions and situations, once pale, once reddened,

once cheerful, once earnest, once in this light, and once in

that. As soon as we do not let the whole series of repetitions

resound in us uniformly, but give our attention to one particular

moment out of the many... this particular mnemic stimulus at once

overbalances its simultaneously roused predecessors and

successors, and we perceive the face in question with concrete

definiteness in that particular situation." A little later he

says: "The result is--at least in man, but probably also in the

higher animals--the development of a sort of PHYSIOLOGICAL

abstraction. Mnemic homophony gives us, without the addition of

other processes of thought, a picture of our friend X which is in

a certain sense abstract, not the concrete in any one situation,

but X cut loose from any particular point of time. If the circle

of ekphored engrams is drawn even more widely, abstract pictures

of a higher order appear: for instance, a white man or a negro.

In my opinion, the first form of abstract concepts in general is

based upon such abstract pictures. The physiological abstraction

which takes place in the above described manner is a predecessor

of purely logical abstraction. It is by no means a monopoly of

the human race, but shows itself in various ways also among the

more highly organized animals." The same subject is treated in

more detail in Chapter xvi of "Die mnemischen Empfindungen," but

what is said there adds nothing vital to what is contained in the

above quotations.



It is necessary, however, to distinguish between the vague and

the general. So long as we are content with Semon's composite

image, we MAY get no farther than the vague. The question whether

this image takes us to the general or not depends, I think, upon

the question whether, in addition to the generalized image, we

have also particular images of some of the instances out of which

it is compounded. Suppose, for example, that on a number of

occasions you had seen one negro, and that you did not know

whether this one was the same or different on the different

occasions. Suppose that in the end you had an abstract

memory-image of the different appearances presented by the negro

on different occasions, but no memory-image of any one of the

single appearances. In that case your image would be vague. If,

on the other hand, you have, in addition to the generalized

image, particular images of the several appearances, sufficiently

clear to be recognized as different, and as instances of the

generalized picture, you will then not feel the generalized

picture to be adequate to any one particular appearance, and you

will be able to make it function as a general idea rather than a

vague idea. If this view is correct, no new general content needs

to be added to the generalized image. What needs to be added is

particular images compared and contrasted with the generalized

image. So far as I can judge by introspection, this does occur in

practice. Take for example Semon's instance of a friend's face.

Unless we make some special effort of recollection, the face is

likely to come before us with an average expression, very blurred

and vague, but we can at will recall how our friend looked on

some special occasion when he was pleased or angry or unhappy,

and this enables us to realize the generalized character of the

vague image.



There is, however, another way of distinguishing between the

vague, the particular and the general, and this is not by their

content, but by the reaction which they produce. A word, for

example, may be said to be vague when it is applicable to a

number of different individuals, but to each as individuals; the

name Smith, for example, is vague: it is always meant to apply to

one man, but there are many men to each of whom it applies.* The

word "man," on the other hand, is general. We say, "This is

Smith," but we do not say "This is man," but "This is a man."

Thus we may say that a word embodies a vague idea when its

effects are appropriate to an individual, but are the same for

various similar individuals, while a word embodies a general idea

when its effects are different from those appropriate to

individuals. In what this difference consists it is, however, not

easy to say. I am inclined to think that it consists merely in

the knowledge that no one individual is represented, so that what

distinguishes a general idea from a vague idea is merely the

presence of a certain accompanying belief. If this view is

correct, a general idea differs from a vague one in a way

analogous to that in which a memory-image differs from an

imagination-image. There also we found that the difference

consists merely of the fact that a memory-image is accompanied by

a belief, in this case as to the past.



* "Smith" would only be a quite satisfactory representation of

vague words if we failed to discriminate between different people

called Smith.





It should also be said that our images even of quite particular

occurrences have always a greater or a less degree of vagueness.

That is to say, the occurrence might have varied within certain

limits without causing our image to vary recognizably. To arrive

at the general it is necessary that we should be able to contrast

it with a number of relatively precise images or words for

particular occurrences; so long as all our images and words are

vague, we cannot arrive at the contrast by which the general is

defined. This is the justification for the view which I quoted on

p. 184 from Ribot (op. cit., p. 32), viz. that intelligence

progresses from the indefinite to the definite, and that the

vague appears earlier than either the particular or the general.



I think the view which I have been advocating, to the effect that

a general idea is distinguished from a vague one by the presence

of a judgment, is also that intended by Ribot when he says (op.

cit., p. 92): "The generic image is never, the concept is always,

a judgment. We know that for logicians (formerly at any rate) the

concept is the simple and primitive element; next comes the

judgment, uniting two or several concepts; then ratiocination,

combining two or several judgments. For the psychologists, on the

contrary, affirmation is the fundamental act; the concept is the

result of judgment (explicit or implicit), of similarities with

exclusion of differences."



A great deal of work professing to be experimental has been done

in recent years on the psychology of thought. A good summary of

such work up to the year agog is contained in Titchener's

"Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought

Processes" (1909). Three articles in the "Archiv fur die gesammte

Psychologie" by Watt,* Messer** and Buhler*** contain a great

deal of the material amassed by the methods which Titchener calls

experimental.



* Henry J. Watt, "Experimentelle Beitrage zu einer Theorie des

Denkens," vol. iv (1905) pp. 289-436.



** August Messer, "Experimentell-psychologische Untersuchu gen

uber das Denken," vol. iii (1906), pp. 1-224.



*** Karl Buhler, "Uber Gedanken," vol. ix (1907), pp. 297-365.





For my part I am unable to attach as much importance to this work

as many psychologists do. The method employed appears to me

hardly to fulfil the conditions of scientific experiment. Broadly

speaking, what is done is, that a set of questions are asked of

various people, their answers are recorded, and likewise their

own accounts, based upon introspection, of the processes of

thought which led them to give those answers. Much too much

reliance seems to me to be placed upon the correctness of their

introspection. On introspection as a method I have spoken earlier

(Lecture VI). I am not prepared, like Professor Watson, to reject

it wholly, but I do consider that it is exceedingly fallible and

quite peculiarly liable to falsification in accordance with

preconceived theory. It is like depending upon the report of a

shortsighted person as to whom he sees coming along the road at a

moment when he is firmly convinced that Jones is sure to come. If

everybody were shortsighted and obsessed with beliefs as to what

was going to be visible, we might have to make the best of such

testimony, but we should need to correct its errors by taking

care to collect the simultaneous evidence of people with the most

divergent expectations. There is no evidence that this was done

in the experiments in question, nor indeed that the influence of

theory in falsifying the introspection was at all adequately

recognized. I feel convinced that if Professor Watson had been

one of the subjects of the questionnaires, he would have given

answers totally different from those recorded in the articles in

question. Titchener quotes an opinion of Wundt on these

investigations, which appears to me thoroughly justified. "These

experiments," he says, "are not experiments at all in the sense

of a scientific methodology; they are counterfeit experiments,

that seem methodical simply because they are ordinarily performed

in a psychological laboratory, and involve the co-operation of

two persons, who purport to be experimenter and observer. In

reality, they are as unmethodical as possible; they possess none

of the special features by which we distinguish the

introspections of experimental psychology from the casual

introspections of everyday life."* Titchener, of course, dissents

from this opinion, but I cannot see that his reasons for dissent

are adequate. My doubts are only increased by the fact that

Buhler at any rate used trained psychologists as his subjects. A

trained psychologist is, of course, supposed to have acquired the

habit of observation, but he is at least equally likely to have

acquired a habit of seeing what his theories require. We may take

Buhler's "Uber Gedanken" to illustrate the kind of results

arrived at by such methods. Buhler says (p. 303): "We ask

ourselves the general question: 'WHAT DO WE EXPERIENCE WHEN WE

THINK?' Then we do not at all attempt a preliminary determination

of the concept 'thought,' but choose for analysis only such

processes as everyone would describe as processes of thought."

The most important thing in thinking, he says, is "awareness

that..." (Bewusstheit dass), which he calls a thought. It is, he

says, thoughts in this sense that are essential to thinking.

Thinking, he maintains, does not need language or sensuous

presentations. "I assert rather that in principle every object

can be thought (meant) distinctly, without any help from sensuous

presentation (Anschauungshilfen). Every individual shade of blue

colour on the picture that hangs in my room I can think with

complete distinctness unsensuously (unanschaulich), provided it

is possible that the object should be given to me in another

manner than by the help of sensations. How that is possible we

shall see later." What he calls a thought (Gedanke) cannot be

reduced, according to him, to other psychic occurrences. He

maintains that thoughts consist for the most part of known rules

(p. 342). It is clearly essential to the interest of this theory

that the thought or rule alluded to by Buhler should not need to

be expressed in words, for if it is expressed in words it is

immediately capable of being dealt with on the lines with which

the behaviourists have familiarized us. It is clear also that the

supposed absence of words rests solely upon the introspective

testimony of the persons experimented upon. I cannot think that

there is sufficient certainty of their reliability in this

negative observation to make us accept a difficult and

revolutionary view of thought, merely because they have failed to

observe the presence of words or their equivalent in their

thinking. I think it far more likely, especially in view of the

fact that the persons concerned were highly educated, that we are

concerned with telescoped processes, in which habit has caused a

great many intermediate terms to be elided or to be passed over

so quickly as to escape observation.



* Titchener, op. cit., p. 79.





I am inclined to think that similar remarks apply to the general

idea of "imageless thinking," concerning which there has been

much controversy. The advocates of imageless thinking are not

contending merely that there can be thinking which is purely

verbal; they are contending that there can be thinking which

proceeds neither in words nor in images. My own feeling is that

they have rashly assumed the presence of thinking in cases where

habit has rendered thinking unnecessary. When Thorndike

experimented with animals in cages, he found that the

associations established were between a sensory stimulus and a

bodily movement (not the idea of it), without the need of

supposing any non-physiological intermediary (op. cit., p. 100

ff.). The same thing, it seems to me, applies to ourselves. A

certain sensory situation produces in us a certain bodily

movement. Sometimes this movement consists in uttering words.

Prejudice leads us to suppose that between the sensory stimulus

and the utterance of the words a process of thought must have

intervened, but there seems no good reason for such a

supposition. Any habitual action, such as eating or dressing, may

be performed on the appropriate occasion, without any need of

thought, and the same seems to be true of a painfully large

proportion of our talk. What applies to uttered speech applies of

course equally to the internal speech which is not uttered. I

remain, therefore, entirely unconvinced that there is any such

phenomenon as thinking which consists neither of images nor of

words, or that "ideas" have to be added to sensations and images

as part of the material out of which mental phenomena are built.



The question of the nature of our consciousness of the universal

is much affected by our view as to the general nature of the

relation of consciousness to its object. If we adopt the view of

Brentano, according to which all mental content has essential

reference to an object, it is then natural to suppose that there

is some peculiar kind of mental content of which the object is a

universal, as oppose to a particular. According to this view, a

particular cat can be PERceived or imagined, while the universal

"cat" is CONceived. But this whole manner of viewing our dealings

with universals has to be abandoned when the relation of a mental

occurrence to its "object" is regarded as merely indirect and

causal, which is the view that we have adopted. The mental

content is, of course, always particular, and the question as to

what it "means" (in case it means anything) is one which cannot

be settled by merely examining the intrinsic character of the

mental content, but only by knowing its causal connections in the

case of the person concerned. To say that a certain thought

"means" a universal as opposed to either a vague or a particular,

is to say something exceedingly complex. A horse will behave in a

certain manner whenever he smells a bear, even if the smell is

derived from a bearskin. That is to say, any environment

containing an instance of the universal "smell of a bear"

produces closely similar behaviour in the horse, but we do not

say that the horse is conscious of this universal. There is

equally little reason to regard a man as conscious of the same

universal, because under the same circumstances he can react by

saying, "I smell a bear." This reaction, like that of the horse,

is merely closely similar on different occasions where the

environment affords instances of the same universal. Words of

which the logical meaning is universal can therefore be employed

correctly, without anything that could be called consciousness of

universals. Such consciousness in the only sense in which it can

be said to exist is a matter of reflective judgment consisting in

the observation of similarities and differences. A universal

never appears before the mind as a single object in the sort of

way in which something perceived appears. I THINK a logical

argument could be produced to show that universals are part of

the structure of the world, but they are an inferred part, not a

part of our data. What exists in us consists of various factors,

some open to external observation, others only visible to

introspection. The factors open to external observation are

primarily habits, having the peculiarity that very similar

reactions are produced by stimuli which are in many respects very

different from each other. Of this the reaction of the horse to

the smell of the bear is an instance, and so is the reaction of

the man who says "bear" under the same circumstances. The verbal

reaction is, of course, the most important from the point of view

of what may be called knowledge of universals. A man who can

always use the word "dog" when he sees a dog may be said, in a

certain sense, to know the meaning of the word "dog," and IN THAT

SENSE to have knowledge of the universal "dog." But there is, of

course, a further stage reached by the logician in which he not

merely reacts with the word "dog," but sets to work to discover

what it is in the environment that causes in him this almost

identical reaction on different occasions. This further stage

consists in knowledge of similarities and differences:

similarities which are necessary to the applicability of the word

"dog," and differences which are compatible with it. Our

knowledge of these similarities and differences is never

exhaustive, and therefore our knowledge of the meaning of a

universal is never complete.



In addition to external observable habits (including the habit of

words), there is also the generic image produced by the

superposition, or, in Semon's phrase, homophony, of a number of

similar perceptions. This image is vague so long as the

multiplicity of its prototypes is not recognized, but becomes

universal when it exists alongside of the more specific images of

its instances, and is knowingly contrasted with them. In this

case we find again, as we found when we were discussing words in

general in the preceding lecture, that images are not logically

necessary in order to account for observable behaviour, i.e. in

this case intelligent speech. Intelligent speech could exist as a

motor habit, without any accompaniment of images, and this

conclusion applies to words of which the meaning is universal,

just as much as to words of which the meaning is relatively

particular. If this conclusion is valid, it follows that

behaviourist psychology, which eschews introspective data, is

capable of being an independent science, and of accounting for

all that part of the behaviour of other people which is commonly

regarded as evidence that they think. It must be admitted that

this conclusion considerably weakens the reliance which can be

placed upon introspective data. They must be accepted simply on

account of the fact that we seem to perceive them, not on account

of their supposed necessity for explaining the data of external

observation.



This, at any rate, is the conclusion to which. we are forced, so

long as, with the behaviourists, we accept common-sense views of

the physical world. But if, as I have urged, the physical world

itself, as known, is infected through and through with

subjectivity, if, as the theory of relativity suggests, the

physical universe contains the diversity of points of view which

we have been accustomed to regard as distinctively psychological,

then we are brought back by this different road to the necessity

for trusting observations which are in an important sense

private. And it is the privacy of introspective data which causes

much of the behaviourists' objection to them.



This is an example of the difficulty of constructing an adequate

philosophy of any one science without taking account of other

sciences. The behaviourist philosophy of psychology, though in

many respects admirable from the point of view of method, appears

to me to fail in the last analysis because it is based upon an

inadequate philosophy of physics. In spite, therefore, of the

fact that the evidence for images, whether generic or particular,

is merely introspective, I cannot admit that images should be

rejected, or that we should minimize their function in our

knowledge of what is remote in time or space.

Lecture XII
Belief



Belief, which is our subject to-day, is the central problem in

the analysis of mind. Believing seems the most "mental" thing we

do, the thing most remote from what is done by mere matter. The

whole intellectual life consists of beliefs, and of the passage

from one belief to another by what is called "reasoning." Beliefs

give knowledge and error; they are the vehicles of truth and

falsehood. Psychology, theory of knowledge and metaphysics

revolve about belief, and on the view we take of belief our

philosophical outlook largely depends.



Before embarking upon the detailed analysis of belief, we shall

do well to note certain requisites which any theory must fulfil.



(1) Just as words are characterized by meaning, so beliefs are

characterized by truth or falsehood. And just as meaning consists

in relation to the object meant, so truth and falsehood consist

in relation to something that lies outside the belief. You may

believe that such-and-such a horse will win the Derby. The time

comes, and your horse wins or does not win; according to the

outcome, your belief was true or false. You may believe that six

times nine is fifty-six; in this case also there is a fact which

makes your belief false. You may believe that America was

discovered in 1492, or that it was discovered in 1066. In the one

case your belief is true, in the other false; in either case its

truth or falsehood depends upon the actions of Columbus, not upon

anything present or under your control. What makes a belief true

or false I call a "fact." The particular fact that makes a given

belief true or false I call its "objective,"* and the relation of

the belief to its objective I call the "reference" or the

"objective reference" of the belief. Thus, if I believe that

Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 1492, the "objective" of my

belief is Columbus's actual voyage, and the "reference" of my

belief is the relation between my belief and the voyage--that

relation, namely, in virtue of which the voyage makes my belief

true (or, in another case, false). "Reference" of beliefs differs

from "meaning" of words in various ways, but especially in the

fact that it is of two kinds, "true" reference and "false"

reference. The truth or falsehood of a belief does not depend

upon anything intrinsic to the belief, but upon the nature of its

relation to its objective. The intrinsic nature of belief can be

treated without reference to what makes it true or false. In the

remainder of the present lecture I shall ignore truth and

falsehood, which will be the subject of Lecture XIII. It is the

intrinsic nature of belief that will concern us to-day.



* This terminology is suggested by Meinong, but is not exactly

the same as his.





(2) We must distinguish between believing and what is believed. I

may believe that Columbus crossed the Atlantic, that all Cretans

are liars, that two and two are four, or that nine times six is

fifty-six; in all these cases the believing is just the same, and

only the contents believed are different. I may remember my

breakfast this morning, my lecture last week, or my first sight

of New York. In all these cases the feeling of memory-belief is

just the same, and only what is remembered differs. Exactly

similar remarks apply to expectations. Bare assent, memory and

expectation are forms of belief; all three are different from

what is believed, and each has a constant character which is

independent of what is believed.



In Lecture I we criticized the analysis of a presentation into

act, content and object. But our analysis of belief contains

three very similar elements, namely the believing, what is

believed and the objective. The objections to the act (in the

case of presentations) are not valid against the believing in the

case of beliefs, because the believing is an actual experienced

feeling, not something postulated, like the act. But it is

necessary first to complete our preliminary requisites, and then

to examine the content of a belief. After that, we shall be in a

position to return to the question as to what constitutes

believing.



(3) What is believed, and the believing, must both consist of

present occurrences in the believer, no matter what may be the

objective of the belief. Suppose I believe, for example, "that

Caesar crossed the Rubicon." The objective of my belief is an

event which happened long ago, which I never saw and do not

remember. This event itself is not in my mind when I believe that

it happened. It is not correct to say that I am believing the

actual event; what I am believing is something now in my mind,

something related to the event (in a way which we shall

investigate in Lecture XIII), but obviously not to be confounded

with the event, since the event is not occurring now but the

believing is. What a man is believing at a given moment is wholly

determinate if we know the contents of his mind at that moment;

but Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon was an historical physical

event, which is distinct from the present contents of every

present mind. What is believed, however true it may be, is not

the actual fact that makes the belief true, but a present event

related to the fact. This present event, which is what is

believed, I shall call the "content" of the belief. We have

already had occasion to notice the distinction between content

and objective in the case of memory-beliefs, where the content is

"this occurred" and the objective is the past event.



(4) Between content and objective there is sometimes a very wide

gulf, for example in the case of "Caesar crossed the Rubicon."

This gulf may, when it is first perceived, give us a feeling that

we cannot really " know " anything about the outer world. All we

can "know," it may be said, is what is now in our thoughts. If

Caesar and the Rubicon cannot be bodily in our thoughts, it might

seem as though we must remain cut off from knowledge of them. I

shall not now deal at length with this feeling, since it is

necessary first to define "knowing," which cannot be done yet.

But I will say, as a preliminary answer, that the feeling assumes

an ideal of knowing which I believe to be quite mistaken. ~ it

assumes, if it is thought out, something like the mystic unity of

knower and known. These two are often said to be combined into a

unity by the fact of cognition; hence when this unity is plainly

absent, it may seem as if there were no genuine cognition. For my

part, I think such theories and feelings wholly mistaken: I

believe knowing to be a very external and complicated relation,

incapable of exact definition, dependent upon causal laws, and

involving no more unity than there is between a signpost and the

town to which it points. I shall return to this question on a

later occasion; for the moment these provisional remarks must

suffice.



(5) The objective reference of a belief is connected with the

fact that all or some of the constituents of its content have

meaning. If I say "Caesar conquered Gaul," a person who knows the

meaning of the three words composing my statement knows as much

as can be known about the nature of the objective which would

make my statement true. It is clear that the objective reference

of a belief is, in general, in some way derivative from the

meanings of the words or images that occur in its content. There

are, however, certain complications which must be borne in mind.

In the first place, it might be contended that a memory-image

acquires meaning only through the memory-belief, which would

seem, at least in the case of memory, to make belief more

primitive than the meaning of images. In the second place, it is

a very singular thing that meaning, which is single, should

generate objective reference, which is dual, namely true and

false. This is one of the facts which any theory of belief must

explain if it is to be satisfactory.



It is now time to leave these preliminary requisites, and attempt

the analysis of the contents of beliefs.



The first thing to notice about what is believed, i.e. about the

content of a belief, is that it is always complex: We believe

that a certain thing has a certain property, or a certain

relation to something else, or that it occurred or will occur (in

the sense discussed at the end of Lecture IX); or we may believe

that all the members of a certain class have a certain property,

or that a certain property sometimes occurs among the members of

a class; or we may believe that if one thing happens, another

will happen (for example, "if it rains I shall bring my

umbrella"), or we may believe that something does not happen, or

did not or will not happen (for example, "it won't rain"); or

that one of two things must happen (for example, "either you

withdraw your accusation, or I shall bring a libel action"). The

catalogue of the sorts of things we may believe is infinite, but

all of them are complex.



Language sometimes conceals the complexity of a belief. We say

that a person believes in God, and it might seem as if God formed

the whole content of the belief. But what is really believed is

that God exists, which is very far from being simple. Similarly,

when a person has a memory-image with a memory-belief, the belief

is "this occurred," in the sense explained in Lecture IX; and

"this occurred" is not simple. In like manner all cases where the

content of a belief seems simple at first sight will be found, on

examination, to confirm the view that the content is always

complex.



The content of a belief involves not merely a plurality of

constituents, but definite relations between them; it is not

determinate when its constituents alone are given. For example,

"Plato preceded Aristotle" and "Aristotle preceded Plato" are

both contents which may be believed, but, although they consist

of exactly the same constituents, they are different, and even

incompatible.



The content of a belief may consist of words only, or of images

only, or of a mixture of the two, or of either or both together

with one or more sensations. It must contain at least one

constituent which is a word or an image, and it may or may not

contain one or more sensations as constituents. Some examples

will make these various possibilities clear.



We may take first recognition, in either of the forms "this is of

such-and-such a kind" or "this has occurred before." In either

case, present sensation is a constituent. For example, you hear a

noise, and you say to yourself "tram." Here the noise and the

word "tram" are both constituents of your belief; there is also a

relation between them, expressed by "is" in the proposition "that

is a tram." As soon as your act of recognition is completed by

the occurrence of the word "tram," your actions are affected: you

hurry if you want the tram, or cease to hurry if you want a bus.

In this case the content of your belief is a sensation (the

noise) and a word ("tram") related in a way which may be called

predication.



The same noise may bring into your mind the visual image of a

tram, instead of the word "tram." In this case your belief

consists of a sensation and an image suitable related. Beliefs of

this class are what are called "judgments of perception." As we

saw in Lecture VIII, the images associated with a sensation often

come with such spontaneity and force that the unsophisticated do

not distinguish them from the sensation; it is only the

psychologist or the skilled observer who is aware of the large

mnemic element that is added to sensation to make perception. It

may be objected that what is added consists merely of images

without belief. This is no doubt sometimes the case, but is

certainly sometimes not the case. That belief always occurs in

perception as opposed to sensation it is not necessary for us to

maintain; it is enough for our purposes to note that it sometimes

occurs, and that when it does, the content of our belief consists

of a sensation and an image suitably related.



In a PURE memory-belief only images occur. But a mixture of words

and images is very common in memory. You have an image of the

past occurrence, and you say to yourself: "Yes, that's how it

was." Here the image and the words together make up the content

of the belief. And when the remembering of an incident has become

a habit, it may be purely verbal, and the memory-belief may

consist of words alone.



The more complicated forms of belief tend to consist only of

words. Often images of various kinds accompany them, but they are

apt to be irrelevant, and to form no part of what is actually

believed. For example, in thinking of the Solar System, you are

likely to have vague images of pictures you have seen of the

earth surrounded by clouds, Saturn and his rings, the sun during

an eclipse, and so on; but none of these form part of your belief

that the planets revolve round the sun in elliptical orbits. The

only images that form an actual part of such beliefs are, as a

rule, images of words. And images of words, for the reasons

considered in Lecture VIII, cannot be distinguished with any

certainty from sensations, when, as is often, if not usually, the

case, they are kinaesthetic images of pronouncing the words.



It is impossible for a belief to consist of sensations alone,

except when, as in the case of words, the sensations have

associations which make them signs possessed of meaning. The

reason is that objective reference is of the essence of belief,

and objective reference is derived from meaning. When I speak of

a belief consisting partly of sensations and partly of words, I

do not mean to deny that the words, when they are not mere

images, are sensational, but that they occur as signs, not (so to

speak) in their own right. To revert to the noise of the tram,

when you hear it and say "tram," the noise and the word are both

sensations (if you actually pronounce the word), but the noise is

part of the fact which makes your belief true, whereas the word

is not part of this fact. It is the MEANING of the word "tram,"

not the actual word, that forms part of the fact which is the

objective of your belief. Thus the word occurs in the belief as a

symbol, in virtue of its meaning, whereas the noise enters into

both the belief and its objective. It is this that distinguishes

the occurrence of words as symbols from the occurrence of

sensations in their own right: the objective contains the

sensations that occur in their own right, but contains only the

meanings of the words that occur as symbols.



For the sake of simplicity, we may ignore the cases in which

sensations in their own right form part of the content of a

belief, and confine ourselves to images and words. We may also

omit the cases in which both images and words occur in the

content of a belief. Thus we become confined to two cases: (a)

when the content consists wholly of images, (b) when it consists

wholly of words. The case of mixed images and words has no

special importance, and its omission will do no harm.



Let us take in illustration a case of memory. Suppose you are

thinking of some familiar room. You may call up an image of it,

and in your image the window may be to the left of the door.

Without any intrusion of words, you may believe in the

correctness of your image. You then have a belief, consisting

wholly of images, which becomes, when put into words, "the window

is to the left of the door." You may yourself use these words and

proceed to believe them. You thus pass from an image-content to

the corresponding word-content. The content is different in the

two cases, but its objective reference is the same. This shows

the relation of image-beliefs to word-beliefs in a very simple

case. In more elaborate cases the relation becomes much less

simple.



It may be said that even in this very simple case the objective

reference of the word-content is not quite the same as that of

the image-content, that images have a wealth of concrete features

which are lost when words are substituted, that the window in the

image is not a mere window in the abstract, but a window of a

certain shape and size, not merely to the left of the door, but a

certain distance to the left, and so on. In reply, it may be

admitted at once that there is, as a rule, a certain amount of

truth in the objection. But two points may be urged to minimize

its force. First, images do not, as a rule, have that wealth of

concrete detail that would make it IMPOSSIBLE to express them

fully in words. They are vague and fragmentary: a finite number

of words, though perhaps a large number, would exhaust at least

their SIGNIFICANT features. For--and this is our second

point--images enter into the content of a belief through the fact

that they are capable of meaning, and their meaning does not, as

a rule, have as much complexity as they have: some of their

characteristics are usually devoid of meaning. Thus it may well

be possible to extract in words all that has meaning in an

image-content; in that case the word-content and the

image-content will have exactly the same objective reference.



The content of a belief, when expressed in words, is the same

thing (or very nearly the same thing) as what in logic is called

a "proposition." A proposition is a series of words (or sometimes

a single word) expressing the kind of thing that can be asserted

or denied. "That all men are mortal," "that Columbus discovered

America," "that Charles I died in his bed," "that all

philosophers are wise," are propositions. Not any series of words

is a proposition, but only such series of words as have

"meaning," or, in our phraseology, "objective reference." Given

the meanings of separate words, and the rules of syntax, the

meaning of a proposition is determinate. This is the reason why

we can understand a sentence we never heard before. You probably

never heard before the proposition "that the inhabitants of the

Andaman Islands habitually eat stewed hippopotamus for dinner,"

but there is no difficulty in understanding the proposition. The

question of the relation between the meaning of a sentence and

the meanings of the separate words is difficult, and I shall not

pursue it now; I brought it up solely as being illustrative of

the nature of propositions.



We may extend the term "proposition" so as to cover the

image-contents of beliefs consisting of images. Thus, in the case

of remembering a room in which the window is to the left of the

door, when we believe the image-content the proposition will

consist of the image of the window on the left together with the

image of the door on the right. We will distinguish propositions

of this kind as "image-propositions" and propositions in words as

"word-propositions." We may identify propositions in general with

the contents of actual and possible beliefs, and we may say that

it is propositions that are true or false. In logic we are

concerned with propositions rather than beliefs, since logic is

not interested in what people do in fact believe, but only in the

conditions which determine the truth or falsehood of possible

beliefs. Whenever possible, except when actual beliefs are in

question, it is generally a simplification to deal with

propositions.



It would seem that image-propositions are more primitive than

word-propositions, and may well ante-date language. There is no

reason why memory-images, accompanied by that very simple

belief-feeling which we decided to be the essence of memory,

should not have occurred before language arose; indeed, it would

be rash to assert positively that memory of this sort does not

occur among the higher animals. Our more elementary beliefs,

notably those that are added to sensation to make perception,

often remain at the level of images. For example, most of the

visual objects in our neighbourhood rouse tactile images: we have

a different feeling in looking at a sofa from what we have in

looking at a block of marble, and the difference consists chiefly

in different stimulation of our tactile imagination. It may be

said that the tactile images are merely present, without any

accompanying belief; but I think this view, though sometimes

correct, derives its plausibility as a general proposition from

our thinking of explicit conscious belief only. Most of our

beliefs, like most of our wishes, are "unconscious," in the sense

that we have never told ourselves that we have them. Such beliefs

display themselves when the expectations that they arouse fail in

any way. For example, if someone puts tea (without milk) into a

glass, and you drink it under the impression that it is going to

be beer; or if you walk on what appears to be a tiled floor, and

it turns out to be a soft carpet made to look like tiles. The

shock of surprise on an occasion of this kind makes us aware of

the expectations that habitually enter into our perceptions; and

such expectations must be classed as beliefs, in spite of the

fact that we do not normally take note of them or put them into

words. I remember once watching a cock pigeon running over and

over again to the edge of a looking-glass to try to wreak

vengeance on the particularly obnoxious bird whom he expected to

find there, judging by what he saw in the glass. He must have

experienced each time the sort of surprise on finding nothing,

which is calculated to lead in time to the adoption of Berkeley's

theory that objects of sense are only in the mind. His

expectation, though not expressed in words, deserved, I think, to

be called a belief.



I come now to the question what constitutes believing, as opposed

to the content believed.



To begin with, there are various different attitudes that may be

taken towards the same content. Let us suppose, for the sake of

argument, that you have a visual image of your breakfast-table.

You may expect it while you are dressing in the morning; remember

it as you go to your work; feel doubt as to its correctness when

questioned as to your powers of visualizing; merely entertain the

image, without connecting it with anything external, when you are

going to sleep; desire it if you are hungry, or feel aversion for

it if you are ill. Suppose, for the sake of definiteness, that

the content is "an egg for breakfast." Then you have the

following attitudes "I expect there will be an egg for

breakfast"; "I remember there was an egg for breakfast"; "Was

there an egg for breakfast?" "An egg for breakfast: well, what of

it?" "I hope there will be an egg for breakfast"; "I am afraid

there will be an egg for breakfast and it is sure to be bad." I

do not suggest that this is a list of all possible attitudes on

the subject; I say only that they are different attitudes, all

concerned with the one content "an egg for breakfast."



These attitudes are not all equally ultimate. Those that involve

desire and aversion have occupied us in Lecture III. For the

present, we are only concerned with such as are cognitive. In

speaking of memory, we distinguished three kinds of belief

directed towards the same content, namely memory, expectation and

bare assent without any time-determination in the belief-feeling.

But before developing this view, we must examine two other

theories which might be held concerning belief, and which, in

some ways, would be more in harmony with a behaviourist outlook

than the theory I wish to advocate.



(1) The first theory to be examined is the view that the

differentia of belief consists in its causal efficacy I do not

wish to make any author responsible for this theory: I wish

merely to develop it hypothetically so that we may judge of its

tenability.



We defined the meaning of an image or word by causal efficacy,

namely by associations: an image or word acquires meaning, we

said, through having the same associations as what it means.



We propose hypothetically to define "belief" by a different kind

of causal efficacy, namely efficacy in causing voluntary

movements. (Voluntary movements are defined as those vital

movements which are distinguished from reflex movements as

involving the higher nervous centres. I do not like to

distinguish them by means of such notions as "consciousness" or

"will," because I do not think these notions, in any definable

sense, are always applicable. Moreover, the purpose of the theory

we are examining is to be, as far as possible, physiological and

behaviourist, and this purpose is not achieved if we introduce

such a conception as "consciousness" or "will." Nevertheless, it

is necessary for our purpose to find some way of distinguishing

between voluntary and reflex movements, since the results would

be too paradoxical, if we were to say that reflex movements also

involve beliefs.) According to this definition, a content is said

to be "believed" when it causes us to move. The images aroused

are the same if you say to me, "Suppose there were an escaped

tiger coming along the street," and if you say to me, "There is

an escaped tiger coming along the street." But my actions will be

very different in the two cases: in the first, I shall remain

calm; in the second, it is possible that I may not. It is

suggested, by the theory we are considering, that this difference

of effects constitutes what is meant by saying that in the second

case I believe the proposition suggested, while in the first case

I do not. According to this view, images or words are "believed"

when they cause bodily movements.



I do not think this theory is adequate, but I think it is

suggestive of truth, and not so easily refutable as it might

appear to be at first sight.



It might be objected to the theory that many things which we

certainly believe do not call for any bodily movements. I believe

that Great Britain is an island, that whales are mammals, that

Charles I was executed, and so on; and at first sight it seems

obvious that such beliefs, as a rule, do not call for any action

on my part. But when we investigate the matter more closely, it

becomes more doubtful. To begin with, we must distinguish belief

as a mere DISPOSITION from actual active belief. We speak as if

we always believed that Charles I was executed, but that only

means that we are always ready to believe it when the subject

comes up. The phenomenon we are concerned to analyse is the

active belief, not the permanent disposition. Now, what are the

occasions when, we actively believe that Charles I was executed?

Primarily: examinations, when we perform the bodily movement of

writing it down; conversation, when we assert it to display our

historical erudition; and political discourses, when we are

engaged in showing what Soviet government leads to. In all these

cases bodily movements (writing or speaking) result from our

belief.



But there remains the belief which merely occurs in "thinking."

One may set to work to recall some piece of history one has been

reading, and what one recalls is believed, although it probably

does not cause any bodily movement whatever. It is true that what

we believe always MAY influence action. Suppose I am invited to

become King of Georgia: I find the prospect attractive, and go to

Cook's to buy a third-class ticket to my new realm. At the last

moment I remember Charles I and all the other monarchs who have

come to a bad end; I change my mind, and walk out without

completing the transaction. But such incidents are rare, and

cannot constitute the whole of my belief that Charles I was

executed. The conclusion seems to be that, although a belief

always MAY influence action if it becomes relevant to a practical

issue, it often exists actively (not as a mere disposition)

without producing any voluntary movement whatever. If this is

true, we cannot define belief by the effect on voluntary

movements.



There is another, more theoretical, ground for rejecting the view

we are examining. It is clear that a proposition can be either

believed or merely considered, and that the content is the same

in both cases. We can expect an egg for breakfast, or merely

entertain the supposition that there may be an egg for breakfast.

A moment ago I considered the possibility of being invited to

become King of Georgia, but I do not believe that this will

happen. Now, it seems clear that, since believing and considering

have different effects if one produces bodily movements while the

other does not, there must be some intrinsic difference between

believing and considering*; for if they were precisely similar,

their effects also would be precisely similar. We have seen that

the difference between believing a given proposition and merely

considering it does not lie in the content; therefore there must

be, in one case or in both, something additional to the content

which distinguishes the occurrence of a belief from the

occurrence of a mere consideration of the same content. So far as

the theoretical argument goes, this additional element may exist

only in belief, or only in consideration, or there may be one

sort of additional element in the case of belief, and another in

the case of consideration. This brings us to the second view

which we have to examine.



* Cf. Brentano, "Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte," p. 268

(criticizing Bain, "The Emotions and the Will").





(1) The theory which we have now to consider regards belief as

belonging to every idea which is entertained, except in so far as

some positive counteracting force interferes. In this view belief

is not a positive phenomenon, though doubt and disbelief are so.

What we call belief, according to this hypothesis, involves only

the appropriate content, which will have the effects

characteristic of belief unless something else operating

simultaneously inhibits them. James (Psychology, vol. ii, p. 288)

quotes with approval, though inaccurately, a passage from Spinoza

embodying this view:



"Let us conceive a boy imagining to himself a horse, and taking

note of nothing else. As this imagination involves the existence

of the horse, AND THE BOY HAS NO PERCEPTION WHICH ANNULS ITS

EXISTENCE [James's italics], he will necessarily contemplate the

horse as present, nor will he be able to doubt of its existence,

however little certain of it he may be. I deny that a man in so

far as he imagines [percipit] affirms nothing. For what is it to

imagine a winged horse but to affirm that the horse [that horse,

namely] has wings? For if the mind had nothing before it but the

winged horse, it would contemplate the same as present, would

have no cause to doubt of its existence, nor any power of

dissenting from its existence, unless the imagination of the

winged horse were joined to an idea which contradicted [tollit]

its existence" ("Ethics," vol. ii, p. 49, Scholium).



To this doctrine James entirely assents, adding in italics:



"ANY OBJECT WHICH REMAINS UNCONTRADICTED IS IPSO FACTO BELIEVED

AND POSITED AS ABSOLUTE REALITY."



If this view is correct, it follows (though James does not draw

the inference) that there is no need of any specific feeling

called "belief," and that the mere existence of images yields all

that is required. The state of mind in which we merely consider a

proposition, without believing or disbelieving it, will then

appear as a sophisticated product, the result of some rival force

adding to the image-proposition a positive feeling which may be

called suspense or non-belief--a feeling which may be compared to

that of a man about to run a race waiting for the signal. Such a

man, though not moving, is in a very different condition from

that of a man quietly at rest And so the man who is considering a

proposition without believing it will be in a state of tension,

restraining the natural tendency to act upon the proposition

which he would display if nothing interfered. In this view belief

primarily consists merely in the existence of the appropriate

images without any counteracting forces.



There is a great deal to be said in favour of this view, and I

have some hesitation in regarding it as inadequate. It fits

admirably with the phenomena of dreams and hallucinatory images,

and it is recommended by the way in which it accords with mental

development. Doubt, suspense of judgment and disbelief all seem

later and more complex than a wholly unreflecting assent. Belief

as a positive phenomenon, if it exists, may be regarded, in this

view, as a product of doubt, a decision after debate, an

acceptance, not merely of THIS, but of THIS-RATHER-THAN-THAT. It

is not difficult to suppose that a dog has images (possible

olfactory) of his absent master, or of the rabbit that he dreams

of hunting. But it is very difficult to suppose that he can

entertain mere imagination-images to which no assent is given.



I think it must be conceded that a mere image, without the

addition of any positive feeling that could be called "belief,"

is apt to have a certain dynamic power, and in this sense an

uncombated image has the force of a belief. But although this may

be true, it accounts only for some of the simplest phenomena in

the region of belief. It will not, for example, explain memory.

Nor can it explain beliefs which do not issue in any proximate

action, such as those of mathematics. I conclude, therefore, that

there must be belief-feelings of the same order as those of doubt

or disbelief, although phenomena closely analogous to those of

belief can be produced by mere uncontradicted images.



(3) I come now to the view of belief which I wish to advocate. It

seems to me that there are at least three kinds of belief, namely

memory, expectation and bare assent. Each of these I regard as

constituted by a certain feeling or complex of sensations,

attached to the content believed. We may illustrate by an

example. Suppose I am believing, by means of images, not words,

that it will rain. We have here two interrelated elements, namely

the content and the expectation. The content consists of images

of (say) the visual appearance of rain, the feeling of wetness,

the patter of drops, interrelated, roughly, as the sensations

would be if it were raining. Thus the content is a complex fact

composed of images. Exactly the same content may enter into the

memory "it was raining" or the assent "rain occurs." The

difference of these cases from each other and from expectation

does not lie in the content. The difference lies in the nature of

the belief-feeling. I, personally, do not profess to be able to

analyse the sensations constituting respectively memory,

expectation and assent; but I am not prepared to say that they

cannot be analysed. There may be other belief-feelings, for

example in disjunction and implication; also a disbelief-feeling.



It is not enough that the content and the belief-feeling should

coexist: it is necessary that there should be a specific relation

between them, of the sort expressed by saying that the content is

what is believed. If this were not obvious, it could be made

plain by an argument. If the mere co-existence of the content and

the belief-feeling sufficed, whenever we were having (say) a

memory-feeling we should be remembering any proposition which

came into our minds at the same time. But this is not the case,

since we may simultaneously remember one proposition and merely

consider another.



We may sum up our analysis, in the case of bare assent to a

proposition not expressed in words, as follows: (a) We have a

proposition, consisting of interrelated images, and possibly

partly of sensations; (b) we have the feeling of assent, which is

presumably a complex sensation demanding analysis; (c) we have a

relation, actually subsisting, between the assent and the

proposition, such as is expressed by saying that the proposition

in question is what is assented to. For other forms of

belief-feeling or of content, we have only to make the necessary

substitutions in this analysis.



If we are right in our analysis of belief, the use of words in

expressing beliefs is apt to be misleading. There is no way of

distinguishing, in words, between a memory and an assent to a

proposition about the past: "I ate my breakfast" and "Caesar

conquered Gaul" have the same verbal form, though (assuming that

I remember my breakfast) they express occurrences which are

psychologically very different. In the one case, what happens is

that I remember the content "eating my breakfast"; in the other

case, I assent to the content "Caesar's conquest of Gaul

occurred." In the latter case, but not in the former, the

pastness is part of the content believed. Exactly similar remarks

apply to the difference between expectation, such as we have when

waiting for the thunder after a flash of lightning, and assent to

a proposition about the future, such as we have in all the usual

cases of inferential knowledge as to what will occur. I think

this difficulty in the verbal expression of the temporal aspects

of beliefs is one among the causes which have hampered philosophy

in the consideration of time.



The view of belief which I have been advocating contains little

that is novel except the distinction of kinds of belief-feeling~

such as memory and expectation. Thus James says: "Everyone knows

the difference between imagining a thing and believing in its

existence, between supposing a proposition and acquiescing in its

truth...IN ITS INNER NATURE, BELIEF, OR THE SENSE OF REALITY, IS

A SORT OF FEELING MORE ALLIED TO THE EMOTIONS THAN. TO ANYTHING

ELSE" ("Psychology," vol. ii, p. 283. James's italics). He

proceeds to point out that drunkenness, and, still more, nitrous-

oxide intoxication, will heighten the sense of belief: in the

latter case, he says, a man's very soul may sweat with

conviction, and he be all the time utterly unable to say what he

is convinced of. It would seem that, in such cases, the feeling

of belief exists unattached, without its usual relation to a

content believed, just as the feeling of familiarity may

sometimes occur without being related to any definite familiar

object. The feeling of belief, when it occurs in this separated

heightened form, generally leads us to look for a content to

which to attach it. Much of what passes for revelation or mystic

insight probably comes in this way: the belief-feeling, in

abnormal strength, attaches itself, more or less accidentally, to

some content which we happen to think of at the appropriate

moment. But this is only a speculation, upon which I do not wish

to lay too much stress.

Lecture XIII
Truth and Falsehood



The definition of truth and falsehood, which is our topic to-day,

lies strictly outside our general subject, namely the analysis of

mind. From the psychological standpoint, there may be different

kinds of belief, and different degrees of certainty, but there

cannot be any purely psychological means of distinguishing

between true and false beliefs. A belief is rendered true or

false by relation to a fact, which may lie outside the experience

of the person entertaining the belief. Truth and falsehood,

except in the case of beliefs about our own minds, depend upon

the relations of mental occurrences to outside things, and thus

take us beyond the analysis of mental occurrences as they are in

themselves. Nevertheless, we can hardly avoid the consideration

of truth and falsehood. We wish to believe that our beliefs,

sometimes at least, yield KNOWLEDGE, and a belief does not yield

knowledge unless it is true. The question whether our minds are

instruments of knowledge, and, if so, in what sense, is so vital

that any suggested analysis of mind must be examined in relation

to this question. To ignore this question would be like

describing a chronometer without regard to its accuracy as a

time-keeper, or a thermometer without mentioning the fact that it

measures temperature.



Many difficult questions arise in connection with knowledge. It

is difficult to define knowledge, difficult to decide whether we

have any knowledge, and difficult, even if it is conceded that we

sometimes have knowledge to discover whether we can ever know

that we have knowledge in this or that particular case. I shall

divide the discussion into four parts:



I. We may regard knowledge, from a behaviourist standpoint, as

exhibited in a certain kind of response to the environment. This

response must have some characteristics which it shares with

those of scientific instruments, but must also have others that

are peculiar to knowledge. We shall find that this point of view

is important, but not exhaustive of the nature of knowledge.



II. We may hold that the beliefs that constitute knowledge are

distinguished from such as are erroneous or uncertain by

properties which are intrinsic either to single beliefs or to

systems of beliefs, being in either case discoverable without

reference to outside fact. Views of this kind have been widely

held among philosophers, but we shall find no reason to accept

them.



III. We believe that some beliefs are true, and some false. This

raises the problem of VERIFIABILITY: are there any circumstances

which can justifiably give us an unusual degree of certainty that

such and such a belief is true? It is obvious that there are

circumstances which in fact cause a certainty of this sort, and

we wish to learn what we can from examining these circumstances.



IV. Finally, there is the formal problem of defining truth and

falsehood, and deriving the objective reference of a proposition

from the meanings of its component words.



We will consider these four problems in succession.



I. We may regard a human being as an instrument, which makes

various responses to various stimuli. If we observe these

responses from outside, we shall regard them as showing knowledge

when they display two characteristics, ACCURACY and

APPROPRIATENESS. These two are quite distinct, and even sometimes

incompatible. If I am being pursued by a tiger, accuracy is

furthered by turning round to look at him, but appropriateness by

running away without making any search for further knowledge of

the beast. I shall return to the question of appropriateness

later; for the present it is accuracy that I wish to consider.



When we are viewing a man from the outside, it is not his

beliefs, but his bodily movements, that we can observe. His

knowledge must be inferred from his bodily movements, and

especially from what he says and writes. For the present we may

ignore beliefs, and regard a man's knowledge as actually

consisting in what he says and does. That is to say, we will

construct, as far as possible, a purely behaviouristic account of

truth and falsehood.



If you ask a boy "What is twice two?" and the boy says "four,"

you take that as prima facie evidence that the boy knows what

twice two is. But if you go on to ask what is twice three, twice

four, twice five, and so on, and the boy always answers "four,"

you come to the conclusion that he knows nothing about it.

Exactly similar remarks apply to scientific instruments. I know a

certain weather-cock which has the pessimistic habit of always

pointing to the north-east. If you were to see it first on a cold

March day, you would think it an excellent weather-cock; but with

the first warm day of spring your confidence would be shaken. The

boy and the weather-cock have the same defect: they do not vary

their response when the stimulus is varied. A good instrument, or

a person with much knowledge, will give different responses to

stimuli which differ in relevant ways. This is the first point in

defining accuracy of response.



We will now assume another boy, who also, when you first question

him, asserts that twice two is four. But with this boy, instead

of asking him different questions, you make a practice of asking

him the same question every day at breakfast. You find that he

says five, or six, or seven, or any other number at random, and

you conclude that he also does not know what twice two is, though

by good luck he answered right the first time. This boy is like a

weather-cock which, instead of being stuck fast, is always going

round and round, changing without any change of wind. This boy

and weather-cock have the opposite defect to that of the previous

pair: they give different responses to stimuli which do not

differ in any relevant way.



In connection with vagueness in memory, we already had occasion

to consider the definition of accuracy. Omitting some of the

niceties of our previous discussion, we may say that an

instrument is ACCURATE when it avoids the defects of the two boys

and weather-cocks, that is to say, when--



(a) It gives different responses to stimuli which differ in

relevant ways;



(b) It gives the same response to stimuli which do not differ in

relevant ways.



What are relevant ways depends upon the nature and purpose of the

instrument. In the case of a weather-cock, the direction of the

wind is relevant, but not its strength; in the case of the boy,

the meaning of the words of your question is relevant, but not

the loudness of your voice, or whether you are his father or his

schoolmaster If, however, you were a boy of his own age, that

would be relevant, and the appropriate response would be

different.



It is clear that knowledge is displayed by accuracy of response

to certain kinds of stimuli, e.g. examinations. Can we say,

conversely, that it consists wholly of such accuracy of response?

I do not think we can; but we can go a certain distance in this

direction. For this purpose we must define more carefully the

kind of accuracy and the kind of response that may be expected

where there is knowledge.



From our present point of view, it is difficult to exclude

perception from knowledge; at any rate, knowledge is displayed by

actions based upon perception. A bird flying among trees avoids

bumping into their branches; its avoidance is a response to

visual sensations. This response has the characteristic of

accuracy, in the main, and leads us to say that the bird "knows,"

by sight, what objects are in its neighbourhood. For a

behaviourist, this must certainly count as knowledge, however it

may be viewed by analytic psychology. In this case, what is

known, roughly, is the stimulus; but in more advanced knowledge

the stimulus and what is known become different. For example, you

look in your calendar and find that Easter will be early next

year. Here the stimulus is the calendar, whereas the response

concerns the future. Even this can be paralleled among

instruments: the behaviour of the barometer has a present

stimulus but foretells the future, so that the barometer might be

said, in a sense, to know the future. However that may be, the

point I am emphasizing as regards knowledge is that what is known

may be quite different from the stimulus, and no part of the

cause of the knowledge-response. It is only in sense-knowledge

that the stimulus and what is known are, with qualifications,

identifiable. In knowledge of the future, it is obvious that they

are totally distinct, since otherwise the response would precede

the stimulus. In abstract knowledge also they are distinct, since

abstract facts have no date. In knowledge of the past there are

complications, which we must briefly examine.



Every form of memory will be, from our present point of view, in

one sense a delayed response. But this phrase does not quite

clearly express what is meant. If you light a fuse and connect it

with a heap of dynamite, the explosion of the dynamite may be

spoken of, in a sense, as a delayed response to your lighting of

the fuse. But that only means that it is a somewhat late portion

of a continuous process of which the earlier parts have less

emotional interest. This is not the case with habit. A display of

habit has two sorts of causes: (a) the past occurrences which

generated the habit, (b) the present occurrence which brings it

into play. When you drop a weight on your toe, and say what you

do say, the habit has been caused by imitation of your

undesirable associates, whereas it is brought into play by the

dropping of the weight. The great bulk of our knowledge is a

habit in this sense: whenever I am asked when I was born, I reply

correctly by mere habit. It would hardly be correct to say that

getting born was the stimulus, and that my reply is a delayed

response But in cases of memory this way of speaking would have

an element of truth. In an habitual memory, the event remembered

was clearly an essential part of the stimulus to the formation of

the habit. The present stimulus which brings the habit into play

produces a different response from that which it would produce if

the habit did not exist. Therefore the habit enters into the

causation of the response, and so do, at one remove, the causes

of the habit. It follows that an event remembered is an essential

part of the causes of our remembering.



In spite, however, of the fact that what is known is SOMETIMES an

indispensable part of the cause of the knowledge, this

circumstance is, I think, irrelevant to the general question with

which we are concerned, namely What sort of response to what sort

of stimulus can be regarded as displaying knowledge? There is one

characteristic which the response must have, namely, it must

consist of voluntary movements. The need of this characteristic

is connected with the characteristic of APPROPRIATENESS, which I

do not wish to consider as yet. For the present I wish only to

obtain a clearer idea of the sort of ACCURACY that a

knowledge-response must have. It is clear from many instances

that accuracy, in other cases, may be purely mechanical. The most

complete form of accuracy consists in giving correct answers to

questions, an achievement in which calculating machines far

surpass human beings. In asking a question of a calculating

machine, you must use its language: you must not address it in

English, any more than you would address an Englishman in

Chinese. But if you address it in the language it understands. it

will tell you what is 34521 times 19987, without a moment's

hesitation or a hint of inaccuracy. We do not say the machine

KNOWS the answer, because it has no purpose of its own in giving

the answer: it does not wish to impress you with its cleverness,

or feel proud of being such a good machine. But as far as mere

accuracy goes, the machine leaves nothing to be desired.



Accuracy of response is a perfectly clear notion in the case of

answers to questions, but in other cases it is much more obscure.

We may say generally that an object whether animate or inanimate,

is "sensitive" to a certain feature of the environment if it

behaves differently according to the presence or absence of that

feature. Thus iron is sensitive to anything magnetic. But

sensitiveness does not constitute knowledge, and knowledge of a

fact which is not sensible is not sensitiveness to that fact, as

we have seen in distinguishing the fact known from the stimulus.

As soon as we pass beyond the simple case of question and answer,

the definition of knowledge by means of behaviour demands the

consideration of purpose. A carrier pigeon flies home, and so we

say it "knows" the way. But if it merely flew to some place at

random, we should not say that it "knew" the way to that place,

any more than a stone rolling down hill knows the way to the

valley.



On the features which distinguish knowledge from accuracy of

response in general, not much can be said from a behaviourist

point of view without referring to purpose. But the necessity of

SOMETHING besides accuracy of response may be brought out by the

following consideration: Suppose two persons, of whom one

believed whatever the other disbelieved, and disbelieved whatever

the other believed. So far as accuracy and sensitiveness of

response alone are concerned, there would be nothing to choose

between these two persons. A thermometer which went down for warm

weather and up for cold might be just as accurate as the usual

kind; and a person who always believes falsely is just as

sensitive an instrument as a person who always believes truly.

The observable and practical difference between them would be

that the one who always believed falsely would quickly come to a

bad end. This illustrates once more that accuracy of response to

stimulus does not alone show knowledge, but must be reinforced by

appropriateness, i.e. suitability for realizing one's purpose.

This applies even in the apparently simple case of answering

questions: if the purpose of the answers is to deceive, their

falsehood, not their truth, will be evidence of knowledge. The

proportion of the combination of appropriateness with accuracy in

the definition of knowledge is difficult; it seems that both

enter in, but that appropriateness is only required as regards

the general type of response, not as regards each individual

instance.



II. I have so far assumed as unquestionable the view that the

truth or falsehood of a belief consists in a relation to a

certain fact, namely the objective of the belief. This view has,

however, been often questioned. Philosophers have sought some

intrinsic criterion by which true and false beliefs could be

distinguished.* I am afraid their chief reason for this search

has been the wish to feel more certainty than seems otherwise

possible as to what is true and what is false. If we could

discover the truth of a belief by examining its intrinsic

characteristics, or those of some collection of beliefs of which

it forms part, the pursuit of truth, it is thought, would be a

less arduous business than it otherwise appears to be. But the

attempts which have been made in this direction are not

encouraging. I will take two criteria which have been suggested,

namely, (1) self-evidence, (2) mutual coherence. If we can show

that these are inadequate, we may feel fairly certain that no

intrinsic criterion hitherto suggested will suffice to

distinguish true from false beliefs.



* The view that such a criterion exists is generally held by

those whose views are in any degree derived from Hegel. It may be

illustrated by the following passage from Lossky, "The Intuitive

Basis of Knowledge" (Macmillan, 1919), p. 268: "Strictly

speaking, a false judgment is not a judgment at all. The

predicate does not follow from the subject S alone, but from the

subject plus a certain addition C, WHICH IN NO SENSE BELONGS TO

THE CONTENT OF THE JUDGMENT. What takes place may be a process of

association of ideas, of imagining, or the like, but is not a

process of judging. An experienced psychologist will be able by

careful observation to detect that in this process there is

wanting just the specific element of the objective dependence of

the predicate upon the subject which is characteristic of a

judgment. It must be admitted, however, that an exceptional power

of observation is needed in order to distinguish, by means of

introspection, mere combination of ideas from judgments."





(1) Self-evidence.--Some of our beliefs seem to be peculiarly

indubitable. One might instance the belief that two and two are

four, that two things cannot be in the same place at the same

time, nor one thing in two places, or that a particular buttercup

that we are seeing is yellow. The suggestion we are to examine is

that such: beliefs have some recognizable quality which secures

their truth, and the truth of whatever is deduced from them

according to self-evident principles of inference. This theory is

set forth, for example, by Meinong in his book, "Ueber die

Erfahrungsgrundlagen unseres Wissens."



If this theory is to be logically tenable, self-evidence must not

consist merely in the fact that we believe a proposition. We

believe that our beliefs are sometimes erroneous, and we wish to

be able to select a certain class of beliefs which are never

erroneous. If we are to do this, it must be by some mark which

belongs only to certain beliefs, not to all; and among those to

which it belongs there must be none that are mutually

inconsistent. If, for example, two propositions p and q were

self-evident, and it were also self-evident that p and q could

not both be true, that would condemn self-evidence as a guarantee

of truth. Again, self-evidence must not be the same thing as the

absence of doubt or the presence of complete certainty. If we are

completely certain of a proposition, we do not seek a ground to

support our belief. If self-evidence is alleged as a ground of

belief, that implies that doubt has crept in, and that our

self-evident proposition has not wholly resisted the assaults of

scepticism. To say that any given person believes some things so

firmly that he cannot be made to doubt them is no doubt true.

Such beliefs he will be willing to use as premisses in reasoning,

and to him personally they will seem to have as much evidence as

any belief can need. But among the propositions which one man

finds indubitable there will be some that another man finds it

quite possible to doubt. It used to seem self-evident that there

could not be men at the Antipodes, because they would fall off,

or at best grow giddy from standing on their heads. But New

Zealanders find the falsehood of this proposition self-evident.

Therefore, if self-evidence is a guarantee of truth, our

ancestors must have been mistaken in thinking their beliefs about

the Antipodes self-evident. Meinong meets this difficulty by

saying that some beliefs are falsely thought to be self-evident,

but in the case of others it is self-evident that they are

self-evident, and these are wholly reliable. Even this, however,

does not remove the practical risk of error, since we may

mistakenly believe it self-evident that a certain belief is

self-evident. To remove all risk of error, we shall need an

endless series of more and more complicated self-evident beliefs,

which cannot possibly be realized in practice. It would seem,

therefore, that self-evidence is useless as a practical criterion

for insuring truth.



The same result follows from examining instances. If we take the

four instances mentioned at the beginning of this discussion, we

shall find that three of them are logical, while the fourth is a

judgment of perception. The proposition that two and two are four

follows by purely logical deduction from definitions: that means

that its truth results, not from the properties of objects, but

from the meanings of symbols. Now symbols, in mathematics, mean

what we choose; thus the feeling of self-evidence, in this case,

seems explicable by the fact that the whole matter is within our

control. I do not wish to assert that this is the whole truth

about mathematical propositions, for the question is complicated,

and I do not know what the whole truth is. But I do wish to

suggest that the feeling of self-evidence in mathematical

propositions has to do with the fact that they are concerned with

the meanings of symbols, not with properties of the world such as

external observation might reveal.



Similar considerations apply to the impossibility of a thing

being in two places at once, or of two things being in one place

at the same time. These impossibilities result logically, if I am

not mistaken, from the definitions of one thing and one place.

That is to say, they are not laws of physics, but only part of

the intellectual apparatus which we have manufactured for

manipulating physics. Their self-evidence, if this is so, lies

merely in the fact that they represent our decision as to the use

of words, not a property of physical objects.



Judgments of perception, such as "this buttercup is yellow," are

in a quite different position from judgments of logic, and their

self-evidence must have a different explanation. In order to

arrive at the nucleus of such a judgment, we will eliminate, as

far as possible, the use of words which take us beyond the

present fact, such as "buttercup" and "yellow." The simplest kind

of judgment underlying the perception that a buttercup is yellow

would seem to be the perception of similarity in two colours seen

simultaneously. Suppose we are seeing two buttercups, and we

perceive that their colours are similar. This similarity is a

physical fact, not a matter of symbols or words; and it certainly

seems to be indubitable in a way that many judgments are not.



The first thing to observe, in regard to such judgments, is that

as they stand they are vague. The word "similar" is a vague word,

since there are degrees of similarity, and no one can say where

similarity ends and dissimilarity begins. It is unlikely that our

two buttercups have EXACTLY the same colour, and if we judged

that they had we should have passed altogether outside the region

of self-evidence. To make our proposition more precise, let us

suppose that we are also seeing a red rose at the same time. Then

we may judge that the colours of the buttercups are more similar

to each other than to the colour of the rose. This judgment seems

more complicated, but has certainly gained in precision. Even

now, however, it falls short of complete precision, since

similarity is not prima facie measurable, and it would require

much discussion to decide what we mean by greater or less

similarity. To this process of the pursuit of precision there is

strictly no limit.



The next thing to observe (although I do not personally doubt

that most of our judgments of perception are true) is that it is

very difficult to define any class of such judgments which can be

known, by its intrinsic quality, to be always exempt from error.

Most of our judgments of perception involve correlations, as when

we judge that a certain noise is that of a passing cart. Such

judgments are all obviously liable to error, since there is no

correlation of which we have a right to be certain that it is

invariable. Other judgments of perception are derived from

recognition, as when we say "this is a buttercup," or even merely

"this is yellow." All such judgments entail some risk of error,

though sometimes perhaps a very small one; some flowers that look

like buttercups are marigolds, and colours that some would call

yellow others might call orange. Our subjective certainty is

usually a result of habit, and may lead us astray in

circumstances which are unusual in ways of which we are unaware.



For such reasons, no form of self-evidence seems to afford an

absolute criterion of truth. Nevertheless, it is perhaps true

that judgments having a high degree of subjective certainty are

more apt to be true than other judgments. But if this be the

case, it is a result to be demonstrated, not a premiss from which

to start in defining truth and falsehood. As an initial

guarantee, therefore, neither self-evidence nor subjective

certainty can be accepted as adequate.



(2) Coherence.--Coherence as the definition of truth is advocated

by idealists, particularly by those who in the main follow Hegel.

It is set forth ably in Mr. Joachim's book, "The Nature of Truth"

(Oxford, 1906). According to this view, any set of propositions

other than the whole of truth can be condemned on purely logical

grounds, as internally inconsistent; a single proposition, if it

is what we should ordinarily call false, contradicts itself

irremediably, while if it is what we should ordinarily call true,

it has implications which compel us to admit other propositions,

which in turn lead to others, and so on, until we find ourselves

committed to the whole of truth. One might illustrate by a very

simple example: if I say "so-and-so is a married man," that is

not a self-subsistent proposition. We cannot logically conceive

of a universe in which this proposition constituted the whole of

truth. There must be also someone who is a married woman, and who

is married to the particular man in question. The view we are

considering regards everything that can be said about any one

object as relative in the same sort of way as "so-and-so is a

married man." But everything, according to this view, is

relative, not to one or two other things, but to all other

things, so that from one bit of truth the whole can be inferred.



The fundamental objection to this view is logical, and consists

in a criticism of its doctrine as to relations. I shall omit this

line of argument, which I have developed elsewhere.* For the

moment I will content myself with saying that the powers of logic

seem to me very much less than this theory supposes. If it were

taken seriously, its advocates ought to profess that any one

truth is logically inferable from any other, and that, for

example, the fact that Caesar conquered Gaul, if adequately

considered, would enable us to discover what the weather will be

to-morrow. No such claim is put forward in practice, and the

necessity of empirical observation is not denied; but according

to the theory it ought to be.



* In the article on "The Monistic Theory of Truth" in

"Philosophical Essays" (Longmans, 1910), reprinted from the

"Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society," 1906-7.





Another objection is that no endeavour is made to show that we

cannot form a consistent whole composed partly or wholly of false

propositions, as in a novel. Leibniz's conception of many

possible worlds seems to accord much better with modern logic and

with the practical empiricism which is now universal. The attempt

to deduce the world by pure thought is attractive, and in former

times was largely supposed capable of success. But nowadays most

men admit that beliefs must be tested by observation, and not

merely by the fact that they harmonize with other beliefs. A

consistent fair-ytale is a different thing from truth, however

elaborate it may be. But to pursue this topic would lead us into

difficult technicalities; I shall therefore assume, without

further argument, that coherence is not sufficient as a

definition of truth.



III. Many difficult problems arise as regards the verifiability

of beliefs. We believe various things, and while we believe them

we think we know them. But it sometimes turns out that we were

mistaken, or at any rate we come to think we were. We must be

mistaken either in our previous opinion or in our subsequent

recantation; therefore our beliefs are not all correct, and there

are cases of belief which are not cases of knowledge. The

question of verifiability is in essence this: can we discover any

set of beliefs which are never mistaken or any test which, when

applicable, will always enable us to discriminate between true

and false beliefs? Put thus broadly and abstractly, the answer

must be negative. There is no way hitherto discovered of wholly

eliminating the risk of error, and no infallible criterion. If we

believe we have found a criterion, this belief itself may be

mistaken; we should be begging the question if we tried to test

the criterion by applying the criterion to itself.



But although the notion of an absolute criterion is chimerical,

there may be relative criteria, which increase the probability of

truth. Common sense and science hold that there are. Let us see

what they have to say.



One of the plainest cases of verification, perhaps ultimately the

only case, consists in the happening of something expected. You

go to the station believing that there will be a train at a

certain time; you find the train, you get into it, and it starts

at the expected time This constitutes verification, and is a

perfectly definite experience. It is, in a sense, the converse of

memory instead of having first sensations and then images

accompanied by belief, we have first images accompanied by belief

and then sensations. Apart from differences as to the time-order

and the accompanying feelings, the relation between image and

sensation is closely similar in the two cases of memory and

expectation; it is a relation of similarity, with difference as

to causal efficacy--broadly, the image has the psychological but

not the physical effects that the sensation would have. When an

image accompanied by an expectation-belief is thus succeeded by a

sensation which is the "meaning" of the image, we say that the

expectation-belief has been verified. The experience of

verification in this sense is exceedingly familiar; it happens

every time that accustomed activities have results that are not

surprising, in eating and walking and talking and all our daily

pursuits.



But although the experience in question is common, it is not

wholly easy to give a theoretical account of it. How do we know

that the sensation resembles the previous image? Does the image

persist in presence of the sensation, so that we can compare the

two? And even if SOME image does persist, how do we know that it

is the previous image unchanged? It does not seem as if this line

of inquiry offered much hope of a successful issue. It is better,

I think, to take a more external and causal view of the relation

of expectation to expected occurrence. If the occurrence, when it

comes, gives us the feeling of expectedness, and if the

expectation, beforehand, enabled us to act in a way which proves

appropriate to the occurrence, that must be held to constitute

the maximum of verification. We have first an expectation, then a

sensation with the feeling of expectedness related to memory of

the expectation. This whole experience, when it occurs, may be

defined as verification, and as constituting the truth of the

expectation. Appropriate action, during the period of

expectation, may be regarded as additional verification, but is

not essential. The whole process may be illustrated by looking up

a familiar quotation, finding it in the expected words, and in

the expected part of the book. In this case we can strengthen the

verification by writing down beforehand the words which we expect

to find.



I think all verification is ultimately of the above sort. We

verify a scientific hypothesis indirectly, by deducing

consequences as to the future, which subsequent experience

confirms. If somebody were to doubt whether Caesar had crossed

the Rubicon, verification could only be obtained from the future.

We could proceed to display manuscripts to our historical

sceptic, in which it was said that Caesar had behaved in this

way. We could advance arguments, verifiable by future experience,

to prove the antiquity of the manuscript from its texture,

colour, etc. We could find inscriptions agreeing with the

historian on other points, and tending to show his general

accuracy. The causal laws which our arguments would assume could

be verified by the future occurrence of events inferred by means

of them. The existence and persistence of causal laws, it is

true, must be regarded as a fortunate accident, and how long it

will continue we cannot tell. Meanwhile verification remains

often practically possible. And since it is sometimes possible,

we can gradually discover what kinds of beliefs tend to be

verified by experience, and what kinds tend to be falsified; to

the former kinds we give an increased degree of assent, to the

latter kinds a diminished degree. The process is not absolute or

infallible, but it has been found capable of sifting beliefs and

building up science. It affords no theoretical refutation of the

sceptic, whose position must remain logically unassailable; but

if complete scepticism is rejected, it gives the practical method

by which the system of our beliefs grows gradually towards the

unattainable ideal of impeccable knowledge.



IV. I come now to the purely formal definition of the truth or

falsehood of a belief. For this definition it is necessary first

of all to consider the derivation of the objective reference of a

proposition from the meanings of its component words or images.



Just as a word has meaning, so a proposition has an objective

reference. The objective reference of a proposition is a function

(in the mathematical sense) of the meanings of its component

words. But the objective reference differs from the meaning of a

word through the duality of truth and falsehood. You may believe

the proposition "to-day is Tuesday" both when, in fact, to-day is

Tuesday, and when to-day is not Tuesday. If to-day is not

Tuesday, this fact is the objective of your belief that to-day is

Tuesday. But obviously the relation of your belief to the fact is

different in this case from what it is in the case when to-day is

Tuesday. We may say, metaphorically, that when to-day is Tuesday,

your belief that it is Tuesday points TOWARDS the fact, whereas

when to-day is not Tuesday your belief points AWAY FROM the fact.

Thus the objective reference of a belief is not determined by the

fact alone, but by the direction of the belief towards or away

from the fact.* If, on a Tuesday, one man believes that it is

Tuesday while another believes that it is not Tuesday, their

beliefs have the same objective, namely the fact that it is

Tuesday but the true belief points towards the fact while the

false one points away from it. Thus, in order to define the

reference of a proposition we have to take account not only of

the objective, but also of the direction of pointing, towards the

objective in the case of a true proposition and away from it in

the case of a false one.



* I owe this way of looking at the matter to my friend Ludwig

Wittgenstein.





This mode of stating the nature of the objective reference of a

proposition is necessitated by the circumstance that there are

true and false propositions, but not true and false facts. If

to-day is Tuesday, there is not a false objective "to-day is not

Tuesday," which could be the objective of the false belief

"to-day is not Tuesday." This is the reason why two beliefs which

are each other's contradictories have the same objective. There

is, however, a practical inconvenience, namely that we cannot

determine the objective reference of a proposition, according to

this definition, unless we know whether the proposition is true

or false. To avoid this inconvenience, it is better to adopt a

slightly different phraseology, and say: The "meaning" of the

proposition "to-day is Tuesday" consists in pointing to the fact

"to-day is Tuesday" if that is a fact, or away from the fact

"to-day is not Tuesday" if that is a fact. The "meaning" of the

proposition "to-day is not Tuesday" will be exactly the opposite.

By this hypothetical form we are able to speak of the meaning of

a proposition without knowing whether it is true or false.

According to this definition, we know the meaning of a

proposition when we know what would make it true and what would

make it false, even if we do not know whether it is in fact true

or false.



The meaning of a proposition is derivative from the meanings of

its constituent words. Propositions occur in pairs, distinguished

(in simple cases) by the absence or presence of the word "not."

Two such propositions have the same objective, but opposite

meanings: when one is true, the other is false, and when one is

false, the other is true.



The purely formal definition of truth and falsehood offers little

difficulty. What is required is a formal expression of the fact

that a proposition is true when it points towards its objective,

and false when it points away from it, In very simple cases we

can give a very simple account of this: we can say that true

propositions actually resemble their objectives in a way in which

false propositions do not. But for this purpose it is necessary

to revert to image-propositions instead of word-propositions. Let

us take again the illustration of a memory-image of a familiar

room, and let us suppose that in the image the window is to the

left of the door. If in fact the window is to the left of the

door, there is a correspondence between the image and the

objective; there is the same relation between the window and the

door as between the images of them. The image-memory consists of

the image of the window to the left of the image of the door.

When this is true, the very same relation relates the terms of

the objective (namely the window and the door) as relates the

images which mean them. In this case the correspondence which

constitutes truth is very simple.



In the case we have just been considering the objective consists

of two parts with a certain relation (that of left-to-right), and

the proposition consists of images of these parts with the very

same relation. The same proposition, if it were false, would have

a less simple formal relation to its objective. If the

image-proposition consists of an image of the window to the left

of an image of the door, while in fact the window is not to the

left of the door, the proposition does not result from the

objective by the mere substitution of images for their

prototypes. Thus in this unusually simple case we can say that a

true proposition "corresponds" to its objective in a formal sense

in which a false proposition does not. Perhaps it may be possible

to modify this notion of formal correspondence in such a way as

to be more widely applicable, but if so, the modifications

required will be by no means slight. The reasons for this must

now be considered.



To begin with, the simple type of correspondence we have been

exhibiting can hardly occur when words are substituted for

images, because, in word-propositions, relations are usually

expressed by words, which are not themselves relations. Take such

a proposition as "Socrates precedes Plato." Here the word

"precedes" is just as solid as the words "Socrates" and "Plato";

it MEANS a relation, but is not a relation. Thus the objective

which makes our proposition true consists of TWO terms with a

relation between them, whereas our proposition consists of THREE

terms with a relation of order between them. Of course, it would

be perfectly possible, theoretically, to indicate a few chosen

relations, not by words, but by relations between the other

words. "Socrates-Plato" might be used to mean "Socrates precedes

Plato"; "PlaSocrates-to" might be used to mean "Plato was born

before Socrates and died after him"; and so on. But the

possibilities of such a method would be very limited. For aught I

know, there may be languages that use it, but they are not among

the languages with which I am acquainted. And in any case, in

view of the multiplicity of relations that we wish to express, no

language could advance far without words for relations. But as

soon as we have words for relations, word-propositions have

necessarily more terms than the facts to which they refer, and

cannot therefore correspond so simply with their objectives as

some image-propositions can.



The consideration of negative propositions and negative facts

introduces further complications. An image-proposition is

necessarily positive: we can image the window to the left of the

door, or to the right of the door, but we can form no image of

the bare negative "the window not to the left of the door." We

can DISBELIEVE the image-proposition expressed by "the window to

the left of the door," and our disbelief will be true if the

window is not to the left of the door. But we can form no image

of the fact that the window is not to the left of the door.

Attempts have often been made to deny such negative facts, but,

for reasons which I have given elsewhere,* I believe these

attempts to be mistaken, and I shall assume that there are

negative facts.



* "Monist," January, 1919, p. 42 ff.





Word-propositions, like image-propositions, are always positive

facts. The fact that Socrates precedes Plato is symbolized in

English by the fact that the word "precedes" occurs between the

words "Socrates" and "Plato." But we cannot symbolize the fact

that Plato does not precede Socrates by not putting the word

"precedes" between "Plato" and "Socrates." A negative fact is not

sensible, and language, being intended for communication, has to

be sensible. Therefore we symbolize the fact that Plato does not

precede Socrates by putting the words "does not precede" between

"Plato" and "Socrates." We thus obtain a series of words which is

just as positive a fact as the series "Socrates precedes Plato."

The propositions asserting negative facts are themselves positive

facts; they are merely different positive facts from those

asserting positive facts.



We have thus, as regards the opposition of positive and negative,

three different sorts of duality, according as we are dealing

with facts, image-propositions, or word-propositions. We have,

namely:



(1) Positive and negative facts;



(2) Image-propositions, which may be believed or disbelieved, but

do not allow any duality of content corresponding to positive and

negative facts;



(3) Word-propositions, which are always positive facts, but are

of two kinds: one verified by a positive objective, the other by

a negative objective.



Owing to these complications, the simplest type of correspondence

is impossible when either negative facts or negative propositions

are involved.



Even when we confine ourselves to relations between two terms

which are both imaged, it may be impossible to form an

image-proposition in which the relation of the terms is

represented by the same relation of the images. Suppose we say

"Caesar was 2,000 years before Foch," we express a certain

temporal relation between Caesar and Foch; but we cannot allow

2,000 years to elapse between our image of Caesar and our image

of Foch. This is perhaps not a fair example, since "2,000 years

before" is not a direct relation. But take a case where the

relation is direct, say, "the sun is brighter than the moon." We

can form visual images of sunshine and moonshine, and it may

happen that our image of the sunshine is the brighter of the two,

but this is by no means either necessary or sufficient. The act

of comparison, implied in our judgment, is something more than

the mere coexistence of two images, one of which is in fact

brighter than the other. It would take us too far from our main

topic if we were to go into the question what actually occurs

when we make this judgment. Enough has been said to show that the

correspondence between the belief and its objective is more

complicated in this case than in that of the window to the left

of the door, and this was all that had to be proved.



In spite of these complications, the general nature of the formal

correspondence which makes truth is clear from our instances. In

the case of the simpler kind of propositions, namely those that I

call "atomic" propositions, where there is only one word

expressing a relation, the objective which would verify our

proposition, assuming that the word "not" is absent, is obtained

by replacing each word by what it means, the word meaning a

relation being replaced by this relation among the meanings of

the other words. For example, if the proposition is "Socrates

precedes Plato," the objective which verifies it results from

replacing the word "Socrates" by Socrates, the word "Plato" by

Plato, and the word "precedes" by the relation of preceding

between Socrates and Plato. If the result of this process is a

fact, the proposition is true; if not, it is false. When our

proposition is "Socrates does not precede Plato," the conditions

of truth and falsehood are exactly reversed. More complicated

propositions can be dealt with on the same lines. In fact, the

purely formal question, which has occupied us in this last

section, offers no very formidable difficulties.



I do not believe that the above formal theory is untrue, but I do

believe that it is inadequate. It does not, for example, throw

any light upon our preference for true beliefs rather than false

ones. This preference is only explicable by taking account of the

causal efficacy of beliefs, and of the greater appropriateness of

the responses resulting from true beliefs. But appropriateness

depends upon purpose, and purpose thus becomes a vital part of

theory of knowledge.