第11章 知識の理論 n.6 - 先入観その5
私はまた、人間の知性と動物の知性との連続性を保持したいという私の欲求のひとつの帰結として、言語の重要性は、非常に大きいとしても、これまで過大視されて来ている、と(も)考えた。信念や知識は言語以前の形態をもっているのであり、このことがよく理解されていなければ信念も知識も正しく分析されえない(分析することはできない)、と私には思われた。 言語の問題に最初に関心を持ち始めた時、私はその困難さと複推さとにまったく理解していなかった。当初はそれらの問題(の本質)が何であるか十分知るこもなく、ただそれらは重要であるという感覚(感じ)のみを持っていた。そして(現在)この領域の完全な知識を持つにいたったなどと言うつもりはないが、いずれにせよ(ともかくも)私の考えは、次第に明瞭かつ明確になり(more articulated, more definite)、そこに含まれている問題を一層よく意識するにいたっている。 |
Chapter 11 The Theory of Knowledge, n.6Fifth. One of the things that I realized in 1918 was that I had not paid enough attention to 'meaning' and to linguistic problems generally. It was then that I began to be aware of the many problems concerned with the relation between words and things. There is first the classification of single words: proper names, adjectives, relation words, conjunctions and such words as ‘all' and ‘some'. Then there is the question of the significance of sentences and how it comes about that they have the duality of truth and falsehood. I found that, just as there are formalists in arithmetic, who are content to lay down rules for doing sums without reflecting that numbers have to be used in counting, so there are formalists in the wider field of language in general who think that truth is a matter of following certain rules and not of correspondence with fact. Many philosophers speak critically of the 'correspondence theory' of truth, but it always seemed to me that, except in logic and mathematics, no other theory had any chance of being right.I thought, also, as a consequence of my desire to preserve continuity with animal intelligence, that the importance of language, great as it is, has been over-emphasized. It seemed to me that belief and knowledge have pre-verbal forms, and that they cannot be rightly analysed if this is not realized. When I first became interested in linguistic problems, I did not at all apprehend their difficulty and complexity. I had only the feeling that they were important, without at first knowing quite what they were. I do not pretend to have arrived at any completeness of knowledge in this sphere, but at any rate my thinking has gradually become more articulated, more definite, and more conscious of the problems involved. |