THE LOGIC OF LANGUAGE
Professor MacKaye's Vigorous Treatment o£ the Importance of Definition Reveals the Probity of His Own Thought
by JamesMacKaye. Dartmouth College Publications, Hanover, 1939,pp.303.$3.50.
A ROUND A QUARTER of a century ago, Lincoln Steffens tells us in his Autobiography, he, with Walter Lippmann, encouraged a group of picked students at Harvard to initiate a voluntary course of lectures on current problems with the aim of leaving "burning questions instead of convictions in the minds of the student audiences." Among these lecturers was James MacKaye, "a trained and humorous thinker." MacKaye understood the economic problem radically and had a solution in his own mind, though he did not offer it to the students. He presented the problem well, Steffens says, and interested the students. TheLogic of Language reveals this same trained mind, one of the genuinely powerful minds of our time, at the height of its maturity and power. And it is perhaps pertinent to record that among the men who came under the influence of MacKaye at about that time was Stuart Chase. For The Logic of Language is concerned with a more fundamental problem than the economic problem, with that problem of communication among men by words the importance of which Stuart Chase and others have recently brought to popular attention. And with all respect to Stuart Chase it may be said that by comparison with this book The Tyranny of Words is but a brilliant and somewhat discursive pamphlet.
For The Logic of Language is Part I of a carefully projected work on reason in three parts, of which the first part was to be entitled Intelligibility, the second Probability, and the third Utility. The first part, fortunately for us, was completed before MacKaye's untimely death and is here published separately through the wise patronage of the trustees of Dartmouth College. Professor William Pepperell Montague of Columbia University contributes a foreword; Albert William Levi, of the department of Philosophy at Dartmouth, one of MacKaye s Dartmouth students to whom the book is dedicated, has ably edited the manuscript and, as one of MacKaye's literary executors, prepared it for the press.
It is impossible, in a brief review, to summarize this book or to give more than a suggestion o£ its importance, its vigor, its luminosity, its wisdom. As both Professor Montague and Mr. Levi state, the focal point of the book is the role of definition in the clarification of language. This emphasis, perhaps, is nothing new. What is new about MacKaye's treatment is the method he has developed for making language an instrument of scientific precision. As anyone who knew MacKaye would know, he does not mean by the "logic" of language the sort of logic Carlyle described as "logic-chopping." Nor does he mean by reason and the reasoning process hairsplitting, quibbling about unimportant terms, that sort of endless intellectual gymnastics which has all too often made philosophy degenerate into a matter for pleasant parlor diversion. For MacKaye believed passionately with Hamlet that we were not given this "capability and god-like reason To fust in us unus'd." He shows how, by misuse, not only the man in the street but also philosophers are guilty of using words loosely and ambiguously with the result of making discussion of important matters the Babel of windy and futile debate it so often is.
FALLACY AND "SCIENCE"
One or two examples may be in point. In illustration of the obvious but too often ignored fact that words are but arbitrary symbols' he tells the story of the lady who said to a famous astronomer: "I feel such an admiration for you astronomers because of your many wonderful discoveries about the universe. But the most wonderful of all it seems to me is your discovery of the names of the planets. How for instance did you ever manage to find out that the red planet named Mars really is Mars?" And a little later he observes: "Philosophers are particularly subject to the fallacy of predestined definition. Thus to many of them it does not occurr that names like truth and goodness and beauty are as much arbitrary signs attached to meanings as is the name Mars."
In discussing the fallacies of naming he says: "Examples of the fallacy of reverse ambiguity are common in legal, political and commercial affairs. Among advertisers it might almost be called the science of reverse ambiguity; and incidentally, by thus changing the name from 'fallacy' to 'science,' I am illustrating the fallacy and the advertisers' practice at the same time. For to call a practice scientific instead of fallacious ennobles the practice, just as calling a constellation Charles' Wain instead of Dipper ennobles the constellation. The widely practiced arts of lauding heroes, calling names, and coining slogans, rest very largely on the fallacy of reverse ambiguity." It is, I imagine, because of this fallacy that current discussions of "Communism" and "Fascism" are mostly nonsense. And by this device "statesmen" can call war peace and vice versa.
The center of the book on the practical side, as Mr. Levi points out in the preface, is to be found in the chapter on Ambiguity and its Avoidance. MacKaye begins the chapter with an example of simple ambiguity: Does the compass point to the north? The ambiguous term, of course, is north. An insufficient definition of north is "a direction to the right hand of the setting sun." Sufficient definitions are (a) geographic north and (b) magnetic north (to simplify MacKaye's fuller definitions). Multiplying the questions and answers: Does the compass point to north (a) (geographic north)? Answer, No. Does the compass point to north (b) (magnetic north)? Answer, Yes. Using this form of "definitional analysis," which MacKaye has "invented" but not "discovered," he examines problems which lead by easy progression from the "confusion of two 'Johns'" (the red-haired and the black-haired), the "confusion of two 'forces,'" the "confusion of two 'dimensions'" to the confusion of two 'theories.'" During the process he leads the reader clearly and firmly through discussions of Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry, Newtonian and non-Newtonian magnitudes, and the "theory" of relativity, which he shows, by a process of analysis I have not space to go into in detail, to be a "definitional" but not a "material" theory. In the two final chapters he applies the method to matters of philosophical discussion: "the nature of the nature of things" and "the nature of existence." Finally, by rigorous analysis, he shows how the endless debate between "idealists" and "realists" is a verbal issue which has been hopelessly confused by the obfuscations of the philosophers themselves.
A GUARD AGAINST MUDDY THINKING
For MacKaye shows how philosophers from Socrates to Berkeley, Bertrand Russell and Einstein have time and again used terms in two or more different senses without telling us or sometimes even themselves that they are doing so. I have read the book only once, to be sure, but with care to see if MacKaye might not himself be guilty of the same offense. And I am bound to say that the edifice he has erected, in its clarity and luminosity, is an edifice of glass (and by glass I mean glass that is transparent, not opaque); and that he is one of the few builders of glass houses (or dwellers in them) who is entitled to throw stones.
Not to be diverted by irrelevancies, though completely aware of the temptation to be so diverted, he has devoted himself solely in this book to shaping, refining, sharpening language and thought as a tool. It is an instrument, in his hands, that should be of great value to philosophers (recently fallen into more or less disrepute). For the layman, in the contemporary chaos of political, economic, and social thought, it should be even more valuable. I have already made good use of it in Freshman English. And it has put me more than ever on guard against the muddiness of my own thinking. In this day of defeatism, of distrust of science, when "the end of reasoning man" is proclaimed from the housetops, this book is a triumphant reaffirmation of the scientific method and the power of human thought.
Not being like MacKaye, I wish to end with what may seem to be an irrelevancy. It was commonly believed by many of his acquaintances (though not, I am sure, by those who knew him best) that he was limited in his aesthetic appreciations. Indeed, in his modesty, he thought so himself. It is true that, like all of us, he had his blind spots. (Music in general and Walt Whitman in particular were two of them.) But there is more than vigor and clarity of thought in this book. In the quotations I have given, there is apparent more than a hint, I hope, of the shrewd sense of humor that was one of his endearing qualities. In a passage, unfortunately too long to quote, in which he describes an expedition to Pack Monadnock with a little girl for checkerberries, there is revealed not only humor but the personality of the whole man, which included a love of beauty, too. There is beauty and beauty: it is a word I have almost renounced, a word to which MacKaye's method might be applied with profit. But surely, in the sense in which "Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare," this book has beauty. There is, perhaps, a beauty of chaos, darkness, fog, though it is not much to live by. This book has the effect, for me at least, of a tree sharply silhouetted against the sky, or clear light striking through a cloud. It is the illumination of chaos we need if our world is to be habitable for human beings. MacKaye was one of the rare minds of our time capable of such illumination.
