In his classic book, PRAGMATISM, William James tells a story about a squirrel. Or, maybe it is about something else. You decide.
He asks us to consider an argument among camping buddies in the Berkshires. It seems that a squirrel had gotten itself positioned on the trunk of a tree so that the tree was in between its own body and the body of one of the campers, on the other side. The camper, wanting to catch sight of the squirrel, started walking around the tree. The squirrel (randomly so far as we can tell, not out of anti-observer animus) moved around the tree to which it clung, in such a way as to keep itself on the opposite side from the man.
When they had each travelled in this way 360 degrees around the tree, an intriguing question arose. Had the man at this point gone round the squirrel?
James noted that the man had gone round the tree, and the squirrel had stayed on the tree. This was enough for some of the disputants -- he had gone round the squirrel too. But he had never been in back of the squirrel. They had been facing toward each other the whole time. So -- he hadn't gone round.
A pragmatically minded member of the group had likely been out on a solitary hike when this debate got underway and returned to find it raging. He said that the proper answer to the question depends on what you take the phrase "go round" to mean. Once we see that the phrase is open to at least two meanings, and that each meaning yields a different answer to the "yes or no" demand, the issue dissolves.
I think that answer very wise, and indeed akin to arguments that Wittgenstein would make at great length years later. Use determines meaning, not the reverse.
I do not see that the phrase is open to more than one interpretation. The fact that the man had gone round the tree, and the squirrel had stayed on the tree, does not mean that the man had gone around the squirrel if he didn't pass the squirrel. That is because we don't use the phrase "go around" to mean "follow around" (the tree, in this case). Yes, meaning is use, but the use must actually exist for it to constitute a meaning.
ReplyDeleteBut I didn't realize this until after I finished reading the comment. As I was reading it, before the pragmatically minded person arrived, I'd thought that the question whether the man had gone around the squirrel was obviously a matter of semantics. Let's assume that this was not obvious when James wrote Pragmatism, because, if it had been, he wouldn't have written about the squirrel. So why was it obvious to me? Would it be obvious to most people today?
It could have been obvious to me but not to most people, because I've studied James and Wittgenstein. Or it could be obvious even to people who have not studied them because their ideas have permeated our thinking. Actually, though, my suspicion is that it would have been obvious even to people in James's day, and that he underestimated his fellow people when he wrote the squirrel example. But my suspicion could be a function of presentism.