ONT Re: Tone, Token, Type
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| Questioner: Well, if you choose so to make Doing the Be-all
| and the End-all of human life, why do you not make meaning to
| consist simply in doing? Doing has to be done at a certain time
| upon a certain object. Individual objects and single events cover
| all reality, as everybody knows, and as a practicalist ought to be
| the first to insist. Yet, your meaning, as you have described it,
| is 'general'. Thus, it is of the nature of a mere word and not
| a reality. You say yourself that your meaning of a proposition
| is only the same proposition in another dress. But a practical
| man's meaning is the very thing he means. What do you make to
| be the meaning of "George Washington"?
|
| Pragmaticist: Forcibly put! A good half dozen of your points must certainly be
| admitted. It must be admitted, in the first place, that if pragmaticism really
| made Doing to be the Be-all and the End-all of life, that would be its death.
| For to say that we live for the mere sake of action, as action, regardless of
| the thought it carries out, would be to say that there is no such thing as
| rational purport. Secondly, it must be admitted that every proposition
| professes to be true of a certain real individual object, often the
| environing universe. Thirdly, it must be admitted that pragmaticism
| fails to furnish any translation or meaning of a proper name, or other
| designation of an individual object. Fourthly, the pragmatistic meaning
| is undoubtedly general; and it is equally undisputable that the general
| is of the nature of a word or sign. Fifthly, it must be admitted that
| individuals alone exist; and sixthly, it may be admitted that the
| very meaning of a word or significant object ought to be the very
| essence of reality of what it signifies.
|
| But when those admissions have been unreservedly made, you find the pragmaticist
| still constrained most earnestly to deny the force of your objection, you ought
| to infer that there is some consideration that has escaped you. Putting the
| admissions together, you will perceive that the pragmaticist grants that a
| proper name (although it is not customary to say that it has a 'meaning'),
| has a certain denotative function peculiar, in each case, to that name and
| its equivalents; and that he grants that every assertion contains such a
| denotative or pointing-out function. In its peculiar individuality, the
| pragmaticist excludes this from the rational purport of the assertion,
| although 'the like' of it, being common to all assertions, and so,
| being general and not individual, may enter into the pragmaticistic
| purport. Whatever exists, 'ex-sists', that is really acts upon other
| existents, so obtains a self-identity, and is definitely individual.
|
| As to the general, it will be a help to thought to notice that there
| are two ways of being general. A statue of a soldier on some village
| monument, in his overcoat and with his musket, is for each of a hundred
| families the image of its uncle, its sacrifice to the Union. That statue,
| then, though it is itself single, represents any one man of whom a certain
| predicate may be true. It is 'objectively' general. The word "soldier",
| whether spoken or written, is general in the same way; while the name,
| "George Washington", is not so. But each of these two terms remains
| one and the same noun, whether it be spoken or written, and whenever
| and wherever it be spoken or written. This noun is not an existent
| thing: it is a 'type', or 'form', to which objects, both those that
| are externally existent and those which are imagined, may 'conform',
| but which none of them can exactly be. This is subjective generality.
| The pragmaticistic purport is general in both ways.
|
| Charles Sanders Peirce, 'Collected Papers', CP 5.429.
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