The Analysis of Mind by Bertrand Russell (red queen free ebook txt) 📕

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