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code. Part of its content, of its attributes and relations, is a fixed index which carries a distinct reference; all the rest is nothing to us, and, except in a moment of idle curiosity, we are unaware that it exists.82
On the other hand, the "idea" could not operate as an idea, could not be in consciousness, save as it involves some imagery, however old, dirty, thin, and frayed. Take the statement, "The angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles." If the statement means anything to a given individual, if it conveys an idea, it must necessarily involve some form of imagery, some qualitative or conscious content. But so far as the meaning is concerned, it is a matter of complete indifference as to what qualities are involved. These qualities may be in terms of visual, auditory, tactual, kinæsthetic, or verbal imagery. The individual may visualize a blackboard drawing of a triangle with its sides produced, or he may imagine himself to be generating a triangle while revolving through an angle of 180°. Any imagery anyone pleases may be employed, so long as there goes with it somehow the idea of the relation of equality between the angles of a triangle and two right angles. But the conceptualist does not stop here. The act of judgment comes in to affirm that the "idea" is no mere idea, but is a quality of the real. "The act [of judgment] attaches the floating adjective [the idea, the logical meaning] to the nature of the world, and, at the same time, tells one it was there already."83 The "idea," the logical meaning, begins where the "image" leaves off. Yet, somehow, the "idea" could not begin, unless there were an "image" to leave off.
An "image" is not an "idea," says the conceptualist. An "idea" is not an "image." (1) An "image" is not an "idea," because an "image" is a particular, individual fragment of consciousness. It is so bound up with its own existence that it cannot reach out to the existence of an "idea," or to anything beyond itself. Chemically speaking, it is an avalent atom of consciousness, if such a thing is thinkable. Mr. Bosanquet raises the question:
Are there at all ideas which are not symbolic?... The answer is that (a) in judgment itself the idea can be distinguished qua particular in time or psychical fact, and so far is not symbolic; and (b) in all those human experiences from which we draw our conjectures as to the animal intelligence, when in languor or in ignorance image succeeds image without conscious judgment, we feel what it is to have ideas as facts and not as symbols.84
(2) An "idea" is not an "image," because an idea is meaning, which consists in a part of the content of the image, cut off, and considered apart from the existence of the content or sign itself.85 This meaning, this fragment of psychical existence, lays down all claim to existence on its own account, that it may refer through an act of judgment to a reality beyond itself and beyond the act also. An "image" is not an "idea" and an "idea" is not an "image," because an "image" exists only as a quality, a sense-content, whereas an "idea" exists only as a relation, a reference to reality beyond. "On the one hand," to recall Bradley's antinomy, "no possible idea [as a psychical image] can be that which it means.... On the other hand, no idea [as logical signification] is anything but just what it means."
There is a significant point of agreement between the conceptualist and the empiricist. Both regard imagery as on the level with sense-perception. For the empiricist, as we have seen, the fact that imagery may be compelled to serve as a yoke-fellow of sense-experience constitutes its logical value. For the conceptualist, however, the association of imagery with sense-experience is of no logical consequence whatsoever, save as it may help to intensify the distinction between imagery and meaning. To quote again from Bradley:
For logical purposes the psychological distinction of idea and sensation may be said to be irrelevant, while the distinction of idea and fact is vital. The image, or psychological idea, is for logic nothing but a sensible reality. It is on a level with the mere sensations of the senses. For both are facts and neither are meanings. Neither are cut from a mutilated presentation and fixed as a connection. Neither are indifferent to their place in the stream of psychical events, their time and their relations to the presented congeries. Neither are adjectives to be referred from their existence, to live on strange soils, under other skies, and through changing seasons. The lives of both are so entangled with their environment, so one with their setting of sensuous particulars, that their character is destroyed if but one thread is broken.86
This point of agreement between conceptualism and empiricism, this placing of imagery and sense-experience on a common level, serves to bring into relief fundamental differences between the two schools of thought; fundamental, because they have to do with the nature of reality itself. The conceptualist in his zealous endeavor to distinguish between imagery and logical meaning has come perilously near driving imagery into the arms of reality. It is the opportunity of empiricism to make them one. How can conceptualism prevent the union? Has it not disarmed itself? The act of judgment, which includes within itself logical meaning as predicate, refers to a reality beyond the act. Both imagery and reality, then, lie outside of the act of judgment! What alliance, or mésalliance, may they not form, one with the other?
The difficulties we have noted thus far in the discussion are due to a large extent, I believe, to incomplete psychological analysis of logical machinery. The empiricist has not carried the psychology of logic as far as the conceptualist, although the latter might be the loudest to disclaim the honor. I will not try to prove this statement, but simply give it as a reason why, in the interest of brevity, I shall pass with little comment over the psychological shortcomings and contributions of empirical logic, and devote what space remains to the psychology implicitly worked out by conceptual logic, and to its possible development, with special reference, of course, to the problem of the logical function of imagery.
The logical distinction, which practically amounts to a separation between imagery and meaning, is the counterpart of the psychological distinction between stimulus and response, between the two poles of sensori-motor activity, where the stimulus is defined in consciousness in the form of imagery, in the form of sense-qualities centrally excited, and where the response is directed and controlled via this imagery, so as to function in bringing some end, project, purpose, or ideal, nearer to realization, some problem nearer to solution.
Psychologically, there is no break between image and response, between thought and action. The stimulus is a condition of action, in both senses of the ambiguity of the word "condition." (1) It is action; it is a state or condition of action. (2) It is also an initiation of action. If the appropriate stimulus, then the desired action. The response to an image is the meaning of the image. Or, the response to any stimulus via an image—mediated, controlled or directed by an image—is the meaning of that image. The less imagery involved in any response, the greater the presumption in favor of the belief that the response is either an instinctive impulse or else has become a habit of mind, an adequate idea. The reduction and loss of sense-content which an image may undergo—the wearing away of an image, it is sometimes called—is not a sign that this sense-content has no logical function; but rather that it has fulfilled a logical function so well that it has made part of itself useless. The husk, to recall one of Mr. Bradley's comparisons, that useless husk, tends to fall away, to lapse from consciousness, after it has served the purpose of helping to bring the kernel of truth to fruition.
This raises again the original question as to whether the sense-content, the quality, the existential quality, of an image has a logical function. I will ask first whether it has a function from the standpoint of psychology. We will agree with the empiricist that the content of an image is representative, that it is a return, a revival, of a sense-content previously experienced through the activity of sense-organs stimulated from the periphery. What is the function, then, of the representative image? Sensation, quality, as we have implied above, is the stimulus come to consciousness. To explain how a stimulus can "come" to consciousness is a problem I will not attempt to go into here. I assume as a fact that there are times when we know what we are about; when we are conscious of the stimuli, or conditions of action, which are tending in this direction or in that, and when through this consciousness we exercise a controlling influence over action by selecting and reinforcing certain stimuli and suppressing or inhibiting others. It is true that we do not always realize to how great an extent our actions are controlled by stimuli which do not come to consciousness, by reflexes, instincts, and habits which do not rise above the threshold of imagery. And when this vast complex of hidden machinery is partly