ABSTRACT

The flounderings of the protocols show how frequently people do not know what they are talking about: in this sense, that they cannot separate the properties which determine the thing they are talking about from other properties which may or may not belong to it without its being thereby any less itself. They wobble in a fatal indecision as to which exactly of the things they happen to know about a thing they will include in it, and con­ stantly use accidents, or inessential properties, as defining ‘its very nature’. The process, then, of clearing up their views must be that of giving them increased power to form new and better arranged things to think about. Or, rather, of making them rec­ ognize that what they mean by a word is within their own con­ trol — not given them inexorably by the language. And that in their choices here they create the things they are talking about.1