History of Western Philosophy - Bertrand Russell [34]
This is the first example in philosophy of an argument from thought and language to the world at large. It cannot of course be accepted as valid, but it is worth while to see what element of truth it contains.
We can put the argument in this way: if language is not just nonsense, words must mean something, and in general they must not mean just other words, but something that is there whether we talk of it or not. Suppose, for example, that you talk of George Washington. Unless there were a historical person who had that name, the name (it would seem) would be meaningless, and sentences containing the name would be nonsense. Parmenides maintains that not only must George Washington have existed in the past, but in some sense he must still exist, since we can still use his name significantly. This seems obviously untrue, but how are we to get round the argument?
Let us take an imaginary person, say Hamlet. Consider the statement 'Hamlet was Prince of Denmark.' In some sense this is true, but not in the plain historical sense. The true statement is 'Shakespeare says that Hamlet was Prince of Denmark,' or, more explicitly, 'Shakespeare says there was a Prince of Denmark called "Hamlet".' Here there is no longer anything imaginary.
Shakespeare and Denmark and the noise 'Hamlet' are all real, but the noise 'Hamlet' is not really a name, since nobody is really called 'Hamlet'. If you say '"Hamlet" is the name of an imaginary person,' that is not strictly correct; you ought to say 'It is imagined that "Hamlet" is the name of a real person.'
Hamlet is an imagined individual; unicorns are an imagined species. Some sentences in which the word 'unicorn' occurs are true, and some are false, but in each case not directly. Consider 'a unicorn has one horn' and 'a cow has two horns'. To prove the latter you have to look at a cow; it is not enough to say that in some book cows are said to have two horns. But the evidence that unicorns have one horn is only to be found in books, and in fact the correct statement is: 'Certain books assert that there are animals with one horn called "unicorns".' All statements about unicorns are really about the word 'unicorn', just as all statements about Hamlet are really about the word 'Hamlet'.
But it is obvious that, in most cases, we are not speaking of words, but of what the words mean. And this brings us back to the argument of Parmenides, that if a word can be used significantly it must mean something, not nothing, and therefore what the word means must in some sense exist.
What, then, are we to say about George Washington? It seems we have only two alternatives: one is to say that he still exists; the other is to say that, when we use the words 'George Washington', we are not really speaking of the man who bore that name. Either seems a paradox, but the latter is less of a paradox, and I shall try to show a sense in which it is true.
Parmenides assumes that words have a constant meaning; this is really the basis of his argument, which he supposes unquestionable. But although the dictionary or the encyclopaedia gives what may be called the official and socially sanctioned meaning of a word, no two people who use the same word have just the same thought in their minds.
George Washington himself could use his name and the word 'I' as synonyms. He could perceive his own thoughts and the movements of his body, and could therefore use his name with a fuller meaning than was possible for any one else. His friends, when in his presence, could perceive the movements of his body, and could divine his thoughts; to them, the name 'George Washington' still denoted something concrete in their own experience. After his death they had to substitute memories for perceptions,