12 Word MagicIn the discussion of classes we saw that the existence of a name does not guarantee the existence of any corresponding entity in the situation. Suppose you start with a construction, say a fairly clear one like child. The name "child" means the construction child, right enough, but the point of the analysis was that there is no need to suppose that the construction child stands for a Platonic entity in the world. This is to say that, by the process of reduction (see pp. 43 if.), you can interpret the construction child in ordinary usage by reference .to Junior, Sis, et at, and do so without committing yourself to a belief in a child in Plato's heaven, who never grows up, whose hands are never in need of washing, who is parentless and sexless. Reduction is possible in principle for even the highest level of abstration; even the use of vague terms, like "chivalry," in careful contexts, need involve no reificatiop.
There are other terms, however, the use of which usually implies the existence of entities in the situation unverifiable in principle. The usual occasion of the use of such terms as "destiny" and "fate" provides no clue for reduction and strongly suggests hypostatization of entities. Such use is commonly called Word Magic. The name, like a spell, conjures an Entity into being. In recent years much attention has been paid to Word Magic, and this phenomenon of language has become an important part of the much discussed "tyranny of words." There has, however, been a certain vagueness in the notion of Word Magic itself. Most writers seem to include every sort of reification and make no distinction between reified uses of, say, "child," and of "destiny." At other times writers seem to include all constructions not firmly anchored in the situation, such as an infant's notion of Santa Claus, and thus indifferently regard simple mistakes due to ignorance of "the furniture of the world. ' as instances of this fallacy.
We shall want to use "Word Magic" in a less vague way. We shall exclude cases of ordinary hypostatization, where the constructions, such as child or red, can be given a straightforward analysis free of metaphysical commitment. We shall also want to exclude mistakes due to ignorance. Sentences about centaurs, elfs, ghosts, cannot be reduced, it is true, but they do not essentially involve reification of entities -- for they might be uttered in good faith apparently on good authority and constitute simple mistakes. Perhaps we have already sufficiently discussed reification. We want, however, to take a look at the centaurs and ghosts. But let us first consider the following case.
a. The Average American smokes 7.472 cigarettes a day. Only a very naive person would suppose that "Average American" designates any class of people, especially people so carefully measuring their consumption of cigarettes. Those who are not so naive know that there may in fact be no one person who smokes exactly 7.472 cigarettes every day, or any day. They will know how to interpret such idioms and the sort of evidence that will confirm or falsify the generalizations. A mistake here is due to ignorance, but the ignorance differs from the example (c) below about the centaurs. The ignorance here is of a rather ordinary convention of language to give a shorthand summary of complicated factual material, rather than ignorance of the kinds of things there are in the world.
b. The centaur is a mythical beast.
The logical analysis of this sentence, which needn't detain us here, shows that, though it probably seldom misleads, it is still a misleading way to speak. The use of "is" where there is no reference to existing things can get confused with the use of the term to imply existence, and hence is misleading. The sentence, "The President is an elective executive," states that for every case where somebody is President he is an elective executive and, moreover, there is such a case. Sentence (b) is of the same form, but can one say, "For every case of centaur, this is a mythical beast, and there is such a case"? Well, it is only the form that is misleading, not the sense, since the form is contradicted by the sense (of "mythical").
c. "The centaur is half man, half horse."
Unless the context contradicts the form of this sentence, there is nothing to show that the construction centaur is unancliored, that no referent can be found in the widest situation known. Now suppose this sentence were to be found in a medieval travel book and that you are a student in a little cathedral school. If you believed this sentence to be true, that is, that "there is such a case," would you be guilty of Word Magic? One does not quibble over the use of this term if he points out that the chief mistake you have made, at the worst, is a reliance on insufficient authority (see #15). You have not traveled yourself over the world -- how do you know what animals are in it? Unless you have deduced a priori (see #28) that centaurs are impossible, the most that one can expect of you in your ignorance is a certain skepticism. In the Middle Ages -- and in many other times and in many places -- people have made mistakes of this sort. They have eaten the horn of the unicorn ground up. They have fed ricecakes to ghosts. They have kept the werewolf from the door with wolfbane or garlic. They have burnt witches. They have trapped demons in trees and rocks. These practices involve magic, but, as we shall use the term, not Word Magic. The spells and other linguistic incantations seem a consequence of a mistaken belief in something, rather than the other way about. The belief is theoretically verifiable. We may never encounter a centaur or a werewolf, but we should certainly recognize one if we did. Let us take another case.
d. Phlogiston makes the fire burn.
Chemists have found no "principle of combustion," in the sense that Newton found a principle of attraction. The problem is not the name "phlogiston." If there were such a principle -- every case of combustion involved its operation just as every case of the attraction of bodies involves gravity -- the name "phlogiston" of course would serve as well as any other. Yet the existence of this name has apparently led astrologers and mystics to state that the chemists must be wrong, that fire must be a uniform element in nature, that there must, therefore, be a uniform principle involved in all combustion. To this day arguments to this effect can be found here and there. With this use of "phlogiston" one enters the presence of Word Magic. No longer can simple ignorance excuse. The fallacy here occurs only in comparatively rare cases where the existence of the word magically guarantees the existence of the entity: we have the name, let's find the thing. This is like the celebrated case of the genius who argued that opium must put people to sleep by virtue of a "dormitive agent" and set out to find that agent in all cases of soporifics.
The situation being what it is, no unique principle of combustion, no unique dormitive agent can be found. Looking for one in advance of knowledge of the nature of things is not a fallacy. Persisting in the search after the situation is understood, simply because of the existence of the name (or, of course, of a useless construction, whatever its name) we call Word Magic.
We come now to usages that automatically involve Word Magic.
e. It was Peter's destiny to build houses.
How can this sentence be confirmed or disproved? If Peter dies without building a single house, we might inscribe on his tombstone: "Here lies Peter. His housebuilding destiny was unfulfilled." Or if Peter dies after building fifty houses, we might then write: "Here lies Peter. His destiny was to build houses, and he built fifty of them." The very sense of such terms as "destiny" is that no verification of sentences of the sort of (e) is possible. The clause "he built fifty of them," does suggest a sort of evidence, but it is easy to see that it is not a condition of having a destiny to build houses to have actually built a number of them. This is made clear by the usage about a destiny being unfulfilled. Take the case of "Sylvester has luck at the races." If this means that Sylvester encounters a higher instance of successful bets than normal expectancy promises, then the sentence amounts to a shorthand way of saying a rather complicated thing. But the practice of touching wood, wearing special colors, compulsively avoiding certain locutions -- all these suggest that, in our culture, more is meant here than a mere shorthand expression. If the speaker uses "luck" to mean a force in the world which is, at least temporarily, on Sylvester's side, does this usage not deceive him into entertaining a thesis which, the world being what it is, is in principle unverifiable? For (e) you might try, "Peter had an interest in building construction and in residence contracting." This is a less picturesque sentence, but at least the conditions are known under which one is willing to say that a person has an interest in doing something, even when he is prevented somehow from doing it. But if your interlocutor is unwilling to accept this or another verifiable paraphrase, if he says something like, "Yes, of course he had an interest in it, but he also had a destiny to do it, I tell you!" -- if this is the best you can get out of him, then you can only tap on wood and cast a counterspell.
All such cases differ from ignorant mistakes about what the situation is, in that they cannot be falsified. No amount of evidence can reach them. Thus they can be separated from sentences about centaurs and ghosts. They have it in common with jeification that they imply metaphysical presuppositions, but differ from these in that no alternative interpretation is possible in the ordinary occasions of use. Child can be analyzed by the rule of reduction to escape any metaphysical entity, though the Platonist will not accept the reduction. But with "destiny" the construction the term names cannot be reduced. Word Magic, then, is that instance of reification where there is no alternative non-metaphysical interpretation and where the construction cannot be verified or falsified in principle.
This is the last fallacy we treat under the general heading of material fallacies. When mystics go so far along the line of Platonism as to persist in using terms that can be given no reference at all to any known situation, it is obvious that psychological factors are involved. We might more wisely have placed this fallacy in the next section, where everything is tinged with magic or, alternatively, where most of the language is incantation. We would have done so, except for the obvious connection with reification. Even in discussing that fallacy, the prime example that suggested itself was the case history of an insane man. But at least the poor fellow had some evidence to support his belief that a secret power was after him: he produced detailed accounts of how this power was operating (see pp. 45 ff.). In the case of Word Magic and in many of the cases in the next section of this book, the psychology seems entirely unhinged. This is the witches' coven, the necromancer's magic 73 square. It is the arena of babbling and madness. It is, in short, the everyday world of leading articles, politicians' platforms, TV com-mericals, and common gossip.
EXAMPLE COMMENT On February 24, 1920, when National Socialism was an obscure movement, a meeting was held during which the Party Program was announced. The size of the audience and the enthusiasm for the Program exceeded Hitler's most sanguine expectations. Hitler uses the following language to describe the thoughts that he says ran through his head as the audience filed out of the hall: A fire had been lighted out of whose flames in time to come a sword was bound to arise that should win again the freedom of the Germanic Siegfried and the life of the German Nation.And beside the coming upheaval I felt strode the goddess of inexorable revenge for the act of perjury of November 9, 1918.
Hitler, Mein Kampf
Notice some general things about this passage. It is highly metaphorical, it is impassioned, it is even inspired. There is nothing particularly reprehensible about being impassioned or inspired, if a writer can sincerely achieve these states as Hitler probably did on this occasion. As to metaphors, figurative language does not of itself involve special difficulty. The metaphors can often translate to prosaic statements; these may be flat and involve a loss of emotion and color but perhaps no loss of substance, if there is any substance. Let us take a closer look at a few of the particular expressions here. 1. "A fire had been lighted out of whose flames in time to come a sword was bound to arise . . ." This translates to something like: "A movement had been started, and out of this beginning there was bound to come some day an armed political power." Here it is not the metaphor but the notion of "bound to" that causes difficulty. "Bound to" suggests inevitability. The laws of gravity obtaining, if you drop an apple it is "bound to" fall. The expression suggests the operation of a law of nature. But there is nothing in the knowledge of political or social nature that could constitute evidence that the acquisition of power is ever inevitable. If Hitler had been killed by a bus on his way home from this meeting, or if any of a thousand other quite possible contingencies had arisen, would the NationalSocialist Party nevertheless have been bound to acquire power in Germany?
2. The words ". . . to win again the freedom of the Germanic Siegfried and the life of the German nation" are also metaphorical. They presumably mean something like "German freedom and prosperous unity." These are the things that are going to be "regained" by the power that is bound to come from the beginnings of the movement. It is readily conceivable that a strong political movement could restore freedom of action to a nation and help it to unity and prosperity.
3. What is the "goddess of inexorable revenge" who is now walking about? Revenge is an intelligible concept; it means something like a consistent motivation to pay back evil with evil. Perhaps the goddess is the embodiment of that motive in Hitler, or even, so to speak, in his movement. But what can be inexorable about a motivation? The word "inexorable" applied to human motivations shows that magical abstractions can be adjectives, as well as nouns like "destiny," just as "bound to," used in similar situations shows that verbs are also available for concocting spells of Word Magic.
4. The date November 9, 191S, makes it evident that by "act of perjury" Hitler is referring to the proclaiming of the German Republic. At least, that is when the Republic was proclaimed. Whether one approves or disapproves of this action, there is no chance that it can be taken literally as "perjury." "Perjury" is lying under oath. It is hard to understand what metaphor occurs here. The likely thing is that the term is simply extended, for its emotive connotations, to mean the public act which the speaker detests and wants his audience to reject.
Peter, a docile follower of the party line, declares, "The dialectic of the class struggle requires the inevitable overthrow of capitalism." This example is similar to the first -- compare the use of "inevitable" with Hitler's "inexorable" and "bound to." If by "dialectic" is meant "clash of opposing political and economic classes," then the outcome will be decided by the course of events and the strength of the interests involved. If by "dialectic" is meant "the resolution of apparently opposed propositions," this will be a logical exercise, irrelevant to the world of political and economic struggle. Finally, if by "dialectic" is meant some underlying principle of historical development, like Spengler's law of decline or Toynbee's law of response -- and this is the way the Marxists and Hegelians talk -- then it is another magical abstraction, and there is no point in adducing evidence from history, since none is relevant. This use of "dialectic" and other Marxian terms is not simple reiflcation, since, aside from how Marxians feel about them, there is no way at all to make the constructions available (as the historians can chivalry -- see #10) to the ordinary users of the language.