30. There is a source of the Myth of the Given to which even philosophers who are suspicious of the whole idea of inner episodes can fall prey. This is the fact that when we picture a child -- or a carrier of slabs -- learning his first language, we, of course, locate the language learner in a structured logical space in which we are at home. Thus, we conceive of him as a person (or, at least, a potential person) in a world of physical objects, colored, producing sounds, existing in Space and Time. But though it is we who are familiar with this logical space, we run the danger, if we are not careful, of picturing the language learner as having ab initio some degree of awareness -- "pre-analytic," limited and fragmentary though it may be -- of this same logical space. We picture his state as though it were rather like our own when placed in a strange forest on a dark night. In other words, unless we are careful, we can easily take for granted that the process of teaching a child to use a language is that of teaching it to discriminate elements within a logical space of particulars, universals, facts, etc., of which it is already undiscriminatingly aware, and to associate these discriminated elements with verbal symbols. And this mistake is in principle the same whether the logical space of which the child is supposed to have this undiscriminating awareness is conceived by us to be that of physical objects or of private sense contents.

    The real test of a theory of language lies not in its account of what has been called (by H. H. Price) "thinking in absence," but in its account of "thinking in presence" -- that is to say, its account of those occasions on which the fundamental connection of language with nonlinguistic fact is exhibited. And many theories which look like psychological nominalism when one views their account of thinking in absence, turn out to be quite "Augustinian" when the scalpel is turned to their account of thinking in presence.

    31. Now, the friendly use I have been making of the phrase "psychological nominalism" may suggest that I am about to equate concepts with words, and thinking, in so far as it is episodic, with verbal episodes. I must now hasten to say that I shall do nothing of the sort, or, at least, that if I do do something of the sort, the view I shall shortly be developing is only in a relatively Pickwickian sense an equation of thinking with the use of language. I wish to emphasize, therefore, that as I am using the term, the primary connotation of "psychological nominalism" is the denial that there is any awareness of logical space prior to, or independent of, the acquisition of a language.

    However, although I shall later be distinguishing between thoughts and their verbal expression, there is a point of fundamental importance which is best made before more subtle distinctions are drawn. To begin with, it is perfectly clear that the word "red" would not be a predicate if it didn't have the logical syntax characteristic of predicates. Nor would it be the predicate it is, unless, in certain frames of mind, at least, we tended to respond to red objects in standard circumstances with something having the force of "This is red." And once we have abandoned the idea that learning to use the word "red" involves antecedent episodes of the awareness of redness -- not to be confused, of course, with sensations of red -- there is a temptation to suppose that the word "red" means the quality red by virtue of these two facts: briefly, the fact that it has the syntax of a predicate, and the fact that it is a response (in certain circumstances) to red objects.

    But this account of the meaningfulness of "red," which Price has correctly stigmatized as the "thermometer view," would have little plausibility if it were not reinforced by another line of thought which takes its point of departure from the superficial resemblance of

to such relational statements as

For once one assimilates the form

to the form

and thus takes it for granted that meaning is a relation between a word and a nonverbal entity, it is tempting to suppose that the relation in question is that of association.

    The truth of the matter, of course, is that statements of the form "'. . .' means - - -" are not relational statements, and that while it is indeed the case that the word "rot" could not mean the quality red unless it were associated with red things, it would be misleading to say that the semantical statement "'Rot' means red" says of "rot" that it [is] associated with red things. For this would suggest that the semantical statement is, so to speak definitional shorthand for a longer statement about the associative connections of "rot," which is not the case. The rubric "'. . .' means - - -" is a linguistic device for conveying the information that a mentioned word, in this case "rot," plays the same role in a certain linguistic economy, in this case the linguistic economy of German-speaking peoples, as does the word "red," which is not mentioned but used -- used in a unique way; exhibited, so to speak -- and which occurs "on the right-hand side" of the semantical statement.

    We see, therefore, how the two statements

and

can tell us quite different things about "und" and "rot," for the first conveys the information that "und" plays the purely formal role of a certain logical connective, the second that "rot" plays in German the role of the observation word "red" -- in spite of the fact that means has the same sense in each statement, and without having to say that the first says of "und" that it stands in "the meaning relation" to Conjunction, or the second that "rot" stands in "the meaning relation" to Redness.{12}

    These considerations make it clear that nothing whatever can be inferred about the complexity of the role played by the word "red" or about the exact way in which the word "red" is related to red things, from the truth of the semantical statement "'red' means the quality red." And no consideration arising from the 'Fido'-Fido aspect of the grammar of "means" precludes one from claiming that the role of the word "red" by virtue of which it can correctly be said to have the meaning it does is a complicated one indeed, and that one cannot understand the meaning of the word "red" -- "know what redness is" -- uniess one has a great deal of knowledge which classical empiricism would have held to have a purely contingent relationship with the possession of fundamental empirical concepts.