Misleading Words

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 64, 13 September 1940, Page 5

Misleading Words

HERE is the same danger in a misleading and inadequate way of talking as there might be in a misleading and inadequate method of map-pro-jection: a man who tries to map our spherical earth on a flat surface necessarily runs into problems and puzzles which are not due to the object he is representing, but to the way in which he is representing it. An intelligent child might well be puzzled, for instance, as to why New Zealand appears twice over ‘on the ordinary Mercator maps of the world. Are there then really two New Zealands though we are ;

only familiar with one? Obviously such a question, and many other similar questions, would never arise if the child had learnt its geography on a spherical globe and not on the flat pages of an atlas. Is it not likewise possible that some at least of the intractable problems of life and the universe may be due, not to anything peculiarly obscure and recalcitrant in life or the universe themselves, but merely to something inadequate or misleading in our mode of representing these through our language? Is it not conceivable that some of the questions with which we torment ourselves may be unanswerable because they are wrongly framed, because they wouldn’t have any sense in a language more simply adjusted to experience? I, for one, do not believe that all the ghosts that have haunted the minds of philosophers can be laid by such simple procedures, but I am persuaded that some of them can certainly be laid in this manner, and that it is worth while considering very carefully whether any problem that vexes us is not really of this kind. (Prof. J. N. Findlay, "A Philosopher Surveys Scientific Methods," 4Y A, August: 27)