Page:Philosophical Review Volume 21.djvu/204

186 When I say to a person who is addressing me, "I don't quite catch your meaning," I mean to refer to that person's state of mind and to what is at that time uppermost in his mind, the conscious purpose of conveying something to me. (2) The relational. Suppose I hear an explosion and ask myself, "What is the meaning of this?" In what sense do I use the term 'meaning'? I seek to place a fact in a relational system—not any relational system, however, but one that seems most suitable and promising. Suppose in consulting a physician and in dilating on how you feel you put at his disposal such and such a symptom. He might relate that symptonsymptom [sic] to the system of your feeling states. To that system good physicians are startlingly inattentive. That system, they hold, offers little in the way of sound and fruitful causal connection. They seek more objective symptoms temperature, pulse-beat, rate of respiration, etc.—and a more objective relational system. The 'meaning' of a disease then is definable in terms other than a psychological resume of what the patient experiences. There is one important peculiarity about this relational use of the concept 'meaning.' The meaning of a fact is often not definable until other facts put in an appearance. A rise in temperature may mark the incipient stages of any one of a number of diseases. The physician is at a loss until other, differentiating symptoms are traceable. He would not contend that he had discovered the meaning of any rise in temperature until he could place that fact correctly; and he cannot place it correctly without the assistance of certain other facts. (3) The amplificatory. Here we ask ourselves, "If such and such is the fact in promise, what is the fact full-blown?" Moving within the fact we seek to ascertain, largely by analysis and an effort of the interpretative imagination, all there is in the fact, its ampler meaning. This use, at its best and at its worst, figures largely in appreciative literary criticism; in fact in every attempt to define a work of art in terms of ideal content, inner coherence, and structural purposiveness. For example, in the Shakespearean criticism of Gervinus with its almost total disregard of historical and textual criticism and its touch of interpretative romancing it appears in extreme form,