Page:Philosophical Review Volume 25.djvu/837

No. 6.] however, is to detect fallacies; and fallacies are largely due to the facts that one term may have several different meanings or ideas attached to it, while two or more terms which are properly synonymous may be artificially credited with distinct meanings. There is no reason in the nature of things why a given idea should be attached to a given word or phrase. The only criterion here is one of human usage, and the thinker must begin to be a thinker by learning to understand terms in the senses recognized by fellow-thinkers who are more competent, or at least more intellectually experienced than himself. He may, however, after sufficient study of authorities, find that some generally recognized meanings are still confused or logically inadequate, and may accordingly proceed to suggest improved connotations and differentiations in the meanings of terms verbally familiar, or even to introduce new terms to express partially new ideas. The psychological justification for this is the conviction that he thereby makes his own ideas more adequate and interdependent. The logical and sociological justification is the postulate that his own ideas are sufficiently typical of those of his educated contemporaries, and that what appears to him to be an improved understanding of things by means of a better system of correlated terms will be ultimately recognized to be such by all who are competent to judge.

Should a human individual, reared in infancy as the fabled Romulus, grow to maturity on an island uninhabited by other human beings, it is of course not possible to say exactly what sort of intelligence he would develop. He would probably acquire, as the joint result of his senses, memory, and imagination, a certain ability to contemplate things and judge of their characters in relation to his own feelings, and quite possibly he might learn to make a few special articulate sounds, each in connection with some familiar or striking object or experience, which sounds would afterwards serve to call up images of the objects or experiences in question. It is, however, incredible that he should attain to anything such as the mastery of a complete language, which mastery becomes, for the socialized and civilized man, almost equivalent to understanding itself.