Page:Schlick - Gesammelte Aufsätze (1926 - 1936), 1938.djvu/223

 tion. The answer may be a description or an explanation. The real difference seems to be this: we have to do with a mere statement of fact if the acts of knowledge on which the proposition is based consists in recognising some directly given entity as something with which I am already familiar and to which I can, therefore apply a name or description. I see a round thing — or feel of it — and say: "This is a ring"; I see a flat thing and say: "this is a leaf"; I see an object of which I do not know the name or use but I say: "this is something I have seen in Central Africa". Or I may say: "this is above that" "this is darker than that", and so on. The common feature of all these propositions is, that they contain the words "this" or "that". In all such instances the acts of recognition lead only to the result that an entity, at first indicated only by the word "this" is now denoted by the word which is always used for it (or for each one of a class of similar things). In order to get the proposition "the ring is lying on the book" we just have to call everything by its ordinary simple name and put the words in the right order = such a proposition will merely express the existence of a fact in the world without explaining it.

In the case of explanatory knowledge, as we may call it, the situation is different. Here the proposition speaks of the thing or event by means of the ordinary name, i. e. the simple word always used as a symbol for it, and then gives it a new name which is a new combination of other symbols.(In the future, if it were convenient, one could always use the new combination, thereby eliminating the simple symbol altogether.) Thus explanation leads to a reduction of the number of symbols necessary for the description of the world and that is the very nature and essence of explanation. Some of the greatest steps in the explanation of the universe are marked by the discoveries which enabled physicists to do away entirely with special symbols for the phenomena of heat and sound and light and describe everything by electrodynamic and mechanical symbols only.

The two kinds of knowledge, although they finally rest on the same base of acts of recognition, are so different in their importance that it would be better not to call them by the same name.

Once I thought that perhaps the term "cognition" could be used for explanatory knowledge, but this would hardly be advisable, as it would make cognition dependent on preceding recognition. There is the term