The Scientist Is Indistinguishable From The Common

... Two Men Could Be Just Alike In All Their Dispositions To Verbal Behavior Under All Possible Sensory Stimulations, And Yet Themeanings Or Ideas Expressed In Their Identically Triggered And Identically Sounding Utterances Could Diverge Radically, For The Two Men, In A Wide Range Of Cases.

It Is Within Science Itself, And Not In Some Prior Philosophy, That Reality Is To Be Identified And Described.

We Must Not Leap To The Fatalistic Conclusion That We Are Stuck With The Conceptual Scheme That We Grew Up In. We Can Change It, Bit By Bit, Plank By Plank, Though Meanwhile There Is Nothing To Carry Us Along But The Evolving Conceptual Scheme Itself. The Philosopher's Task Was Well Compared By Neurath To That Of A Mariner Who Must Rebuild His Ship On The Open Sea.

Implication Is Thus The Very Texture Of Our Web Of Belief, And Logic Is The Theory That Traces It.

The Strategy Of Semantic Ascent Is That It Carries The Discussion Into A Domain Where Both Parties Are Better Agreed On The Objects (viz., Words) And On The Main Terms Connecting Them. Words, Or Their Inscriptions, Unlike Points, Miles, Classes And The Rest, Are Tangible Objects Of The Size So Popular In The Marketplace, Where Men Of Unlike Conceptual Schemes Communicate At Their Best. The Strategy Is One Of Ascending To A Common Part Of Two Fundamentally Disparate Conceptual Schemes, The Better To Discuss The Disparate Foundations. No Wonder It Helps In Philosophy.