What is the Emotional Meaning's - part three

WHAT IS THE EMOTIONAL MEANINGS - PART THREE - FINAL

As a last example, we may take a part of an attack made by a newspaper on a novel. This runs: "Its vicious plea for the acknowledgement and con-donation of sexual perversity, and the grounds on which it is based, loosen the very sheet anchor of conduct." This passage calls out such strong emotions of abhorrence that most readers will be content to condemn the novel without further inquiry. Yet the effect is gained entirely by the choice of words with emotional meanings.

It happens to deal with a subject on which emotions are strong, so a dispassionate examination is all the more necessary. We note that a plea is simply an argument, plus a suggestion of a repugnance for the kind of argument used; that con-donation is tolerance plus an emotional suggestion that such toleration is indefensible; that sexual means something in the life of love of which we disapprove, and that a perversity is an unusualness plus an emotional suggestion of abhorrence. The loosening of a sheet anchor is a metaphor implying change and suggesting to a landsman the emotion of fear, while conduct is simply behaviour of which we approve.

So reduced to its bare bones of statement of objective fact (ignoring for a moment the special difficulties raised by the word vicious), the passage becomes: "Its argument for the acknowledgement and tolerance of unusualness in the life of love, and the ground on which it is based, change the principles of behaviour". This clearly is an important statement if it is true, but is not enough in itself to condemn the book, because undoubtedly our principles of behaviour do need changing from time to time. We can only decide intelligently whether or not they need changing in the particular case under discussion, when we have made a dispassionate statement of what the proposed changes are and why they are defended. As in all other cases, discussion of the question with emotionally charged words obscures the problem and makes a sensible decision difficult or impossible.

The word vicious has some special difficulties of its own. It arouses emotions of disapproval, but there is no word with the same objective meaning which would not. If we call the book bad, corrupt, or evil, the same emotions would be aroused. So we cannot perform the simple operation of replacing vicious by an emotionally neutral word with the same objective meaning. Can we then leave it out altogether, on the ground that it has no objective meaning, but that it is used merely to arouse emotion?"

Here we are up against a problem about which there has been much dispute. Some people consider that all such words as "good," "bad," "beautiful," "ugly," only indicate one's own emotional reactions toward actions or things and in no sense properties of the actions or things themselves. But when we see a man steal a penny from a child and we call his action "bad," we are in fact saying something meaningful about the action itself and not merely about our own feelings. As to what that something is we may leave the philosophers to disputes; it may only be that the man's action has subtracted from the total amount of human happiness. So to say a book is vicious is not the same kind of thing as contrasting the slaughter of regular troops by Communards with the execution of the Communards by regular soldiers. The statement that the book is vicious has meaning which is not merely emotional, although, of course, the statement may not be true.

On the other hand, it is clearly not quite the same kind of meaning as a simple statement of outside fact such as "This is a book". Whether the book is good or bad is a real question, but it is a question peculiarly difficult to decide. Our own statement  one way or the other is likely to be nothing but a reflection of our own personal prejudices and to have, therefore, no sort of scientific exactness. At the same time, such words certainly arouse strong emotions and should, therefore, be used sparingly in honest argument. The use of words implying moral judgements in the course of argument is very generally an attempt to distort the hearers view of the truth by arousing emotions.

If we are trying to decide a simple question of fact, such words should be left out, because it is easier to settle one question at a time. If a man is accused of poisoning his wife, the prosecuting attorney should not say, "This scoundrel who hounded his wife to her grave." The question to be decided is whether the man did poison his wife. If he did, he is a "scoundrel" undoubtedly, but calling him a scoundrel does not help to decide the question of fact. On the contrary, it makes a correct decision more difficult by rousing emotions of hatred for the accused in the minds of the jury. Another obvious objection to the use of the word "scoundrel" before the man is convicted, which puts in the ranks of "crooked thinking," is that it "begs the question" or assumes what is to be proved. The man is only a scoundrel if he is guilty, and yet the word has been used in the course of an argument to prove that he is guilty.

These two objections can be urged against the word "vicious" in the condemnation of a book quoted above. It calls up strong emotions making a just decision of the nature of the book difficult, and it assumes exactly what the article professes to prove - that the book is a bad one.

The aim of this essay has been to distinguish one kind of crooked thinking, in the hope that those who recognize how their opinions can be twisted away from the truth by the use of words with emotional meanings may be able to recognize this source of error and to guard themselves against it. Those of its readers who have found anything new to them in the ideas of this chapter should not, I suggest, be content simply to read the essay, but should try to do some practical work on its subject matter.

If you were studying botany, you would not be content merely to read books on botany. If you were, that would not carry you far in botanical knowledge. Instead, you would gather plants form the hedges and weeds from your garden, dissecting them, examining them with a microscope or magnifying glass, and drawing them in your notebook. Emotional thinking is as common as a weed. It is to be found in the leading articles of newspapers, in the words of people carrying on discussions on political, religious, or moral questions, and in the speeches made by public men when these deal with controversial matters. In order to understand it, we should collect specimens by putting them down on paper and then we should dissect them.

Current political and social controversy in the US  abounds in such words and phrases as "crackpot," "economic royalists," "the abundant life," "bureaucracy" - or, on the street level - "scabs," "finks," "nigger-lovers". The New York Herald Tribune habitually referred to the child labour bill for NY state as the "youth control bill"; the Hearst press dubbed the New Deal the "Raw Deal"; Communists use the words "Trotzkyite" and "Fascist" to cover a multitude of sinners; Secretary lckes managed to get some powerful emotional undertones from Ferdinand Lundberg's phrase, "America's Sixty Families."

With these ideas and phrases in mind, it is not difficult to set forth on a practical search for truth. I suggest that readers should copy our controversial phrases form newspapers, books, or speeches which contain emotionally coloured words. Then they should underline all the emotional words, afterwards rewriting the passages with the emotional words replaced by neutral ones. Examine the passage then in its new form in which it merely states objective facts without indicating the writer's emotional attitude toward them, and see whether it is still good evidence for the proposition it is trying to prove. If it is, the passage is a piece of straight thinking in which emotionally coloured words have been introduced merely as an ornament. If not, it is crooked thinking, because the conclusion depends not on the objective meaning of the passage but on the emotions roused by the words.

When we condemn such a use of emotional words in writings and speeches, we must remember that this is a symptom of a more deep-seated evil -their prevalence in our own private, unexpressed thinking. Many of our highly coloured political speakers whose speeches stir us as we are stirred by romantic poetry show themselves unable to think calmly and objectively on any subject. They have so accustomed themselves to think in emotionally toned words that they can no longer think in any other way. They should have been poets or professional orators, but certainly not statesmen.

It really does not matter much if we sometimes use emotional words. We all do when we are trying to produce conviction. What does matter is that we should not lose the power to think without them. So a more important exercise than any we can perform on written material is one we can perform on our own minds. When we catch ourselves thinking in emotional phraseology, let us form a habit of translating our thoughts into emotionally neutral words. So we can guard ourselves from over being so enslaved by emotional words and phrases that they prevent us from thinking objectively when we need to do so-that is, whenever we have to come to a decision on any debatable matter.

here...Feelings...original contents by www.sensualityface.com or www.fairyage.com / described with help of ROBERT H. THOULESS Emotional meanings