Concerning the Formal

Abstract

(1) To characterize the language of science from a different point of view, let us consider certain circumstances within so-called everyday language. Let us imagine that a man has spent some time in France to learn the language, and on his return we put a French book before him to test his knowledge of French. Suppose this book is written for sailors and concerns the events of life on board ship, using many special terms about manoeuvring with sails and so on; or we may suppose that he is shown a book on the life of workers in a particular firm. Suppose we observed the fact that they were expressions or whole passages that he could not make out. Could we then say that he does not know French? We should have to deny this, for a Frenchman who was not a sailor or a factory hand would be similarly embarrassed. This reflection makes us see that only certain words and their combinations fall under the imprecise description of ‘everyday language’, and these are common to all special languages of sailors, factory workers, farmers, engineers and so on. For example, the words ‘and’, ‘left’, ‘table’ and so on occur in all these special languages, and likewise words that denote activities that are independent of one’s calling, such as ‘go’, ‘eat’ and so on. The special languages differ from everyday language in that their concepts are less vague, they exhibit new concepts and leave modified and usually smaller scope for certain words.