Chase’s pages without renewed self-searching, not to say self-castigation. There are probably few writers on serious subjects who can read Mr. The Tyranny of Words is essentially a digest, interpretation, and amplification of their results, and it is the first deliberate, systematic, popularly usable discussion of semantic method. Schiller’s Formal Logic, Thurman Arnold’s Symbols of Government, and various other more and less technical analyses of the modus operandi of thought. Richards’s Philosophy of Rhetoric, Bridgman’s Logic of Modern Physics, Pareto’s Mind and Society, F. This new method of linguistic analysis - ‘semantics is the term now coming into use to denote it -has been adumbrated in Korzybski’s Science and Sanity, The Meaning of Meaning, by Ogden and Richards. He finds himself preceded there by few pioneering moderns - mathematicians, physicists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, critics - who among them are working out the prolegomena to a new technique of communication, science of the relation between word and meaning. Chase decides to take language into the laboratory for some long-overdue psychochemical overhauling. M e treat the words as if they were themselves things, as if they were self-defining and particularly we do this with the large verbal abstractions by means of which so many of our more dubious intellectual operations are transacted - liberty, democracy, the law, right and wrong, Fascism, truth, art, neutrality, socialism, production, value, science, progress. At a certain point he begins to perceive that the core of the difficulty is our general failure to agree on the identity of the concrete matters to which our words refer. Specifically, he becomes more and more perturbed by the apparent failure of his own trenchant writings to mean the same thing to any two equally intelligent, equally analytical readers. Chase remarks in a key sentence of his opening chapter, ‘needed to be taken into the laboratory for competent investigation.’ Not alone among contemporary publicists, he finds himself dismayed by the paradox that as the verbal resources of communication multiply and supposedly improve, the efficiency of communication seems to decline.
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