Semantics, like skepticism and empiricism, is a direct consequence of the disappearance of epistemology and the subsequent discovery of the inadequacy of rationalism. The rationalists believed that the truth could be found by the use of reason and logic alone because they had assumed that the world was rational and logical. Because the world is not rational and logical, they had failed. The skeptics accordingly doubted the capacity of the mind to know; the empiricists rejected the use of reason and tried to deal with the world by the senses alone; the semanticists tried to deal with the world by bringing its lack of logic and rationality into the mind itself. They did this, not by rediscovering the rules of epistemology but by changing the rules of logic. To them the old logic—Aristotelian logic, as they called it—was the source of all modern confusion, error, frustration and insanity. Accordingly, they tried to replace it by a non-Aristotelian logic whose basic innovation was that it rejected the principle of contradiction. The abandoning of this principle—which they called the “either-or principle”—meant that they rejected all rigid categories or definitions and were prepared to act with vague, variable and over-lapping definitions whose content varied during use in order to reflect the admitted dynamic quality of the external world.
—Carroll Quigley, “Epistemology, Semantics, and Doublethink”
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