Language as a Vehicle of Information

Abstract

Science is a discourse; he who passes over this condition in silence runs a great risk of losing his way completely. In fact if this aspect of science is ignored, nothing is left but a bundle of techniques, or more precisely, some series of badly connected gestures, effective perhaps, but static, proposing nothing to the mind but an exact and servile imitation, bearing in themselves no force of expansion and progress. Such is in fact the character of common knowledge, although it generally makes use of ordinary language to transmit itself, but without really exploiting it, and it is in this that common sense is to be distinguished from scientific knowledge. Common knowledge uses, so to speak, common language as a neutral vehicle; for scientific knowledge language is not only a vehicle between different minds, but also a mediator between one mind and its objects. Now, with such insistence on this linguistic aspect, one might be afraid of ending up straight away with a rhetorical conception of science. My intention, however, is to combat just this view. The rhetorical use of language is radically distinguished from its scientific usage in that the former is confined to a purely verbal universe.

[Because, Socrates, in the other arts all the knowledge, so to speak, is concerned with manual labor and activities of that kind; but in rhetoric there is no such manual operation. All its activity and effectiveness is through words (Plato 1955, p. 7).]