"Definition." by John Dewey; Arthur F. BentleyReview by: Arthur Francis SmullyanThe Journal of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Sep., 1947), p. 99Published by: Association for Symbolic LogicStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2267237 .

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REVIEWS 99

age should be recognized, or also underlying metaphysical laws of being or laws of things. Here the r6le of the three traditional "laws of thought" is (or need be) only to serve as illustrations of laws of logic.

It would seem to the reviewer that the author confuses his main question with another one, namely whether the three traditional laws are in any sense, as some have alleged, prior to or more fundamental than other laws of logic. The passages quoted from Boole and Stebbing seem to be intended to give a negative answer to this latter question.

The author expresses the opinion that "a primary desideratum of the present day is the finding of a metaphysical foundation for mathematical logic." ALONZO CHURCH

JOHN DEWEY and ARTHUR F. BENTLEY. "Definition." The journal of philosophy, vol. 44 (1947), pp. 281-306.

In terms of philosophical and psychological views, expressed in previous articles and re- viewed in this journal by Church (X 132), the authors undertake to discuss a wide range of interpretations both ancient and modern of the sense of the word "definition." They have no difficulty in showing that the word "definition" has been used in many different ways and this result should surprise few students of logical theory. More surprising is their convic- tion that the word "definition" will continue to be an equivocal term untii a general theory of language on a full behavioral basis has been secured. In this connection they refer with manifest approval to the contribution of B. F. Skinner in the Symposium on operationism (Psychological review, vol. 52, p. 270).

Skinner, in the article referred to, insists that the psychologist cannot join the logician in regarding a definition as a rule for the use of a term. The psychologist must instead ac- count for the "functional relation between a term, as a verbal response, and a given stimulus.`" It is this behavioral description of the psychologist's activity which, according to Skinner, is the operational basis for the psychologist's use of terms and which is "not logic but science." Skinner then proceeds to engage in the fantasy that modern logic is "dualistic" in its theory of meaning and can "scarcely be appealed to by the psychologist who recognizes his own responsibility in giving an account of verbal behavior" (p. 270).

I can find no evidence anywhere in their article that Dewey and Bentley have a clearer conception of the distinction between logic and the behavioral theory of inquiry than does the distinguished psychologist to whom they refer. It is only by confusing the two subject matters that they could have been led to affirm that "modern logic" is undependable without a developed theory of behavior. ARTHUR FRANCIS SMULLYAN

GUSTAV BERGMANN. Remarks on realism. Philosophy of science, vol. 13 (1946), pp. 261-273.

This paper presents in outline a proposal for a "positivistic analysis" of statements such as "This is a real wall," which assert the reality of some physical object. In accordance with the basic idea of positivistic analysis, the author interprets such statements as asserting the occurrence of certain sense data in specific patterns. Most of the questions of logical detail which arise in this context are not discussed in this article. In connection with his analysis, the author proposes a criterion for the meaningfulness of the sentences of a scientific language which has certain advantages over the vaguer "theoretical verifiability" condition advocated in earlier logical positivist writings. But while the author seems to consider his criterion as novel, it does not appear to me to differ essentially from analogous criteria set forth by Carnap in his essay, Testability and meaning (II 49). In essence, Bergmann's criterion amounts to the requirement that all meaningful sentences be constructed inac- cordance with specifiable rules of logical syntax, and that the referents of the primitive predo icates and of the individual constants be accessible to our direct experience in a specifiable sense. Bergmann argues that this criterion makes it possible to give a reasonable interpreta- tion to the realistic view that empirical statements are verifiable because meaningful, rather than meaningful because verifiable. CARL G. HEMPEL

C. WEST CHURCHMAN. Carnap's "On inductive logic." Ibid., pp. 339-342. This is a set of brief critical remarks directed against Carnap's two articles (XI 19) on

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