Pagina 54 - BCSV, XXXV, 2005

54 LEON POMPA
of a feature that conforms to the same set of criteria in every case of its
correct application. That is what is required if we are to be able legiti-
mately to identify an instance of prudence in one nation as an instance
of the same property in another nation, or, to bring the point closer to
home, a poetic character signifying prudence in one nation as signifying
the same property as a poetic character in another nation111.
It is now necessary, therefore, leaving aside the particular arguments
made in the foregoing section, to raise the question whether, by means
of the language appropriate to it, there is any way in which the imagina­
tive universal can preserve the identity of meaning that is cruciai here.
As a starting point it is useful to consider what it is about conceptual lan-
guages that enables them to express and retain the identity of meaning
of concepts. Plainly this is a vast subject on which an immense amount
has been written and it is impossible in the present essay to do more than
indicate the rough outlines of what, I think, would be an acceptable an-
swer. In generai, this comes down to the distinction between form and
content which, in language, is manifested in the distinction between syn-
tax and semantics. It is this distinction that makes it possible for the
words that signify concepts to preserve their identity of meaning. It does
so by allowing us to make assertions in which the same words are used
in different sentences or different words in the same sentences and to es-
tablish whether, when this is done, the sentences retain or lose their truth
values in the same communicative contexts. The identity of the meaning
of the word ‘church’ and its difference in meaning from, say, the word
‘group’, is constituted by the fact that when the former is used in one
range of statements, it is treated as having the value ‘true’, while if it is
substituted by the latter in the same range of statements it will be treat­
ed as ‘false’, whereas, in a different range of sentences, these results will
be different. This, of course, is altogether too simple and must be sub­
ject to many qualifications before it can be accepted: there is no one syn-
tactical structure to which all sentences must conform, though all must
conform to some recognisable structure; many words have a variety of
meanings, while very few, with the exception of words which are given
specific technical definitions in artificial languages such as those of the
naturai sciences, have very clear-cut meanings; many overlap in various
111 It should be noted that it is not strictly correct to talk in terms of single properties
when referring to poetic characters, since Vico identifies single poetic characters with many
different properties. Apollo, for example, is given as the principle of the names of gentes, of
history, of civil light, of articulate words, of song and verse, of oracular oration, of the Science
of divinity and, through all this, of humanity itself {Sn25, § 418). But though this might cre­
ate further complications they are nothing like as cruciai as the basic difficulty.