The importance of
investigating the diviner's answer lies in the fact that we
often think we have given a meaning to a statement P if
only we assert “I
feel (or I believe) that
P is the case.”
(We shall talk
at a later occasion of
Professor Hardy saying that
Goldbach's
theorem is a proposition because he can believe that it is
true.) We have already said that by merely explaining
the meaning of the words “three feet” in the
usual way, we have not yet explained the sense of the phrase
“feeling that water is three feet,
etc.” Now we should not have felt these
difficulties had the diviner said that he had
learnt to
estimate the depth of the
17.
water, say, by digging for
water whenever he had a particular feeling and in this way
correlating such feelings with
measurements of
depth. Now we must examine the relation of the process
of
learning to estimate with the act of estimating.
The importance of this examination lies in this, that it
applies to the relation between learning the meaning of a word and
making use of the word. Or, more generally, that it
shows the different possible relations between a rule given and
its application.