"In fact, words are well adapted for description and the arousing of emotion, but for many kinds of precise thought other symbols are much better"
About this Quote
Haldane is doing the scientist’s favorite two-step: praising language just enough to keep the poets calm, then quietly taking the steering wheel away. Words, he concedes, excel at the human jobs: painting a scene, stirring a crowd, transmitting mood. Then comes the pivot: when thought needs to be exact, language starts to look less like a tool and more like a source of error.
The subtext is a warning about how easily prose smuggles in ambiguity. Natural language is elastic by design; it tolerates metaphor, implication, and social niceties. That flexibility is a feature in politics and art, but a bug in domains where tiny differences matter. “Many kinds of precise thought” is doing work here: Haldane isn’t claiming words are useless, only that certain intellectual tasks outgrow them. Mathematics, logic, diagrams, chemical notation, even graphs: these “other symbols” don’t just abbreviate. They constrain. They make it harder to hide behind vagueness and easier to catch yourself cheating.
Contextually, Haldane sits in a 20th-century moment when scientific ambition is exploding and formal systems are ascendant: statistics professionalizes, physics and genetics lean hard on equations, and philosophy wrestles with logic as a kind of mental hygiene. His line also reads like a polite jab at public debate, where emotionally charged words can masquerade as rigorous argument. If you want truth rather than persuasion, he implies, you sometimes have to change languages entirely.
The subtext is a warning about how easily prose smuggles in ambiguity. Natural language is elastic by design; it tolerates metaphor, implication, and social niceties. That flexibility is a feature in politics and art, but a bug in domains where tiny differences matter. “Many kinds of precise thought” is doing work here: Haldane isn’t claiming words are useless, only that certain intellectual tasks outgrow them. Mathematics, logic, diagrams, chemical notation, even graphs: these “other symbols” don’t just abbreviate. They constrain. They make it harder to hide behind vagueness and easier to catch yourself cheating.
Contextually, Haldane sits in a 20th-century moment when scientific ambition is exploding and formal systems are ascendant: statistics professionalizes, physics and genetics lean hard on equations, and philosophy wrestles with logic as a kind of mental hygiene. His line also reads like a polite jab at public debate, where emotionally charged words can masquerade as rigorous argument. If you want truth rather than persuasion, he implies, you sometimes have to change languages entirely.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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