14 COMMON SENSE (aND SCIENCE) 



We have in common a biological heritage. Moreover, the experi- 

 ences of early childhood, in die context of which each individual be- 

 gins to form his stock of concepts, are far more uniform for all of us 

 than are the experiences of any later period. Then too, the things and 

 situations called to our attention in childhood— and the way they are 

 presented to us— are in large part determined by a comparatively 

 uniform cultural tradition. More specifically our language, by vir- 

 ture of the resources it oflFers and fails to oflFer, must, as Whorf ob- 

 serves, condition the species of concepts we form and the way we 

 use diem. 



We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances 

 as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize 

 it in this way— an agreement that holds throughout our speech com- 

 munity and is codified in the patterns of our language. 



Polanyi offers a handsome illustration of how language mediates the 

 interplay of percepts and concepts : 



Think of a medical student attending a course in the X-ray diagnosis 

 of pulmonary diseases. He watches in a darkened room shadowy 

 traces on a flourescent screen placed against a patient's chest, and 

 hears the radiologist commenting to his assistants, in technical lan- 

 guage, on the significant features of these shadows. At first the stu- 

 dent is completely puzzled. For he can see in the X-ray picture of a 

 chest only the shadows of the heart and the ribs, with a few spidery 

 blotches between them. The experts seem to be romancing about fig- 

 ments of their imagination; he can see nothing that they are talking 

 about. Then as he goes on listening for a few weeks, looking care- 

 fully at ever new pictures of difterent cases, a tentative understand- 

 ing will dawn on him; he will gradually forget about the ribs and be- 

 gin to see the lungs. And eventually, if he perseveres intelligently, a 

 rich panorama of significant details will be revealed to him: . . . He 

 has entered a new world. He still sees only a fraction of what the ex- 

 perts can see, but the pictures are definitely making sense now and 

 so do most of the comments made on them. He is about to grasp what 

 he is being taught; it has clicked. Thus, at the very moment when he 

 has learned the language of pulmonaiy radiology, the student will 

 also have learned to understand pulmonary radiograms. The two can 

 only happen together. Both halves of the problem set to us by an un- 

 intelligible text, referring to an unintelligible subject, jointly guide our 

 efforts to solve them, and they are solved eventually together by dis- 



