Dr. Bridgman taught at Harvard University in the early part of this century and wrote a book entitled The Logic of Modern Physics that was published in 1927.

As you might expect from the title, the work was primarily on physics. But in it you’ll also find observations on verbal communication as insightful and as clear as any to be found in books written by linguists or semanticists. If not more so. 

Here are a few of them:

• The true meaning of a term is to be found by observing what a man does with it, not what he says about it.

And:

• If a question has meaning, it must be possible to find an operation by which an answer may be given to it . . . . Many of the questions asked about social and philosophical subjects will be found to be meaningless when examined from the point of view of operations.

Also:

• Operational thinking will at first prove to be an unsocial virtue; one will find oneself perpetually unable to understand the simplest conversation of one’s friends . . . [However] not only will operational thinking reform the social art of conversation, but all our social relations will be liable to reform.

Lastly:

• Let anyone examine in operational terms any popular present-day discussion of religious or moral . . . [or political] . . . questions to realize the magnitude of the reformation awaiting us.

Yeah. Like Judeo-Christian principles, moral values, political correctness, and right wing or left wing.

Dr. Bridgman, Sir, I salute you. You called it exactly right almost 80 years ago. It’s a great pity that that reformation is still awaiting us.

Think about it.