Anna Wierzbicka - Experience, Evidence, and Sense - The Hidden Cultural Legacy of English

Experience, Evidence,
and Sense
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Experience,
Evidence, and
Sense
The Hidden Cultural Legacy of English
A NNA W IERZBICKA
1
2010
3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wierzbicka, Anna.
Experience, evidence, and sense : the hidden cultural legacy
of English / Anna Wierzbicka.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-536800-0; 978-0-19-536801-7 (pbk.)
1. English language—Semantics. 2. English language—Social aspects.
3. Language and languages—Philosophy. I. Title.
PE1585.W54 2009
420.10 43—dc22 2009000574
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, I would like to express my gratitude to Cliff Goddard, who
read successive versions of all the chapters of this book and contributed enor-
mously to the analyses presented in it.
I would like to thank the Australian Research Council for providing funds for
research assistance, without which I would not have been able to complete this
project. I have been blessed by research assistants of exceptional competence and
dedication; they contributed valuable ideas (and saved me from numerous errors,
conceptual as well as practical). I want to express my deep and sincere thanks to
my long-term research assistants Helen Bromhead, Anna Gladkova, and Carol
Priestley.
I would also like to acknowledge the input of my ARC-funded research
associates, Mary Besemeres and Ian Langford. Mary’s expertise in English
literature, cross-cultural life-writing, and English studies has significantly en-
riched this book. Ian’s expertise in law was particularly relevant to the chapters
on evidence and common sense.
I am indebted to many other colleagues who were willing to discuss with me
the aspects of the book where their expertise was particularly relevant. In
particular, I have benefited from semantic discussions with Zhengdao Ye, Jock
Wong, and Kyung Joo Yoon, from discussion about French with James Grieve,
about German with Andrea Schalley and Gaby Schmidt, about Italian with Brigid
Maher; about Russian with Anna Gladkova; and about philosophical matters with
Thomas Mautner, Jim Franklin, and Doug Porpora.
I am grateful to my semantics students at the Australian National University
for their valuable input. My advanced Seminar on Semantics was an unfailing
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
source of inspiration and enjoyment as well as a testing ground for many of the
analyses developed in this book.
I would like to thank my editor at Oxford University Press, Peter Ohlin,
whose suggestions, advice, and support were as helpful this time as with previous
projects.
Over the years I have been greatly helped by discussions with family
members. My daughters, Mary Besemeres (who has already been mentioned as
my ARC-funded research associate) and Clare Besemeres Brooker, spent
hundreds of hours discussing with me, and arguing about, the meaning of many
quintessentially English words and phrases without equivalents in other lan-
guages and of Anglo values and assumptions associated with them. My husband,
John Besemeres, has for some decades done a great deal to edit much of my
published work and suggested rephrasings aimed at making my English prose
sound a little less Polish and more “Anglo” (“reasonable” and “dispassionate”)
than it otherwise might have been, and he did so on this occasion again.
Earlier versions of two chapters of the book were published as journal
articles: “Moral Sense,” (Journal of Social, Evolutionary & Cultural Psychology,
1(3), 66–85), and “Exploring English phraseology with two tools: NSM semantic
methodology and Google,” (Journal of English Linguistics, 37(2):101–129). A
section of the chapter on “Experience” was published as “‘Experience’ in John
Searle’s Account of the Mind: Brain, Mind, and Anglo Culture,” (Intercultural
Pragmatics, 3–3 (2006) 241–255).
CONTENTS
Part I. Introduction
1. Making the Familiar Look Foreign, 3

1. Mere Words or Keys to a Cultural World? 3
2. The Cultural and Historical Baggage of English, 4
3. The Legacy of “British Empiricism,” 6
4. The English Word Empirical and the French Word Empirique:
A Closer Look, 11
5. ‘Theory’, ‘Common Sense’, and the Reliability of the Senses, 13
6. Natural Semantic Metalanguage as an Effective Methodology for Cultural
Semantics, 16
Part II. Experience and Evidence
2. Experience: An English Keyword and a Key Cultural Theme, 25

1. The Uniqueness of the English Concept of ‘Experience’, 25
2. Experience as the Mother of Wisdom: Shakespeare’s Sapiential Perspective, 34
3. “A Frightening Experience”: From a Retrospective to an
Introspective Perspective, 38
4. Sensory Experience as a Basis for Empirical Knowledge:
A Lockean Perspective, 44
viii CONTENTS
The Verb to Experience: Evidence for the Semantic Shift, 54

5.
6.
Experiences in Anglophone Philosophy: John Searle’s Perspective, 58
Experience in Religion: William James’s Perspective, 65
7.
8.
“Bearing Witness”: Shared Experience in Anglophone
Art and History, 74
9. I Know from Experience . . . , 78
10. English Experience Compared with German Erfahrung
and Erlebnis, 83
11. Concluding Remarks: The History of Ideas and
the Meaning of Words, 90
3. Evidence: Words, Ideas, and Cultural Practices, 94

1. Evidence as a Key Cultural Concept in Modern English, 94
2. An Outline of the Semantic History of Evidence, 100
3. Linguistic Evidence, 119
4. The New Discourse of Evidence, 122
5. Sources of the Modern Concepts of Evidence in Law, Theology, Philosophy, and
Science, 131
6. Concluding Remarks: Semantics, Culture, and Society, 144
Part III. Sense
4. The Discourse of Sense and the Legacy of “British Empiricism,” 151

1. Sense, Senses, and Modern English Speechways, 151
2. The Five Senses, 155
3. The Verb to Sense, 159
4. A Sense of What Is Happening, 162
5. To Have a Sense That . . . , 169
6. There Is a Sense That . . . , 176
7. Give Us a Sense of . . . , 178
5. A Sense of Humor, a Sense of Self, and Similar Expressions, 184

1. A Sense of Humor, 184
2. A Sense of Self, 192
3. A Sense of Freedom (Confidence, Achievement, Competence), 198
4. A Sense of Obligation (Duty, Responsibility, Urgency), 202
5. A Sense of History, a Sense of Time and Place,
a Sense of Reality, 204
6. A Sense of Joy, 209
6. A Strong Sense, a Deep Sense, and Similar Expressions, 212

1. A Strong Sense (of Something), 212
2. A Deep Sense (of Something), 231
CONTENTS ix
3. A Sharp Sense (of Something), 242

4. A Good Sense (of Something), 250
5. A Great Sense (of Something), 262
6. A Real Sense (of Something), 269
7. A False Sense (of Something), 277
8. A Keen Sense (of Something), 279
9. A Clear Sense (of Something), 292
10. An Acute Sense (of Something), 302
7. Moral Sense, 313

1. Moral Sense: A Human Universal or an Artifact of English? 313
2. A Brief History of the Concept of “Moral Sense,” 317
3. Moral Sense in the Eighteenth Century and Now: A Comparison, 322
4. A Sense of Right and Wrong in Present-Day English, 324
5. Conclusion, 326
8. Common Sense, 328

1. The Importance of Common Sense in Anglo Culture, 328
2. Common Sense in Law, 333
3. The Uniqueness of English Common Sense
(Common Sense vs. Bon Sens), 337
4. The Meaning of Common Sense in Contemporary English, 346
5. Thomas Reid and the Origin of English Common Sense, 354
6. Common Sense and the British Enlightenment, 359
9. From Having Sense to Making Sense, 368

1. Being Sensible, 368
2. Having Sense, 372
3. Making Sense, 377
Part IV. Phraseology, Semantics, and Corpus Linguistics
10. Investigating English Phraseology with Two Tools: NSM and Google, 395
1. An Overview, 395
2. Clear and Stable Contrasts, 396
3. Stable and Overwhelmingly Sharp Contrasts, 397
4. Figures, Proportions, and Patterns, 398
5. Anomalies: How Significant Are They? 400
6. Monitoring the Proportions of Strong Sense to Deep Sense, 402
7. Limitations of Google as a Tool for Exploring
English Phraseology, 403
8. Comparing the Results of Google and Yahoo Searches, 404
9. Concluding Remarks, 405
x CONTENTS
Notes, 407
References, 417
Appendix, 431
Index, 441
PART I
INTRODUCTION
1
Making the Familiar Look Foreign
1.1. Mere Words or Keys to a Cultural World?
In his tribute to Clifford Geertz the teacher, his colleague Robert Darnton (2007,
32) writes that Geertz “tried to make the distant seem familiar and the familiar
look foreign—as in Gulliver’s Travels, one of his favorite books.”
The present book, which focuses on English as a cultural universe, shares the
second of these two aspirations: to make the familiar look foreign. Darnton says
further that Geertz wanted to help his students break “through the barrier of
culture-bound thinking” (ibid.). This is also the ambition of Experience, Evi-
dence, and Sense.
According to Darnton, Geertz’s main objective was to show “how people
construe the world through signs, not merely by means of verbal clues but also by
reference to objects from everyday life” (ibid.). Like its predecessor, English: Mean-
ing and Culture, this book shows the ways in which “verbal cues” (and especially
certain keywords) define the conceptual world inhabited by speakers of what I call
“Anglo English” (see section 1.2). It shows that new techniques developed in
linguistic semantics can help both outsiders and insiders penetrate this world better
than has heretofore been possible. It also demonstrates that these techniques can help
native speakers of Anglo English break through the barriers of culture-bound think-
ing, barriers that are often invisible even to Anglo anthropologists and linguists (who
are professional students of “otherness”), let alone other scholars.
Geertz was rather exceptional in that effort, and he understood the pivotal
role of languages in the construction of cultural worlds. His main goal, however,
was to make the distant seem familiar rather than the familiar look foreign, and,
3
4 INTRODUCTION
as an anthropologist rather than a linguist, he understandably did not see the

semantic analysis of English as one of his main priorities.
For me as a linguist, however, this is a priority. It is the task of this book to
“other” or “denaturalize” English or at least one important aspect of English.
Darnton (2007, 33) says in his tribute that Geertz worked hard to get across the
notion that “symbolic systems . . . hold together with a power of their own . . . and
that the interpretation of them requires rigorous empirical study as well as
conceptual clarity.” This also applies to the systems of meanings encoded in
language: They, too, hold together with a power of their own, and their interpre-
tation also requires rigorous empirical study, as well as conceptual clarity.
This book demonstrates that certain culture-specific keywords can act as
linchpins for whole networks of meanings and that to penetrate their meanings
is to gain entry into a whole cultural world. To paraphrase Darnton, “the game
is difficult, but anyone can play.” Darnton applied these words to anthropology as
practiced and taught by Geertz, but they can also be applied to cultural semantics
as understood in this book. The game is difficult to the extent that it is unfamiliar
and requires a degree of concentration, but it does not involve any technical
apparatus whatsoever. Meanings are explored here through the prism of simple
words like do, happen, know, want, and think (see section 1.6), and any mentally
alert person who speaks and reads English can participate in this exploration.
1.2. The Cultural and Historical Baggage of English
In his book English as a Global Language David Crystal (2003, 20) states that
“Language is the repository of the history of a people. It is its identity.” This
statement echoes the deep insight of the founder of general linguistics, Wilhelm
von Humboldt (1988, 60), who affirmed, two centuries ago, that “there resides in
every language a characteristic world-view . . . every language contains the whole
conceptual fabric and mode of presentation of a portion of mankind.”
Although some culture-blind theories of language and cognition, developed
in the twentieth century, have at various times attracted a great deal of attention,
empirical “language-and-culture” studies have not undermined Humboldt’s view
but on the contrary supported it with extensive evidence. (For references and
discussion see, e.g., Wierzbicka [1992, 1997]; see also Shweder [1991] and
Pavlenko [2005].)
But given the fact that English has now become (or is quickly becoming) a
global language,1 there is a widespread temptation today to modify Humboldt
and to say that, while his proposition may apply to all other languages, it does not
apply to English. English (so the argument goes), unlike other languages, is
“neutral”—a purely functional, international language that is free from the
baggage of any particular history and tradition; furthermore, English is so
diversified that, although dozens of different traditions may be reflected in it,
no one tradition provides a shared “conceptual fabric” (in Humboldt’s sense).
With the ever-increasing dominance of English in the contemporary world
(cf., e.g., Graddol 2006), there is a growing urgency to the question of whether an
MAKING THE FAMILIAR LOOK FOREIGN 5
irreconcilable conflict exists between the view that English is shared by people
from many different cultural traditions and the notion that English itself—like
any other language—has certain cultural assumptions and values embedded in it.
The position I take here—as in my 2006 book, English: Meaning and
Culture—is that even though there are many “Englishes” around the world (all
of them worthy of recognition, appreciation, and study), there is also an Anglo
English; moreover, this Anglo English is not a cultural tabula rasa, a blank slate.
Anglo English is what the Indian American linguist Braj Kachru (1985, 1992)
calls the English of the “inner circle” and includes, as David Crystal (2003, 60)
puts it, “the traditional bases of English, where it is the primary language: . . . the
USA, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.” This book, like my
2006 English, describes the cultural content—or cultural baggage—of this Anglo
English.
It goes without saying that Anglo English is neither homogeneous nor
unchanging and that, for example, Australian English differs in many ways
from British English. I have studied such differences in numerous publications
(Wierzbicka 1986, 1992, 1997, 2002a, 2003a [1991]), as have others (see, e.g.,
Goddard [2006, in press]). There are also profound semantic and cultural differ-
ences between British English and American English (see, e.g., Kövecses 2000;
Malouf 2003). At the same time, to adequately characterize what Kachru calls
“Englishes of the outer circle” (such as Singapore English) and to fully under-
stand them as expressions of local cultures, it is eminently useful to be able to
compare them with Anglo English. The concept of Anglo culture, which, of
course, is also an abstraction, can be particularly useful to millions of immigrants
to Anglophone countries like Britain, the United States, and Australia. To deny
the validity of this concept is to deny immigrants the cultural training that is
essential to their social advancement. Anglo English is an essential part of Anglo
culture.
Philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (1975, 11) writes that “if we are not to
accept language automatically, but to strive for a reasoned historical understand-
ing, we must face a whole host of questions of verbal and conceptual history.”
Both my 2006 English and the present book address such questions of “verbal and
conceptual history” and explore English as a vehicle of cultures. In particular,
they investigate the links between aspects of English and aspects of Anglo
culture.
As I have demonstrated in English: Meaning and Culture, everyday English
words like right, wrong, reasonable, and fair (among many others) are important
instances of words that are used automatically and yet contain a wealth of history
and pass on a great deal of cultural heritage. Words of this kind may be “invisi-
ble” to native speakers, who simply take them for granted and assume that their
equivalents exist in other languages. By analyzing such “invisible” words, their
history, and their current use, including the conversational routines and discourse
patterns associated with them, I have shown from a linguistic point of view the
extent to which, as literary scholar David Parker (2001, 4) puts it, “cultural
knowledge constitutes a shared social space” that is handed down through and
embedded in the English language itself.
6 INTRODUCTION
Rather than denying the existence of the cultural baggage embedded in Anglo
English, I believe it is important to explore the contents of that baggage—important
for practical, as well as intellectual, reasons: for language teaching, “cultural
literacy” teaching, cross-cultural training, international communication, and
so on.
In addition, this book extends the exploration of the hidden cultural legacy of
English and focuses in particular on some of the most basic “Anglo” assumptions
about ways of knowing—assumptions that English carries with it, imperceptibly,
in its spectacular expansion in the modern world.
1.3. The Legacy of “British Empiricism”
English is saturated with “British empiricism”. The phrase “British empiricism”

is often dismissed as a cliché, but linguistic evidence shows that this cliché carries
with it a great deal of truth. The contrast between “British empiricism” and
“continental rationalism” is also often dismissed as a cliché, but again, linguistic
evidence shows that there is a great deal of truth in it. A century ago Bertrand
Russell (1943[1912], 114) wrote in The Problems of Philosophy:
One of the great historic controversies in philosophy is the controversy between the
two schools called respectively “empiricists” and “rationalists.” The empiricists—
who are best represented by the British philosophers, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume—
maintained that all our knowledge is derived from experience; the rationalists—who
are represented by the Continental philosophers of the seventeenth century, espe-
cially Descartes and Leibniz—maintained that, in addition to what we know by
experience, there are certain “innate ideas” and “innate principles,” which we know
independently of experience.
Commenting on this passage, British philosopher Roger Woolhouse under-

mines this contrast between British empiricists and continental rationalists as
simplistic:
The idea that the English Channel has intellectual significance was perhaps shared
by Voltaire, who saw European and British philosophers as having temperamentally
different styles. But the philosophers Russell mentions would not have accepted it.
Berkeley and Hume were indeed both British, but they would not have seen
themselves as falling, along with Locke, into a school diametrically opposed to
Descartes and Leibniz on the Continent. Though Locke undoubtedly set many of the
parameters of their thought, Berkeley and Hume are as often critical of him as they
are in agreement with Nicolas Malebranche, a French Cartesian. Pierre Gassendi
was French too, but Locke’s philosophy shows marked similarities with his. Nor
would these philosophers have characterized themselves or others primarily by
these labels. (Woolhouse 1988, 1)
But linguistic evidence is, in an important sense, on Russell’s side. Whatever

view one takes of the history of European philosophy, a great cultural divide
exists between the “empiricism” of the English language and the absence of such
a stance in other European languages. The point is that Locke, whose Essay
Concerning Human Understanding “may have been the most widely read book
apart from the Bible in eighteenth-century England” (Wood 1991, 140), set many
parameters not only for the thought of Berkeley and Hume but also for the
prevailing ways of thinking of educated seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
English speakers in general; moreover, these parameters became so entrenched
in English that to this day they shape some aspects of Anglo-English discourse
and set it apart from that of the Francophone descendants of Descartes, Male-
branche, and Gassendi.
Woolhouse (1988, 1–2) emphasizes that “the systematic use of the labels
‘empiricist’ and ‘rationalist’ is a product of nineteenth-century histories
of philosophy” and that those histories of philosophy “saw seventeenth- (and
eighteenth-) century philosophy in idealized terms, as a conflict between two
opposing schools which reached some sort of resolution in the philosophy of
Kant” (see also Van Fraassen 2002, 202). In fact, Russell (1943[1912]), too, came
to see the great historical controversy between ‘empiricists’ and ‘rationalists’ as
something that was later resolved (“It has now become possible to decide with
some confidence as to the truth or falsehood of these opposing schools” [115]).
Nonetheless, whatever philosophers such as Russell may have decided about
empiricism and rationalism, the modern English language, shaped to a significant
degree by the writings of British empiricists, decided in its own way, and the
glowing aura of the word empirical in today’s English sends its own message to
the increasingly English-speaking globe.
To see how important the word empirical is in modern English—in contrast,
for example, to the French empirique—compare, to begin with, their respective
frequencies in modern corpora such as COBUILD.2 Thus, there are forty-seven
instances of empirical per 10 million words in the English COBUILD and only
twenty-five instances of empirique in the French COBUILD. More importantly,
however, the two words do not mean the same thing; furthermore, empirical has
positive connotations, whereas empirique often has negative ones (except, it seems,
in translations from English, where it is calqued from the English empirical).
For example, in the French COBUILD one finds collocations like naı̈ f et
empirique, whereas one could not say naive and empirical in English. In different
contexts, empirique can be translated into English as ad hoc, anecdotal, haphaz-
ard, based on rule of thumb, groping, and the like. As such glosses intimate, the
French word—which in context is often opposed to raison (‘reason’), scientifique
(‘scientific’), and methode (‘method’)—implies a lack of method, a lack of
planning, a lack of thought, and a lack of a rational or logical basis. These facts
show that the words empirique and empirical are not just slightly different in their
meanings but reflect very different concerns, attitudes, priorities, and values.
A comparison of the relevant entries in French and English dictionaries
points in the same direction. French dictionaries describe empirique in somewhat
pejorative terms and contrast it with rationnel (‘rational’), whereas English
dictionaries tend to describe empirical in positive terms and contrast it (as a
preferred alternative) with ‘theories’. For example, the monumental Dictionnaire
8 INTRODUCTION
historique de la langue française (1995, vol. 1, 682) defines the word empirique
as follows: “Empirique qualifie aujourd’hui ce qui reste au niveau de l’expérience
commune et n’a rien de rationnel” (‘empirique today describes what remains on
the level of common experience and has nothing rational [about it]’). The flavor
of the definition of the word empirical offered, for example, by the Collins
COBUILD English Language Dictionary (1991) is very different: “Empirical:
empirical knowledge, study, etc.; relies on practical experience rather than on
theories.”
This contrast between the words empirique and empirical is particularly
illuminating given that they both originated from an ancient school of physi-
cians (Empirici, as opposed to Dogmatici or Methodici), who, as Van Fraassen
(2002, 202) puts it in his Empirical Stance, “preferred to base their practice
entirely on experience (that is, on the accumulated experience of the medical
profession) and not on theories drawn from more general philosophies or
cosmologies.” As van Fraassen also notes, in English the term empiric(k)
acquired a pejorative sense early on, as is evident in Shakespeare’s reference
to quacks in All’s Well That Ends Well (II, i): “We must not corrupt our hope,
To prostitute our past-cure malladie to Empiricks.” (In this passage, the king,
who is regarded by his learned physicians as terminally ill, rejects an offer of
cure from an “empirick.”)
For a long time, the words empirical and empiricism could also be used in
English in a negative sense. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
includes the following quotations:
The Chymistry of the Galenical Tribe is a ridiculous . . . and . . . dangerous Empericism

[sic]. (1659)
The art became debased with empiricism. (1756)
Mere observation and empiricism, not even the commencement of science. (1817)
The application of hasty and empirical measures. (1861)
The great majority of accidents are . . . the results of empirical management. (1872)
By an empirical formula is meant one that is conceived or invented without any analysis
or demonstration. (1829)
Gradually, however, first a neutral and then a positive meaning of empirical

appeared in English usage and supplanted the negative one, as the following
nineteenth-century examples from the OED illustrate:
An empirical law observed by Baron Bode, in the mean distances of the planet. (1834)
An empirical law then, is an observed uniformity, presumed to be resolvable into simpler
laws, but not yet resolved into them. (Mill 1846)
The empirical corroboration of his doctrine by direct experiment. (Buckle 1869)
Thus, in the course of the nineteenth century the word empirical started being
used without any negative connotations, as in the following collocations: empiri-
cal generalizations (1843), empirical methods (1862), empirical corroboration
(1869), and indeed, empirical evidence. For example, the brother of scientist John
Dalton wrote this about him after his death in 1844: “In 1810, he published Part II
of his New System [of chemical philosophy], giving more empirical evidence for
it” (quoted in Moody and Bridges 1992).
The following late-nineteenth-century quote from the OED’s entry for
nature records a semantic, as well as a scientific, change in progress:
The empiricism of today is more scientific than it was in former days. (1880)
The triumph of the new meaning of empiricism is reflected in Huxley’s statement,

also in the entry for nature:
All true science begins with empiricism. (1881)
As for the word empiricist, it, too, was used in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries in a pejorative sense, as in the following quote from Shaftesbury (1698–
1712) cited in the OED:
The prescriptions of the vulgar-wise, like those of the Empiricists. (1698–1712)
Francis Bacon, who later came to be seen as the great forerunner of British
empiricism, dissociated himself from ‘empiricists’ in a famous passage in Novum
Organum, in which he represents them as too simplistic in their reliance on
observation and experience:
Those who have practiced the sciences have been either empiricists or dogmatists.
The empiricists, like ants, merely collect and use: the rationalists, like spiders, spin
webs out of themselves. But the way of the bee lies in between: she gathers
materials from the flowers of the garden and the field and then by her own powers
transforms and digests them; and the real work of [science] is similar. (Bacon 1994
[1620], book 1, aphorism XCV)
As van Fraassen (2002, 33) notes, even John Stuart Mill, “the last great
representative of British empiricism,” repudiated the term empiricism (in
Bacon’s sense): “When this time shall come [when the right method is followed
in all areas of inquiry], no important branch of human affairs will be any longer
abandoned to empiricism and unscientific surmise” (Mill 1974, vol. 8, 930;
quoted in Van Fraassen 2002).
Yet, as the history of the word empirical reveals, whatever happened to
British empiricism in academic philosophy, with time, aspects of it became
firmly entrenched in the English language.
As the semantic history of the French word empirique illustrates, in the
French cultural thought world, the rationalist web spinners gradually achieved
a greater and more enduring prestige than either the data-gathering ants (who
“merely collect and use”) or the bees, with their middle way. But in the “Anglo-
sphere,” the distrust of rationalist spiders proved greater and more enduring, and
10 INTRODUCTION
the preferred middle option—the way of the bee—became firmly associated with
the term empirical (that is, with a term previously linked with the antitheoretical
ants). In the end, the word empirical acquired enormous prestige in English, as
did also its conceptual partners evidence, experience, and sense.
The idea articulated and defended at length by Locke that “knowledge is
ultimately dependent on the senses” (Woolhouse 1988, 73) lives on in Anglo
culture and in the English language. To be sure, in the eighteenth century this
idea also influenced a number of French philosophers, in particular
La Mettrie and Condillac. La Mettrie, for example, wrote the following in his
Traite de l’^
ame [1745]: “Il n’est point de plus sûrs guides que les sens. Voilà mes
Philosophes. Quelque mal qu’on en dise, eux seuls peuvent éclairer la raison
dans la recherche de la vérité” (There are no guides surer than the senses. They
are my Philosophers. Despite the bad things that are said about them, they
alone can illuminate reason in the search for truth) (in La Mettrie 1970, 54).
Condillac (1947, 8) deplored the Cartesians, who “decry them as errors and
illusion” (“les Cartesiens . . . crient si fort contre les sens. Ils répètent si souvent
qu’ils ne sont qu’erreurs et illusions”). Yet the semantic history of French shows
that in the sphere of the French language it was the Cartesians who had the
last word.3
Not so in the sphere of the English language, however. Here, Locke’s idea
that “knowledge is ultimately dependent on the senses” has been so widely
accepted that it is often presented as a scientific truism, as in the following
characteristic passage from a university textbook on psychology: “All knowledge,
as the Sophists of ancient Greece knew, comes only through the senses
and those who would ‘know how they know’ turn quite naturally to the contem-
plation of the senses as the originators of experience” (Geldard 1972, v). As
philosopher and historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto (1998, 121) notes somewhat
wistfully, “dependence on the evidence of our senses seems ineluctable to modern
westerners.”
But while assertions such as Geldard’s could in principle be disputed,
the meanings of words cannot be because native speakers simply take
them for granted, and so ‘British empiricism’ lives on in the English
language.
In the preface to his book Englishness and National Culture, literary scholar
Antony Easthope (1999, ix) writes:
Englishness and National Culture aims to demonstrate a profound and hardly

acknowledged continuity between the seventeenth century and today. This means
that often when English people (journalists, historians, novelists, poets, comic
writers and others) think they are speaking in their own voices, in fact the discourse
of an empiricist tradition is speaking for them.
I agree with Easthope on this point, but I believe that the influence of the
empiricist tradition goes even deeper and reaches even more widely than this
quote (or Easthope’s book as a whole) suggests. According to Easthope, “beyond
questions of language it is the discursive formation that matters” (ibid., 76).
However, the English language is larger than any particular “discursive forma-
tion.” It carries with it habits of the heart and the mind that are both far less visible
to its speakers and writers than particular discourse strategies and also less open
to conscious manipulation and choice. For example, words like experience,
evidence, and sense are taken for granted and treated as basic mental tools by
all speakers of Anglo English (including those who, like Easthope, look at the
British empiricist tradition from a distance).
1.4. The English Word Empirical and the French

Word Empirique: A Closer Look
The differences between contemporary English empirical (always positive) and

contemporary French empirique (often negative) are so illuminating as to deserve
a number of examples. First, here are five excerpts from the French COBUILD (in
the English glosses, empirique is rendered as “empirical,” but the context shows
that this is not exactly what empirique means):
A. L’astrologie est un rapport naı̈f et empirique au cosmos (Astrology is a naı̈ve

and empirical relationship with the cosmos).
B. En résumé, l’automatisation s’impose lorsque les échanges d’information . . . sont
trop importants pour être organisés de façon empirique, voire pas organisés
du tout (In sum, automatization imposes itself when exchanges of information . . .
are too important to be organized in an empirical fashion, or even not organized
at all).
C. Dans ce métier, à défaut de doctrine, la rumeur et le ragot tiennent lieu de
pensée: ils accrochent le geste quotidien à un semblant de logique. Et ce
“corpus” là ne s’apprend guère à l’école. Ce savoir interne est au contraire
totalement empirique (In this profession [police], which lacks a doctrine,
rumor and gossip take the place of thought: They attach everyday gestures to a
semblance of logic. And that “corpus” is not learned at school. On the contrary,
this internal knowledge is totally empirical).
D. [C’est] un type qui fuit la vie et dérive sur une mer démontée. Un parano
consentant qui obéit à un besoin confus, déraisonnable et empirique de son
ego, de ses glandes, de son ventre ([He is] a type who flees from life and
drifts about on a stormy sea. A consenting paranoiac who obeys the
confused, irrational and empirical needs of his ego, of his glands, of his
stomach).
E. Ces épisodes lui valent de farouches inimitiés. Les pages que l’auteur consacre
à la “méthode Soros” sont parmi les plus intéressantes. “Réflexive,” moins
“cartésienne” que psychologisante, franchement empirique pour certains,
“elle relève plus de l’art que de la science” (Such episodes earn him fierce
hostility from various quarters. The pages that the author devotes to the “Soros
method” are among the most interesting ones. “Reflexive,” psychologizing
rather than “Cartesian,” downright empirical, according to some, “more art
than science”).
12 INTRODUCTION
The cultural image of empiricism that emerges from COBUILD’s Bank of

English could hardly be more different. Here common collocations prominently
include unquestionably good things such as empirical reality, empirical vali-
dity, empirical evidence, empirical data, empirical tests, empirical research,
and empirical facts. Moreover, in contrastive contexts in which empirical is
opposed to something else, this something else is viewed negatively, whereas
empirical is always and unquestionably seen as something good. Here are some
examples:
Efforts are being made to research it scientifically on the basis of empirical evidence
instead of philosophical logic and reasoning.
In the absence of proper empirical astronomical research, Greek speculations about
extraterrestrial systems rested almost entirely on philosophical debate . . . .
I have been forced by the logic of events to abandon this ultimatist Utopian perspective
and to think in much more limited, empirical, here-and-now terms.
Rather than rely wholly on empirical evidence of damage done to the twelve target sets,
they began offering subjective estimates based partly on intuition of how effectively the
Iraqis could function.
Following the correct political ideology was apparently more important than empirical
evidence and careful academic inquiry, and to agree with the World Bank on anything was
to betray the cause.
Above all, the word empirical is repeatedly contrasted with the words theory,
theoretical, theoretically, and theorizing, as in the following example:
True, there are no “facts” independent of “theory,” but there should be constraints on the
way we indulge in theorizing. It all becomes quite futile if we allow the theoretical tail to
wag the empirical dog.
In striking contrast, the material in the French COBUILD suggests, rather, a fear that
the “empirical tail” might be allowed to wag the “theoretical dog.”
Interestingly, in official European Union documents that are required
to have both an English and a French version, the French word empirique
is sometimes rendered in English as empirical (and vice versa)—transla-
tions that are inaccurate and misleading and sometimes make little sense.
For example, the following sentence from a report by the Court of Justice
of the European Communities sounds bizarre because it opposes to one
another two words, scientific and empirical, which in English go hand in
hand:
At first, their curative effects had no scientific basis[;] purely empirical criteria prevailed.
(opinion of Advocate General Ruiz-Jarabo Colomer, July 10, 2003)
(The French version reads: “Au début, leur vertus thérapeutiques n’avaient aucun
fondement scientifique, des critères purement empiriques primaient.”)
1.5. ‘Theory’, ‘Common Sense’, and the Reliability

of the Senses
The superior position of the empirical dog in relation to the theoretical tail is
reflected in a number of ways in modern English, none of them matched in
French. The most obvious example, perhaps, is the word theorize (usually used as
the gerund theorizing, as in an earlier example). The pejorative implications of
this word in many contexts are evident in one of the following definitions in the
Collins COBUILD (1991):
1. If you theorize about something . . . you develop an abstract idea or set of ideas
about something in order to explain it.
2. If you theorize, you think in an abstract way about things instead of doing
something practical or useful.
Those pejorative implications of theorize (at least in one of its uses) are clearly
reflected in the collocations included in the COBUILD corpus, where this word tends
to co-occur with adjectives like obscure, fanciful, endless, pure, random, ab-
struse, and fatuous (as well as simply abstract).
Another linguistic reflex of what is known in English as the “horror of
theory” (and the existence of this expression speaks for itself) can be found in
the expression in theory, which is often followed in English discourse (either
directly or at some distance) by but or however. Judging by the material in
COBUILD, expressions like great in theory but in practice . . . are extremely com-
mon in contemporary English discourse:
All well and good in theory, but . . .

. . . in theory . . . but actually . . .
. . . in theory that sounds very good, but in practice . . .
. . . noble and . . . terrific in theory. However, in practice . . .
. . . in theory, yeah, it’s a very good idea, but . . .
That’s great in theory, but try to put it into practice.
Fine and noble in theory . . . but not so easily put into practice.
This is all fine—in theory. However, in practice . . .
In theory . . . In practice, however . . .
In theory . . . However, in reality nothing could be further from the truth.
In theory, they are no longer at war, but in fact . . .
While the French corpus also presents examples where en theorie (‘in
theory’) is followed by mais en pratique (‘but in practice’), it is unusual
for en theorie to be ironically combined with words of positive evaluation
like good, great, terrific, or fine, as is the case in the English examples cited
earlier.
14 INTRODUCTION
Another feature that is characteristic of modern English discourse is the use

of the expression in theory in combination with modal verbs (e.g., should, could,
would), as in the following examples from COBUILD:
In theory, we could decide . . . In practice . . .

In theory, you would be a tradesperson . . .
In theory, this is what you should be doing, but let’s face it . . .
In theory you know the model should produce . . .
In theory it should be possible . . .
I suppose in theory you could . . . but . . .
In theory that shouldn’t be a problem . . .
The combination of the expression in theory with modal verbs like should, could,
and would emphasizes the gap between theory and reality. Without too much
exaggeration one could say that in theory has evolved in modern English into
what linguists might call “a marker of irrealis.”
Thus, the data from the two corpora confirm, in a striking way, that
two quite different cultural attitudes toward experience and reason are
embedded in French and English. The advent of modern corpora (large,
electronically searchable databases such as COBUILD’s Bank of English and
COBUILD’S French corpus) allows us to explore such differences in a new
way. The differences in meaning between empirical and empirique brought
to light through a systematic study of their collocations and their use in
context confirm that British empiricism has become ingrained in the English
language.
This empiricism is not a mere cliché, a groundless stereotype, a historical
fiction, or a ripple in the history of European philosophy. Rather, it is an enduring
feature of the modern English language, a feature that British, American, and
other long-established varieties of English share with the international and global
varieties: the English of international academic journals and conferences, air
traffic control, the Internet, international organizations, international law, busi-
ness, trade, and so on.
This book focuses on three aspects of this enduring heritage of British
empiricism linked with three key English words: experience, evidence, and
sense (all of which have, as it happens, false friends, des faux amis, in French:
experience, evidence, and sens).
In his classic text, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of
Common Sense, Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid wrote: “Wise men now agree,
or ought to agree in this, that there is but one way to the knowledge of nature’s
works; the way of observation and experiment” (Reid 1997 [1764], 11). Reid
expressed profound confidence in the basic reliability of the senses: “Our Senses
are given us by nature not to deceive but to give us true information of things
within their Reach” (quoted in Brookes 1997, xxi). This trust in the senses was
accompanied in Reid’s work by a pronounced distrust of “conjectures and
theories,” which “are the creatures of men, and will always be found very unlike
the creatures of God” (1997, 12).
Reid makes no bones about targeting Descartes (“the great Des Cartes”) as
one of the archenemies of ‘common sense’:
Des Cartes . . . resolved not to believe his own existence till he should be able to give
a good reason for it. . . . A man that disbelieves his own existence, is surely as unfit
to be reasoned with as a man that believes he is made of glass. There may be
disorders in the human frame that may produce such extravagances, but they will
never be cured by reasoning. Des Cartes indeed would make us believe that he got
out of this delirium by this logical argument, Cogito ergo sum. But it is evident he
was in his senses all the time, and never seriously doubted of his existence. For he
takes it for granted in this argument, and proves nothing at all. (ibid., 16)
Thomas Reid was an enormously popular writer in the English-speaking

world, as the forty editions of his Inquiry into the Human Mind testify, and
there can be little doubt that his writings and their great popularity have
contributed to the subsequent career of the expression common sense in English
and of the corresponding value in Anglo culture (see chapter 8 on common
sense). What is most relevant in the present context is Reid’s commonsensical,
anti-Cartesian defense of the senses, observation, and experiment as the foun-
dation of knowledge. When one considers the different semantic fates of the
twin words empirique and empirical in French and English, one must conclude
that the different stances taken by key British and Continental philosophers in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had far-reaching linguistic and cultur-
al ramifications for modern English and the increasingly English-speaking
world.
In Britain, the seventeenth century was not only the century of Francis
Bacon, John Locke, and the rise of British empiricism in philosophy but also
the century of the Newtonian revolution and the birth of experimental science.
Empirical philosophy and experimental science were closely allied in Britain at
that time.
The ‘natural philosophers’ who came together in Gresham College in Lon-
don in 1660 to found the Royal Society wanted, as Gribbin (2005, xii) puts it, to
“form themselves into a society which would promote the use of experiments to
probe nature and unlock its secrets.” It is significant that their presiding spirit was
philosopher Francis Bacon. As Gribbin (ibid.) comments:
Individual scientists . . . had already realized the importance of the experimental

method in science and had achieved isolated successes through its application. But
this was a bold new proposal for a concerted attack, on a broad front, to find out how
the world worked. In making this proposal, the Gresham group were consciously
following the teaching (but not the practice) of the philosopher Francis Bacon, who
was no experimental scientist himself but had written influential books promoting
the idea of experimental science earlier in the seventeenth century.
Locke, who was a close friend of Newton, had extensive medical knowledge
and worked with prominent scientists such as Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke,
16 INTRODUCTION
was also closely associated with the Royal Society and was elected a member
in 1668.
Gribbin (2001, 149) notes in his Science, a History, 1543–2001 that “The
three people who between them established both the scientific method itself and
the preeminence of British science at the end of the seventeenth century were
Robert Hooke, Edmund Halley and Isaac Newton” and that “the Newton band-
wagon . . . has now been rolling for 300 years.” One might add that the rise of
concepts like empirical science and empirical evidence in modern English is
inextricably linked to this “rolling of the Newton bandwagon.”
1.6. Natural Semantic Metalanguage as an Effective

Methodology for Cultural Semantics
The lexicon of a language is a treasury of meanings. If these meanings can be

revealed—accurately, precisely, and in a way that makes them transparent to both
insiders and outsiders—much can be learned about the entrenched ways of
thinking characteristic of a given society or cultural sphere and about their
cultural and historical underpinnings. Given the significance of English in the
contemporary world, it is particularly important that the hidden cultural and
historical baggage of English be well understood.
As I have argued in English: Meaning and Culture (2006), the task of
revealing that hidden baggage of English requires a suitable methodology. As I
have demonstrated there and show again here, such a methodology is based on a
small set of simple, intelligible, and universally available words, that is, words
with semantic equivalents in all languages. This small set of universal words (that
is, universal word meanings) provides a “natural semantic metalanguage” (NSM)
for exploring languages, cultures, and ways of thinking.
Those semanticists (formal or generativist) who see detailed attention to the
meanings of words as something of little importance or interest and prefer instead
to develop abstract systems of semantic representation (see, e.g., Jackendoff
2006) are like Francis Bacon’s spiders spinning webs out of themselves. Lexico-
graphers, on the other hand, have traditionally followed the way of the ant. For
example, the Oxford English Dictionary has accumulated a great mass of valu-
able data but presents it in an entirely atheoretical manner, producing a jungle
with no paths leading from A to B, no clear signposts, and no consistent system of
semantic analysis that would allow either insiders or outsiders to find their way.
By contrast, the approach taken in this book follows the way of the bee in
that it gives close attention to the meanings of words gathered from the gardens of
literature and modern linguistic corpora and then transforms them by means of a
coherent semantic methodology—NSM.
In this section I illustrate the use of this methodology by analyzing the
meanings of the modern English word empirical and, for comparison, that of the
French word empirique. By using the NSM analytical framework, we can
extend our exploration of the concepts associated with these words and arrive
at an analysis that is both more precise and more illuminating. To be able to
present this analysis, however, I first need to give an overview of the methodo-
logy itself.
The NSM approach to linguistic description is based on two fundamental
assumptions: first, that every language has an irreducible core that enables its speak-
ers to understand all complex thoughts and utterances; second, that the irreducible
cores of all natural languages match, so that we can speak, in effect, of the irreducible
core of all languages, which in turn reflects the irreducible core of human thought.
As Leibniz argued eloquently three centuries ago, not everything can be
explained. At some point, all explanations must come to an end, for a regressus
ad infinitum explains nothing. Some things must be self-explanatory (intuitively
clear), or we could never understand anything. The explanatory power of any
explanation depends therefore on the intuitive clarity of the indefinable concep-
tual primes that constitute its ultimate foundation.
A natural language is a powerful system in which very complex and diverse
meanings can be formulated and conveyed to other people. The NSM theory
of language and thought assumes that the intelligibility of all such meanings
depends on the existence of a basic set of conceptual primes that are intuitively
clear (and presumably innate), require no explanations, and constitute the bedrock
of human communication and cognition. Cross-linguistic empirical work under-
taken within the NSM framework suggests the existence of sixty-three universal
conceptual primes.4 Table 1.1 presents them in two versions, English and French.
The first hypothesis, which NSM researchers have pursued for more than three
decades by means of extensive empirical investigations, is that all languages have
lexical exponents for each of the conceptual primes (words, bound morphemes, or
fixed expressions). The second hypothesis, which has also long been pursued in
wide-ranging empirical investigations, is that in all languages conceptual primes
can enter into the same combinations. Of course, the word order and the morpho-
syntactic trappings may differ from language to language, but the hypothesis is that
the elements, their combinations, and their meanings will be the same (cf. Goddard
and Wierzbicka 2002; cf. also Peeters 2006; Goddard 2008).
This means that, just as we can have a rudimentary universal lexicon of
indefinable concepts, we can also have a rudimentary universal grammar of such
concepts. Furthermore, if we have a minilexicon and a minigrammar, then we can
have a minilanguage, one that is carved out of natural languages and can be used
for the description and comparison of languages, their lexicons, grammars, and
discourse practices: in short, a natural semantic metalanguage.
Since this metalanguage is carved out of any natural language, the semantic
explications constructed in it are intuitively meaningful and have psychological
reality. Consequently, unlike semantic formulae based on various artificial form-
alisms, NSM formulae are open to verification (they can be tested against native
speakers’ intuitions). Because it is based on the shared core of all languages, the
NSM can serve as a “cultural notation” (Hall 1976) for the comparison of cultural
values, assumptions, norms, and ways of speaking across the boundaries between
societies, communities, subcultures, and epochs.
In some situations, an English version of the NSM can also serve as a simple
lingua franca for basic communication between speakers of different languages
18 INTRODUCTION
TABLE 1.1. Table of Semantic Primes: English and French Versions
English Version French Version
I, YOU, SOMEONE, SOMETHING/ MOI, TOI, QUELQU’UN, substantives

THING, PEOPLE, BODY QUELQUE CHOSE/CHOSE, GENS,
CORPS
KIND, PART TYPE DE, PARTIE relational substantives
THIS, THE SAME, OTHER/ELSE CE, LE MÊME, AUTRE determiners
ONE, TWO, SOME, ALL, MUCH/ UN, DEUX, IL Y A . . . QUI, TOUT, quantifiers
MANY BEAUCOUP
GOOD, BAD BON/BIEN, MAUVAIS/MAL evaluators
BIG, SMALL GRAND, PETIT descriptors
THINK, KNOW, WANT, FEEL, PENSER, SAVOIR, VOULOUR, mental predicates

SEE, HEAR SENTIR, VOIR, ENTENDRE
SAY, WORDS, TRUE DIRE, MOTS, VRAI speech
DO, HAPPEN, MOVE, TOUCH FAIRE, ARRIVER, BOUGER, action, events, movement,
TOUCHER contact
TO BE (SOMEWHERE), THERE IS/ ÊTRE (QUELQUE PART), IL Y A, location, existence,

THERE ARE, TO HAVE, TO BE AVOIR, ÊTRE (QUELQU’UN, possession, specification
(SOMEONE/SOMETHING) QUELQUE CHOSE)
LIVE, DIE VIVRE, MOURIR life and death
WHEN/TIME, NOW, BEFORE, QUAND, MAINTENANT, AVANT, time

AFTER, A LONG TIME, A SHORT APRÈS, LONGTEMPS, PEU DE
TIME, FOR SOME TIME, IN A TEMPS, POUR UN TEMPS, EN UN
MOMENT MOMENT
WHERE/PLACE, HERE, ABOVE, OÙ, ICI, AU-DESSUS, AU- space

BELOW, FAR, NEAR, SIDE, DESSOUS, LOIN, PRÈS, CÔTÉ,
INSIDE DANS
NOT, MAYBE, CAN, BECAUSE, IF NE . . . PAS, PEUT-ÊTRE, logical concepts

POUVOIR, À CAUSE DE, SI
VERY, MORE TRÈS, PLUS intensifier, augmentor
LIKE COMME similarity
· Primes exist as the meanings of lexical units (not necessarily as distinct lexemes).
· Exponents of primes may be words, bound morphemes, or phrasemes.
· They can be formally complex.
· They can have different morphosyntactic properties, including word class, in different languages.
· They can have combinatorial variants (allolexes).
· Each prime has well-specified syntactic (combinatorial) properties.
who do not speak English well. In this respect it can be compared with practically
oriented minilanguages such as “Globish” (Nerrière 2006).
“Globish” is an English-based minilanguage that purports to be free of the
historical and cultural baggage of English. In fact, however, many words that are
paramount carriers of this baggage—for example, fair, right, wrong, and mind—
are included in the lexicon. In particular, experience, evidence, and sense, the
three English keywords studied in this book, which, as I have demonstrated, are
saturated with British empiricism, have all made it onto the list of fifteen hundred
words that constitute the lexicon of “Globish.” This shows that “Globish” is in
fact “Glenglish.”
The inventor of Globish, Jean-Paul Nerrière, says that “It is not a language, it
is a tool. A language is the vehicle of a culture. Globish doesn’t want to be that at
all. It is a means of communication” (quoted in Blume 2005). In many situations
Globish may be a more feasible communication tool than normal English, but it is
still, to some extent, a vehicle of culture—in particular, Anglo culture. The
invisible cultural legacy of English is hidden in the meaning of many Globish
words. By contrast, the NSM minilexicon of sixty-three words that have match-
ing semantic counterparts in all languages is independent of any one specific
culture.
To demonstrate NSM methodology, I propose two explications: one of the
French word empirique and one of the English word empirical (in the English
version of NSM, which closely matches the French version).
Reading these explications, one should bear in mind that they are minitexts
written not in English but in NSM-English and that, on first encounter, such texts are
bound to seem strange. The words are familiar, the syntax is easy, the ideas expressed
in the individual lines are clear, and the overall style is so simple as to seem childish.
Yet to take in the full meaning of each minitext and to spot the places where the two
minitexts differ from one another requires some effort on the reader’s part:
empirique (e.g., approach)

a. someone thinks like this (about something):
b. “I want to know some things about this
c. maybe I can know these things if I do some things
d. because of this, I want to do some things
e. I don’t know well what I can do
f. I don’t want to think about it for a long time
g. I know that before, when people did some things
they could know some things about things like this because of this
h. maybe the same will happen to me now”
i. it can be bad if someone thinks like this
empirical (e.g., approach)
a. someone thinks like this (about something):

b. “I want to know some things about this
c. I know that people can’t know things like this about something
if they don’t do things of some kinds to some things
20 INTRODUCTION
d. if people do things of these kinds to some things, they can see

some things because of this
e. at the same time some parts of their bodies can touch some things
f. after this, they can know some things because they have done these
things
g. I want to do some things like this now”
h. it is good if someone thinks like this
The French concept as explicated here suggests, above all, a lack of method:
There is an element of groping here, of haphazardness, and of reliance on collective
and hearsay experience (rather than on one’s own sensory experience), as well as
on luck (“maybe”). The explication does not explicitly say, “I don’t want to think
about it,” which would imply that the word empirique can never be used in neutral
contexts, but it does exclude extended reflection as a way to proceed (“I don’t know
well what I can do; I don’t want to think about it for a long time”).
The English concept, on the other hand, suggests a conscious acceptance of a
methodical approach that involves doing “certain things to some things” and is
based on personal sensory experience (defined via seeing and touching). This
positive emphasis on the senses and on the experimental method based on them
links the modern English concept of the empirical with the revolution in thinking
set in motion by early British empiricists like Francis Bacon and John Locke and
scientists like Newton, Halley, Hooke, and Boyle. The NSM methodology offers
a framework within which such differences can be explored and elucidated.
In a recent discussion of my work, semanticist Ray Jackendoff (2006, 356),
who works in the generativist (Chomskyan) tradition and advocates a variety
of semantics that he calls “conceptual semantics,” has written the following:
“Conceptual semantics begins to offer a theoretical approach to language proces-
sing that fits together with findings in psycholinguistics . . . and lends itself
to plausible speculations behind the evolution of the language capaci-
ty . . . Wierzbicka, by contrast, stays very close to the linguistic ground.”
This book, too, stays “very close to the linguistic ground”—it explores
materials found “on the ground” through the prism of a coherent semantic theory
whose basic assumptions have remained stable for more than three decades of
testing, during which the hypotheses in question were continually revised in
response to the data. As more and more scholars became involved in this
enterprise, the testing was applied to more and more languages, and as the advent
of modern corpora radically increased the scope of data available for many
languages (including English, French, and Russian), the empirical basis for
collecting and testing data has also radically expanded.5
The belief in the value of introspection and disciplined semantic intuition
that I defend in my 1972 book, Semantic Primitives, is a constant in the semantic
explorations in the NSM framework. Objective data, such as those that occur in
contemporary linguistic corpora, cannot interpret themselves, and to make sense
of them one still needs to consult one’s semantic intuitions. At the same time, to
reject these enormously rich new sources of data and to continue to rely on
analyses of one’s own invented examples (as Chomsky did in the 1960s and as
those working in the Chomskyan tradition continue to do in the twenty-first

century)—is to show a commitment to the way of the spider so extreme and so
single-minded that those who are interested not only in theories but also in
empirical reality can only marvel at it.
Jackendoff is by no means the only prominent exponent of such an attitude in
contemporary semantics or even the most extreme one. So-called formal seman-
ticists are equally remote from and apparently not interested in empirical data.
For example, Ruth Kempson’s (1996, 561) statements that “natural languages
can be analyzed as formal inference systems in like manner to familiar logical
inference systems such as predicate calculus” and that “these logic systems are
set up to model truth-preserving relations” can give a flavor of what formal
semanticists are and are not interested in.
To borrow the words of distinguished French typologist Claude Hagège
(1985, 67), the artificial formalisms and abstract models favored by many
linguists “can tell us something about . . . the cleverness of those who fashion
them, but not about the languages themselves.” Inventors of such formalisms
and models can spin formal webs with considerable artfulness and virtuosity, but
they are not interested in exploring language-specific meanings shaped by history
and culture.6
Jackendoff (2006) contrasts NSM methodology unfavorably with his own
approach, arguing, first, that it is too empirical (“stays very close to the linguistic
ground”) and, second, that it avoids formalisms: “Wierzbicka, by contrast
. . . analyzes words simply in terms of other words” (356). However, staying
very close to the linguistic ground means being able to see what those with their
eyes high above that ground are likely to miss. As for the charge that I analyze
words simply in terms of other words, I believe that this is the only way to
analyze them intelligibly. Moreover, NSM explications, which comprise simple
everyday words, can achieve a degree of intuitive clarity and accessibility that is
not possible with more technical modes of semantic description.
For example, Jackendoff’s analysis of the meaning of the words rights and
obligations in terms of artificial formulae includes brackets, indices, Greek
letters, and abbreviations like “RT” (for “rights”) and “OB” (for “obligations”).
Following this method, one could analyze the meaning of the English word
empirical as EMP and then suggest that EMP is universal, as RT and OB are
(supposedly) universal. Proceeding in this way, one can indeed avoid the charge
of analyzing words in terms of other words, but it is not clear how one could
explain anything to anyone or verify one’s claims.
Symbols like RT, OB, or EMP are not self-explanatory, and the concepts
encoded in the English words right, obligation, and empirical are not universal.
To find out what these concepts are and how they differ from those encoded in
other languages (e.g., from the French words droit and empirique or the German
words Pflicht and Verpflichtung), we indeed need to analyze them using other
words—as is normally done in dictionaries, which also endeavor to be intelligible
and useful. In NSM work, however, the other words in terms of which explana-
tions are couched are not chosen at random, as is usually done in dictionaries,
but are drawn from a highly constrained list of simple words that, as decades of
22 INTRODUCTION
cross-linguistic investigations undertaken by many scholars have shown, appear

to have their semantic counterparts in all languages.
The English word empirical does not have an exact semantic equivalent in
French, but want, do, someone, something, maybe, and before do in vouloir, faire,
quelqu’un, quelque chose, peut-tre, and avant, respectively. Such matching
word meanings give us a shared conceptual currency in terms of which all
meanings can be intelligibly described and compared across cultures, languages,
and epochs. They also give us a tool that enables us to explore the cultural
baggage of modern English and its implications for the world at large.
PART II
EXPERIENCE AND EVIDENCE

2
Experience: An English Keyword

and a Key Cultural Theme
EXPERIENCE. In that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately
derives itself.
—John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding
Science aims to understand the world of experience.

—The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 1995
2.1. The Uniqueness of the English Concept of

‘Experience’
In Ian McEwan’s acclaimed recent novel, Saturday, the protagonist, a neurosur-

geon, meditates on the human brain:
For all the recent advances, it’s still not known how this well-protected one
kilogram or so of cells actually encodes information, how it holds experiences,
memories, dreams and intentions. He doesn’t doubt that in years to come, the coding
mechanism will be known, though it might not be in his lifetime. Just like the digital
codes of replicating life within DNA, the brain’s fundamental secret will be laid
open one day. (McEwan 2005, 254)
Does the human brain really hold within its cells “experiences, memories,
dreams and intentions”? To an English neurosurgeon like Henry Perowne
25
26 EXPERIENCE AND EVIDENCE
(McEwan’s hero) it may seem obvious that it does and that all that needs to be
discovered is “the coding mechanism.” Neither Perowne nor his creator seems to
be aware that a non-English-speaking neurosurgeon would not be making the
same assumptions about the human brain. Words like experiences, memories,
dreams, and intentions are not language-independent (and readily translatable)
labels for some objective realities but artifacts of the English language and the
Anglo culture. For example, without a change in their meaning, neither experi-
ences nor memories could be translated into German or Russian, and it would not
occur to a (monolingual) German or Russian neurosurgeon to think about the
human brain in those terms.
In a Russian dictionary, the equivalent of experience is opyt, a word that has
no plural form (except when it is used in the sense of ‘experiment’) and could not
possibly be used to translate the Anglo neurosurgeon’s experiences. The Oxford
English-Russian Dictionary (1984) assigns to experience two Russian glosses: 1.
(process of gaining knowledge, etc.)—opyt; 2. (event)—slučaj; an unpleasant
experience—neprijatnyj slučaj. The Russian word slučaj simply means some-
thing like ‘case’ or ‘event’, and this is how it is glossed in the Oxford Russian-
English Dictionary (1978). These glosses make it clear that there is really no way
to render an unpleasant experience in Russian without a serious loss in meaning:
An unpleasant experience is clearly a far cry from an unpleasant event.
The corresponding situation in German is not as bad as it is in Russian, but it
is still very problematic. I illustrate this with a reference to Wittgenstein’s work
Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology (1980) and its English translation.
When Wittgenstein speculated about the traces that some “experiences” may
leave in a person’s brain, he used the German word Erlebnis. The English
translator (Elizabeth Anscombe) rendered Erlebnis as “experience,” but she
acknowledged that experience does not mean the same as Erlebnis, as it translates
two German words, Erlebnis and Erfahrung, which do not mean the same.
Wittgenstein himself claimed that, for example, “emotions” (Gemütsbewegun-
gen) like sadness, joy, grief, and delight are Erlebnisse (plural), whereas “im-
pressions” (Eindrücke) like smells, colors, and sounds are Erfahrungen (plural).
Not surprisingly, Anscombe found the passage in which Wittgenstein discusses
the differences between Erlebnisse and Erfahrungen (ibid., vol. 1, 836) virtually
impossible to translate into English:
This passage presents severe problems of translation, because quite ordinary Ger-
man has two words, “Erlebnis” and “Erfahrung,” both of which are regularly
translated ‘experience.’ I was not willing either simply to use the German words
or to say, e.g., ‘experience1’ and ‘experience2.’ I have therefore kept ‘experience’
for ‘Erlebnis’ and used ‘undergoing’ for ‘Erfahrung.’ I apologize for the air of
philosophical technicality and the unnaturalness that is forced upon me by having to
find two words where common or garden[-variety] English has only one. (ibid., 148,
translator’s note)
The fact that “ordinary German” has two words where “common or garden[-
variety] English” has only one indicates that the conceptual category of
EXPERIENCE : AN ENGLISH KEYWORD AND A KEY CULTURAL THEME 27
“experiences,” lexicalized in English, is different from its two nearest counter-

parts in German.
It is interesting to note that in the index to Wittgenstein’s Remarks (vol. 1),
experience [Erfahrung] appears 34 times, and experience [Erlebnis] 126 times.
The fact that Erlebnis is normally a count noun, whereas Erfahrung can be either
a count noun (typically, plural) or a mass noun, suggests that the former may be a
better match for the “experiences” of Anglophone scientists than the latter. It is
worth noting, therefore, that Erlebnis (from erleben ‘to live through’, from leben
‘to live’) is a relatively recent word in German and that its historical and cultural
roots and conceptual associations are quite different from those of modern
English experiences. To quote philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer:
It is surprising to find that, unlike Erleben, the word Erlebnis became common only
in the 1870s. In the eighteenth century it is not found at all, and even Schiller and
Goethe do not know it. Its first appearance, seemingly, is in one of Hegel’s letters.
But even in the thirties and forties I know of only occasional instances (in Tieck,
Alexis, and Gutzkow). The word appears equally seldom in the fifties and sixties
and appears suddenly with some frequency in the seventies. The word comes into
general use at the same time as it begins to be used in biographical writing.
(Gadamer 1975, 55)
According to Gadamer, the fact that the word Erlebnis has its roots in
biographical literature is highly relevant to its meaning. (In the following quote
I have replaced the translator’s word experience with the original words, Erlebnis
and erleben. The “two meanings” to which the quote refers are the “immediacy”
and the “lasting residue” of what one has lived through.):
The essence of biography, especially the nineteenth-century biographies of artists

and poets, is to understand the works from the life. Their achievement consists
precisely in communicating the two meanings that we have distinguished in Erleb-
nis and in seeing these meanings as a productive union: something became an
Erlebnis inasmuch as it is not only erlebt (‘lived through’), but inasmuch as its
having been lived through (Erlebtsein) has a particular emphasis that gives it lasting
importance. An Erlebnis of this kind gains a wholly new quality of being an artistic
expression. Dilthey’s famous title Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung (Experience and
Poetry) succinctly formulates the association. (ibid., 56; the original: Gadamer
1972, 57)
In fact, from the way Gadamer describes Erlebnis (in both a historical and a
synchronic perspective), any scientific and empirical connotations appear to be
alien to it:
The coined word Erlebnis, of course, expresses the criticism of the rationalism of
the Enlightenment, which, following Rousseau, emphasized the concept of life
(Leben). It was probably Rousseau’s influence on German classicism which intro-
duced the criterion of Erlebtsein (being experienced) and hence made possible the
formation of the word Erlebnis. But the concept of life is also the metaphysical
background for the speculative thought of German idealism and plays a fundamen-
tal role in Fichte, Hegel and even Schleiermacher. As against the abstraction of the
understanding and the particularity of perception or representation, this concept
implies the connection with totality, with infinity. This is clearly audible in the tone
which the word Erlebnis has even today. (Gadamer 1972, 57)
Gadamer’s comments on Erlebnis and Anscombe’s on the difficulty of

translating Erlebnis and Erfahrung into English should serve as food for
thought to all those who assume that ‘experience’ is either a universal human
concept or a conceptual category based on nature itself rather than on one
language- and culture-specific interpretation of reality (and, of course, so
should the dictionary data on Russian). I hope to provide more such food for
thought in the following sections of this chapter. For the moment, let me note
that, in Anglophone cognitive science, as well as in neuroscience and neuro-
psychology, experience and experiences are among the most fundamental tools
of the trade. For example, a typical abstract of the journal Cognitive Science
might look like this:
We propose a vision of the structure of knowledge and processes of learning based

upon the particularity of experience. Highly specific cognitive structures are con-
strued through activities in limited domains of experience. . . . Applying this vi-
sion . . . [we] . . . trace the interplay of specific experiences with the interactions of
ascribed, disparate structures. The interpretive focus is on learning processes
through which a broadly applicable skill emerges from the interaction and integra-
tion of knowledge based on specific, particular experiences. (Lawler 1981, 1)
Two key subjects of cognitive science, neuroscience, and neuropsychology

are memory and consciousness, and the literature on both relies crucially on the
term experience. For example, the Handbook of Cognitive Neuropsychology, in a
section titled “Retaining Experiences in Memory,” presents two alternative
theories of memory, both based on the (unexamined) term experience:
What is it that is retained in our cognitive system as a result of having experiences?

The essential idea of a record-keeping theory is that a record of each experience is
put into a kind of storage bin. . . . In contrast, the essential idea of a constructionist
approach is that the various cognitive systems (e.g., the visual system, the language
system) are changed by experiences, but no record-by-record accounts of experi-
ences are stored anywhere. (Rapp 2001, 119)
The literature on consciousness is similarly dependent on the term experi-

ence and on its plural form, experiences. For example, David Chalmers, in his
renowned book, The Conscious Mind (1996, 3), states that “What is central to
consciousness, at least in the most interesting sense, is experience.”
Experience in what sense? There is no definition, but there is an indication of
the range: “Conscious experiences range from vivid colour sensations to experi-
ences of the faintest background aromas; from hard-edged pains to the elusive
experience of thoughts on the tip of one’s tongue; from mundane sounds and
smells to the encompassing grandeur of musical experience; from the triviality of

a nagging itch to the weight of a deep existential angst” (ibid.).
Similarly, Benjamin Libet (1987, 271), in the Encyclopedia of Neuroscience,
defines consciousness as “conscious, subjective experience” and characterizes it
further as “subjective awareness and experience, whether it be sensory experi-
ences of our environment, external and internal, or subjective experience of our
feelings and thoughts, or simply awareness of our own existing self and presence
in the world.”
There is simply no way to translate such ideas (without distortion) into, for
example, Russian because Russian has no word with a range corresponding to
that described by Chalmers or Libet. A number of words could be tried, in
particular vpečatlenija (‘impressions’), vosprijatija (‘perceptions’), oščuščenija
(‘sensations’), pereživanija (roughly, ‘prolonged strong emotions due to living
through a difficult time’), and opyt (roughly, ‘accumulated life experience’), but
none of them would make sense in a putative Russian translation of Chalmers’s
or Libet’s sentences. In the Oxford Russian-English Dictionary, the word
pereživanie (sg.) (from perežit’ ‘to go through’, and žit’ ‘to live’) is glossed
as ‘experience’, but in fact, it is even further from experience than the German
Erlebnis.
Chalmers (1996), who strongly argues that “consciousness exists,” that it is
important “to take consciousness seriously” (xii), and that a “reductive explana-
tion of consciousness is impossible” (xiv), also says that “conscious experience is
part of the natural world” (5), that “trying to define conscious experience in terms
of more primitive notions is fruitless” (4), and that any characterizations of it that
can be given “cannot qualify as true definitions, due to their implicitly circular
nature” (4).
I fully agree that consciousness exists and needs to be taken seriously and
also that neither concepts like ‘think’ and ‘feel’ nor their combinations like “I
think” and “I feel” can be defined (without circularity) in terms of any more
primitive notions (cf. Wierzbicka 1996, chapter 8; Goddard 2003). But is it true
that concepts like ‘experience’ (and ‘consciousness’) cannot be defined either?
To say this would be to privilege English over all other languages and to
privilege the speakers of English over the speakers of other languages. For
example, since Russian does not have the concept of ‘experience’, the only
way this concept can be explained to Russians and introduced into their concep-
tual world is through more elementary concepts (such as ‘think’, ‘feel’, and ‘I’),
which are lexicalized in Russian and in all other languages of the world (see
Goddard and Wierzbicka 2002).
It would be more justified, then, to say that “thinking” and “feeling” are “part
of the natural world,” whereas “experiences,” while real, are filtered through the
prism of the English language. Erlebnisse and pereživanija are also real, but they
are filtered through the prism of German and Russian. Thus, the concept of
experience (what Chalmers calls ‘conscious experience’) needs to be denatura-
lized. To do this, we need to define the concept in terms of more “primitive”
notions (such as ‘think’, ‘feel’, ‘happen’, and ‘I’). As I demonstrate, this can be
done without any implicit or explicit circularity.
In his book In the Theater of Consciousness (1997, 14), Bernard J. Baars

states that “coming back to consciousness in the morning, we humans report a
rich and varied array of experiences: colors and sounds, feelings and smells,
images and dreams, the rich pageant of everyday reality . . . Our brains begin with
a whole new mode of functioning.” In fact, however, it is not “we humans” who
report such a “rich and varied array of experiences” but rather “we Anglos.”
Russians, for example, can report seeing “colors and sounds, feelings and smells,
images and dreams” but not “experiences” of all of these: They simply do not
think in such terms and do not have a similarly stretchy concept that could cover
such a wide range of psychological phenomena.
The human brain as such should not be confused with the human brain as
seen through the prism of the Anglo mind. English words like experiences and
memories are not neutral, culture-free analytical tools suitable for discussing
human brains but constructs of the English language and Anglo culture. Given
the central role of English in today’s science, including psychology, cognitive
science, and neuroscience, it is particularly important that such culture-specific
constructs not be absolutized and also that they be well understood.
I have discussed the English word memory and its meanings elsewhere (Wierz-
bicka 2007). Here I focus on the word experience and its semantic history in a broad
outline. My main point is that this word plays an extremely important role in the
thought world associated with the English language and that the changes in its use
and meanings reflect and provide evidence for important cultural developments.
To put it bluntly, to understand Anglo culture and to see it in a historical
comparative perspective, we need to understand the meanings, the history, and
the cultural underpinnings of the English keyword experience.
For example, the Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Honderich 1995) not
only defines “science” as an endeavor aimed at “understanding the world of
experience” but also defines another key English term, empirical, as “based on
experience” (taking the word experience for granted). “A statement, proposition
or judgment is empirical,” it adds, “if we can only know its truth or falsity by
appealing to experience” (226). English dictionaries, too, define empirical in
terms of experience. For example, in the Collins COBUILD English Language
Dictionary (1991), the entry in question reads: “empirical: Empirical knowledge,
study, etc.; relies on practical experience rather than theories, e.g., . . . the empiri-
cal study of anatomy.” Similarly, in the Longman Dictionary of the English
Language (1984) one reads this definition: “empirical—originating in, based
on, or relying on observation or experience rather than theory.”
As discussed in the introduction, the word empirical is now used extensively
in the language of science and philosophy, including popular science and popular
philosophy. It is a buzzword in the language of the media, as well as the discourse
of various bureaucracies, government institutions, universities, and so on. Em-
pirical studies and empirical results are crucial to funding decisions in Anglo-
phone countries, and empirical can be a helpful word to use in grant applications
of any kind. However, what does empirical really mean? To say that it means
“based on experience” explains little if the different senses of the word experi-
ence are neither sorted out nor defined.
My general argument is that the word experience has several different

meanings in English. Some of them go back to at least the sixteenth century,
while some are more recent, and the semantic history of experience is linked
with important developments in Anglo culture and Anglo ways of thinking.
The account given here is by no means exhaustive, but it captures the most
important developments in the history of Anglo thinking about the concept of
‘experience’. In what follows, I discuss in some detail seven distinct senses of
the word, which fall into two broad groups. One of these groups, which includes
older meanings, involves past experience and knowledge accumulated over
time; the other includes more recent meanings and has to do with current
experience. Thus, the semantic history of experience can be summarized as
follows:
Experience: An Overview
A. Past experience, accumulated knowledge

1. a doer’s accumulated knowledge
2. an undergoer’s accumulated knowledge
3. an observer’s accumulated knowledge
B. Current experience, sensory or sensory-like

4. an observer’s and an undergoer’s current perception or series of perceptions
5. an observer’s and a participant’s records of their perceptions
6. an experiencer’s current awareness-cum-feeling
7. an experiencer’s limited but reliable knowledge of a place and time
My main point is this: The word experience plays a vital role in English
speakers’ ways of thinking and provides a prism through which they interpret
the world. While its range of use is broad and includes a number of distinct
senses, several of these senses have a common theme that reflects a charac-
teristically Anglo perspective on the world and on human life. This is why the
word experience is often untranslatable (without distortion) into other lan-
guages, even European languages. I illustrate this with two preliminary
examples.
In 2000 British novelist Martin Amis published his autobiography, titled
Experience. The perspective on his own life reflected in this title would be
impossible to capture in one word or even a short phrase in my native Polish
(or in Russian or even French): The French word experience has different
implications. In fact, Amis’s book was published in a French translation (in
2003, by Gallimard) under the title Experience—plausible enough, and yet I
would say misleading. The closest one could get to the meaning of Martin
Amis’s title in other European languages would probably be to use a phrase
meaning “my life,” as in Marcel Reich-Ranicki’s German memoir, Mein Leben
(1999; the English translation is titled The Author of Himself: The Life of Marcel
Reich-Ranicki, 2001). However, such a translation would lose Amis’s perspec-
tive on life (roughly, “my life, seen as what I have experienced”).
In German, one could also use the word Erfahrung as a title (one of the two
dictionary equivalents of experience mentioned earlier), but this would imply
something about learning from what had happened to one in the course of one’s
life. According to Langenscheidts Grosswörterbuch Deutsch als Fremdsprache
(1997), Erfahrung means “Wissen oder Können, das man nicht theoretisch aus
Büchern, sondern in der Praxis (durch eigene Erlebnisse) bekommt” (‘knowl-
edge or skills that one has gained not theoretically, from books, but from
practice [through one’s own “experiences”]’). The word Erlebnisse, as used in
this definition (which I have translated here as experiences), is, as mentioned
earlier, the plural of Erlebnis, a word that the same dictionary defines as “etwas
das einem passiert” (‘something that happens to someone’). A second meaning
attributed by the same dictionary to Erfahrung (in the plural) is “Erlebnisse, aus
denen man etwas lernt” (‘ “experiences” from which one learns something’).
Thus, it is impossible to translate the title of Martin Amis’s memoir into
German without changing both its meaning and the perspective on life reflected
in it; the same also applies to other European languages (Amis’s title refers
not so much to learning from his past as to the sum total of what he has
experienced).
Turning to my second preliminary example, in an article about Iraq in the
Times Literary Supplement titled “From Bell to Bush” the author writes: “The
best present-day accounts are those written from a single angle and directly from
experience. The Fall of Baghdad by Jon Lee Anderson . . . is an invaluable
eyewitness report for posterity” (R. Fox 2005). The phrase “directly from expe-
rience” refers here (as emphasized in the next sentence) to an eyewitness report,
but again, it has multiple implications that would be impossible to capture in a
short phrase in other languages. In Polish and in Russian, respectively, the
phrases z własnego doswiadczenia and iz sobstvennogo opyta (‘from one’s own
“experience” ’) suggest a reflection on and learning from “what happened to me
in the past” rather than on “what I observed happening in the place where I was at
the time,” and, arguably, so would the German phrase aus eigener Erfahrung. As
one perceptive native speaker commented to me, aus dem Erlebten (lit. ‘from
what [one] has lived through’) would be closer to the reporter’s eye-witness
perspective (combined with personal involvement), but both phrases—aus eige-
ner Erfahrung and aus dem Erlebten—would distort the perspective of the
English version in different ways. For French, native speakers reject experience
in this context and suggest temoignage (lit. personal testimony) as the best French
rendering, but this loses the participant perspective of the English phrase directly
from experience, which combines as it were objective witnessing with personal
involvement and subjective impact (I return to this example from the Times
Literary Supplement in section 2.9).
These are just two preliminary observations on the uses of experience in
modern English. The main claim is that behind this word is a family of interre-
lated concepts that reflect a unique, language- and culture-specific perspective on
the world.
Significantly, the word experience is also a word frequently used in adver-
tising in Anglophone countries. For example, in tourism, people are urged to visit
this or that place and to have a “unique experience” in zoos, aquariums, national
parks, and so on. Here are several examples from the Internet (www.australia.
com):
Australia is a land full of powerful experiences just waiting to be discovered.

The experience of seeing these gigantic creatures rising from the ocean is unforgettable.
An encounter with these captivating seabirds is among Australia’s most magical wildlife
experiences.
One of the most memorable experiences you can have is to cuddle a koala.
Swimming with wild dolphins in their natural environment is a rare and exhilarating
experience.
Phrases like enjoyable experience, thrilling experience, exciting experience, and

unforgettable experience are the stock-in-trade of the entertainment industry,
emphasizing both the subjective delight in what is being offered and its potential
cognitive value. Similarly, the phrase first-hand experience (very common in
present-day English) is prominent in educational and professional advertising:
The full-time course of study incorporates a six-month housing practice placement,

designed to provide students with firsthand experience of various aspects of housing
policy and practice under supervised conditions.
Through Local Partnerships you have something no one can teach—experience. It takes
time to gain the necessary skills and experience to achieve success. No matter what theory
you learn, there’s no substitute for firsthand experience.
This course will be run via the Stanford Instructional Television Network. Students will
have firsthand experience working on projects that transcend cultural, time-zone,
language, and country boundaries.
At the same time, reporting that is based on experience is praised as the best
possible source of knowledge about what happens in the world—a limited source
but the most reliable of all. Again, one does not think or speak like this in other
languages.
The uniqueness of the theme of experience in Anglo culture has not been
recognized in the vast literature linked with this key English word. For example,
the chapter devoted to experience in Martin Jay’s book Cultural Semantics (1998,
47) opens with the following words: “‘However paradoxical it may seem,’ Hans-
Georg Gadamer writes in Truth and Method, ‘the concept of experience seems to
me one of the most obscure that we have.’ ‘Of all the words in the philosophical
vocabulary,’ Michael Oakeshott agrees in Experience and Its Modes, ‘it is the
most difficult to manage.’ ” But the term discussed by Oakeshott was experience,
whereas that discussed by Gadamer was Erfahrung, and since the two words do
not mean the same, it is hard to see how the two authors can agree or disagree in
these passages. Erfahrung may be the most obscure word in the German, and
experience, in the English philosophical vocabulary, but the two words do not
stand for the same concept.
Jay is not unaware that experience and Erfahrung differ in meaning, but he
chooses to treat this fact as if it were a minor detail. This is even more striking in
his more recent book, devoted entirely to experience and titled Songs of Experi-
ence: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (2005).
While the book’s scope is restricted to American and European variations on the
theme of experience, this theme—identified by the English word experience—is
seen, as the title emphasizes, as universal and as equally relevant to Japan, India,
or ancient Greece as it is to the modern Anglosphere:
Not only is “experience” a term of everyday language, but it has also played a role in
virtually every systematic body of thought, providing a rich vein of philosophical
inquiry ever since the Greeks . . . .
It might be tempting to provide a comparative analysis of the way the term has
functioned in the vocabularies of non-Western thinkers. Attention has recently been
drawn, for example, to its importance in the work of the great twentieth-century
Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida, who explicitly called “pure experience” the
“foundation of my thought.” Scholars of Indian thought have probed its dimensions
in their indigenous traditions. But it will demand enough of the author to try to
explicate its role in thinkers closest to home, whose languages he can read. Our
scope therefore will be confined to British, French, German, and American thinkers
from many disciplines for whom “experience” has been an especially potent term.
(ibid., 3–4)
The repeated use of the phrase the term in these passages is striking. Which term?
The modern English term experience?
It is not my purpose here to criticize Jay’s Songs of Experience, which is a
valuable and well-researched book. However, it is important to recognize the
culture-specific character of the Anglo theme of experience, as well as the
cultural importance of the word experience in modern Anglo culture. To treat
this theme as universal is both Anglocentric and unfair to Anglo culture itself. It
may become universal through the global use of English, but even then its
historical roots and culture-specific slant needs to be borne in mind.
Above all, however, the present confusion surrounding the word experience
needs to be cleared up. This can be done only through precise semantic analysis
of the cluster of meanings linked with this highly polysemous English word.
2.2. Experience as the Mother of Wisdom:

Shakespeare’s Sapiential Perspective
I start my historical exploration of experience with Shakespeare. According to the

concordances, there are twenty examples of experience and (one of experiences)
in Shakespeare’s works. Here is a selection:
1. Experience is by industry achieved

And perfected by the swift course of time.
(The Two Gentlemen of Verona, act 1, scene 3)
2. Go, then, my mother, to thy daughter go

Make bold her bashful years with your experience.
(King Richard III, act 4, scene 4)
3. His years but young, but his experience old.
(The Two Gentlemen of Verona, act 1, scene 3)
4. Yes, I have gained my experience.
(As You Like It, act 4, scene 1)
5. I have then sinned against his experience and
transgressed against his valour.
(All’s Well That Ends Well, act 2, scene 5)
6. Peace, peace, and give experience tongue.
(Pericles, Prince of Tyre, act 1, scene 2)
7. Experience, manhood, honour, ne’er before
Did violate so itself.
(Antony and Cleopatra, act 3, scene 10)
As far as one can tell, most, if not all, of these examples refer to knowledge
accumulated over time by doing things and presumably by reflecting on them—
knowledge seen as a gain (something good) and associated with advanced age. As
example 3 illustrates, experience in the sense under discussion (experience1) does
not, strictly speaking, require old age (“His years but young, but his experience
old”), but it implies knowledge of the kind that normally can be acquired only
with age. This leads us to the following explication of what I call experience1,
that is, experience that refers to “a doer’s accumulated knowledge” (cf. example
1: “experience is by industry achieved”):
experience1 (a doer’s accumulated knowledge)

(e.g., “experience is by industry achieved”)
a. this someone did many things at many times

b. many things happened to this someone because of this
c. this someone thought about these things at many times
d. because of this, afterward this someone knew many things
e. like people can know many things if they have lived for a long time
f. it is good if someone is like this
The “like” component of this explication (component e) points to a prototype of

knowledge linked with experience1: Roughly speaking, experience1 is associated
with the kind of knowledge that normally only those people who have lived for a long
time can have. However, “like” is vaguer than “kind of”: Strictly speaking, experi-
ence1 is not identified as necessarily a distinct kind of knowledge. “Like” has a wider
range of interpretations than “kind of,” and it is this wider range that is relevant here.
The term prototype is more helpful here than terms like ‘kind’ or ‘variety.’
It appears that, at one time, English shared the meaning portrayed in this
explication with French. For example, Furetière’s (1978) seventeenth-century
dictionary of French defines the phrase un homme d’experience (‘a man of
experience’) as follows: “On appelle un homme d’ expérience, celuy qui

a vescu et raisonné long-temps, qui a veu et leu beaucoup de choses et
d’affaires, qui connoist le monde par sa propre expérience” (‘One calls a man
of experience someone who has lived and reflected for a long time, who has
seen and read many things and goings-on, who knows the world by his own
experience’).1
This definition, which explicitly mentions “living and thinking for a
long time,” also corresponds quite well to the predominant use of experience
in Shakespeare and captures some aspects of this meaning better than any of
the OED definitions. On the other hand, there is no reference in this definition
to “practice” (doing things), an element recognized in the OED entry for
experience and in Dr. Johnson’s (1755) two definitions of it: “1. Practice;
frequent trial. 2. Knowledge gained by trial and practice.” The explication of
experience1 proposed here takes into account all these key aspects of the
Shakespearean meaning: doing, happening, thinking, knowing, living, and a
long time.
The meaning of experience explicated here is very much in evidence from
the sixteenth century on. Remarkably, however, in the course of the seventeenth
century a very different meaning came to the fore—one closer to a category
described by the OED as follows: “The fact of being consciously the subject of a
state or condition, or of being consciously affected by an event” (I discuss this
shift later). Here let me simply note that the Shakespearean meaning of experi-
ence is still in use in present-day English, alongside a related meaning that is
linked with a particular kind of activity, which can be regarded as an offshoot of
that earlier Shakespearean meaning.
This other, more recent meaning is also associated with the adjective experi-
enced; for example, an experienced driver has a great deal of experience in
driving, and an experienced teacher, in teaching. There are no experienced
teachers or the like in Shakespeare’s language, and experience was linked at
the time with living in general rather than with doing any particular kind of work.
Nonetheless, it is easy to see the path between Shakespeare’s meaning and the
twentieth-century one defined by the Collins COBUILD Dictionary of English
(1991) as “knowledge or skill in a particular job which you have gained because
you have worked at the job for a long time.” Such a specialization of experience
in a particular kind of work is no doubt linked with the emergence of work as a
conceptual category in modern life and modern English and also with the
specialization of knowledge (with the idea of expertise) and so on. Most of
Shakespeare’s heroes and heroines did not have work in the modern sense of
the word, and their experience was life experience in general rather than experi-
ence in any particular job.
The present meaning of experience as specialized practice, so to speak (e.g.,
teaching experience) (experience1A), can be portrayed as follows:2
experience1A (a doer’s specialized skill)

(e.g., she has a lot of experience [doing this kind of thing], as in “she has a lot of teaching
experience”)
a. this someone did things of this kind for a long time

b. many things happened to this someone because of it
c. this someone thought about these things at many times
d. because of this, afterward this someone knew many things about things of this kind
e. like people can know many things about something
if they have done many things of the same kind before
f. this someone could do things of this kind well because of it
g. it is good if someone is like this
Apart from the modern meaning designated here as experience1A (a doer’s

specialized skill), we have identified so far one old (i.e., Shakespearean) meaning
of experience that can be conveniently labeled “a doer’s accumulated knowl-
edge” (experience1). We might then ask whether there was also in Shakespeare’s
time a meaning that could be labeled as an undergoer’s accumulated knowledge?
If we conjecture that such a meaning might indeed have existed, we can portray
this hypothetical meaning as follows:
experience2 (an undergoer’s accumulated knowledge)
a. many things happened to this someone at many times

b. this someone thought about these things at many times
c. because of this, afterward this someone knew many things about some things
This explication differs from that of experience as “practice” in the absence

of the first component (“this someone did many things at many times”) and the
last one (“it is good if someone is like this”). While I have not found any clear
examples of such a hypothetical meaning in Shakespeare’s works, I have found
some such examples (often with the plural form experiences) in other sixteenth-
century authors (accessible through Literature Online).3 Here are two such
examples, both with the plural form experiences and both from Roger Ascham’s
work The Scholemaster (Ascham 1968 [1570]):
A Father, that doth let loose his son to all experiences, is most like a fond Hunter, that
letteth slip a whelp to the whole herd. Twenty to one he shall fall upon a rascal, and let go
the fair game.
The youth in England . . . should be by good bringing up so grounded in judgment of
learning . . . as when they should be called forth to the execution of great affairs, in service
of their prince and country, they might be able to use and to order all experiences, were
they good, were they bad, and that according to the square, rule, and line, of wisdom,
learning, and virtue.
There are also many similar examples in seventeenth-century literature—in

John Bunyan’s and George Fox’s autobiographical writings, for example (see
section 2.7).
In addition to the meanings of experience labeled here as “a doer’s accumu-
lated experience” and “an undergoer’s accumulated knowledge,” there are also
sixteenth-century uses that can be interpreted as “an observer’s accumulated

knowledge.” For example, in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline Imogen observes the
behavior of courtiers at court and notes (in an aside) that it disproves reports
that she heard earlier:
[Aside] These are kind creatures. Gods, what lies I have heard!
Our courtiers say all’s savage but at court:
Experience, O, thou disprovest report!
This meaning (experience3)—an observer’s rather than a doer’s or an undergoer’s

experience—can be explicated as follows:
experience3 (an observer’s accumulated knowledge)

(e.g., “Experience, O, thou disprovest report!”)
a. some things were happening for some time somewhere where this someone was
b. because of it, this someone knew what was happening in this place at this time
c. this someone often thought about it
d. because of this, this someone knows some things about it
e. like someone can know what is happening somewhere if this someone sees it
The assumption behind this meaning is that, if a person is in a place

where something is happening, this person can know a good deal about
it because this person can see what is happening. However, as the word
observer suggests, this person does not have to actually see what is happen-
ing; one can acquire knowledge that is comparable to seeing (like seeing).
The basis of comparison lies in coming to know something about something
not because someone else said something about it. Seeing something with
one’s eyes is a good example of such a path to the acquisition of knowledge,
indeed a prototypical one (at least for the speakers of European languages;
cf. Classen 1993).
2.3. “A Frightening Experience”: From a

Retrospective to an Introspective Perspective
As we have seen, the Shakespearean (so to speak) conviction that we can

grow in knowledge by living and doing things is still present as a theme in
contemporary (twentieth- and twenty-first-century) English. At the same time,
however, the word experience has developed in English a new meaning far
removed from anything that we find in the language and thought world of
Shakespeare and his contemporaries. It is also a meaning that has no equiva-
lents in other European languages and appears to have spread widely in
English only in the nineteenth century. Some examples from Literature
Online:
Romola for the first time felt this questioning need like a sudden uneasy dizziness and want
of something to grasp; it was an experience hardly longer than a sigh, for the eager
theorizing of ages is compressed, as in a seed, in the momentary want of a single mind.
(George Eliot, 1863)
I had quite forgotten that mornings in the country were so fine! One might enjoy an
experience of this kind once or twice a year very well indeed. (J. T. Trowbridge, 1873)
As we drew near to Jaffa, the boys spurred up the horses and indulged in the excitement of
an actual race—an experience we hardly had since we raced on donkeys in the Azores.
(Mark Twain, 1869)
Then you know nothing of what such an experience is like and Heaven forbid that you
ever should. (Thomas Hardy, 1874)
As the first of these examples illustrates, experience in this new, peculiarly

English sense can be very short—“hardly longer than a sigh”—and so it has
nothing to do with an accumulation of knowledge over time. This is related to
grammatical features of experience in this new sense: It is always countable (an
experience rather than experience).
Such a brief and transient experience is always linked with an event some
aspects of which are known only to the person to whom this event happens. For
example, the exciting experience of horseback riding is not open to inspection by
those observing the race, and no one other than the experiencers themselves can
know whether or not this event really was exciting. As the last of the examples
emphasizes, no one other than the experiencers themselves can know what the
experience in the relevant sense of the word is like: By definition, as it were,
experience in this sense refers to an event seen from within.
Roughly speaking, the earlier (Shakespearean) sense of experience refers to
an objective fact about a person: the fact that this person has gradually accumu-
lated a certain amount of knowledge (chiefly by doing things). By contrast, the
new, post-seventeenth- and largely post-eighteenth-century meaning refers to
people’s subjective awareness of something that is happening to them: Like a
feeling, an experience in this new sense of the word cannot be gleaned from
outside. In a sense, an experience is even more subjective and unknowable to
other people than a feeling: Feelings can sometime show in a person’s face,
movements, or tone of voice, but experiences do not similarly show—presumably
because they can involve not only feelings but also some accompanying thoughts.
This new, subjective sense of experience should be distinguished from superfi-
cially similar ones like that in the following quote from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe:
Thus my tears banished all my religious hope, all that former confidence in God,
which was founded upon such wonderful experience as I had had of His goodness.
(Defoe 1719, 184)
The rise of this new meaning of experience in English can be traced to some
extent by searching for the frame “it was a/an (adjective) experience” at Litera-
ture Online. No occurrences of this frame are found before 1850, but numerous
examples appear in the 1850–1899 period, in most cases with the adjective new:
All are in motion, and the throngs of well-dressed people moving to and fro, on horse-back,
and in carriages, together with the gay assemblages crowded upon the piazzas of the
hotels, constitute a lively and festive scene. . . . It was a wholly new experience to
Gertrude. (1854)
Mliss warmed at once to these free-spoken, open-hearted girls. It was a new and pleasant
experience. (1873)
For when Angie lifted her eyes, not only had she read the unutterable in his, but he also had
looked far down into the depths of her soul, and seen something he did not quite dare to put
into words, but in the light of which his whole life now seemed transfigured. It was a new
and amazing experience to Mr. St. John, and he felt strangely happy. (1875)
It was a new and disagreeable experience for Joseph to appear in the character of a
borrower. (1870)
Robinson Crusoe’s “wonderful experience” of God’s goodness was not a

wonderful experience: it was experience in a cumulative sense, appreciated as it
were from outside rather than felt from within. The fact that in Defoe’s use
experience was uncountable (no indefinite article) is consistent with this cumula-
tive and postfactum sense of the word. (It was not experience in the sense of a
doer’s accumulated knowledge but rather experience in the sense of an under-
goer’s accumulated knowledge.)
The emergence of the subjective sense of the noun experience was, I suggest,
closely related to the rise of the verb to experience in a sense that appears to have
entered the English language in the course of the eighteenth century and expand-
ed during the nineteenth and is richly represented in present-day usage (see
section 2.5).
A Dictionary of Selected Collocations (Hill and Lewis 1977) includes the
following adjectives among those commonly collocating with the word experi-
ence: alarming, appalling, bitter, delightful, disconcerting, distressing, disturb-
ing, electrifying, exciting, fascinating, frustrating, grueling, harrowing, horrible,
horrifying, interesting, moving, nerve wracking, painful, (un)pleasant, poignant,
sad, shattering, sickening, thrilling, unnerving, and upsetting. This suggests that
the most common collocations with experience describe the experience in ques-
tion in terms of accompanying emotions. The emphasis tends to be, therefore, not
so much on the knowledge acquired through such episodes as on their impact.
The experiencers know, above all, how they felt. This is certainly different from
the Shakespearean experience as accumulated wisdom. An exploration of the
frame “it was a/an (adjective) experience” in COBUILD confirms this emphasis on
feeling and also on the unusual (typically, novel) character of what one is going
through. Here is a selection of typical present-day examples from COBUILD:
We had a water birth. . . . It was a great experience and no problem.

When the group emerged from the long corridor out of the pyramid, their faces were
flushed with pleasure. It was a marvelous experience, spiritual, as well as cultural.
It was a lovely experience teaching him.
Domestic/food prep in a five-star hotel in Lake Louise, Alberta. It was a fantastic
experience.
I in fact enjoyed going to Oxford. . . . I mean, it was a wonderful experience even if I

didn’t do very well on the exams.
It was a curious experience, meeting this man who had spent his childhood in our house
and garden.
It was a terrific experience to play on the same field as Ryan Giggs.
The cows started shunting [pushing] me against the post, and I had to grab onto it to keep
[stay on] my feet. It was a terrifying experience as they pressed against me with their
angry eyes glaring menacingly.
It was an exhilarating experience to be with so many knowledgeable, interesting people.
Elma was so cold that she was unable to speak for almost half an hour. . . . It was an
horrendous experience.
As these typical examples illustrate, references to a particular experience

that was happening to someone at a particular time often imply that it was
something unusual (not like at other times), and adjectives like new, unusual,
interesting, amazing, and weird are common in such sentences in COBUILD. At
the same time, the unusual event affecting the person is accompanied by a
feeling (“when it was happening, this person felt something because of it”). The
event (linked with a feeling) is arresting: The person going through the episode
in question pays attention to what is happening and thinks something like “this
is happening to me now.” Since the person is taking notice of what is happen-
ing, that person knows what it is like. As a result, this person can subsequently
remember what it was like and thus has certain qualitative (experiential)
knowledge.
An experience in the sense under discussion does not have to be unique, of
course (although a unique experience is also a common collocation), but it has
to be seen as sufficiently different from the normal state to attract the person’s
attention and also to be linked with some noticeable feeling. The person who is
going through the episode in question is aware of what is happening to him or
her, takes note of how it feels, and as a result acquires some knowledge—
knowledge that other people cannot have (unless the same things happened to
them, too).
To account for the combination of components linked with this modern
experiential sense of the noun experience (conscious, subjective, and qualitative),
I posit for it the following explication:
experience4 (an experiencer’s current, subjective awareness-cum-feeling)

(e.g., “it was a frightening experience”)
a. something was happening to this someone at that time

b. when it was happening, this someone felt something because of it
c. at the same time, this someone thought about it like this:
“this is happening to me now”
d. this someone knew at that time what it was like at that time
e. because of this, when this someone thought about it afterward,
this someone could think about it like this:
f. “I know what it was like when it was happening

g. I know it like I know what I feel when I feel something
h. I know it like I know what I see when I see something”
The most remarkable features of this new, peculiarly English sense of the
noun experience is its subjective and contemporaneous perspective, that is, the
fact that the speaker is entering as it were the mind of those to whom something is
happening at the time when it is happening and is grasping their awareness of
what is happening to them (“this is happening to me now”)—an awareness that
gives the undergoer a special, subjective knowledge of a particular event that is
not accessible to other people.
In the Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience the authors (Bennett and
Hacker 2003, 282) write: “It is striking that it is natural to try to refer to the
specific quality of a given experience by means of an indexical expression, such
as ‘this’ or ‘that.’ So we find David Chalmers asking, ‘Why do conscious
experiences have their specific character?’ and in particular, ‘Why is seeing red
like this rather than like that?’ And it seems evident that the ‘like this’ and the
‘like that’ are intended to be ways of referring to the specific qualities that
experiences are alleged to have.”
The observation that it is natural to speak about experiences in terms of
“this” is consistent with the semantic analysis developed here. In fact, this
analysis answers the question raised by Chalmers (and various other philosophers
writing about conscious experiences): It is natural to speak about experiences in
terms of “this” because “this” is part of the meaning of the English word
experience (in the relevant sense). What Chalmers calls “a conscious experience”
is called simply an experience in ordinary English—and this word (in the relevant
sense) stands for a construct that includes as a component someone’s thought:
“this is happening to me now.”
Thus, there is, so to speak, an indexical and a first-person perspective encoded
in the meaning of experience in this modern sense of the word—a perspective that
was absent from the meanings of this word as used by Shakespeare and his
contemporaries and is absent from the meaning of its closest counterparts in
many other European languages. Consider, for example, the following glosses in
the Collins-Robert French-English, English-French Dictionary (1996):
I had a pleasant/frightening experience.

‘Il m’est arrivé une chose . . . agréable/effrayante.’
(lit. something pleasant/frightening happened to me)
She went through some terrible experiences.
‘Elle est passée par de rudes épreuves.’
(lit. she’s gone through some terrible hardships/ordeals)
We had many unforgettable experiences there.
‘Nous y avons vécu (passé) bien de moments inoubliables.’
(lit. we had passed there [or lived through] many unforgettable moments)
She swam in the nude, and it was an agreeable experience.
‘Elle a nagé toute nue et a trouvé cela agréable.’
(lit. she swam in the nude and found it pleasant.)

It wasn’t an experience I’d care to repeat.
(Ce n’est pas une aventure que je tiens à recommencer.)
(lit. It was not an adventure that I’d like to repeat.)
One key feature of the all these English sentences that is absent in their
French translations is a thought that (according to the speaker) the experiencer
had at the time of the event in question: “this is happening to me now.” Another
key feature is a link (implied in the word experience itself) between this thought
and an accompanying feeling and also between this thought and this feeling and
some resulting knowledge: Because the experiencer thought and felt like this at
the relevant time, he or she knew something in a special, experiential way—like
one knows what one feels when one feels something or what one sees when one
sees something.4
How reliable is such experiential knowledge according to the folk episte-
mology embedded in the word experience (in the relevant sense)? The explica-
tion does not claim that after the event the person knew what it was like when it
was happening; it claims only that at the time when it was happening the person
knew what it was like. At the same time, it claims that because the person had that
knowledge at that time, afterward, when thinking about it, this person could say
(with some justification), “I know what it was like,” vouching for this affirmation
with an appeal to the senses: “I know it like I know what I feel when I feel
something in my body,” “I know it like I know what I see when I see something.”
(For further discussion and justification of these two components see section
2.10.)
Thus, I am suggesting that in the semantic history of experience there
occurred (between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century) an important shift
from a long-term and retrospective view, which was also an objective, external
one, to one that was subjective and internal, as well as short term and introspec-
tive (introspective and yet, as it were, empirical).
Among all of the commentaries on experience that I have come across in the
literature, only one comes close to recognizing this shift: Raymond Williams’s
entry on “Experience” in his Keywords (1983, 126–29), which explicitly distin-
guishes between “experience past” and “experience present.” Williams links the
first sense of experience with the word lessons and the second, with the word
consciousness, and he describes the two senses as follows: “(1) knowledge
gathered from past events, whether by conscious observation or by consideration
and reflection; (2) a particular kind of consciousness, which can in some contexts
be distinguished from ‘reason’ or ‘knowledge’” (126). Discussing these two
senses, Williams notes that experience has for some time been the subject of “a
fundamental controversy,” and he suggests that “much of the controversy is
confused, from the beginning, by the complex and often alternative senses of
experience itself” (128).
It is the purpose of this chapter to clear up that confusion. To do so, we need
to recognize and try to understand the shift from the retrospective to the intro-
spective perspective that occurred in the semantic history of English.
How and why did this shift occur? To answer this question we need to turn
our minds to the new ideas and new ways of thinking that arose in seventeenth-
century England and Scotland and became entrenched in both modern Anglo
culture and the English language. I discuss these new ways of thinking in the next
section.
2.4. Sensory Experience as a Basis for Empirical

Knowledge: A Lockean Perspective
As mentioned earlier, in his dictionary published in 1755, Dr. Johnson assigned to

experience two meanings: “1. Practice, frequent trial; 2. Knowledge gained by
trial and practice.” The first of these is illustrated with the phrase “with experi-
ence taught” (from Milton), and the second, with a quote from Shakespeare and
the following one from Pope: “Mark what I advise, whom age and long experi-
ence render wise.”
Whether experience as “practice” should indeed be distinguished as a sepa-
rate meaning from experience as “knowledge (gained from practice)” is an open
question. What is more important in the present context is that the phrase
“knowledge gained by . . . ” blurs a very important difference in ways of thinking:
that between knowledge accumulated over a long period of time (in the course of
living) and knowledge found by observing what is happening to us at a particular
time and making as it were a contemporaneous note of it.
Earlier I quoted the OED’s formula that describes one meaning of experience
as “the fact of being consciously the subject of a state or condition, or of being
consciously affected by an event.” This formula, too, blurs an important differ-
ence: that between reflecting on what happened to us in the past and being aware
of what is happening to us in the present. For example, the OED places a sentence
by Chaucer in this category—“Experience . . . were enough for me to speak of
woe that is in marriage” (1386)—and also this nineteenth-century sentence:
“Another unlooked for experience was in store for us” (1878). Between these
two sentences, however, lies a great divide due to a radically new idea that
entered the collective consciousness of English speakers in the seventeenth
century: roughly speaking, the idea of a particular, individual experience (epi-
sode) of which a person is conscious at the time it occurs. A key component of
this idea is a thought that occurs to a person at a particular time: “This is
happening to me now. (In the earlier example from 1878, such an experience is
anticipated rather than actually present, but it is anticipated as present—some-
thing to consciously live through at a particular time).
This new attention to “what is happening to me now” is closely related to the
focus on the senses, characteristic of the seventeenth-century discourse of experi-
ence. For example, Locke (1975[1690], 546, Essay 4.3.14)5 wrote: “Our knowledge
in all these inquiries reaches very little further than our experience. . . . For all the
qualities that are co-existent in any subject, without the dependence and evident
connexion of their ideas one with another, we cannot know certainly any two to
coexist any farther than experience, by our senses, informs us” (emphasis added).
As this quote illustrates, for Locke, ‘experience’ is very much a matter of

sense experience. As Shapin (1994, 75) notes in his Social History of Truth,
“appeals to experience . . . run throughout the Essay on a number of different
topics. Locke’s general programme in that work was to substitute for the claims
of the innate ideas and truths an experience-generated alternative, an alternative
which followed in the footsteps of the Royal Society and Bacon.” But experience
in what sense (or in what senses)?6
The reference to what “experience, by our senses, informs us [of]” links
experience with the current perceptions. Of what kinds of things could “experience,
by our senses, inform us”? Presumably, only those that are happening right now in
the place where we are. When ‘experience’ becomes largely a matter of sense
experience, it can no longer have the retrospective perspective that it had, for
example, in Shakespeare’s works but can have only a contemporaneous perspective
(our senses cannot inform us of something that happened to us in the past).
Furthermore, since it is now linked with a particular time and place, it is no longer
cumulative. It can, on the other hand, be repetitive, and indeed, collocations like
daily experience and constant experience become quite frequent in the seventeenth-
century philosophical discourse. It is no longer a question of many things done over
a long period of time but of the same thing happening at many particular times.
Indeed, from the point of view of the seventeenth-century experimental
science, this is what matters most: a particular sense experience, replicable and
repeated by others.
Consider, for example, the following sentences from Locke’s “Examination of
P. Malebranche’s Opinion of Seeing All Things in God”: “Show me one who has
not got by experience, i.e., by seeing or feeling, the idea of space or motion, and I
will as soon by words make one who never felt what that is, have a conception of
heat, as he, that has not by his sense perceived what space or motion is, can by
words be made to conceive either of them” (Locke 1824 [1706], vol. 8, 249).
Locke virtually defines “experience” here in terms of seeing or feeling, and
by “feeling” he clearly means bodily feeling (sensations) rather than feelings
based on thoughts (emotions). When we consider this sentence in context,
however, we understand that seeing and (bodily) feeling are for Locke two
prototypes of experience rather than its defining features: Experience can for
him also refer to what happens in the mind and can be analyzed by introspection.
In a prototypical case, people repeatedly see or feel something (by touching), take
note of what they see or feel, and as a result know something—to the extent to
which sight and touch are trustworthy. In a nonprototypical case (such as mental
experience), people take note of what is happening in their own mind and as a
result know something—with the same immediacy and the same degree of
epistemological security that knowledge based on sight or touch makes possible.
Presumably, experience could have been for Locke auditory or olfactory, as
well as visual or tactile, but his choice of the prototypes—seeing or feeling—is
noteworthy. These correspond to two keywords of seventeenth-century scientific
discourse, often combined in one phrase: “eye and hand” or “hand and eye.” For
example, in the preface to his famous work, Micrographia, naturalist Robert
Hooke contrasted a philosophy based on “discourse and disputation,” which
“chiefly aims at the subtilty [sic] of its deductions and conclusions,” with “the
real,” “the experimental Philosophy,” based on “a sincere Hand and a faithful
Eye” (Hooke 2003 [1665], pages of the preface not numbered). The word eye
stood, of course, for seeing, and hand, for touching, but more generally the two
words stood for observation and experiment. Locke’s phrase “by experience, i.e.,
by seeing and feeling” connects with the emphasis of his fellow members of the
Royal Society on the “eye-and-hand” approach to knowledge.
The fact that Locke defined experience in terms of two prototypes (see and
feel) helps us also to understand how he could have explicitly linked experience
with the senses and at the same time applied it to certain mental phenomena:
Everyone’s experience will satisfy him, that the mind, either by perceiving, or
supposing the agreement or disagreement of any of its ideas, does tacitly within
itself put them into a kind of proposition affirmative or negative: which I have
endeavoured to express by the terms putting together and separating. But this action
of the mind, which is so familiar to every thinking and reasoning man, is easier to be
conceived by reflecting on what passes in us when we affirm or deny, than to be
explained by words. (Locke 1975 [1690], 576, Essay 4.5.6; emphasis added)
Thus, the key to Locke’s conception of experience appears to be reflecting on

what “passes [happens] in us” when we do something—as we know “from
inside,” that is, in the way in which we can know what we see when we see
something or what we feel when we touch something.
In a key passage about the human mind as a tabula rasa (blank slate) at birth,
Locke wrote:
Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters,
without any ideas: how comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast
store, which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost
endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I
answer, in one word, from experience. In that, all our knowledge is founded; and
from that it ultimately derives itself. (ibid., 104, Essay 2.1.2)
All of the materials for “our understanding” come, Locke tells us, from two
sources: sensation (based on “external sensible objects”) and reflection (based on
“internal operations of our minds perceived and reflected on by ourselves”):
First, our senses, conversant about particular sensible objects, do convey into the
mind several distinct perceptions of things, according to those various ways wherein
those objects do affect them. And thus we come by those ideas we have of yellow,
white, heat, cold, soft, hard, bitter, sweet, and all those which we call sensible
qualities . . . Secondly, the other fountain from which experience furnisheth the
understanding with ideas is the perception of the operations of our own mind within
us, as it is employed about the ideas it has got. (ibid., 105, Essay 2.1.3–4)
Obviously, this second source of experience is not external to a person

but internal; yet for Locke, it is analogous to the first source and as it were
explainable through that analogy: “This [second] source of ideas every man has
wholly in himself; and though it be not sense, as having nothing to do with
external objects, yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be called
internal sense” (ibid., Essay, 2.1.4; emphasis added).
Thus, seeing and (bodily) feeling are for Locke the prototypes of all experi-
ence, including not only auditive, olfactory, tactile, and gustatory sensations but
also mental experience (as in observing one’s own thought processes). What I see
or what I feel (in my body) does not have to be construed as something that is
happening to me and as a source of knowledge, but it can be so construed—and
this is the construal on which Locke and many of his contemporaries chose to
focus and for which they appropriated the old word experience (while continuing
to use it in the old senses as well).
We can see this construal, for example, in Locke’s discussion of what would
happen if “a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish
between a cube and a sphere of the same metal” regained sight. Would this man
be able to tell, on the basis of sight, which was the globe and which was the cube?
Locke’s answer is “Not. For though he has attained the experience of how a
globe, how a cube affects his touch, yet he has not yet obtained the experience
that what affects his touch so or so, must affect his sight so or so” (ibid., 146,
Essay 2.9.8). What is striking in this passage is the way in which Locke discusses
seeing in terms of how one’s sight is affected by the object (in other words, what
happens to the person).
The OED defines one sense of experience as “the actual observation of facts
and events,” and it distinguishes this sense from that defined as “the fact of being
consciously the subject of a state or condition, or of being consciously affected by
an event” (both illustrated with examples from the fourteenth to the nineteenth
century). However, in the seventeenth-century new epistemological discourse, the
ideas of observation and of being a conscious subject (of what is happening here
and now and of what is happening to or in me) came close together and in many
contexts became intertwined; frequently the words experience and observation
appeared side by side. For example, Locke writes that “I must appeal to experience
and observation whether I am in the right: the best way to come to truth being to
examine things as really they are, and not to conclude they are as we fancy of
ourselves, or have been taught by others to imagine” (ibid., 162, Essay 2.11.15).
In most cases, “observing” referred to using one’s own eyes, and it often
focused on “what is happening to me (to my eyes).” For example, in a letter to
Locke, Newton wrote that he had jeopardized his eyesight by observing the sun
with the naked eye and that afterimages of the sun had appeared to him for three
days afterward:
The observation you mention . . . I once made upon my self with the hazard of my
eyes. The manner was this. I looked a very little while upon the sun in a looking-
glass with my right eye & then turned my eyes into a dark corner of my chamber &
winked to observe the impression made & the circles of colours which encompassed
it & how they decayed by degrees & at last vanished. This I repeated a second & a
third time. . . . And now in a few hours time I had brought my eyes to such a pass
that I could look upon no bright object with either eye but I saw the sun before me,
so that I durst neither write nor read but to recover the use of my eyes shut myself up
in my chamber made dark for three days together & used all means to divert my
imagination from the Sun. (Newton 1959–1977 [1661–1727], 153–54)
Other observers looked at the sun and suffered the same consequences.
Thomas Harriot, who discovered sunspots, noted that, after looking at the
sun, “my sight was after dim for an hour” (Rigaud 1833, 34). With the naked
eye, a Professor Greaves measured the diameter of the sun and reported
that, “for some days after, to that eye with which I observed, there appeared
as it were a company of crows flying together in the air at a good distance.
At the first I did verily believe I saw a company of crows flying in the air”
(ibid., 33).
In such seventeenth-century accounts self-observation is closely linked
with the use of the word experience. Consider, for example, the following
passage from Locke’s Essay (note the phrase we find by experience, which
implicitly links experience with observation): “The idea of the beginning of
motion we have only from reflection on what passes in ourselves; where we find
by experience, that barely by willing it, barely by a thought of the mind, we can
move the parts of our bodies which were before at rest” (Locke 1975 [1690],
235, Essay 2.11.4). One can interpret this “experience” as presented here by
Locke as follows (this is not an explication of the word experience but an NSM
elucidation of Locke’s model):
The experience of moving one’s arm
a. when I think “I want my arm to move now”

something happens to me because of it (i.e., my arm moves)
b. when it happens, I feel something in my body
c. I think about it like this at this time: “this is happening to me now”
d. when it is happening, I know what it is like at this time
e. if I want to think about it afterward, I can think like this:
g. I know it like I know what I feel when I feel something in my body
h. I know it like I know what I see when I see something with my eyes[M]”
Of course, when I am raising my arm I do not have to think about it like this:
“this is happening to me now.” But I can—if I choose “to turn my thoughts that
way” (ibid., 107, Essay 2.1.7). This is what turns ordinary “operations of the
mind” into “experience”—turning one’s thoughts that way and considering them
attentively:
For, though he that contemplates the operations of his mind cannot but have plain
and clear ideas of them; yet, unless he turn his thoughts that way, and considers
them attentively, he will no more have clear and distinct ideas of all the operations
of his mind, and all that may be observed therein than he will have all the particular
ideas of any landscape or of the parts and motions of a clock, who will not turn his
eyes to it, and with attention heed all the parts of it. The picture or clock may be so
placed, that they may come in his way every day; but yet he will have but a confused
idea of all the parts they are made of, till he applies himself with attention to
consider them each in particular. (ibid.)
Locke calls such mental and bodily experiments “experience,” but one could
also call them self-observation. In this case, the component “I know what it is like
when it is happening” refers to introspective knowledge (mental and embodied at
the same time). For Locke, such knowledge is not radically different from
observing the impact that external phenomena (e.g., fire) can have on one’s
body and mind and indeed from observing external phenomena without any
such impact (a point to which I return at the end of this section). Arguably, the
new discourse of experience was closely linked with the scientific revolution as it
developed in England in the seventeenth century.
Consider, for example, the following passage from Robert Boyle’s “A free
enquiry into the vulgarly received notion of nature” (Boyle 1996 [1686], 40):
“Bodies placed in an extraordinary large glass will presently come into so
differing a state that warm animals cannot live in it, nor flame (though of pure
spirit of wine) burn, nor syringes draw up water, nor bees or such winged insects
fly, nor caterpillars crawl—nay, nor fire run along a train of dried gunpowder—
all which I speak upon my own experience.”
Boyle could have said, “as I have often observed myself,” but he preferred to
say “upon my experience.” What extra meaning did he express in this way? One
additional implication appears to be that he did certain things to find out what
happens under such circumstances, and another, that he was personally and
bodily involved in what happened at the time when it happened—by being
there at the time and, as it were, witnessing with his own body and mind what
was happening. The component “I know it like I know what I feel when I feel
something in my body” seems to be there (as well as “I know it like I know what I
see when I see something with my eyes”), vouchsafing the validity of the
account—even if Boyle is describing here what he observed, that is, what he
saw with his eyes. (In fact, he was manipulating some objects with his hands,
too.)
The idea of doing something to find out what will happen to me when I do it
and, consequently, what will happen to others when they do the same is the
driving force behind seventeenth-century experimental science and the whole
empirical worldview that was associated with it in England. ‘Experience’ here
becomes personal experience and is thought of as “something that happened to
me” and as a source of knowledge that may be limited but is reliable nonetheless.
The form self-experience, which appeared in the mid-seventeenth century, is
revealing in this respect. Consider these examples from the OED:
Mere ignorance, and want of self-experience, is guilty of this error. (1645)

Those who have such evidence and self-experience are usually more affected than those
that have things by hear-say only. (1650)
Men generally arrive at Wisdom by such rugged steps of self-experience. (1673)
Self-experience clearly reflects thinking in terms of “what happened to me”

and also along the lines of “I know what it was like when it was happening to
me.”
As Yolton notes in his Locke Dictionary, “At the end of his long discussion
and rejection of the claims for innate ideas and propositions in the first book of
the Essay, Locke announces that in the rest of that work he has tried ‘to raise an
Edifice uniform, and consistent with itself, as far as my own Experience and
Observation will assist me’ (Essay 1.4.25). He says that he will support his
principles by appeal to ‘Men’s own unprejudiced Experience, and Observation’”
(Yolton 1993, 73; emphasis added). Thus, what was essential for Locke was not
just experience in some general sense but one’s own experience—and also what
one can find (come to know) on this basis.
Like the prefix self- (in self-experience), so the word own (in my own
experience and men’s own experience) highlights the first-person perspective
that was so important to many experimental scientists and empiricist philoso-
phers in seventeenth-century England. For them, experience was conceptually
related to experiment—to what one finds out by means of one’s own senses (Dr.
Johnson [1755], in his entry for the verb to experiment, defines it as “to know by
experiment”).
In his Social History of Truth (1994, 201–202) Shapin speaks in this connec-
tion of “individualistic empiricism” produced by Royal Society publicists (e.g.,
Sprat, Oldenburg, Glanville) and leading practitioners (e.g., Boyle, Hooke, Wilk-
ins). As he points out, “the Royal Society motto—Nullius in verba (‘On no man’s
word’)—crystallized members’ insistence upon the problematic status of testi-
mony and epistemic virtues of direct individual experience in the constitution of
genuine knowledge” (ibid.).
In the same context, Shapin (1994, 201) quotes William Harvey, the author
of On the Generation of Animals, who told his readers “to strive after personal
experience, not to rely on the experience of others.” He also notes (Shapin 1994,
203) that Robert Boyle, in his “Christian Virtuoso,” explicitly distinguished
“personal experience, which man acquires immediately by himself and accrues
to him by his own sensations,” from “historical experience,” which “though it
was personal in some other men, is but by his relation or testimony . . . conveyed
to us.” Again, the word personal, like self and own, implies here a first-person
perspective on what happens to us.
In a similar vein, John Ray, in his preface to Willesby’s Ornithology (1678),
emphasized that he and his fellow researchers did not rely upon “other men’s
descriptions, but we ourselves did carefully describe each Bird from the view and
inspection of it lying before us” (Ray quoted in Shapin 1994, 202). It was this
emphasis on one’s personal observation that led commentators like Shapin to
speak of “seventeenth-century English empiricist individualism.”
Alongside observation, the word experience plays a key role in such ac-
counts, as it did in the seventeenth-century texts themselves. As Shapin put it,
seventeenth-century English epistemological rhetoric “was a rhetoric which
insisted that no source of factual information possessed greater reliability or
inspired greater confidence than the direct experience of an individual. The
legitimate springs of empirical knowledge were located in the individual’s

sensory confrontations with the world” (ibid.; emphasis added).
Again, I suggest that the words direct and individual—like self, own, and
personal—are intended to imply a first-person perspective: The emphasis is on
“what is happening to me (now),” “what I see,” “what I feel (in my body),” and
“what I know.”
It was in such a historical context, I suggest, that the word experience
developed a new meaning that reflected and to some extent incorporated the
new ways of thinking characteristic of what Shapin describes as the period of
“empiricist individualism.” In many contexts, it became unnecessary to say
“personal experience” or “one’s own experience” because the word experience
itself came to connote a personal perspective. For example, when Locke says
“Experience here must teach me what reason cannot,” he clearly means “my own
experience” (Essay 4.12.9).
Characteristically, for Locke (as for many of his contemporaries), experi-
ence is not so much “long” as “constant” or “daily”: It is not so much knowl-
edge accumulated over time as knowledge derived (repeatedly) from a
particular sensation or perception occurring at a particular moment. For exam-
ple, of the “experience of touching fire” he wrote this: “The pleasant brightness
and lustre of flame and fire so delights children, that at first they always desire
to be handling of it: but when constant experience has convinced them, by
the exquisite pain that it has put them to, how cruel and unmerciful it is,
they are afraid to touch it, and carefully avoid it” (Locke 1824 [1690], 109).
The experience referred to in this passage (experience5) can be explicated
as follows:
experience5 (an observer’s repeated and replicable current perception)
a. at many times, the same thing happened to someone

b. when it was happening, this someone thought about it like this:
c. this someone knew at that time what it was like at that time
d. because of this, this someone could afterward think about it like this:
e. “I know what it was like when it was happening
f. I know it like I can know what I see when I see something
g. I know it like I can know what I feel when I feel something in a part of my body
when this part touches something”
The experience of touching fire is, of course, very different from that of
watching it, and it is more natural to think of touching fire (and burning oneself)
as “something that is happening to me now” than to think of seeing fire in this
way. One could argue that, in the case of watching fire, one is simply observing
something rather than experiencing it. Yet in the seventeenth-century discourse
of experience the word experience was linked with both feeling (by touch) and
seeing: Apparently, seeing, too, came to be looked upon (in certain contexts) as
“something that is happening to me.”
Characteristically, Boyle refers to a scholar (Boetius de Boot) who “upon his

own particular and repeated Experience delivers so memorable a Narrative of the
Turquoise changing Colour” (Boyle 1964 [1664], 408). Clearly, the mode of
Boetius’s account (as described by Boyle) is a first-person one: “I did this and
this,” “I saw this and this,” and “I know what it was like.” At the same time, it is
an account of a particular and repeated episode (“whenever I did such and such,
the same thing happened”). It is also, one might say, an account of what Boetius
de Boot observed, but Boyle chooses to use for it the word experience. Nothing
could be more characteristic of the new, seventeenth-century perspective on
‘experience’: It is someone’s own (personal, subjective), it is particular (rather
than long) and repeated (rather than accumulated), and it tends to be linked with
doing something—if only in the sense of observing (paying attention to) what is
happening at a given moment.
The link between doing something (to find out what happens when one does
it) and attentive self-observation is particularly emphasized in Robert Boyle’s
(1774, vol. 5, Christian Virtuoso, 513–14) discussion of the differences between
the English virtuosi (like himself) and other contemporary philosophers, espe-
cially Cartesians:
Although the peripatetic (and some other) philosophies do also pretend to be

grounded upon reason and experience, yet there is a great difference between the
use that is made of these two principles by the school-philosophers and by the
virtuosi. For those, in the framing of their system, make but little use of experi-
ence . . . .But now, the virtuosi I speak of . . . make a much greater and better use of
experience in their philosophical researches. For they consult experience both
frequently and heedfully; and, not content with the phenomena that nature sponta-
neously affords them, they are felicitous, when they find it needful, to enlarge their
experience by trials purposely devised, and, ever and anon reflecting upon it, they
are careful to confirm their opinions to it; or, if there be just cause, reform their
opinions by it. So that our virtuosi have a peculiar right to the distinguishing title,
that is often given them, of experimental philosophers.
The component “this person knew what it is like” appears to be another

seventeenth-century novum, alongside the subjective first-person perspective,
which is also associated with another key English concept, ‘consciousness’.
However, experience has, in addition, a qualitative aspect related to its sensory
or sensory-like characteristic. This qualitative feature of the Lockean, seven-
teenth- and post-seventeenth-century experience is also related to the emergence
of the verb to experience, which I have already touched upon and discuss more
fully in the next section.
The conceptual closeness of the self-observation of an undergoer (“this is
happening to me now”) and participant observation (of places and other people)
(“this is happening here now”) in seventeenth-century English thought is a
noteworthy phenomenon with important consequences for the ways of thinking
characteristic of modern Anglo culture. The case of a reporter writing about
Baghdad “from direct experience” is, of course, different from that of someone
with “memorable experiences” of cuddling a koala or someone who had “a

musical experience.” Yet in the modern Anglo mind all such different experi-
ences somehow belong together. I suggest that what all these various types of
experience had in common was the attention to and contemporaneous mental
recording of “this” and “now,” as well as a conviction that such mental recording
could give rise to some knowledge as reliable as that based on seeing and
touching.
The double prototype—Locke’s “see and feel”—ensures that, while
Locke’s conception of experience was not retrospective (like, say, Shake-
speare’s), it was not exclusively introspective, either, but rather introspective
and extrospective at the same time. The fact that Locke’s cultural descendants
could use experience both in phrases like “varieties of religious experience” and
in statements like “science aims at understanding the world of experience” is
related to this terminological and conceptual equation between two varieties of
knowledge—that based on the thought “this is happening to me now” and that
based on the thought “this is happening here now” (I return to this point in
section 2.9).
When one compares Locke’s model of experience with that analyzed in
section 2.3, one is struck, above all, by the similarities: Clearly, the conception
reflected in modern phrases like a frightening experience or a weird experience
was built on the foundation of Lockean epistemology. At the same time there are
also noticeable differences between the two models.
First, Locke’s experience, which was primarily a mass noun, referred to a
repetition of the same observations, whereas phrases like a frightening experi-
ence refer to a particular episode that was not necessarily repeated.7 Second,
phrases like a frightening experience refer to episodes invariably accompanied by
a feeling (not specifically a bodily feeling but simply feeling), whereas this was
not the case with Locke’s experience, which referred to a bodily feeling as one of
the two prototypes (“feel” and “see”) but did not include feeling as a necessary
ingredient of each occurrence.
Taken together, these differences have a certain logic. For Locke, what made
certain observable episodes interesting was the repetition, the pattern on which
certain (cautious but reasonably reliable) generalizations could be built. But for
later generations of English speakers, individual episodes also came to be of
interest—especially when they were unusual and charged with feeling. In partic-
ular, in the Romantic era, unusual feelings were of great interest, and nineteenth-
century novels also gave a great deal of attention to individual feelings. However,
in English literature (unlike on the Continent), such feelings were interpreted
through the prism of the Lockean (and post-Lockean) model of attentive self-
observation, contemporaneous mental records, and sensory and sensory-like
knowledge.
The expansion of the use of experience from a mass noun (as in Locke) to
either a mass or a count noun (as in nineteenth-century literature) was one
grammatical reflection of this conceptual and cultural change. The rise of the
verb to experience, to which I now turn, was another.
2.5. The Verb to Experience: Evidence for the

Semantic Shift
I have already mentioned (in section 3) the emergence, in the eighteenth century, of
the verb to experience in a subjective sense, and I have linked it with the post-
Enlightenment semantic developments that affected the noun experience. To un-
derstand these links, let us start with the use of the verb to experience in present-day
English. Here are some examples from COBUILD, grouped in five groups:
1. “bad feelings”
The fact that it was centered on Brisbane’s sister-city of Kobe will add to the sadness
experienced by Queenslanders.
Things people do in their daily lives, the joys and sorrows they experience.
2. “good feelings”
For a fleeting instant, he experienced a sense of exhilaration, a feeling that he [was] indeed
part of a holy crusade.
3. “bad events”
It doesn’t compare with the deprivations experienced by the early settlers, my family
included.
Those suffering grief or loss are not always those who have experienced a death in the
family, she says.
A recent survey found that as many as one in four people experience sleeping difficulties.
4. “good events”
. . . providing an opportunity for talented children, musicians, and singers to experience
quality musical theater.
They [a football team] experience wonderful support down there.
5. “sights, lifestyles, etc.” (language of advertising)
Egypt is a land made by the river, and a Nile cruise is the only way to really experience the
dramatic landscapes and sunsets.
A unique opportunity for involved travelers to experience the traditional village life in
Rajasthan and Gujarat.
As this selection of examples (from the internet) illustrates, the verb to

experience can combine with quite a wide range of complements, including
“bad” feelings (such as sadness and sorrow), “good” feelings (such as exhilara-
tion and joy), “bad” events (such as a death in the family, deprivations, sleeping
difficulties), “good” events (such as support for a team, participating in a musical
production), and activities like sightseeing and tourism (presented as something
that is either enjoyable or cognitively and existentially enriching).
Interestingly, sentences with the verb to experience often explicitly empha-
size qualitative knowledge that cannot be obtained in any other way:
Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY, has created a prototype environment
that would have enabled Housman to experience what it feels like to fly in a helicopter
over his beloved Wenlock Edge.
By “being there” they will be able to experience what it’s like to be inside a molecule, a
violent storm, a distant galaxy, or trapped in a vortex.
The Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary (1991) assigns to the verb
to experience the following two definitions (labeled as “3” and “4,” following the
two definitions of the corresponding noun): “3. If you experience a situation or
problem, it happens to you or you are affected by it, e.g., ‘Similar problems have
been experienced by other students.’ 4. If you experience an emotion or a
physical feeling, you have it or feel it, e.g., ‘He experienced a pang of sad-
ness . . . They experienced a mild burning sensation.’ ”
In fact, however, to ‘experience’ an emotion or a sensation differs from
simply ‘having’ or ‘feeling’ it because the verb to experience also implies an
awareness, that is, roughly, thinking and knowing. Similarly, to experience a
problem differs from simply having a problem (and no one would say “I’m
affected by a problem”): Here, too, the verb to experience implies that one thinks
and knows something. In both cases (experiencing a problem and experiencing an
emotion) there is also an idea that something is happening to the experiencer and
that this person feels something because of this.
The recent spread of the verb to experience in the language of advertising
highlights the assumption inherent in its present-day meaning that we can learn
something from what happens to us—something that we cannot learn by listening
to others or by reading—if at the time when it is happening we feel something and
consciously think about what is happening to us. In the explication given below I
use as a reference point a quote from Jack Kerouac’s novel Lonesome Traveler
which illustrates several different aspects of the verb’s meaning: “No man should
go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the
wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his
true and hidden strength” (Kerouac 1989 [1960], 128).
He experienced healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness. ¼
a. something was happening to him at that time (he was alone in the wilderness for some
time)
b. when it was happening he felt something because of it (he was bored)
c. he thought about it like this at that time: “this is happening to me now”
d. he knew at that time what it was like at that time
e. because of this, if he wanted to think about it afterward he could think about it like this:
This explication of the verb (in the relevant sense) is almost identical to that
of the noun experience as it occurs in the frame “it was an ADJ (e.g., frightening)
experience” (i.e., experience4). The count noun experience almost implies that
what happened became for the experiencer a subject of reflection (something to
think about), whereas the verb to experience implies only that it is potentially so.
Thus, line e in the explication of the noun reads “because of this, when this
someone thought about it afterward, this someone could think about it like this,”
whereas in that of the verb, when has been replaced by if: “because of this, if this
someone wanted to think about it afterward, this someone could think about it
like this.” This difference between when and if matches that in the part-of-speech
status of the word: The abstract noun suggests something (that someone thinks
about), and the verb carries no such implication. Otherwise, the core of meaning
is the same in both cases.
I have posited here a big shift in the semantic history of experience and
linked it with the new philosophical and scientific ideas that emerged in England
in the seventeenth century and subsequently spread throughout society, eventu-
ally becoming entrenched in the English language. As one major argument in
support of this hypothetical shift I have cited internal reconstruction: The nine-
teenth-century enjoyable experience or frightening experience is so far removed
from this sixteenth-century experience (seen as “the father of wisdom” or “the
mother of science”) that some intermediate steps must have existed, and the
seventeenth-century shift from a third- to a first-person perspective that I have
posited would help us to make sense of these long-term developments. The
emergence of the verb to experience in a sense closely related to the new post-
seventeenth-century sense of the noun is another piece of evidence for the
postulated seventeenth-century shift.
According to the OED, the verb started being used in England in the
sixteenth century but apparently in senses that had nothing to do with an experi-
ential (subjective, first-person) perspective. For example, the OED cites the
following sixteenth-century sentence, where to experience appears to mean
something like “to test, to try”:
In extreme necessity it were better to experience some remedy, than to do nothing. (1533)
Other old and obsolete uses of the verb include one that the OED glosses as “to
give experience to: to make experienced; to train (soldiers)” and another glossed
as “to be informed or taught by experience.” In Literature Online we can find
seventeenth-century examples referring to a woman who has “experienced”
another’s “fidelity and obedience” (1693), to people who “have experienced the
state of matrimony” (1696), and to someone who “never experienced that ab-
sence . . . makes us soon forget the object beloved” (1689). None of these early
examples refer to acts of conscious self-observation at a particular time. Consid-
er, for example, the following sentence:
Sir, to be born to petticoats, and yet to wear embroidered breeches, is a pleasant thing:
I speak, Sir, what I have experienced. (1693)
The speaker says, in effect, that being born poor and coming into good fortune
later in life is a pleasant thing and that he is speaking from experience. In doing
so, he is claiming knowledge based on past experience (“I know it because it
happened to me”) rather than on turning attention inward and thinking “this is
happening to me now”; unlike experiential knowledge, his knowledge can be
articulated and passed on to others.
One more example of the “old” use of the verb to experience is an eigh-
teenth-century sentence (from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
cited in the OED):
They soon experienced that those who refuse the sword must renounce the scepter. (1776)
The grammatical frame “they experienced that . . . ” makes it obvious that the
sentence is not referring to the protagonists’ act of self-observation but to a
conclusion drawn from something that has happened to them: They found out
(i.e., came to know) that those who refuse the sword must renounce the scepter,
and they came to know it by reflecting on what had happened to them. There is no
question here of the concurrent thought that “this is happening to me now,” and
the resulting knowledge can be put into words.
Judging by the material in Literature Online, however, in the course of the
eighteenth century a very different kind of sentence with the verb to experience
emerged and spread in English; one that linked this verb with the noun sensation
(or sensations) in particular. The following are some examples from the very end
of the century:
A cold and boisterous navigation awaited us. My palpitations and inquietudes augmented
as we approached the American coast. I shall not forget the sensations which I
experienced on the sight of the Beacon at Sandy-Hook. (1799)
Without knowing why, I became anxious and uneasy. I had a confused feeling that I had
seen the man before, but whether in France, Switzerland, or Italy I could not tell. I
experienced that sort of disagreeable sensation from looking at his face. (1799)
“Believe me, Sir,” she then continued, “surprise was the last sensation I experienced upon
a late . . . transaction. My extraordinary personal defects and deformity have been some
time known to me, though—I cannot tell how—I had the weakness or vanity not to think of
them as I ought to have done!” (1796)
In the situations described in these examples people turn their attention

inward and observe what is happening inside and how it feels. The same applies
to other sentences from the same period that do not include the word sensation (or
sensations) but focus on a contemporaneous record of a feeling and a thought:
Then I experienced rapture as at the birth of my first-born. (1799)

By slow degrees I began to comprehend my situation and to recollect what had happened
immediately before. I felt greatly alarmed; . . . I endeavoured to move; my limbs felt
palsied and absolutely lifeless. I experienced a sinking and sickness of heart that
seemed to be the immediate precursor of death. (1799)
This selection of examples from the very end of the eighteenth century is not
meant to imply that it is only then that the verb to experience started being used in
the new, ‘experiential sense’, for the matter requires further investigation.
In particular, the role of both the noun and the verb experience in the writings
of John Wesley and in the language of Methodism deserves close study (see
section 2.7).
For the moment, let us simply note that, at the end of the eighteenth century,
the verb to experience (in its new, ‘experiential’ sense) was quite common. In the
nineteenth century, the use of this verb greatly increased, especially in relation to
emotions, and in the twentieth century it became one of the most common
psychological verbs in the English language.
If one compares a large number of examples of the verb to experience in the
nineteenth-century Literature Online with a large number of examples in a
present-day database like COBUILD, one is struck by the differences between the
two. In the former corpus, the great majority of examples (more than 90 percent)
refer to emotions, whereas in the latter, more than half refer to situations, events,
and processes of various kinds. No doubt this is partly due to the language of
advertising (and similar), where the verb to experience is combined with com-
plements like Egypt, a new lifestyle, life in France, the great outdoors, the
regional food of Vietnam, and so on, but not exclusively. There are also many
references to events like childbirth, mental illness, sexual intercourse, a decrease
in sexual activity, competition, resistance from clients, wins and losses in football
games, and so on.
Furthermore, it is not just people whose lives and circumstances are de-
scribed in such terms. For example, countries ‘experience’ certain trends, gov-
ernments ‘experience’ setbacks, institutions ‘experience’ changes in the
electronics environment, businesses ‘experience’ increases in fees, companies
‘experience’ an influx of investments, and so forth. From reading hundreds of
such examples one gets the impression that ‘experiencing’ has become a central
verbal metaphor in modern English—a lens through which events, situations, and
processes tend to be viewed. It is, of course, an anthropocentric lens, but it is also
a peculiarly Anglo one.
2.6. ‘Experiences’ in Anglophone Philosophy: John

Searle’s Perspective
We have seen how Anglophone neuroscience and cognitive science tend to treat
‘experiences’ as basic realities of human life. Often the same happens in
philosophy. For example, in his book Mind: A Brief Introduction, John Searle
writes:
On Descartes’ view all I can have certain knowledge of are the contents of my own
mind, my actual thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and so on. . . . On Descartes’ view
we do not directly perceive objects and states of affairs in the world. What we
directly perceive, that is, perceive without any inferential processes, is the contents
of our own minds. So if I hold up my hand in front of my face, what I directly
perceive, what I strictly and literally perceive, according to Descartes, is a certain
visual experience that I am having. Descartes calls these experiences “ideas.”

(Searle 2004, 22)
When Searle writes that “Descartes calls these experiences ‘ideas,’” he

appears to imply that we are, in reality, having experiences that Descartes
chooses to call “ideas.” However, it could equally well be said that we are
actually having some ideas that Searle calls “experiences.” In other words, he
writes as if ‘experiences’ were the real thing and not ethnophilosophical con-
structs that are dependent to some extent on contemporary English.
Searle (ibid.) writes further: “What exactly is the relationship between our
inner perceptual experiences, on the one hand, and material objects and other
features of the external world on the other?” (23), and “what is the relation
between my personal identity and my bodily identity? In addition to this or that
particular experience, do I also have the experience of myself as a self?” (25).
Throughout the book, Searle raises questions about the mind, the self,
personal identity, consciousness, intentionality, and so on. However, he does
not raise similar questions about experiences, a concept that he uses as his
analytical tool, interpreting therefore both Descartes and Hume through the
prism of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century English word experience(s).
Thus, of Hume he writes: “Hume made devastating criticisms of the Cartesian
account of the self and personal identity. There is no experience of the self,
according to Hume . . . many other philosophers follow Hume in supposing that
there is no such thing as a self in addition to the sequence of our particular
experiences” (37).
However, Hume did not really write about a person’s life in terms of a
“sequence of our particular experiences.” In fact, while he very frequently used
the word experience in the singular (248 times in the Treatise of Human Nature
alone), he did not use the plural form experiences at all. He spoke of ‘perceptions’
and ‘impressions’ but not of ‘experiences’ and distinguished ‘impressions’ from
‘experience’. Thus, when Searle portrays Hume’s conception in terms of ‘ex-
periences’, he is looking at it through the prism of a more recent, habitual way of
thinking.
In portraying the views of Hume and other philosophers of the past in terms of
‘experiences’, Searle notes that they themselves used terms other than “experi-
ences,” but he seems to regard this as an unimportant difference in terminology:
They believe (and by “they” I mean such great philosophers as Descartes, Locke,
Berkeley, Hume, and Kant) that we do not see the real world. . . . All that we ever
actually perceive directly . . . are our inner experiences. In the past century philo-
sophers usually put this point by saying “We do not perceive material objects, we
perceive only sense data.” Some of the earlier terminology used for sense data were
“ideas” (Locke), “impressions” (Hume), and “representations” (Kant). (Searle
2004, 260)
I argue, however, that it is not merely a matter of terminology and that the
word experiences carries with it a certain model of the mind different from, for
example, that of Hume. For Hume, as for Locke, experience (which he used as a
mass noun) was still a matter of repetition (of certain observations, for example,
observations about the co-occurrence of fire and heat; cf. Hume 1978 [1739],
book I, part III, section IV). He called the individual acts of observation not
“experiences” but “perceptions”—a word that did not carry with it the claim to
knowledge based on self-awareness that experience(s) as a count noun has come
to embody in modern English.
The differences in meaning between Searle’s word experiences and Hume’s
words perceptions and impressions may be irrelevant to the controversy about
“perceptual realism” (which is what interests Searle), but it is not unimportant
from other points of view. First, it misrepresents Hume’s conception, which was
based on the notions of “perceptions”, “impressions”, and “experience” and not
on that of “experiences”. And second, the use of the untranslatable English word
experiences as a basic analytical tool gives this ethnophilosophical English
concept a status that no language-specific folk concept can legitimately have.
To a reader who is not a native speaker of English it is striking to what extent
Searle’s philosophical prose depends on the English words experience, experi-
ences (plural), and to experience (verb) and how impossible it would be to
translate it, without distortion, into other European languages. To give one
more example, here is Searle on causation and on Hume’s account of it:
I think Hume was looking in the wrong place. He was looking in a detached way at
objects and events outside of him and he discovered that there was no necessary
connection between them. But if you think about the character of your actual
experiences it seems to me quite common that you experience yourself making
something happen (that is an intentional action), or you experience something
making something happen to you (that is a perception). In both cases it is quite
common to experience the causal connection. (Searle 2004, 204, emphasis added)
Again, the assumption seems to be that our “actual experiences” are some-
thing that we can be certain of (they are unquestionably real, they are a given):
“When I turn my attention inward, he [Hume] tells us, what I find are specific
experiences. I find this or that desire for a drink of water, or a slight headache, or
feeling of pressure of the shoes against my feet, but there is no experience of the
self in addition to these particular experiences” (ibid., 278, emphasis added).
In fact, Hume does not speak about experiences but about something he calls
“perceptions” (the section of the Treatise titled “Of Personal Identity” [book I,
part IV, section VI] contains fifty-two occurrences of perceptions and only two of
experience). Here are several examples:
For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble
on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or
hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception,
and never can observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are
removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself, and may
truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions removed by death, and could
I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate, after the dissolution of my body,
I should be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is further requisite to make

me a perfect nonentity. (Hume 1978 [1739], 252, emphasis added)
As far as I can see, the idea of deliberately “turning my attention inward” to

observe what is currently happening to me (in me) became lexicalized in English
in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (as a new meaning of the
old word experience). But it appears that for a long time this new meaning was
linked with the repetition of certain self-observations (sensory and sensory-like)
and that it only gradually became possible to speak of particular “experiences.” It
seems likely that the path from experience (in the relevant sense) to experiences
led via the new, ‘experiential’ sense of the verb to experience, which, as section
2.5 notes, appears to have spread in the eighteenth century.
When Searle speaks of “experiences,” he appears to take such acts of self-
observation for granted, but in fact, thinking in those terms is a modern Anglo
habit of the mind that derives from the empirical tradition and its reflection in
the English language.8 For example, when I, as a native speaker of Polish, turn
my attention inward, I do not find any “specific experiences.” I do find certain
feelings—for example, a headache or a feeling of pressure of the armchair
against my body. I also catch myself having (or having just had) certain
thoughts. But I do not think of any of these in terms of “experiences.” I can
talk about such exercises in introspection in both Polish and English in terms of
“feelings,” “thoughts” and “what is happening to me,” because both Polish and
English have lexicalized the universal semantic primes FEEL, THINK, HAPPEN, and
ME (I).However, I could not talk about them in Polish in terms of “experiences”
because there is no such word in Polish and no such habitual interpretive
scheme.
Searle rightly emphasizes that consciousness has an inherently first-person
point of view, and, while he does not say so explicitly, he appears to take it for
granted that the same applies to experiences:
Consciousness has a first-person ontology. It exists and is experienced by a human

or [an] animal subject and in that sense it exists only from a first-person point of
view. . . . Conscious states have a subjective mode of existence in the sense that they
exist only when they are experienced by a human or [an] animal subject. . . .
Whenever I hear philosophers and neurobiologists say that science cannot deal
with subjective experiences I always want to show them textbooks in neurology
where the scientists and doctors who write and use the books have no choice but to
try to give a scientific account of people’s subjective feelings because they are
trying to help actual patients who are suffering. (Searle 2004, 135–36, emphasis
added)
This suggests that if consciousness has a first-person mode of existence,

so do (subjective) experiences. As we have seen, experience in the Shakespearean
sense (wisdom accumulated through living and doing things) does not have
this first-person ontology. A particular experience, however, and experiences
(in the plural) are like consciousness: they necessarily involve a first-person
perspective.
Searle (ibid.) argues that our experiences are not discrete and that they form a
“unified conscious field” (298). For example, “At present, I do not just experience
the feeling of my fingertips, the pressure of the shirt against my neck, and the
sight of the falling leaves outside, but I experience all of these as part of a single,
unified, conscious field” (136). In fact, Searle criticizes Hume for what he calls
his “atomistic conception of experience” (298): “He [Hume] thought that experi-
ence always came to us in discrete units that he called ‘impressions’ and ‘ideas.’
But we know that that is wrong. We know, as I have tried to emphasize, that we
have a total, unified, conscious field” (ibid.).
Interestingly, in present-day English (both ordinary English and philosophi-
cal English), the word experience in fact reflects a perspective that is both
atomistic and holistic. The word consciousness can be used only as a mass
noun (one cannot speak of *many consciousnesses) and thus indeed reflects a
holistic perspective, but experience is also used as a count noun (e.g., an experi-
ence, many experiences). When experience is used as a count noun (i.e., experi-
ences), it has an atomistic, as well as a first-person, perspective. When it is used
as a mass noun, it has a holistic perspective and may or may not have a first-
person one. For example, teaching experience does not have a first-person
perspective, whereas Experience (as the title of Martin Amis’s memoir) has a
holistic first-person perspective.
There is, I suggest, another difference between “consciousness” and “expe-
rience(s)” as English folk categories: the qualitative character of the latter. Searle
argues, against various other philosophers, that “every conscious state has a
qualitative feel to it. Conscious states are in that sense always qualitative . . . .
The notion of consciousness and the notion of ‘qualia’ are completely co-
extensive” (ibid., 134).
In fact, however, the concepts linked with the words consciousness and
experience(s) differ in this respect. The English concept of an experience in-
cludes, as I have shown, a component (“I know what it was like”) based on an
earlier thought (“this is happening to me now”). While the concept of conscious-
ness is beyond the scope of this book and cannot be explicated here, it is worth
pointing out that, although it, too, builds on the elements think, know, and I, it
does not include the element like (the conceptual basis of the qualitative feel
implied by the relevant sense of experience).
It is truly remarkable to what extent many philosophical arguments in Anglo-
American philosophy rely on the word experience, the meaning of which is not
examined. In its entry for “experience,” the Oxford Companion to Philosophy
(Honderich 1995, 261) provides a good example of this:
If knowledge is to be based on experience, as it seems reasonable to think that

observational knowledge is, one’s beliefs about the world must somehow be derived
from, or justified by, one’s sense experience of the world. It is a problem, however,
to understand how it is possible for experience to lend support to, or justify, the
beliefs it gives rise to. If one thinks (as some philosophers do) of experience as
itself belief-like in character, as having propositional content, a content that can
(like the content of a belief) be false, then a question can be asked about what
justifies the experience. What guarantee (or even justification) is there that the
experience (its content) is true? If, on the other hand, experience is understood as
non-propositional (as it usually is), as something without (a possibly false) content,
then there is a problem about how experience can justify the beliefs based on it . . . .
If experiences are not themselves belief-like in character . . . they cannot imply,
cannot explain or be explained by, anything. How, then, can they function as
reasons to believe anything? According to such a view, our experience of the
world may be a cause of, but it is not a justification for, the beliefs we have about the
world.
Other theories of justification . . . give experience both a causal and a justifica-
tory role (as carriers of information) in cognition.
As I see it, this argument presents difficulties in comprehension for cultural

outsiders because the polysemous and language-specific word experience is not
defined and is simply taken for granted.
Philosophy, at least Anglo philosophy, often sets clear thinking as a primary
goal. However, it is seldom recognized that this goal cannot be achieved if the
meaning of the main analytical tools used—the keywords—is not examined and,
in particular, if polysemous keywords are used without their polysemy (syn-
chronic and diachronic) being recognized and elucidated.
For example, a phrase like “if knowledge is to be based on experience” (in
the passage from the Oxford Companion to Philosophy) begs the question:
experience in what sense? In the same sense in which Locke wanted to base all
knowledge on experience or in some more or less different sense?
The passage moves from “if one thinks of experience as belief-like” to “if
experiences are not themselves belief-like,” but, as already noted, Locke did not
speak of experiences (in the plural) at all: For him, experience was a mass noun.
So maybe the Companion’s idea of “knowledge being based on experience” is
indeed different from Locke’s. Moreover, are the Companion’s experiences (in
the plural) meant to correspond to Hume’s impressions? Or to Hume’s percep-
tions? Or rather to Hume’s experience (a word that, as already mentioned, was
used in the Treatise 248 times)?
When passages like that from the Companion are read by people from a non-
English-speaking background, the references to experience and experiences
present difficulties. But for their part, Anglo-English readers, who are accus-
tomed to taking the word experience for granted, may pass over its synchronic
and diachronic polysemies without paying them sufficient attention.
The abstracts in The Philosopher’s Index are a good illustration of how
Anglo philosophers can take English-specific words like experience for granted,
assuming that this word carves nature at its joints and that the whole world thinks
in such terms.
For example, an article titled “Descartes on the Cognitive Structure of
Sensory Experience” (Simmons 2003, 549) argues that “Descartes offers a uni-
fied cognitive account of sensory experience”—seemingly implying that Des-
cartes had really spoken of “sensory experience” or thought in such terms.
Another abstract “contrasts David Chalmers’ formulation of easy and hard
problems of consciousness with a Cartesian formulation. For Chalmers, the easy
problem is making progress in explaining cognitive functions. . . . For Descartes,

the easy problem is knowing the essential features of conscious experiences”
(Mills 1998, 119). But is it really a “Cartesian formulation”? Or is it rather a
projection of the author’s own terminology and way of thinking?9
Similarly, a review of Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins’s book A
Passion for Wisdom: A Very Brief History of Philosophy (1997) states that the
authors “explore how, for example, the value of subjective experience [emphasis
in the original] is treated in Augustine, Luther, Descartes, and Kierkegaard”—as
if “experience” were not an ethnophilosophical construct in English or, alterna-
tively, as if Augustine, Luther, Descartes, and Kierkegaard had written and
thought in modern English. Examples can be multiplied.
“In philosophy there is no escaping history,” says Searle (2004, 13). But
equally, there is no escaping language. In my view, it is a mistake to think that
one can give an accurate account of Descartes’ or Hume’s view of “experiences”
if one has never used this word or any other word with an equivalent meaning. It
is again a mistake to think that one can develop a valid theory of “human
experiences” without examining the meaning of the word experiences. Words,
and especially cultural keywords like experience and experiences, matter. These
words belong to history and are part of “our linguistically transmitted experi-
ence” (Gadamer (1975, 491).10
In a section titled “Leading Humanistic Concepts,” Gadamer (ibid., 11)
wrote of the century of Goethe and its importance for German culture and the
German language:
Key concepts and words with which we customarily operate acquired their defini-
tion then, and if we are not to accept language automatically but to strive for a
reasoned historical self-understanding, we must face a whole host of questions of
verbal and conceptual history. In what follows it is possible to do no more than
begin the great task that faces investigators, as an aid to our philosophical inquiry.
Concepts such as ‘art’ [Kunst], ‘history’ [Geschichte], . . . ‘Weltanschauung’, ‘ex-
perience’ [Erlebnis], . . . which we use automatically, contain a wealth of history.
For the English language and Anglo culture, the same can be said about Locke’s
century, and what applies to German keywords like Weltanschauung also applies
to the English keyword experience.
Searle concludes his Mind: A Brief Introduction as follows: “We do not live
in several different, or even two different, worlds, a mental world and a physical
world, a scientific world and a world of common sense. Rather, there is just one
world; it is the world we all live in, and we need to account for how we exist as a
part of it” (Searle 2004, 304).
But if “we” means “we human beings” (rather than “we Anglos”), then we
also need to acknowledge that, depending on where each of us lives and where
our linguistic, conceptual, historical, and cultural home is, our respective ac-
counts of how we humans exist as a part of the world may be different. They do
not have to be different, however, certainly not radically different, because the
existence of universal human concepts like THINK, FEEL, KNOW, and sixty or so
others ensures that we can rigorously examine and compare our respective
accounts and coordinate them. We can learn to denaturalize our own culturally
shaped perspectives and aim at an account consistent with the best insights of all
ethnophilosophical traditions while at the same time transcending their culture-
specific limitations.
2.7. The Word Experience in Religion: William

James’s Perspective
The word experience plays an important role in English religious language.

William James’s classic book Varieties of Religious Experience (James 1985
[1902]) is symptomatic in this respect: For James, religion was above all a matter
of “experience.” To some extent, of course, this may have been a reflection of his
psychological perspective on religion, but it is also a thoroughly Anglo perspec-
tive.
Nearly three centuries before James, the author of a spiritual classic, The
Bruised Reed, the Puritan preacher Richard Sibbes (who died in 1635) wrote:
“Experience is the life of a Christian. What is all knowledge of Christ without
experience?” (quoted in Taves 1999, 48). The Catholic Descartes, who was
Sibbes’s near contemporary and who lived just across the English Channel, did
not write about Christianity in this way. This was seventeenth-century England.
Francis Bacon died a decade before Sibbes, and the word experimental was
already in the air, along with experience. Indeed, Sibbes himself often used
experience to speak of religion. The Calvinist emphasis on the individual (in
contrast to the church and its teachings) meshed seamlessly in Sibbes’s approach
to religion with the Baconian emphasis on “experience” (in contrast to abstract
reason).
But what exactly did someone like Sibbes mean by “experience” (decades
before Locke’s Essay)? Was he using this word in the same sense in which
William James was nearly three centuries later?
Here is one example from Sibbes (1973[1630], 207–208): “The lower Christ
comes down to us, the higher let us lift him up in our hearts: so will all those do
that have ever found the experience of Christ’s work in their heart.” And here is a
twentieth-century comment on Sibbes: “To heal truly, the Physician [i.e., Christ]
must in effect first wound, and wound deeply. . . . no one can truly come to Christ
who has not first experienced this ‘bruising’” (Black 1988). It would be easy to
interpret Sibbes’s reference to “experience” through the prism of much later uses
of the word (both noun and verb), but such anachronistic reading should be
avoided. There is no reason to assume, as much of the literature does, that
while views and emphases of prominent religious figures in England changed
over the centuries, the meaning of the word experience stood still. It did not. For
example, Sibbes did not yet use the verb experience in the way his twentieth-
century coreligionists did.
Ann Taves, the author of a book titled Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experien-
cing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (1999, 351)
writes: “ ‘Religious experience’ meant something very different in 1750 and in

1900 in the Anglo-American context. Within late eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century evangelicalism, ‘religious experience’ meant religious experience as
understood in a particular tradition.” In the title of her book, Taves is referring
to a use of the verb to experience (experiencing religion) singled out by the OED
as a distinct meaning and glossed as “to be converted, US.” Here are some
examples from the OED (sixteen more, all from the nineteenth century, can be
found in Literature Online):
I have “experienced religion,” as well as thousands of others, and in the same way. (1837)
He was a wonderful pious peddler . . . had just experienced religion. (1852)
You’d think nobody ever experienced religion afore, he’s so set up about it. (1891)
Some went so far as to doubt if she had even experienced religion, for all she was a
professor. (1868)
The last of these examples is particularly indicative of the importance of

“experience” in this view of religion, reflected in the history of the English
language: A “professor” is someone who “professes” religion, and (the speaker
assumes) there is little value in that if the professed belief is not based on
“experience.”
The nineteenth-century use of experience in the phrase to experience reli-
gion appears to have built on earlier religious language, especially that of
Methodism, where sudden conversions were often referred to as “experiences.”
Certainly the word appears repeatedly in all accounts of eighteenth- and nine-
teenth-century Methodism, as in the following passage from the Oxford Dictio-
nary of National Biography (Rack 2004):
Much more to Wesley’s taste, and more central to his vision of Methodism’s mission,
was an outbreak of perfectionist experiences late in the 1750s. Perfection had been
preached, experienced, and discussed in the 1740s, but Wesley claimed that such
cases had ceased for twenty years. Though he always argued for perfection from
scripture, in 1759 he went so far as to claim that he would give up the doctrine if there
were no living witnesses.
From 1760 the experiences proliferated, sometimes accompanied by shrieks and
groans reminiscent of the early days of the revival. Wesley thought these experiences
favourable to the growth of the movement. By 1761 some were speaking of third
blessings or of separate experiences of the sanctification of the mind and of the heart
by faith.
In its characterization of Methodism’s doctrine and devotion, the same

dictionary repeatedly highlights Wesley’s appeals to experiences and emphasizes
Locke’s influence on him. For example, it states: “Following Anglican tradition,
he appealed to the combined authority of scripture, early church tradition, and
reason, though increasingly also to experience . . . He was strongly empiricist in
principle, rejecting innate ideas. However, he stretched empiricism to cover ‘a
new class of senses’ ‘opened in your souls’ by God, ‘not depending on the organs
of flesh and blood’ (Works, 8.276)” (ibid.).
Here are two examples of “experiences” in Wesley’s own writings:
I speak what is confirmed by your own, as well as others’ experiences. (n.d., Notes
on the Bible)
I was much confirmed in the “truth that is after godliness” by hearing the experi-
ences of Mr. Hutchins, of Pembroke College, and Mr. Fox: two living witnesses that
God can (at least, if He does not always) give that faith whereof cometh salvation in
a moment, as lightning falling from heaven. (Wesley1951 [1735–1790])
Wesley also often used the verb to experience:
Q. When may a person judge himself to have attained this [Christian perfection]?
A. When, after having been fully convinced of inbred sin, by a far deeper and
clearer conviction than that he experienced before justification, and after having
experienced a gradual mortification of it, he experiences a total death to sin, and
an entire renewal in the love and image of God, so as to rejoice evermore, to pray
without ceasing, and in everything to give thanks. If a man be deeply and fully
convinced, after justification, of inbred sin; if he then experience a gradual
mortification of sin, and afterwards an entire renewal in the image of God.
(Wesley 1872)
Wesley himself was no doubt building on the use of experience by earlier

religious writers, such as George Fox (founder of the Quakers) and Puritans
John Bunyan and Robert Sibbes, but under his pen the use of experience (noun
and verb) clearly expanded in range.
Generally speaking, however, while Wesley used experience fairly often (in
the electronic database “Christian Classics, Ethereal Library,” which covers
about three thousand pages of his works, there are 162 instances), his use of the
word reflects a retrospective perspective rather than an introspective one. For
example, he frequently uses phrases like “long experience,” “experience tea-
ches,” “experience shows,” “experience of all ages,” “those who have more
experience,” and “whatever experience thou hadst gained.” In fact, even the
“perfectionist experiences” (Rack 2004, 187–88) linked with sudden conversion
appear to have been understood as something a person undergoes and can recount
(an undergoer’s perspective) rather than conscious self-monitoring episodes of
the kind that we later encounter in William James’s discussion (see below).
The story of experience in the (English) language of religion—from Fox
and Bunyan through Jonathan Edwards and Wesley to William James and then
to the present day—deserves a detailed study. Here I focus on James’s Varieties
of Religious Experience (1985 [1902]) and on two rather typical volumes
published a century later (one of them with the word experience in the title):
The Experience of God—How 40 Well-known Seekers Encounter the Sacred
(Robinson 1988) and If Grace Is True: God Will Save Every Person (Gulley
and Mulholland 2004).
For James, experience is a defining feature of religion, and it is not experi-

ence in a retrospective sense, as in Fox, Bunyan, or even Wesley, but in an
introspective one:
Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the
feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they
apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the
divine. . . . it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it,
theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow.
In these lectures, however, . . . the immediate personal experiences will amply fill
our time, and we shall hardly consider theology or ecclesiasticism at all. (James
1985 [1902], 34)
James repeatedly stresses that in his lectures “ecclesiastical institutions” are of no

interest at all: “The religious experience which we are studying is that which lives
itself out within the private breast” (ibid., 269.” As he repeatedly emphasizes, in
his view religion is above all a matter of “first-hand” religious experience,
“individual,” “personal,” and “private” (cf. Levinson 1981).
To better explain what he means by what he calls “first-hand individual
experience” James quotes from the autobiographical journal of George Fox (1975
[1694]):
I fasted much, and walked abroad in solitary places many days, and often took my
Bible and went and sat in hollow trees and lonesome places till night came on; and
frequently in the night walked mournfully about by myself, for I was a man of
sorrows in the times of the first workings of the Lord in me. . . .
But as I had forsaken all the priests, so I left the separate preachers also, and
those called the most experienced people; for I saw there was none among them all
that could speak to my condition. And when all my hopes in them and in all men
were gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do,
then, Oh then, I heard a voice which said, ‘There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can
speak to thy condition.’ And when I heard it my heart did leap for joy. (James 1985
[1902], 269–70)
James comments: “A genuine first-hand religious experience like this is bound to

be a heterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely madman”
(ibid., 270). In fact, however, Fox himself does not once use the word experience
(an experience) to describe what happened to him. Clearly, unlike James, he did
not think in such terms.
Similarly, when James discusses John Bunyan’s experiences (as they would
be called now) and quotes from his autobiographical writings, it is striking that
Bunyan himself does not use the word experience:
Then I was struck into a very great trembling, insomuch that at some times I
could, for whole days together, feel my very body, as well as my mind, to
shake and totter under the sense of the dreadful judgment of God, that should fall
on those that have sinned that most fearful and unpardonable sin. I felt also such a
clogging and heat at my stomach, by reason of this my terror, that I was, especially
at some times, as if my breast bone would have split asunder. . . . Thus did I wind,
and twine, and shrink, under the burthen that was upon me; which burthen also did
so oppress me, that I could neither go, nor lie, either at rest or quiet. (James 1985
[1902], 134)
Thus, Bunyan described very vividly what was happening to him, what he felt,
and what he thought, but he did not interpret such episodes through the prism of
the modern Anglo concept of “experience.” For James, on the other hand,
‘experience’ was reality itself. It had two parts, subjective and objective, equally
important and inextricably linked:
The world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an objective and a
subjective part, of which the former may be incalculably more extensive than the
latter, and yet the latter can never be omitted or suppressed. The objective part is the
sum total of whatsoever at any given time we may be thinking of, the subjective part
is the inner “state” in which the thinking comes to pass. (ibid., 333)
The “objective part” was much larger (“what we think of may be enormous”), yet
the “subjective part” was no less important (sometimes, for polemical purposes,
James presented it as even more important): “The inner state is our very experi-
ence itself; its reality and that of our experience are one” (ibid., 393). What James
appears to mean is that, when something is happening to a person, this person
feels what it is like (“he privately feels it rolling out on fortune’s wheel” in the
following quote) and simultaneously thinks about what is happening and how it
feels. This is “the inner ‘state’ in which the thinking comes to pass”—and “the
axis of reality” runs through such episodes, which combine personal events,
feelings, thoughts, and some knowledge based on them:
That unsharable feeling which each one of us has of the pinch of his individual
destiny as he privately feels it rolling out on fortune’s wheel may be disparaged for
its egotism, may be sneered at as unscientific, but it is the one thing that fills up the
measure of our concrete actuality, and any would-be existents that should lack such
a feeling, or its analogue, would be a piece of reality only half made up.
...
If this be true, it is absurd for science to say that the egotistic elements of
experience should be suppressed. The axis of reality runs solely through the
egotistic places—they are strung upon it like so many beads. (ibid., 393–94;
emphasis added)
In this and other similar passages we can recognize the key assumption of
modern Anglo-English discourse based on the words experience (noun) and to
experience (verb): that when something happens to a person, if this person makes
a contemporaneous mental note of what is happening to him or her, this person
can come to know something that it would be impossible to know in any other
way. There is no concomitant assumption that such knowledge is always infalli-
ble or that it is very extensive, but it is assumed that it is valuable and reasonably
reliable—probably more so than any putative knowledge based on purely intel-

lectual speculations or social practices of any kind.
James’s conviction that experience is more in touch with reality than theo-
logical speculations and abstract religious knowledge may seem very similar to
Wesley’s, and the word experience as James and Wesley use it may seem to have
the same meaning. In fact, however, such an impression may be based on an
illusion.
As noted by Taves (1999), within late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
evangelicalism, there were numerous religious autobiographies with the phrase
“religious experience” in the title, most of them written by Methodists. In this
usage, “religious experience” referred to authenticated personal testimonials:
“I know that it happened because it happened to me.” With James, the use of
“religious experience” changed:
With the publication of the Varieties, William James theoretically constituted

“religious experience” as an object of study, defining it as a generic “something”
that informed “religion-in-general” apart from any tradition in particular. He did so
by abstracting that which he identified as religious experience . . . from the theologi-
cal contexts in which it had been embedded and linking these diverse experiences
together by means of psychology. (ibid., 35)
A question that Taves does not address is the changing meaning of the word
experience itself. How does its meaning in James compare with that in Wesley?
And that in Wesley with that in Sibbes?
While the matter requires further investigation, one could tentatively pro-
pose the following historical scenario:
Sibbes
some things happened to this someone at some times
this someone thought about these things for some time
because of this, this someone afterward knew some things about things of this kind
Wesley
some things happened to someone at some times
this someone felt something at these times because of it
this someone thought about these things for some time
because of this, this someone could afterward say something like this about it:
“I know that it happened because it happened to me”
James
something happened to someone at that time
when it was happening, this someone thought like this:
this someone knew at that time what it was like at that time
because of this, this someone could afterward think about it like this:
“I know what it was like at that time
I know it like I know what I see when I see something
I know it like I know what I feel when I feel something”
As Taves emphasizes, “narrating experience” and doing it in the form of

personal testimony were important parts of Methodism. Both the “narrating” and
the “testimony” are reflected in the historical scenarios by the “say” component:
“This someone could afterward say something like this about it: I know that it
happened because it happened to me” (note: not “I know what it was like at that
time,” but “I know that it happened.”)
As Taves notes, Methodist so-called experience meetings “provided the
occasion for recounting (or witnessing to) one’s experience and thus provided
models of authentic experience for others. Unlike private devotions, which were
not social, and public worship, which was not personal, experience meetings gave
voice to the individual within society. As one unsympathetic Anglican priest
complained, “I have great objection to ‘experience-meetings’ . . . they are a short
sermon upon the little word I” (Taves 1999, 75). However, this ubiquitous “I” of
Methodist “experience meetings” was not the conscious, attentive “I” focused on
the thought “this is happening to me now”: Presumably, a sudden, Damascus-like
experience of a blinding light did not lend itself to such a conscious contempora-
neous thought. As the title (Fits, Trances, and Visions) of Taves’s book empha-
sizes, those were primarily involuntary and not quite conscious experiences.
In the proposed historical scenario, the involuntary character of Methodist
“experiences” emphasized by Taves is reflected in the first two components
(happen ! feel) and also in the absence of conscious contemporaneous thought:
“This is happening to me now.”
The meaning of experience reflected in the term experience meetings seems
to stand halfway between its meaning in Sibbes and that in James. It reflects a
first-person perspective but not yet an introspective one. The trances and visions
that Taves’s title highlights did not provide a suitable context for the conscious
self-monitoring that underlies the modern Anglo worldview reflected in the
modern uses of the word experience.
In James’s book, the worldview based on this assumption is rehearsed in the
context of religion; in other books (written in English) it is rehearsed in the
context of philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, history, literary studies,
biography, autobiography, and so on. It is, however, a modern Anglo worldview
embedded in modern English. We do not find it in John Bunyan or George Fox, as
we do not find it in Descartes. On the other hand, we do find it in Locke, and some
time later, in the language of his cultural descendants. Earlier I quoted Locke’s
key statement: “ . . . EXPERIENCE. In that all our knowledge is founded; and
from that it ultimately derives itself” (Essay, 2.1.2). William James’s references
to “experience,” with their distinctly Anglo flavor, harken back not to Sibbes’s
words “Experience is the life of a Christian” but to Locke’s seminal words
(seminal for modern Anglo culture).
The concept of religious experience, so characteristic of the English-language
literature on religion, is often treated in this literature as universal. For example,
Anthony O’Hear, in his book Experience, Explanation, and Faith: An Introduction
to the Philosophy of Religion (1984, 26), quotes James’s (1985 [1902], 436)
statement that “what religion reports . . . always purports to be fact of experience”
and asserts that statements such as this “could be easily multiplied” both “from
within Christianity and from other religions” and that they “are claiming in effect
that the fundamental source of religious knowledge is the religious experience of
the believer” (O’Hear 1984, 26).
In fact, however, this is a highly Anglocentric assertion. Statements such as
James’s could not be easily multiplied from other religions because the concept
of religious experiences is tied to the English language. It is also Anglocentric for
a philosopher of religion to marvel at how wide the range of religious experience
is because this is not a fact about religion but at least partly about the meaning of
the English word experience:
Religious experience ranges from intense and possibly ecstatic and mystical states
to the feeling of warmth and security many people frequently feel at religious
services. What they have in common is that they are not cases of perception through
the five senses, but of some other sort of sensitivity altogether. What we will be
primarily examining here is the extent that parallels can be drawn between religious
experience and sensory perception. (ibid.)
The claim that religious experience is not strictly sensory but is sensory-like and
that “parallels can be drawn between religious experience and sensory percep-
tion” has its roots in Locke’s Essay and in the cultural tradition linked with it.
There would, of course, be nothing wrong with this if not for the fact that the
writers working within that tradition are often locked in it and locked in the
language derived from it.
Turning now to The Experience of God: How 40 Well-known Seekers
Encounter the Sacred (Robinson 1998), which is a slim paperback of 237
pages, I note that the word experience (either as a noun or a verb) occurs in
it—I have counted—174 times and that all these occurrences would be
impossible to translate (without a change of meaning) into other European
languages.
One well-known French book of religious conversion (Frossard 1976) bears
the title Dieu existe, je l’ai rencontré (‘God exists, I have encountered him’). It
would be impossible, however, to say in French Dieu existe, je l’ai éprouvé
(éprouver is the closest French counterpart of to experience). The title The
Experience of God carries with it implications that are impossible to render in
one phrase in, for example, French, German, Italian, Russian, and Polish, and the
same applies to all of the other 173 occurrences of the word experience in
Robinson’s book.
One implication of the phrase the experience of God is that God definitely
exists; it is based on the model of phrases like the experience of reality or the
experience of the world, which take it for granted that reality and the world exist.
In this respect, the experience of God is different from James’s adjectival phrase
religious experience: Religious experience vouches for the reality of the subjec-
tive experience but not necessarily for that of God.
Both religious experience and the experience of God vouch for the reality of
something that happened in the experiencer’s mind and also for the fact that this
had some basis in what was happening to the experiencer at the time. They also
imply that what was happening in the experiencer’s mind included a thought that
had the form of a contemporaneous record (“This is happening to me now”) and a
claim to firsthand, sensory-like knowledge: “I know it like I know what I feel
when I feel something in my body; I know it like I know what I see when I see
something.” Finally, both the phrases religious experience and experience of God
imply that the experiencer learned something in the process: It was a matter not
just of thinking and feeling but also of coming to know something that one did not
know before and that one can come to know only firsthand.
In Robinson’s book the Experience of God, nearly all of the forty contribu-
tors are native speakers of English, and to nearly all of them it seems natural to
think of their religion as their experience of God. The conspicuous exceptions—
those who do not use the word experience when talking about God—are the Dalai
Lama, Mother Teresa, and the Thai American Taoist Manak Chia, that is, people
of a non-English-speaking background (and, as far as I have been able to
ascertain, the only non-Americans in the group). It is hard to resist the conclusion
that these nonnative speakers of English simply do not think about God in those
terms and that, different as they are from each other in their attitude toward
religion, they all differ in an important respect from those for whom Anglo
English is their conceptual home.
In the other contemporary book mentioned earlier, If Grace Is True: Why
God Will Save Every Person, the authors, Philip Gulley (a Quaker) and James
Mulholland (a Baptist clergyman) often talk about “experiencing God.” In his
Polish account of their discussion, Wacław Hryniewicz (a Catholic priest)
clearly has great difficulties in translating the word experience (both noun and
verb). For example, he renders the phrase experience of God as do swiadczenia z
Bogiem, using the plural form of the word do swiadczenie (‘accumulated life
experience’) and the preposition z ‘with’: ‘life experiences with God’ (Hrynie-
wicz 2005, 176).
Sometimes Hryniewicz translates the verb experience with the Polish verb
doswiadczyc, stretching the possibilities of this Polish verb far beyond the normal
limits. He says (idiomatically): łaska, kt orej doswiadczyłem (‘the grace which I
have experienced’, possible in Polish) and (unidiomatically) Bog, ktorego
doswiadczyłem (‘God, whom I have experienced’, normally not possible in
Polish).
Furthermore, Hryniewicz writes: “Pisza˛c je˛zykiem własnych doświadczeń
autorzy cytowanej ksia˛żki przekonuja˛, że Bóg jest miłościa˛, że Jego wola˛ jest
zbawienie całego świata” (ibid., 179) (‘Writing in the language of their own
[accumulated] experiences, the authors of the book argue that God is love, that
he wants the salvation of the whole world’). Moreover, he confesses: “Ksia˛żka
owych pastorów . . . jest mi bliska i droga. Przemówiła do mnie je˛zykiem
świadectwa i niezwykłej szczerości” (ibid., 180) (‘I love this book. It moves
me and speaks to me through its language of testimony and through its great
sincerity’).
Thus, in writing about a book by the two American Protestants, which he
greatly admires, Hryniewicz repeatedly trips over the word experience (through
no fault of his own). To translate this word, he reaches for three very different
Polish words: do swiadczenie (‘accumulated experience’, a retrospective perspec-
tive), przeżycia (‘life-changing emotions’), and swiadectwa (‘testimony’), as well
as the verb do swiadczyc, reminiscent of the premodern use of the English verb to
experience. As a result, however, the authors’ perspective is to some extent
distorted. It could not be otherwise: It is simply impossible to preserve that
perspective while writing in Polish, as it would be impossible to preserve it in
other languages. Again, it is a peculiarly Anglo viewpoint.
Let me close this discussion of experience in religion with several quotes
from Gullen and Mulholland’s (2004) book, which show not only the way
experience is used but also the tremendous weight that it can carry in the cultural
tradition to which the authors belong (the post-Lockean Anglo tradition):
Intimacy with God is more like making love than joining a club, hearing a lecture, or
reading a book. There are simply some things we must experience for ourselves. (15)
These experiences with God have become the bedrock of my faith. I trust them. (21)
During these years, I learned the importance of asking whether what I’ve been taught was
true. Of course, that answer can be found only through experience. (30)
We forget life is a series of experiences that continually challenge the beliefs we hold
sacred. (30)
“I’ve experienced it!” is the most compelling response to “Why do you believe that?”
(31)
I ask them, “What has been your experience with God?” (36)
The word of God is a voice. It is experienced. (40)
There are simply no words in Polish that can carry a similar weight and express a
similar perspective on faith.
2.8. “Bearing Witness”: Shared Experience in

Anglophone Art and History
“Bearing Witness” is the title of an Australian review of three art exhibitions. The
subtitle reads as follows: “These exhibitions tell very different stories about the
war experience, from the horror and waste to the voyaging and boredom” (Smee
2005, 14). The word experience occurs in the article ten times. What does a
phrase like war experience tell us about the art so described?
The first-person perspective is clearly there, and so is the subjective and
qualitative perspective; the theme includes “what happened to me” (as well as
“what I saw happen where I was”), and the implication is “I know what it was
like.” There is also the implicit claim that I know it “from inside,” as an outsider
cannot know it—that is, arguably, “I know it like I know what I feel when I feel
something.”
Thus, while experience in the phrase war experience is a mass noun, it is
not experience in the Shakespearean sense or in one of its more recent offshoots
like teaching experience (roughly, “skill acquired through practice”). Rather, it

is experience seen as “lived knowledge” about a particular time, based on a
series of sensory or sensory-like experiences, with a common theme extended
over time.
The plural form, experiences, also occurs in this article, as does the verb to
experience. For example, about the German painter Otto Dix we read:
Although Dix based his paintings on sketches he made in the trenches, he didn’t
create the works in Der Krieg until 1924, a half-decade after the end of the war.
Still, when you consider what he must have experienced as a machine-gunner in
1916 at the Battle of the Somme, that seems rather soon; some experiences can
show internally for a lifetime and still prove indigestible, incommunicable. (Smee
2005, 14)
If we were to interpret the sentence “what he must have experienced as a

machine-gunner” as referring to what happened to Dix himself, we could propose
the following explication. (Of course Dix himself did not think about his time as a
soldier in terms of “experiences” but in terms of certain German words, most
likely erleben [verb] and Erlebnisse [noun]. But Smee’s sentence represents an
English speaker’s point of view, and this is what the following explication is
aimed at):
What he experienced as a machine gunner in 1914
a. some things were happening for some time somewhere where he was at that time
b. when these things were happening, he felt something because of this
c. he thought about these things like this at that time:
“this is happening here now; this is happening to me now”
d. he knew at that time what it was like at that time
e. because of this, if he wanted to think about it afterward, he could think about it like this:
The noun experience used as a mass noun in the phrases the experience of the
war and the war experience appears to have a very similar meaning, although
these phrases imply, in addition, something shared by many people and linked
with particular places and times.
The experience of war
a. some things were happening to some people at that time for some time
b. it was not like at other times
c. when these things were happening, these people felt something because of it
d. they thought about it like this at that time:
“this is happening here now; this is happening to me now”
e. they knew at that time what it was like at that time

f. because of this, when they thought about it afterward, they could think
about these things like this:
g. “I know what it was like when it was happening
h. I know it like I know what I feel when I feel something in my body
i. I know it like I know what I see when I see something”
If this explication is correct, a phrase like the experience of war, which refers
to what some people (rather than one person) experienced, allows for two
thoughts rather than one: “this is happening here now” and “this is happening
to me now” (with the deictic element this referring to different things).
A person’s experiences such as those evoked by the three art exhibitions do
not need to be unique, although they have to be individual. They can be shared, as
in the following examples from COBUILD:
They were mainly comparing notes about shared experiences in Queensland.

We still have our friendship, which is based on happy memories and shared experiences
stretching back over many years.
Experience as a mass noun can also be “shared.” In fact, the name of one of the
three exhibitions discussed in the review is “Shared Experience: Art and War—
Australia, Britain, and Canada in the Second World War.” But “shared experience”
still has a first-person singular perspective: It goes back to each person’s presumed
thoughts, “this is happening here now; this is happening to me now.”
Phrases like the war experience lend themselves to a collective perspective
(shared experience) because a modifier like war evokes a collective frame of
reference: “some things were happening to some people.” In addition, a reference
to “shared experience” sends a message along the following lines: “these people
were involved in the same war and were on the same side; things of the same kind
were happening to them; they can all think about these things in the same way: we
know what it was like.” Nonetheless, this does not cancel the individual perspec-
tive implied by the word experience itself: because behind or underneath the
recognition of sameness there is also a claim that every individual insider has
some special knowledge.
What is interesting about phrases like the experience of war or the war
experience from a broader comparative perspective is the subsuming of trau-
matic, horrific, and catastrophic problems of one’s life under a category,
cognitive and sensory at the same time, which can also be used for insignificant
events such as the experience of having a hot shower, eating chocolates, or
walking in uncomfortable shoes. For example, in Polish, the word przeżycie (lit.
‘living through’) would be used only in relation to major, emotionally charged
events, not mundane ones. The plural phrase przeżycia wojenne ‘war experi-
ences’ is quite natural, but, first, it does not connect conceptually with any
mundane experiences; second, it has a plural form: it refers to many (major)
episodes, not to a sum total seen as a whole, as the English mass noun
experience does.
In Polish one could also speak of doswiadczenia wojenne (also plural) using
the word doswiadczenie, which bilingual dictionaries offer as a translational
equivalent of experience. However, this word does not embody the experiential,
embodied perspective of a phrase like the war experience. For example, one could
never speak of “exorcising” (doswiadczenia) as one can speak of “exorcising war
experience” because this word has a retrospective and cumulative perspective, not
an introspective and contemporaneous one. It refers to what one has learned from
what one has been through, not to how it was and how it felt at the time.
The same can be said about the German phrase gemeinsame Erfahrungen,
which would perhaps be the most plausible translation of the title of the exhibition,
“Shared Experience.” First, Erfahrungen, too, is plural, and the singular gemein-
same Erfahrung would be even less appropriate as a rendering of the English title.
Second and more important, both Erfahrungen and Erfahrung have the retrospec-
tive perspective of Shakespeare’s experience, not the introspective and contempo-
raneous one of the English expression shared experience (see section 2.10).
One final point about the war experience is that the “war experience”
celebrated in these exhibitions in Canberra in 2005 seems strangely at odds
with “the Myth of the War Experience” denounced by historian George Mosse
(1990) throughout his book Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World
Wars. To quote Jay (2005, 175), “what the historian George Mosse dubbed the
Myth of War Experience emerged in the Weimar Republic from the sacralization
of violence as a means of justifying the horrible loss of life and preparing the way
for another sacrificial slaughter to avenge the defeat of the last.” To illustrate his
thesis, Mosse repeatedly refers to a book by German poet Ernst Jünger titled Der
Kampf als inneres Erlebnis (‘Battle as Inner Experience’) (Berlin, 1922), in
which Jünger wrote enthusiastically “about the new race of men which the war
had created, men loaded with energy, men of steel, ready for combat” (Mosse
1990, 162).
One can see how the German words Erlebnis and Kriegserlebnis (cf. Vondung
1980) may lend themselves to such use and how they could have served German
nationalistic myths. However, the connotations of the English phrase the war
experience are different from those of the German word Kriegserlebnis, and it is
a pity that Mosse does not draw any linguistic and historical distinctions here. For
example, when referring to Bill Gammage’s (1974) study of the diaries and letters
of Australian soldiers, The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War, he
comments as follows: “These attitudes were common among soldiers of most
nations who articulated their war experiences” (6). But can one really equate the
“war experience” of Australian war veterans with the “Kriegserlebnis” of the ideal
German warriors sung by poets like Ernst Jünger? The fact that the title “shared
experience” cannot be rendered in German as gemeinsame (‘common’) Erlebnisse
or geteilte (‘shared’) Erlebnisse highlights the semantic difference between expe-
rience and Erlebnis and also between war experience and Kriegserlebnis. (For
further discussion of the German word Erlebnis see section 2.10.)
Looking at human life in all of its aspects, manifestations, episodes, and
vicissitudes in terms of “experiences” and “experience” is a specifically Anglo
worldview—a unique habit of the mind entrenched in the English language.
2.9. I Know from Experience . . .
In section 1.1 I briefly discussed a sentence from an article on Baghdad from the
Times Literary Supplement, with the phrase “accounts written . . . directly from
experience.” What exactly does this phrase mean in light of our discussion so far?
The collocations from experience and especially I know from experience are
quite common in contemporary English. Here are some examples from COBUILD:
I know from experience what it is like to be pulled out of England’s squad.

You’re actually quite far ahead of . . . so that, instead of us having to think about what it
would be like to have spoken language, we can [know] from experience exactly what it’s
like. . . . We are largely reporting from experience.
I’ve just been out to Pakistan, and I know, speaking from experience, that they have got
the most fantastic enthusiasm for the game.
I know from experience that the two families involved can feel flat once the wedding’s
over and the couple have left.
I write from experience, as for some years I have run [driven] a Porsche 944 as my
personal car.
I know very well, from experience and not from books, what it is to be a reformer.
The Labour leader was speaking from experience when he made his passionate plea on
behalf of the victims of crime. Tony Blair’s north London home has been burgled five
times in the last eighteen months, a neighbour revealed.
I start with the last of these examples—the sentence about Tony Blair “speaking
from experience” about having one’s home burglarized. If someone says, “I’m
speaking from experience,” one clear implication is “it happened to me”; another
is that “I know what it is like when this happens to someone”; and yet another is that
there is a causal connection between the two: “I know what it is like when this
happens to someone because I know what it was like when it was happening to me.”
It is not immediately obvious what the basis of the implicit claim about the
causal link is: how does it follow from “it happened to me” that “I know what it is
like when it happens to someone”? Presumably, another implicit claim is that “I
remember,” and this in turn appears to imply that, at the time when it was
happening to me, I took notice—I made a contemporaneous mental note of
what it was like for me at the time.
Thus, in addition to the components “it happened to me” and “I know what it
is like” and to the postulated causal link between these two, sentences like “I
know from experience” and “I’m speaking from experience” appear also to
include some semantic components referring to what one thought at the time
and to the resulting knowledge. This leads us to the following explication (of at
least one sense of the phrase I know from experience):
I know from experience . . .
a. I know what it is like when this happens to someone

because at some time before it was happening to me
b. when it was happening, I thought about it like this: “this is happening to me now”
c. I knew at that time what it was like at that time
d. because of this, when I thought about it afterward, I could think about it like this:
e. “I know what it was like when it was happening
f. I know it like I know what I feel when I feel something in my body
g. I know it like I know what I see when I see something”
Phrases like “I know from experience what it is like” in the first two
examples from COBUILD are revealing and support the references to “I knew
what it was like” in the proposed explication.
Alongside first-person sentences like “I know from experience (what it is
like),” there are also third-person sentences like “he knows from experience,”
and in principle, the components given here in the first person could be
rephrased (except for the indented material) in a third-person format. I have,
nonetheless, kept the explication with the first-person format as well because
sentences like “I know from experience” appear to be far more common in real
speech than “he/she knows from experience” or “you/they” know from experi-
ence.” This asymmetry is understandable: it is more natural to claim that
“I know what it was like” than to attribute such a subjective and qualitative
insight to other people. Nonetheless, third-person sentences (“he knows from
experience”) are also possible.
But would the same kind of explication apply to all cases in which somebody
is reporting something from experience? For example, would it apply to the
sentence about Baghdad (“account written directly from experience”)? Tony
Blair can know what it is like to have one’s home burglarized because it happened
to him, but is Jon Lee Anderson’s account of the fall of Baghdad similarly
referring to “what happened to me [Anderson]”?
The sentence “I know what it was like when it was happening” seems
to be equally applicable to Anderson and to Blair. Yet there is also a
difference: Blair’s implicit claim was “I know what it is like when this
happens to someone because it happened to me,” whereas Anderson’s
implicit claim is “I know what it was like in that place when it was
happening because I was there at that time.” This suggests that the phrase
“I know from experience” (and related expressions) can cover at least two
different cases: roughly speaking, the case of an experiencer-undergoer and
that of an experiencer-observer. The phrases personal experience and direct
experience provide helpful clues in this regard: Tony Blair was speaking
“from personal experience,” whereas Anderson was writing “from direct
experience.” To see exactly what this apparent difference between “personal
experience” and “direct experience” might involve we need an explication of
the latter case.
He writes about the fall of Baghdad from direct experience.
a. he knows what it was like there when it was happening there

because he was there at that time
b. when it was happening there, he thought about it like this:

“this is happening here now”
c. he knew at that time what it was like there at that time
d. because of this, when he thought about it afterward, he could think about it like this:
e. “I know what it was like there when it was happening
f. I know it like I know what I feel when I feel something in my body
g. I know it like I know what I see when I see something”
The two explications differ, above all, in the thought attributed to the
experiencer-undergoer and the experiencer-observer: “this is happening to me
now,” and “this is happening here now.” They both include, however, the
component “this person knew at that time what it was like at that time.” It
could be said that the interpretation of this component is in each case different:
Tony Blair knew what it was like primarily because he knew how he felt at the
time, and Jon Lee Anderson knew what it was like primarily because he knew
what he saw at that time. Nonetheless, the word experience implies a similar
perspective in both cases—both Blair and Anderson could afterward think like
this:
“I know what it was like when it was happening

I know it like I know what I feel when I feel something in my body
I know it like I know what I see when I see something”
Do all sentences in the frame “I know from experience . . . ” imply either “I

know what it is like because it happened to me” or “I know what it was like
because I was there”? If one examines all of the examples of this phrase in a large
database like COBUILD, one can see that this is not the case. Consider, for example,
the following sentence:
It was then that he saw it coming: a solid wall of rain, turning the smoothness of the water
to foam. He knew from experience that the wind would not be far behind.
Here, the speaker appears to be speaking “from past experience” rather than
“from personal experience” or “from direct experience.” Of course, in some
sense, the latter two categories also imply something that happened in the past,
yet the expression past experience—which is very common in present-day En-
glish (fifty-two examples in COBUILD)—implies a perspective on the past events
that differs from the other two.
For example, the sentence “he knew from experience that the wind would
not be far behind” implies knowledge accumulated from the observation of
events over a period of time. It refers to a certain regularity that could not have
been observed at any particular time but could have been deduced from
thinking about what happened in the past. There is a difference between
making a mental note of “what is happening now” and reflecting on “what
happened before.” This is why past experience is not direct experience, and the
two phrases, past experience and direct experience, reflect that difference in
perspective.
A related phrase that provides a useful clue is “learning from experience,”
which is also common in present-day English (ten examples in COBUILD). Here is
one example:
Learning from past experience, Justin stresses their teamwork. “When we play together,
we try to arrange things until they have an emotional effect. The results are wonderfully
askew, punked-up songs.”
“Learning from experience” usually implies “learning from past experience,”

that is, learning from thinking about what one has observed in the past over a
period of time. “Knowing from experience” can also have the past perspective of
“learning from experience” rather than the current perspective as in the sentences
about Tony Blair and Jon Lee Anderson.
Consider, for example, the following sentences from COBUILD, all combining
know with past experience:
We are bound to see inflation continuing high while activity weakens and unemployment
rises. But we know from past experience that this discomfort will be temporary as long as
policy continues to be focused on reducing inflation.
They were seated on wooden benches, which he knew from past experience were hard
and uncomfortable.
Without knowing what their plan will land them with, each enterprise puts in requisitions
that would, if met, cover all possible contingencies. They also know from past experience
that their request is unlikely to be met in full.
We respect each and every Dublin player, but fear doesn’t enter into it. From past
experience I know how hard it is to beat Dublin teams in the Championship, especially
in Croke Park. But this year they haven’t got Charlie Redmond or Paul Clarke and they
appear to have a few injuries.
In all these sentences, “knowing something from past experience” refers to what
people have learned from what has happened to them in the past, and the same
applies to many sentences that use the same frame without the word past. Here
are some examples of this latter kind from COBUILD:
I actually know from experience the difference in prices as far as food’s concerned.
Organically grown vegetables—you can pay twice as much as you will for nonorganic
vegetables.
We know from experience that our coffins [for pets] give people the peace of mind that
they have given their best to their pets.
I know from experience it’s a story [about a “pig of a man”] that should not be read to
small, finicky girls.
In all such sentences, the speaker spells out what someone has learned from what
happened to that person—or happened in the place where that person was—in the
past.
Leaving aside this last type of sentence, which refers to accumulated knowl-
edge, I note that, in the two other types discussed in this section, experience is
used as a mass noun, not as a count noun. Unlike in Locke’s and Hume’s works,
however, this experience does not refer to observed regularities. At the same
time, it differs from experience used as a count noun (as in “it was a frightening/
an interesting experience”) insofar as it does not imply anything emotionally
charged.
Of course, sentences like that about Tony Blair may well refer to some
unusual episodes accompanied by feelings, but this is not an inherent feature of
the frame “I know from experience.” For example, the person who says “I know
from experience what it was like to be a reformer” is not referring to any
particular episodes linked with feelings. Rather, it is a question of having learned
from something that one has been through as a conscious observer of one’s own
situation.
Thus, this use of experience as a mass noun is different from both that of
Shakespeare (experience1) and that of Locke (experience5). It is, however, a use
that implies a first-person perspective, conscious self-observation, and knowl-
edge based on an awareness of what is happening to us. In other words, it is a
thoroughly post-Lockean perspective.
The claim that I am making here requires some evidence. Since the phrase “I
know from experience” can also be used (in some sentences) in a clearly pre-
Lockean sense, how can we prove that in other sentences it is used in an
“experiential”, post-Lockean sense?
Some evidence on this point can be drawn from a comparison between
English and other European languages. For example, in French one can say “je
sais d’expérience,” lit. ‘I know from experience’, and the French COBUILD data-
base includes four such sentences. All of them, however, have a propositional
complement that specifies what one has learned from one’s past (“I know from
experience that . . . ”). None of these examples has the subjective, qualitative
character of English sentences like “I know from experience what it is like,”
which cannot be translated into French with “je sais d’expérience” and a comple-
ment analogous to “what it is like.” Nor does French permit the literal equivalent
of “speaking from experience” (*je parle d’expérience), “writing from experi-
ence” (*j’écris d’expérience), or “reporting from experience” (*je rapporte d’ex-
périence). The French COBUILD includes no such sentences.
Similarly, in Russian, one could say Ja znaju po opytu, čto . . . (lit. ‘I know
from experience that . . . ’), but again this would be propositional knowledge (“I
know that”), a conclusion drawn from what has happened to the speaker in the
past, not a case of “knowing what it is like”: The subjective, qualitative, “experi-
ential” perspective of the English sentences would be missing.
Finally, in German, one could say Ich weiss aus eigener Erfahrung daß . . .
(lit. ‘I know from [my] own experience that . . . ’), but this, too, is a case of
intellectual, propositional knowledge, not of any subjective, qualitative
knowledge, and it is illuminating that the more subjective, autobiographical

German word Erlebnis (plural Erlebnisse) could not be used in such sentences
at all (*ich weiss aus eigenen Erlebnisse).
Thus, it is only the English word experience that allows the speaker to claim
qualitative (nonpropositional) knowledge (“I know what it is like”) based on acts
of conscious, attentive observation and self-observation (“I thought: this is
happening to me now/this is happening here now”). This is what I mean by a
post-Lockean perspective.
2.10. English Experience Compared with German

Erfahrung and Erlebnis
To appreciate the uniqueness of the English concept of “an experience” and to see
the reality of the components posited here, it will be helpful to compare it with the
closest concepts in several other languages. Since multiple comparisons are not
possible for reasons of space, I have chosen for this purpose the German words
Erfahrung and Erlebnis, which are mentioned throughout this chapter. (To
eliminate any confusion that might result from the polysemy of Erfahrung (1. a
mass noun, 2. a count noun), I focus, whenever appropriate, on the plural forms).
When one searches a German corpus for the plural forms Erfahrungen and
Erlebnisse, one is struck, above all, by the frequent co-occurrence of these words,
both translatable into English as experiences. Here are some examples from the
Limas corpus of Bonn University:
De facto kann man sich nämlich gegen den Einfluss neuer Erkenntnisse, Erfahrungen und
Erlebnisse niemals effektiv absichern. ‘In reality, one can never guard oneself against an
influx of new knowledge [plural], new experiences1 and experiences2.’
Für Ihren Urlaub sind Erfahrungen und Erlebnisse im Bereich von Kultur und Kunst von
Wichtigkeit. ‘For your holiday, cultural and artistic experiences1 and experiences2 are
[especially] important.’
Wem der Urlaub bereichernde Erfahrungen und Erlebnisse vermitteln soll . . . das ist der
Reisetyp. ‘A person to whom a vacation brings enriching experiences1 and experiences2—
such a person is a real traveler.’
Clearly, the two words glossed here as experiences1 and experiences2 do not
mean the same thing. What do they mean, then? To find out, it will be helpful to
look at sentences in which only one of the two words occurs and examine its
characteristic collocations and contexts. Starting with Erfahrungen, when one
examines a large set of examples from a corpus, one notices, above all, colloca-
tions like the following ones (from the same corpus):
nach meinen Erfahrungen ‘according to my experiences1’

(e.g., Nach meinen Erfahrungen trifft man normalerweise in europäischen und
amerikanischen Bibliotheken folgendes Bild, ‘according to my experiences1, one usually
finds the following situation in European and American libraries’)
Erfahrungen mit Vitamin E ‘experiences1 with vitamin E’

gesammelte Erfahrungen ‘accumulated experiences1’
Erfahrungen eines akademischen Lehrers [Pädagogen, etc.] ‘the experiences1 of an
academic teacher [pedagogue, etc.]
die dabei gewonnen Erfahrungen . . . ‘the experiences1 gained in the course of . . . ’
Erfahrungen mit Firmen ‘experiences1 with firms’
die Erfahrungen der Physik, der Chemie, der Geologie ‘the experiences1 of physics,
chemistry, geology’
die Erfahrungen in den letzten Jahren haben gezeigt, daß . . . ‘the experiences1 of recent
years have shown that . . . ’
wir wissen aus den Erfahrungen mit Musikschülern, daß . . . ‘we know from experiences1
with music students that . . . ’
As such characteristic collocations and contexts suggest, the word Erfahrun-

gen emphasizes knowledge gathered or obtained over time from many situations
that one has been in (usually when doing something) and reflected upon. Erfah-
rung in the singular, used as a count noun (eine Erfahrung), is also possible, but it
appears to be less common than either Erfahrungen in the plural or Erfahrung as
a mass noun. Arguably, for the count noun, the plural is more basic than the
singular, and this is the form I explicate here:
Erfahrungen (von jemandem) (‘someone’s experiences’)
a. someone did many things at many times

b. many things happened to this someone at many times because of it
c. this someone thought about these things for some time
d. because of this, this someone knows many things about things of some kinds
Broadly speaking, this is consistent with the definition of the mass noun
Erfahrung offered, for example, by the German version of Wikipedia (http://
www.wikipedia.org): “Erfahrung ist eine allgemeine Bezeichnung für Kennt-
nisse und Verhaltensweisen, die man durch Wahrnehmung und Lernen erwirbt
oder erworben hat” (“Erfahrung is a general word for knowledge and ways of
behaving that one acquires or has acquired through active perception and
learning”). This is Erfahrung as a mass noun, but in German this mass noun is
semantically very close to the count noun, and in fact, the preceding definition is
followed directly by an explanation about how Erfahrungen (plural) are collected
(“gesammelt”).
As the explication proposed here makes clear, the concept of Erfahrungen
shares some components with the Shakespearean experience (which was “by
industry achieved“) and with modern expressions like teaching experience, but it
is different from both of them in some respects. At the same time, it is quite
different from modern English experiences (in the plural), which do not result in
propositional knowledge (one cannot say in English, for example, “according to
my experiences, one usually finds the following situation in European and
American libraries”).
In fact, the German sentences with Erfahrungen quoted here are virtually
impossible to translate into English without a change in meaning because in
(modern) English the plural form experiences implies a subjective “personal
knowledge” that cannot be conveyed to others, whereas in German, Erfahrungen
implies something like “lessons that can be drawn from what happened to me”
(and that could be conveyed to others). This is why, in English, one would
normally not speak about “one’s experiences [plural] with vitamin E” or “one’s
experiences [plural] with local firms,” whereas in German, phrases like these
(including Erfahrungen) are very common.
Turning now to Erlebnis, which is not used as a mass noun and for which the
singular is more basic, let us first note the following definition from Wikipedia:
“Das Erlebnis ist ein Ereignis im individuellen Leben eines Menschen, das sich
vom Alltag des Erlebenden so sehr unterscheidet, dass es ihm lange im Gedächt-
nis bleibt” (‘The Erlebnis is an event in the individual life of a person that is so
different from this person’s daily life that it remains in memory for a long time’).
This is followed by two helpful comments:
Erlebnisse können befriedigender (z. B. Teilnahme an einer Feier, Sex), aufregen-

der (ein Abenteuer oder eine Reise) oder traumatisierender (Opfer eines Verbre-
chens) Natur sein. (‘Erlebnisse [plural] can be satisfying [e.g., participation in a
celebration; sex], exciting [e.g., an adventure or a trip], or traumatizing [e.g., victim
of a crime’]).Ein Erlebnis unterscheidet sich vom Ereignis dadurch, dass es vorran-
gig vom Erlebenden selbst als besonders empfunden wird. (‘An Erlebnis differs
from an event in that it is perceived primarily by the undergoer him/herself as
something special’).
As these explanations from Wikipedia make clear, an Erlebnis refers to a special

event in a person’s life that is linked at the time with some emotion and is remem-
bered later. This is quite different from an Erfahrung, which has to do with knowl-
edge rather than feeling and does not have to be perceived as special and highly
personal. To give the English reader a feel for the German concept of Erlebnis
I present five examples from the Limas corpus (some of them are fairly long):
An einem Nachmittag hatte ich mit dem besagten Herrn ein aufschlußreiches Erlebnis.
(‘One afternoon I had a very revealing Erlebnis with this gentleman.’)
Wie entstehen Zwangsneurosen? Nun, eines weiß man hier mit Sicherheit: Ihr Auslöser ist
immer in Situationen zu suchen, in denen ein Mensch zum erstenmal einem ganz
bestimmten, tiefgreifenden Erlebnis der Verunsicherung ausgesetzt war, dem
Schreckgespenst der Nichtbewältigung. (‘How do compulsions arise? Well, one thing is
certain: the trigger can always be found in situations in which a person encounters for the
first time a profoundly unsettling, nightmarish Erlebnis of being unable to cope.’)
Eine ganz große Freude bemächtigte sich meiner. . . . Es erinnerte mich noch lange Jahre
an dieses besondere jagdliche Erlebnis. (‘A great joy came over me. . . . For many years
this particular hunting Erlebnis kept coming back to me.’)
Man machte dem jetzigen Münchner Weihbischof zum Vorwurf, daß er als Hauptmann der
deutschen Wehrmacht im Juni 1944 in Italien einen Befehl zur Erschießung von Geiseln
weitergab . . . Man kann es ihm glauben, daß er sich juristisch und moralisch schuldlos
wußte . . . und daß ihn dennoch dieses Erlebnis nie mehr zur Ruhe kommen ließ. (‘The
suffragan bishop of Munich was reproached for having, as a captain in the Wehrmacht in
June 1944, passed on an order to shoot hostages . . . Although he felt that he was legally and
morally blameless . . . this Erlebnis continued to disturb him.’)
Die Halluzinationen werden als solche erkannt. Die Einbildungskraft ist gesteigert. Lange
vergangene Erlebnisse können wieder auftauchen und noch einmal durchlebt werden.
(‘The hallucinations are recognized for what they are. The power of imagination is
increased. Long-forgotten Erlebnisse can resurface and be relived.’)
As these examples illustrate, Erlebnis refers to an event perceived as

personal, subjective, special, memorable, and emotional. The last example
highlights the fact that Erlebnis is felt to be semantically related to leben ‘to
live’ and its derivatives (erleben, durchleben). To account for all these aspects
of Erlebnis, I propose the following explication (in this case, I explicate the
singular form, which is semantically more basic than the corresponding plural
form):
Erlebnis (someone’s Erlebnis)
a. something happened to this someone at that time

b. this someone felt something because of it at that time
c. when this someone thought about it afterward,
this someone could think about it like this:
d. “I know how I felt when this was happening to me
e. I have lived for some time
f. many things happened to me during this time
g. not many of these things were like this thing”
h. after things like this happen to someone,
this someone can be because it of not like this someone was before
As these explications and examples show, both Erfahrungen and Erleb-

nisse differ from experiences (as well as from each other) in a number of
respects.
The word Erfahrungen—unlike experiences—has a cumulative and retro-
spective perspective and is similar in this respect to the mass noun Erfahrung (as
well as to the Shakespearean experience). As the data from corpora show, it is
frequently combined with the verb sammeln (‘to gather, to collect’) and also with
adjectives that characterize a whole domain or type, such as chemische (‘chemi-
cal’) Erfahrungen, historische (‘historical’) Erfahrungen, die klinischen (‘clini-
cal’) Erfahrungen, and praktische (‘practical’) Erfahrungen. In English one does
not similarly speak about gathering experiences (or experiences gathered) or
chemical experiences, clinical experiences, and so on. Even when Erfahrung is
used in the singular (eine Erfahrung), this singular form suggests a special case of
Erfahrungen in the plural, which are normally “gathered” (rather like a noodle is
in English a special case of noodles; a horse race, of (horse) races; or a utensil, of
utensils).
Unlike experiences, Erfahrungen are not linked with feelings (whether

bodily or emotional), and while it does imply reflection, it does not imply any
particular thought. Furthermore, while both Erfahrungen and experiences imply
knowledge, in the case of Erfahrungen this knowledge is communicable to other
people.
The word Erlebnis is linked with feeling but—unlike experience(s)—it
implies neither knowledge nor a conscious, contemporaneous thought: “this is
happening to me now.” In addition, Erlebnis implies something special and
something with a long lasting impact, and it is explicitly related to the notion
of a person’s life. Furthermore, the meaning of Erlebnis does not include any
references to sensory prototypes: it has nothing to do with seeing or bodily
feeling, and this is why (as Wittgenstein noted) sensory impressions (Eindrücke)
are more likely to be categorized as Erfahrungen than Erlebnisse.
My claim that the modern meaning of the English experience(s) includes two
(prototypical) “sensory” components is so important for the overall account
proposed here that the arguments in its favor invoked throughout this work
may need to be reviewed. Suppose that, at the end, a reader thinks like this: I
buy the first-person perspective, I buy the conscious thought (i.e., “this is
happening to me now”), and I buy the claim to contemporaneous qualitative
knowledge (i.e., “this someone knew at that time what it was like at that time”)
and also to subsequent qualitative knowledge (i.e., “because of this, this someone
could later know what it was like at that time”). But why should I also buy the
claim that there is an implicit reference to two sensory prototypes: “I know it like
I know what I feel when I feel something in my body” and “I know it like I know
what I see when I see something (with my eyes)”?
There are two main arguments that I want to invoke in favor of this last
claim. The first claim is historical. Even without the two sensory components, the
meaning of the modern English concept of experience(s) as it emerges from the
analysis presented here is so unusual (in both a historical and a cross-linguistic
perspective) that it demands an explanation. I have found such an explanation in
the intellectual revolution that took place in England in the seventeenth century. I
have also shown that in the new discourse of experience that emerged in England
at that time, references to “eye and hand” (as in Hooke and Boyle) and to “see and
feel (touch)” (as in Locke) played an important role and that they shaped a new
perspective on human knowledge—a perspective that the scientists of the Royal
Society called “experimental” and which later came to be known as “empirical.”
It could be claimed, of course, that the “eye and hand” perspective later
disappeared from the modern concept of experience, but such a claim would itself
need to be supported with evidence. My own hypothesis, according to which this
new perspective (which gave birth to the modern English concept of experience)
is still there, gives a simpler overall account. The burden of proof is, I suggest, on
those who might wish to posit a more complex overall picture, with some
references to “see and feel” first coming in and then dropping out.
My second main argument comes from the examination of the range of use
of the modern English word experience(s). To begin with the verb to experience,
the range illustrated in the following sentences is much broader than, for
example, that of the German verbs erfahren and erleben, the French verb
éprouver, and the Russian verbs ispytat’ and perežit’:
She experienced a trauma.

She experienced a death in the family.
She experienced some difficulties.
She experienced a strange sensation in her ears.
She experienced a sense of exhilaration.
She experienced some visual disturbances.
A Nile cruise is the only way to experience the dramatic landscapes and sunsets [of Egypt].
For the first time, she experienced quality musical theater.
Seen from a cross-linguistic perspective, this is a very wide range indeed. Yet few
linguists would be tempted to posit eight different meanings for the verb to
experience in these eight sentences: clearly, this is not a case of multiple polyse-
my but of a wide range of use. Nonetheless, this range is not unlimited. Compare,
for example, the following contrasts in acceptability:
A. She experienced difficulties in breathing/walking.

B. ? She experienced difficulties in thinking/reasoning/meeting people.
Why is it that one does not find sentences like B in English corpora, whereas one
finds sentences like A? My explanation is that breathing and walking are physical
activities, compatible with a sensory basis implied by the word experience,
whereas thinking, reasoning, and meeting people are not.
The same explanation applies to the boundaries of the range of the noun
experience. For example, common German phrases like praktische und theore-
tische Erfahrung (lit. ‘practical and theoretical experience’) and die praktischen
und theoretischen Erfahrungen (lit. ‘practical and theoretical experiences’) can
hardly be translated into English with the word experience: in English, theoreti-
cal experience sounds like an oxymoron (as does theoretical experiences).
The reason is, I suggest, that the (modern) English experience is seen as
necessarily embodied and that the two prototypes of “eye and hand” (see and
feel) (touch) are part of this word’s meaning.
The German Erfahrung includes no such references to ‘embodiedness’, to
“eye and hand” (see and touch), and this is why theoretische Erfahrung does not
sound like an oxymoron in German. Once again, this reference to “eye and hand”
(see and touch) is a unique feature of the English concept—a concept that
epitomizes “British empiricism” and the folk philosophy born from it and
transmitted through the English language.
Near my house in Canberra there is a massage parlor with a big sign out
front: “The ultimate massage experience.” According to several German con-
sultants, it would be difficult to render the meaning of this sign in German: There
is no “Erfahrung” (no abstract knowledge) in a “massage experience,” and for at
least some consultants the sensuous implications of the English phrase appear to
be at odds with the emotional and potentially life-changing implications of

Erlebnis. In English, however, the bodily feeling of a massage easily lends itself
to a cognitive perspective: in the Anglo cultural tradition, the idea that knowledge
derives from the senses makes perfect sense.
Some of my German consultants report that for them, the use of Erlebnis in
the hypothetical advertising phrase das ultimative Massageerlebnis would be
fine. It needs to be noted, therefore, that if a massage is being sold as an
“Erlebnis,” this is not done on the same basis as when it is being sold as an
“experience.” (As one consultant put it, “the word Massageerlebnis promises me
something that will change me considerably.”) The fact is that one can’t say in
German *ich weiss aus Erlebnis (or aus eigenen Erlebnisse) ‘I know from
Erlebnis’ (or ‘from my own Erlebnisse): an Erlebnis is not seen as a source of
knowledge. Ich weiss aus Erfahrung (‘I know from Erfahrung’) would be fine
because Erfahrung is indeed seen as a source of knowledge, but a massage cannot
be described as an Erfahrung.11
The thought reflected in the sign that promises “the ultimate massage
experience” is a thoroughly Anglo thought that is unsayable in German, French,
Russian, and Polish and reflects one of the most basic assumptions of Anglo-
English folk philosophy—an assumption that links knowledge with a sensory
basis. “Empirical science” is, of course, assumed to be communicable and
interpersonally verifiable, but it is also assumed to be ultimately derived from,
and verifiable through, individual sense experiences.
The article on Erfahrung in Wikipedia uses the phrase reine Erfahrung (‘pure
Erfahrung’) to explain the philosophical view that experience is the source of all
knowledge. As the article makes clear, the implied contrast is between Erfahrung
and Denken (‘thinking’). In English, however, one would not say “pure experi-
ence”; one would simply say “experience” because the word experience itself
includes in its meaning a reference to embodied sensory knowledge based not on
abstract thinking but on something that happens to a person in a real, here-and-
now situation and is mentally noted at the time (“this is happening to me now”).
According to the worldview reflected in the English word experience, the
two sensory prototypes of see and feel (touch) provide the gold standard of
knowledge, which is secure and reliable—at least as much as human knowledge
can (according to that worldview) ever be. When I see something, I know what I
see; when I feel something in my body, I know what I feel. No other knowledge
(or supposed knowledge) can claim as much certainty and epistemological
security as knowledge based on these two prototypes—or on something compa-
rable to them, such as other senses that provide information about the here and
now. Those other senses can include not only strictly bodily faculties (like
hearing and smell) but also (at least for some speakers of English) a spiritual
sense, a religious sense, a moral sense, and so on; but they cannot include abstract
reasoning or theoretical thinking. This is why one cannot have a “theoretical
experience” in English, as one can have a “theoretische Erfahrung” in German.
The gold standard of Anglo folk philosophy is the standard of seeing and
touching, eye and hand—or so we are led to conclude from the semantic analysis
of the English word experience.
2.11. Concluding Remarks: The History of Ideas and

the Meaning of Words
In his Locke Dictionary, in a passage partially quoted earlier, Yolton (1993, 75)
writes:
Appeals to experience . . . run throughout the Essay on a number of different topics.

Locke’s general programme in that work was to substitute for the claim of innate
ideas and truths an experience-generated alternative, an alternative which followed
in the footsteps of the Royal Society and Bacon. . . . Berkeley and Hume carried
forward this stress on experience-based knowledge; as did Condillac in France.
If one considers the role that the word experience plays in English today—in
philosophy, religion, science, and also in social life and everyday discourse—in
the light of those earlier seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophical dis-
cussions, one is amazed at the extent of their influence on the English language
and on the ways of thinking reflected in it and transmitted through it. To be sure,
British empiricists were not alone in stressing the importance of experience-
based knowledge, and Condillac for one may also have been wholeheartedly
committed to this idea. But if one looks at contemporary French and compares it
with contemporary English, it becomes clear that Condillac had no strong
influence on the shape of the French language in this respect, whereas Locke
and his fellow empiricists in England and Scotland had a huge influence on the
shape of English. A statement like that used in one of the epigraphs to this chapter
(“Science aims to understand the world of experience”) could not be replicated in
French or, I believe, in any other language. The reason is not only that other
languages have not created word meanings that correspond to those of the
English experience but also that they have not created a word-meaning
corresponding to science, either: The English word science, which excludes
humanities, logic, and mathematics, is itself saturated with empiricism.
In German, the word Wissenschaft (from wissen ‘to know’) focuses on the
systematic presentation of knowledge, and its two branches—Naturwissenschaf-
ten and Geisteswissenschaften (from Natur ‘nature’ and Geist ‘mind, spirit’)—do
not privilege empirical, sense-derived knowledge over any other kind. French,
too, has les sciences exactes (‘exact sciences’) and les sciences d’homme (‘human
sciences’). But in English, knowledge based on experience achieved such great
prestige and status in the edifice of human knowledge that it shaped the modern
concept of science itself.
Thus, the statement “science aims at studying the world of experience” is not
only untranslatable but also somewhat tautological. It is also less than fully clear.
Experience is a word linked with a major cultural theme in modern Anglo culture,
and like many other such words—for example, evidence, privacy, and reason-
able—it is polysemous. Which of the meanings of experience discussed here
could be intended in the statement that describes science as aiming at “under-
standing the world of experience”?
Clearly, not experience in the sense of knowledge accumulated through

practice and not in the sense of knowledge accumulated in the course of living
and having things happen to us. Presumably, not in Martin Amis’s sense (where
“experience” is seen as a totality of what one has “experienced” in one’s life) and
not in William James’s sense, which includes “religious experience.” Is it, then,
experience in Locke’s sense? But Locke’s experience was not, as we have seen,
restricted to knowledge derived from the senses. As Yolton emphasizes in his
Locke Dictionary, “there was a tendency in writers after Locke to overlook his
reflective experience as a source of ideas and knowledge; this was especially true
with Condillac and late French historians of philosophy. The concept of experi-
ence for Locke was broad, general and diverse” (Yolton 1993, 75). Does this
mean that Locke’s concept of experience was broader than that invoked in the
Oxford Companion to Philosophy’s characterization of science?
Recall also the same Companion’s definition of the term empirical: “based on
experience.” Experience in what sense? Would what Yolton calls (with reference
to Locke) “reflective experience” also be a basis for empirical knowledge? Would
William James’s study of the varieties of religious experience be recognized as
empirical? Without some answers to such questions, a definition of the word
empirical based on the word experience can hardly be regarded as helpful.
In his Social History of Truth Shapin writes:
English “moderns” repeatedly insisted upon the epistemic inadequacy of testimony

and authority. Truth could be guaranteed by relying on individual direct experience
and individual reason; reliance upon other’s testimony was a sure way to error. That
much is well known, and that much is what allows present-day “moderns” to speak
about seventeenth-century individualistic empiricists as “the founders of moderni-
ty.” (Shapin 1994, xxix)
Thus, “modernity” can be seen as founded on the concept of experience

forged by the seventeenth-century scientists and philosophers. Anglo modernity,
that is, modernity as construed through the English language. Given the role of
English in today’s increasingly global world (including current “knowledge-
making” practices and what Shapin calls “epistemological decorum”), it is
important that we clearly understand the cultural and historical underpinnings
of the Anglo-English concepts of experience.
Let me close this inquiry into the meaning of experience with some method-
ological reflections on the role of introspection in semantic analysis and the need
to combine introspection with other methods.
First, introspection is absolutely indispensable, and nobody understood this
better than Locke, who wrote:
It is not easy for the mind to put off those confused notions and prejudices it has imbibed
from custom, inadvertency, and common conversation. It requires pains and assiduity to
examine its [the mind’s] ideas, till it resolves them into those clear and distinct simple
ones, out of which they are compounded. . . . [Yet] till a man doth this . . . he builds upon
floating and uncertain principles. (Locke 1975 [1690], 180–81, Essay 2.13.27)
As this quote illustrates, Locke not only understood the importance of

introspection for “human understanding” but also appreciated, better than any-
body else, the effort required for this process to yield fruit. It is commonly
believed that a native speaker, when asked what a word means, is able, after a
moment’s introspection, to supply a valid answer. In fact, this is not what
introspection as a path to semantic analysis is all about. As Locke saw, to be
fruitful, introspection needs to be deep, rigorous, and prolonged. It is also, I
would add, a process that needs to be shared with others and must proceed by trial
and error; thus, by consensus it gradually emerges from a collective effort of at
least two (and preferably more) native speakers.
However, as we understand today better than Locke did, even a prolonged,
systematic, and shared process of introspection is not enough. First, since this
process must proceed through mental experimentation, it needs to rely on an
established methodology: Above all, there must be an independently estab-
lished set of primes—in Leibniz’s phrase, an “alphabet of human thoughts”—
in terms of which successive semantic hypotheses can be formulated and
tested. There must also be some established strategies for determining a
word’s polysemy, since without sorting out a word’s different meanings, no
meanings can be identified at all—whether in a synchronic or a diachronic
perspective. In particular, the different meanings of a polysemic cluster are
closely related (as in the case of the English word experience) if they cannot
be distinguished from one another without an independently established set of
primes.
For a language like English, with good historical records reaching back
several centuries, the use of a historical perspective, in addition to a synchronic
one, is also very important, for at least two reasons. The first is cultural: to
appreciate the cultural underpinnings of the present-day English lexicon, we
must understand how present-day meanings developed out of the older ones
and also how some older meanings coexist with more recent ones in the collective
consciousness of English speakers. The second reason is semantic: to draw a
plausible map of today’s meanings of a cultural keyword like experience, it is
highly desirable to be able to construct a plausible account of the successive
changes in this word’s semantic history.
It is also good to be able to place an English cultural keyword such as
experience in a comparative perspective and in particular, to compare it with
its closest counterparts in historically and culturally close European languages,
especially French and German. Often it is particularly useful to compare the
meanings of the faux amis (‘false friends’), such as the English experience and
the French experience.
Last but certainly not least, lexical and cultural semantics finds an invaluable
resource in databases such as the COBUILD corpus. The more culturally important a
word is, the more likely it is that it will be linked with a whole web of interrelated
meanings. It may be impossible to sort out such a web without inspecting literally
hundreds of examples. For this, modern corpora such as COBUILD are invaluable.
At the same time, it would be an illusion to think that a large corpus such as
COBUILD can do the semanticists’ work for them. New resources such as databases
and new methodologies based on them make quick progress possible. But
nothing will replace and supersede either the Lockean methodology of examining
one’s own thoughts and understanding (cf. Essay 2.1.5) or the Leibnizian meth-
odology of experimenting with different configurations of universal semantic
primes—the “letters” of the “alphabet of human thoughts.”
3
Evidence: Words, Ideas, and

Cultural Practices
In the word evidence, together with its conjugates, to evidence, evidencing,

evidenced, and evidentiary, the English language possesses an instrument of
discourse peculiar to itself: at least as compared with the Latin and French
languages. In those languages the stock of words applicable to this purpose is
confined to the Latin verb probare and its conjugates: a cluster of words with
which the English language is provided, in addition to those which, as just
observed, are peculiar to itself.
(Jeremy Bentham 1978 [1827] vol. 1, 17)
3.1. Evidence as a Key Cultural Concept in Modern

English
Evidence is a keyword in present-day English. In many domains, it is almost

impossible to engage in a serious discussion in English without drawing on it at
some point. I illustrate this, first of all, with two brief exchanges from Australian
TV program transcripts:
1) 7:30 report: TV current affairs program (about Dick Smith, the head of the
Australian Civil Aviation Safety Authority, titled “A Turbulent Career,” March 23,
1999):
DICK SMITH : I think it was cancelled because of pressure from outside forces.
I think there was a tremendous industrial issue against change. . . .
DAVID HARDAKER : John Woods was attacked for being resistant to change.
94
EVIDENCE : WORDS, IDEAS, AND CULTURAL PRACTICES 95
JOHN WOODS : It was a convenient smear. . . . Where’s the evidence? It’s easy to say
these things.
DICK SMITH : I have evidence.
2) Lateline: current affairs TV program (a discussion including former British

foreign secretary Robin Cook and two members of the British Parliament’s
Foreign Affairs Committee, June 17, 2003):
COMMITTEE MEMBER : But you accept that absence of evidence, I think it’s Donald
Rumsfeld’s phrase, is not in itself evidence of absence?
ROBIN COOK : No, but the absence of evidence is a bloody thin ground on which to
go to war.
OTHER COMMITTEE MEMBER : You never produced any evidence to show
containment was working.
ROBIN COOK : I think that the evidence is already there on the ground in the absence
of any chemical or biological weapons or long-range missiles or weapons capable
of being fired in forty-five minutes or a rebuilt chemical factory—none of which
have been found. That to me does suggest that containment was working quite well.
As these two examples illustrate, there is in present-day English a whole rich
discourse based on the word evidence and its collocations. In particular, discus-
sions, debates, and polemical exchanges often hinge on the use of this crucial and,
as Bentham noted, uniquely English concept. In section 4 I cite more examples of
the use of evidence in argumentative interpersonal exchanges. Here I illustrate
the significance of evidence in contemporary Anglo discourse with examples
from a polemical article in the New Republic Online. It is not a scientific article
but an “opinion piece,” titled “The Case against Intelligent Design: The Faith
That Dare Not Speak Its Name” (Coyne 2005):
Darwin . . . provided voluminous and convincing evidence for them. The weight of
this evidence was so overwhelming that it crushed creationism.
The overwhelming evidence for evolution can be found in many books. . . .
Darwin’s third line of evidence came from biogeography.
In the last 150 years, immense amounts of new evidence have been collected. . . .
But support for the idea of natural selection was not so strong, and Darwin had no
direct evidence for it.
. . . many of the missing links cited by Pandas [book title] as evidence for
supernatural intervention are no longer missing.
In sum, the treatment of the fossil evidence for evolution in Pandas is shoddy
and deceptive.
And what about the strong evidence for evolution from biogeography?
Given the overwhelming evidence for evolution and the lack of evidence for
ID [Intelligent Design], how can intelligent people hold such views? Is their faith so
strong that it blinds them to all evidence?
As these examples illustrate, evidence is a very common word in English (at

least in certain registers), as well as a very important one. In this particular article
(twenty-four pages long), there are no fewer than seventeen references to evi-
dence, and this word plays a crucial role in the argument: in a sense everything
depends on it. As the examples in this article also illustrate, evidence has a very
rich phraseology: convincing evidence, the weight of evidence, direct evidence,

strong evidence, overwhelming evidence, well supported by evidence, new evi-
dence, to collect evidence, to give no evidence, no direct evidence for, to
deal with evidence, much of the evidence, lack of evidence, and so on. The
most characteristic grammatical frames of evidence in the key modern sense
include evidence for, evidence that, evidence in favor of (or against). Equally
characteristic is the modern collocation conclusive evidence (the earliest example
cited in the OED is dated 1768). Two characteristic examples (also from the
OED):
Conclusive evidence of the impermeability of the strata. (Nature 1889)

Experiments have been carried out which gave conclusive evidence that positrons are
ejected from lead by the ª-radiation. (Science 1933)
Given how crucial evidence is to contemporary Anglo-English discourse, it

is truly remarkable that other European languages have no word for evidence.
The best that the bilingual dictionaries can offer as the supposed equivalent of the
English evidence is words like preuves (French), prove (Italian), Beweise (Ger-
man), or dowody (Polish), that is, words that correspond in fact to the English
word proof. Indeed, these words would normally be used to translate English
sentences that include the word evidence (sentences such as those cited here from
the article in the New Republic Online).
In fact, however, evidence does not mean the same as proof, and to “prove”
something is not the same as to “provide evidence” for it. “Proofs” can be given
in mathematics or in logic on the strength of pure thinking. Evidence, however,
requires more than thinking—it also requires some basis in what people can see,
hear, touch, or smell. It requires an empirical basis, that is, a basis in empirical
reality.
It is this empirical character of the concept of evidence, encoded in the
word evidence as it is used in contemporary English, which makes the English
evidence and the French evidence “false friends” (des faux amis), as recognized
in the English-French Dictionnaire des faux amis (Van Roey, Swallow, and
Granger 1998). Essentially, the French word, in contrast to the English one, has
no empirical implications—a fact reflected in its definition in the French
Academy Dictionary (Dictionnaire de l’Academie): “evidence: the quality of
that which commands the mind’s immediate assent by imposing itself in a clear
and distinct manner” (“Qualité de ce qui emporte l’assentiment immédiat de
l’esprit en s’imposant à lui de façon claire et distincte”), and earlier, in Littre’s
(1963 [1860]) definition: “evidence: the property of that which is evident; the
notion of a truth so perfect that it does not require another proof” (“Caractère de
ce qui est évident; notion si parfaite d’une vérité qu’elle n’a pas besoin d’autre
preuve”).
As these definitions suggest, the French evidence focuses on the clarity and
indeed obviousness of whatever it is (that “commands the mind’s immediate
assent”). The English evidence requires both more and less: more because it
demands some basis in empirical reality, and less because it does not have to
command “the mind’s immediate assent”: in fact, in English, evidence can be

expected to be critically examined rather than immediately assented to.
What exactly is the difference between “reality” and “empirical reality”?
And why is it that mathematics and logic do not seem to deal with the latter?
Presumably, the main reason is that mathematics and logic rely (or are seen as
relying) on pure thinking. “Empirical reality,” on the other hand, presupposes
some basis in people’s experience, which includes things that happen to people
or, more precisely, things that people can know because of what has happened to
their bodies (and not solely because of what they arrived at by thinking).
Emphasizing the influence of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British
empiricism on the general intellectual climate of the time, historian Felipe
Fernández-Armesto (1998, 153) writes: “Newton’s work was both genuinely
pioneering and embedded in the broader context of English and Scottish thought
of the time: empiricism—the doctrine that reality is observable and verifiable by
sense-perception. The success of science surely made possible this distrust of
metaphysics.”
I suggest that this is where the unique Anglo concept of evidence (as we
know it in nineteenth- and twentieth-century English) was born and nourished: in
the intellectual climate created by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English
and Scottish thought. Remarkably, the modern concept of evidence, born in
British philosophy, law, and science (see section 3.4), has become one of the
key concepts in Anglo culture, and evidence has become almost a household
word in modern English. It is certainly deeply entrenched in law, science,
research of any kind (including in the humanities), and journalism, not to mention
detective stories and the like. By its salient presence in English discourse, the
word evidence seems to constantly send the message that “thinking” is not
enough for “knowing” and that something else is needed: either seeing or
something similar to it (sensory perception). Every time this word is used, this
message is reinforced.
Early British empiricists did not see knowledge as an alternative to truth, and
Locke, for example, “explicitly aimed to defeat the despairing idea ‘that either
there is no such thing as truth at all’; or that mankind hath no sufficient means to
attain a certain knowledge of it” (Honderich 1995, 496). At the same time, Locke
made “truth” depend on testing (“trial”) and “evidence,” saying, for example, that
“trial and examination must give [truth] price” (ibid.). He gave a key role in this
context to “the evidence of the senses.” As the empiricist ideas spread, however,
references to “truth” seem to have gradually declined, and the emphasis was
placed more and more on experience, observation, facts, and “evidence.” David
Hume, for example, declared in his Enquiry concerning Human Understanding
that “A wise man . . . proportions his belief to the evidence” (Hume 2000, 84).
But what exactly did Locke mean by “evidence” when he expressed his full
confidence in the “evidence of the senses”? And what did he mean when he
affirmed that a wise man “proportions his belief to the evidence”? Was the word
evidence used at that time in the same sense in which it is used now? Fernández-
Armesto says, for example, that “Locke . . . adopted a crudely commonsensical
attitude to the evidence of our senses” (1998, 153) and that “experimental
evidence collected by Newton himself helped to suggest the limitations of

sensations” (ibid., 155). But did Newton talk about his experiments as “evidence”
for this or that view? Did he use the word evidence at all, and if he did, was he
using it in our sense of the word?
To answer such questions, we need to engage in rigorous semantic
analysis, not only synchronic but also diachronic (historical). This requires a
suitable methodology, and again, such a methodology is available in the NSM
approach.
But while universal semantic primes are a reliable analytical tool for recon-
structing the meaning of words, expressions, or constructions from earlier periods,
it is important to emphasize that any such reconstruction is only hypothetical. In a
sense, any semantic analysis is only hypothetical: we seek to propose a set of
explications that best account for the observable usage of a word or an expression.
In synchronic analysis, however, our explications can also be tested against the
intuitions of the native speakers. In historical semantics, this is not possible: there
are no native speakers of earlier stages to consult; all we can rely on is the evidence
of the texts and especially of the contexts. At the same time, the meanings of the
words surrounding the one under investigation did not stand still, either, so even
the evidence from collocations must be treated with caution and hermeneutical
suspicion.
A sixteenth- or seventeenth-century sentence containing the word evidence
may sound to us perfectly modern, and its meaning there may seem to us quite
clear. But then we must ask ourselves: why was it also possible for the same
writer to use evidence in contexts in which we could not possibly use it today?
We need to arrive at an explication that (barring polysemy) would be substitut-
able for the word as defined in all contexts and not only in those in which it could
still be used today.
In a sense, difficulties in doing historical semantics are familiar to anyone
who has ever seriously engaged in it. For NSM semanticists, however, they are
particularly acute, given the severe methodological constraints under which its
practitioners work: the use of a highly restricted metalexicon, the ideal of
substitutability in context, and a total ban on technical vocabulary in semantic
descriptions. Arguably, however, it is precisely these methodological constraints
that give us the best chance to gain some insight into the ways of thinking of the
past generations: if we can assume anything about their conceptual resources at
all, it is safer to assume that they too had those concepts that can be found in all
languages today than that they had any others—in particular, any language- and
culture-specific concepts of present-day English.
For example, if we want to understand what sixteenth-, seventeenth-, or
eighteenth-century writers meant by “evidence,” it is more helpful to use simple
words in our explications—words like know, think, say, and see (which, evidence
suggests, have exact semantic equivalents in all languages)—rather than to rely
on complex and highly language-specific words of present-day English such as
fact, empirical, perception, or evidence itself.
The emergence of the modern concept of evidence (as just used in the phrase
“evidence suggests”) is as important for the history of philosophy and science as
it is for the history of the English language and Anglo culture. Philosopher Ian
Hacking has written about it as follows:
Many modern philosophers claim that probability is a relation between an hypothe-

sis and the evidence for it. This claim, true or false, conceals an explanation as to the
late emergence of probability: the relevant concept of evidence did not exist
beforehand. The way in which it came into being has much to do with the specific
way that the dual concept of probability emerged. One of the preconditions for
probability was the formation of this concept of evidence.
What concept of evidence? Crudely, that which some philosophers have called
“inductive evidence.” (Hacking 1975, 31)
So when did the concept of evidence, which is crucial (according to Hacking)1 to

both “probability” and “induction,” emerge in British philosophy and, more
generally, in the world of thought associated with the English language? Hacking
links the emergence of “induction” and, by implication, of “evidence” with
Joseph Glanvill’s Vanity of Dogmatizing, which was first published in 1661:
“Why is the problem of induction such a newcomer on the scene? There is a
simplistic answer. Until the seventeenth century there was no concept of evidence
with which to pose the problem of induction!” (Hacking 1975, 31). Hacking calls
his own answer “simplistic” but also “partially right”:
Despite such intimations as one may find in Glanvill in 1661, it is significant, and
explicable, that the problem of induction had to wait in the wings some eighty years
after the birth-decade of probability. . . . Glanvill merely raises the flag over a new
philosophical continent, discovered at the time of probability, but which cannot be
exploited until other events have occurred. But our simplistic answer is partially
right. A concept of evidence is a necessary condition for the stating of a problem of
induction. A problem of induction does not occur in the earlier annals of philosophy
because there was no concept of evidence available. (ibid.)
Hacking does not explain exactly what he means when he says that “the
relevant concept of evidence did not exist beforehand”: does he mean that no
individual philosopher thought in this way or that there was no such concept in
the public domain, that is, no such shared concept?
Unfortunately, historians of ideas seldom make such distinctions and seldom
pay attention to John Locke’s profound insight that, while “simple ideas” can be
compounded at will by individual thinkers, it is the word that can give such a
conceptual compound stability and make it a shared tool for thought and com-
munication. A combination of semantic components created by an individual
speaker “would cease again, were there not something that did, as it were, hold it
together, and keep the parts from scattering” (Locke 1959 [1690], vol. 2, 50).
Locke’s metaphor for this stabilizing role of the word was a knot: “Though
therefore it be the mind that makes the collection, it is the name which is as it
were the knot that ties them fast together” (ibid.).
This book is based on the Lockean assumption that words matter and that
concepts encoded in the meaning of words provide shared conceptual “knots” for
a given speech community. This does not mean that there can be no concepts that
are not lexically encoded; rather, it means that the lexical encoding of certain
concepts provides evidence for their status as “knots” in the shared conceptual
framework of a given community of discourse.
The word evidence, too, is such a knot (or rather a set of knots): each
meaning of evidence, at each stage of its semantic development, has acted as
such a knot for speakers of English.
3.2. An Outline of the Semantic History of Evidence
3.2.1. From certainty to doubt: An overview

The semantic history of the English word evidence provides important evidence
for the changes in the ways of thinking about knowledge that were predominant
among English speakers between the sixteenth and the twenty-first centuries.
In tracing this history in a broad outline, I start with the entry for evidence in the
Oxford English Dictionary (OED).
The OED ascribes to evidence nine different meanings, subdivided in
some cases by means of letters and united in overarching categories in other
cases by means of Roman numerals. The two main categories emerging from
this rather confusing presentation are the following two (labeled by the OED
as 1 and 5):
1. The quality or condition of being evident; clearness, evidentness.

5. Grounds for belief; testimony or facts to prove or disapprove any conclusions.
In addition, the OED mentions what it calls “legal uses of 5.” Of these, the main
one is defined as follows: “Information, whether in the form of personal testimo-
ny, the language of documents, or the production of material objects, that is given
in legal investigation, to establish the fact or point in question.”
The first of the two main groups (1 and 5) singled out by the OED is
illustrated by examples like the following two:
Certain Truths, that have in them so much of native Light or Evidence . . . it cannot be
hidden. (1665)
So evident that we require no grounds at all for believing them save the ground of their
own very evidence. (1882)
The available examples of this first category appear to be fairly homogeneous

semantically, and the meaning in question appears to be straightforwardly
derived from the meaning of the adjective evident, which can be described
along the following lines: “It is evident ¼ people can’t not know it.” Evidence
is no longer used in this sense in contemporary English, and this meaning is not of
central interest to this chapter. It needs, however, to be borne in mind if only so
that we do not confuse the other meanings of evidence with it.
To say that this category is fairly homogeneous semantically does not mean
that all of the examples ascribed to it by the OED have exactly the same meaning
or that over the ages there was no semantic development within this category at
all. In fact, as we will see later, evidence in the sense derived from the adjective
evident appears to have changed (probably in the seventeenth century) from
something nongradable (‘the evidentness’) to something that is a matter of degree
(‘the degree of evidentness’). (I return to evidence in the sense of ‘evidentness’
later.) I focus, however, primarily on the second category, which is far less
homogeneous. Since (according to the OED) this category includes examples
ranging in time from 1380 to the present day, the OED appears to imply that,
from the fourteenth century to the present day, there has been some constant
concept of evidence in English and that it can be defined, approximately at least,
as “grounds for belief.”
In fact, as I demonstrate here, such a portrayal misrepresents the facts and
conceals extremely significant shifts and developments. It is true that some
sentences from earlier periods may sound as if the word evidence were used in
them with the same meaning that it has today. Such sentences, however, are
misleading. Since they appear to be compatible with the present-day meaning we
tend to read this meaning into them. When we consider a wider range of examples
from the same period, however, it becomes clear that none of the meanings that
we can plausibly posit for that period are identical with those found in present-
day English.
In sorting out the different meanings lumped together in the putative overall
category “grounds for belief,” I posit five different stages in the semantic
development of evidence, which, I argue, have led to the emergence of the
cultural key concept as we know it in present-day English. These five stages
are not strictly consecutive because at each stage both an older and a more recent
meaning coexist. It is now generally accepted in historical semantics that seman-
tic change is always accompanied by periods of polysemy: different meanings of
a word must coexist for some time, and often they do so for long periods (cf. e.g.,
Traugott and Dasher 2002; Wilkins 1996). Furthermore, while different mean-
ings of a polysemous word differ from each other discretely by the presence or
absence of certain semantic components, the spread of a new meaning is always
gradual (cf. Schuchardt 1972 [1885]) and often imperceptible.
The change of meaning may be particularly hard to notice for those who live
in a period when it occurs if this change involves important cultural concepts like
those encoded in the different meanings of evidence. A semantic change is in
such cases the result of changes in discourse practices, which both reflect and
promote new ways of thinking. As a result of gradually spreading new ways of
thinking and speaking, a word (e.g., evidence) starts to appear more and more
often in new contexts and in new collocations, and some of the meanings initially
conveyed by those new contexts and collocations rub off on the keyword itself,
first as invited inferences and ultimately as part of the new semantic invariant.
For example, in English the word drink has long been used in contexts
referring to alcoholic beverages and often co-occurred with words like wine,
beer, and bottle. As a result, it acquired at some stage a permanent association
with alcohol, which led to a new meaning, as in “I have been drinking hard”
(1611, OED) or “They sit long and drink soundly” (1630, OED). This new
meaning coexists, of course, in modern English with the more general one that
can apply to any liquid.
In the case of evidence, different meanings have coexisted for centuries.
Nonetheless, we can identify a certain general direction of semantic develop-
ment, and broadly speaking, the five stages can be presented in a chronological
order. In a highly simplified way, they can be described as follows:
Stage I (roughly, fourteenth–eighteenth centuries)

Evidence means something comparable to what Shakespeare called “an ocular
proof” (from Latin oculus ‘eye’). When Othello says to Iago “give me the ocular
proof,” he is asking for something that he can see with his own eyes, that is (to his
mind), something irrefutable. When the scientist Joseph Priestley writes in 1777
about “the form in which evidence is presented in Euclid,” he is still using the word
evidence in reference to something that is absolutely irrefutable, as the testimony of
one’s own eyes is. The assumption is that the testimony of one’s own eyes cannot be
doubted: an “ocular proof” is as reliable as a mathematical or logical proof.
Stage II (roughly, seventeenth–nineteenth centuries)
At this stage evidence means, generally, a source of certain and reliable
knowledge—as certain and reliable as knowledge based on sight (“people can
know it well”)—not quite “a proof” but more than “grounds for belief.” For
example, when Milton writes polemically (in 1644) of “the clear evidence of the
Scripture,” he appears to have in mind “what people can know well” rather than
“what people can’t not know,” as he is arguing against Catholics, who in his view
reject that “clear evidence” in favor of “the unwieldy volumes of tradition.”
A paradigmatic example of such certain and reliable knowledge was the

testimony of trustworthy eyewitnesses, first in law and subsequently, in other
domains. In particular, as Shapiro (2000, 119) notes, reference to eyewitness
testimony was a commonplace in the language of English naturalists associated
with the Royal Society. Here, too, the adjective ocular was sometimes used.
“Naturalists routinely referred to ‘ocularly manifest’ observations or to ‘ocular
demonstration[s] . . . of matter of fact.’ Royal Society members witnessed Valen-
tine Greatsake’s inexplicable curves in order to ‘have an ocular Testimony of
Truth’ as ‘eyewitnesses of what was done’” (ibid., 120).
But there is an important difference between an “ocular proof ”—the irrefut-
able testimony of one’s own eyes (Stage I)—and an “ocular testimony” of
trustworthy eyewitnesses (Stage II).
Stage III (roughly, late seventeenth–nineteenth centuries)

At this stage, evidence means, in general, a source of knowledge comparable to
knowledge based on sight. This knowledge is no longer seen as clear and certain,
but neither is it thought of as mere “grounds for belief ”: it is still a matter of what
people “can know,” though not necessarily “can know well.”
Stage IV (roughly, late eighteenth–twenty-first centuries)
At this stage evidence begins to be understood as, roughly speaking, “grounds
for belief.” The implication is that it is or can be solid grounds and that a belief
based on it can be compared with one based on sight. It is no longer, however, a

matter of knowledge but a matter of belief.
Stage V (roughly, nineteenth–twenty-first centuries)
This stage, which prevails in present-day English, represents a further
weakening of the confidence that people place in evidence. As in stage IV,
evidence is seen as “grounds for belief” (not a matter of knowledge), but
those grounds are no longer expected to be solid and trustworthy. “Evidence” is
now seen as “possible grounds for belief”—possible but always questionable, in
fact, grounds for a hypothesis, a conjecture, or a claim rather than for justifiable
belief.
Each of these five stages in the evolution of evidence can be linked with three
semantic components, the first of which I represent as follows (it refers here to the
proposition that is being asserted):
I. people can’t not know that it is true

II. people can know well that it is true/that it is like this
III. people can know that it is like this
IV. people can think that it is like this
V. people can say that it is like this
The second component, essentially the same in all cases, is causal and refers in
some way to the prototype of knowledge based on seeing. Initially, it can be
formulated as “because they know something else (well).” The third component
reflects different attitudes toward the reliability of what people can see. Those
different attitudes can be portrayed as follows:
I. when people see something

they cannot not know some things about it because of this
II. when people see something, if they see it well,
they can know some things about it well because of this
III. when people see something
they can know some things about it because of this
IV. when people see something
they can think some things about it because of this
V. when people see something
they can say some things about it because of this
In what follows, I discuss the five stages one by one under the following
headings: Stage I, “ocular proof” or the equivalent; Stage II, clear and certain
knowledge; Stage III, knowledge based on observation; Stage IV, grounds for
belief; and Stage V, support for a claim. Fuller linguistic evidence for these
stages is presented later (in section 3.3). In sections 3.2.2 to 3.2.7 I present
some examples with brief discussion and very selective supporting evidence.
Here I point out that the set of explications proposed in this section (3.2.1)
constitutes an exercise in internal reconstruction and that the coherence of the
overall picture emerging from it is in itself an argument in favor of this

reconstruction.
Apart from the internal coherence of the overall picture presented here and
from the linguistic evidence (presented more fully in section 3.3), I draw to
some extent on what some of the most influential philosophers of different
periods—in particular, John Locke and David Hume—say about evidence. My
primary concern is, of course, the history of English as spoken by “ordinary
people” rather than the views or the linguistic usage of philosophers. But in the
case of English, these things are closely related. It is well known that philoso-
phers like Locke and Hume, who were widely read and admired in Britain
and America, significantly influenced the intellectual climate of their times
and have shaped, to some extent, the conceptual vocabulary of English
(cf. Bauman and Briggs 2003; Porter 2000; Ashcraft 1991; Wierzbicka
2006). The changes in the meaning of key English words like evidence reflect
this influence.
3.2.2. Stage I: The “ocular proof ” or equivalent

Stage I can be illustrated with examples like the following ones:
The deeds that Christ did been [are] unsuspect evidence that Christ is both God and man.
(Wycliff 1871 [ca. 1380], 107)
This horse . . . was to Troy an evidence of love and peace for evermore. (Gower 1901
[1390], Book 1p67)
There is no evidence whereof to know a difference between the drunken and the wode
[madman]. (ibid., Book 6 p182)
But it ought to be . . . as we shall prove by open evidence through God’s help.
(A Compendious Old Treatise showing . . . that we ought to have the scripture in English
[Tyndale 1450 in Arber 1871, 172])
Angelical actions may therefore be reduced into three general kinds; first, most delectable
love arising from the visible apprehension of the purity, glory, and beauty of God
invisible . . . ; secondly, adoration grounded upon the evidence of the greatness of
God . . . ; thirdly, imitation bred by the presence of his exemplary goodness. (The first
Book of Ecclesiastical Polity [about angels]) (Hooker 1969 [1594], 55–56)
Evidence in this sense is closely related to evidence in the sense of “evidentness.”

For example, because of Christ’s deeds it is “evident” that Christ is both God and
man; the Trojan horse is, so to speak, “an ocular proof” of the Greeks’ love and
goodwill; God’s greatness is “evident” (because of his creation); and the “open
evidence” will make “evident” the truth that the writer seeks to establish. In
another passage in Gower (1901[1390], book 4, 325), the allegorical character
called Sloth is accompanied by his secretary, called Negligence, “who would not
“look” [i.e., notice] his evidence,” in other words, who would not notice what is
obvious.
In Wycliff’s translation of the Bible, evidence translates the Latin evidentia,
and the context makes it clear that it refers to something obvious and undeniable
(as it were, an “ocular proof ”), as in the following passage, which I quote in three
versions: Wycliff’s, the Vulgate’s, and a modern English translation:
But the spirit of almighty God made great evidence of his showing, so that all that
were hardy to obey to him, falling down by the virtue of God, together turning in
unbinding, or unstrength, and inward dread. Forsooth some horse appeared to him,
having a dreadful sitter, best adorned; and he with fierceness or birr, rushed the
former feet to Heliodorus; forsooth he that sat on him was seen for to have golden
arms. (Wycliff’s Bible, with modernized spelling)
Sed spiritus omnipotentis Dei magnam fecit suae ostensionis evidentiam,
ita ut omnes qui ausi fuerant parere ei, ruentes Dei virtute in dissolutionem et
formidinem converterentur. Apparuit enim illis quidam equus terribilem habens
sessorem, optimis operimentis adornatus isque cum impetu Heliodoro priores calces
elisit: qui autem ei sedebat, videbatur arma habere aurea. (the Vulgate)
But just as he was approaching the treasury with his bodyguards, the Lord
of spirits who holds all power manifested himself in so striking a way that those
who had been bold enough to follow Heliodorus were panic stricken at God’s power
and fainted away in terror. There appeared to them a richly caparisoned horse,
mounted by a dreadful rider. Charging furiously, the horse attacked Heliodorus
with its front hoofs. The rider was seen to be wearing golden armor. (New American
Bible)
The richly adorned horse and the dreadful rider who are seen wearing golden
armor are cited here as “ocular proof” of the “Lord of spirits” manifesting himself
in an obvious and striking way.
This early meaning of evidence appears to be quite close to the meaning of
the French word evidence, whose definition in the Academy French Dictionary
(Dictionnaire de l’Academie) was quoted earlier. There is no evidence that the
meaning of evidence has changed substantially over the centuries, and the
definition of evidence offered in Furretière’s dictionary of 1690 is quite similar
to those quoted earlier from the current Academy Dictionary (online) and from
Littré (1963[1860]): “The quality of things which makes them clearly visible to
the bodily eyes and to the mind” (‘Qualité des choses, qui les fait voir et connoı̂tre
clairement tant aux yeux du corps que de l’esprit’).
The early (Stage I) meaning of the English word evidence is similar to that of
evidence insofar as here, too, the truth is so clear that it “imposes itself” on the
mind. (An early eighteenth-century dictionary [Kersey 1708] defines the word as
follows: “Évidence—the being evident, plainness”; evident is defined in turn
as “manifest, clear, apparent.”) Both the early (Stage I) meaning of English
evidence and French evidence can be traced back to the medieval Latin evidentia
(cf. Niermeyer 1976; Vier 1951).
Using NSM, I explicate this early meaning of evidence (as illustrated in the
English examples given earlier) in the following way:
[I] people can’t not know that it is true
because they can know something else well
like people can know some things about something well
when they see this thing well
For example, while people cannot see that Christ was both God and man,
they cannot not know that it is true because they can know something else well
(as well as people can know something when they see this thing well), namely,
his deeds. Similarly, while people cannot see the greatness of God, they cannot
not know that it is true that God is great because they can know something
else well (God’s creation), like people can know something well when they can
see it well.
The knowledge referred to in this use of evidence appears to have been seen
as equivalent to a proof, as illustrated by the sixteenth-century quote presented
earlier: “as we shall prove by open evidence.” Open evidence does not provide a
proof, however, but rather makes all proof unnecessary: The truth of the matter is
“plain and clear.” Used in this sense, evidence tends to occur either without
adjectives or with ones like plain and clear (or open), which emphasize the “good
visibility” rather than saying anything else about the source of knowledge or
qualifying that knowledge in any way. Thus, evidence in this sense can refer to
the “testimony” of one’s own eyes regarded as absolutely reliable and also to a
geometrical proof (as in “the form in which the evidence is presented by Euclid”).
3.2.3. Stage II: Clear and certain knowledge

The second stage in the semantic development of evidence that I am
tracing can be illustrated by examples like the following ones (from Locke
1975 [1690], 713):
the clear evidence of his senses . . .

you in vain bring the evidence of clear reasons . . .
men will disbelieve their own eyes, renounce the evidence of their senses, and give their
own experience the lie, rather than admit of anything disagreeing with these sacred tenets.
At this stage, evidence appears to still be seen as a source of knowledge and

indeed certain knowledge rather than “grounds for belief ” but arguably no longer
as “necessary knowledge,” that is, as something that people “can’t not know.”
Rather, as mentioned earlier, it appears to be seen as something that people “can
know well.” For example, in Locke’s usage, phrases like “the clear evidence of
the senses” or “the evidence of clear reasons” appear to imply knowledge with a
secure basis but no longer an absolute one. The adjectives with which evidence
(in the relevant sense) collocate in Locke’s writings include plain, clear, great,
convincing, and certain, as well as infallible, invincible, incontestable, and
demonstrable.
It is true that in Locke’s writings, evidence can also be treated as a matter of
degree, as in the following sentences:
For the evidence that any proposition is true (except such as are self-evident) lying only in
the proofs a man has of it, whatsoever degrees of assent he [a man] affords it beyond the
degrees of that evidence, it is plain that all the surplus of assurance is owing to some other
affection. (Locke 1975 [1690], 697)
the prerogative that belongs to truth alone, which is to command assent by only its own
authority, i.e., by and in proportion to that evidence which it carries with it. (ibid., 698)
In sentences of this kind, however, Locke is using evidence in a sense derived

from the adjective evident (and discussed at the outset as the OED’s category 1).
The close link between evident in this sense (that is, the gradable evidence) and
the adjective evident is clear in the following sentence:
Reason . . . can never permit the mind to reject a greater evidence to embrace what is less
evident. (ibid., 695)
In phrases with a nominal modifier referring to the source of knowledge such

as the evidence of reason, the evidence of our sight, the evidence of our senses, or
the evidence of faith, evidence implies certain, secure knowledge. On the other
hand, the phrase its evidence, where its refers to the knowledge itself rather than
its source, refers to the degree of evidentness. The word self-evidence, quite
common in Locke’s writings, is also semantically derived from an adjective, in
this case self-evident. Unlike evident, neither self-evident nor self-evidence is
gradable.
Leaving aside both self-evidence and evidence in the sense of “evidentness,”
we can see that in Locke’s usage evidence implies certain, secure, and above all
clear knowledge. The “evidence of the senses” (and in particular “the evidence of
our sight”) is for Locke a paradigmatic case of knowledge that is certain and clear
(though not absolute or what he called “intuitive”; see below): when people can
see something well, they can know some things about it well. This sense is
represented by the following formula:
[II] people can know well that it is true/that it is like this

because they can know something else well
like people can know some things about something well
when they can see this thing well
The two versions of the first component (“that it is true/that it is like this”)
indicate that in fact this formula represents, in a condensed form, two distinct
stages (IIA and IIB). The hypothetical stage IIA shares the concern for truth
(characteristic of stage I), and the hypothetical stage IIB is closer in at least one
respect to stage III, which, as we will see shortly, is more concerned with factual
knowledge than with “the knowledge of the truth.”
Turning now to the component “people can know well,” we note that in
modern English, the phrase to know well is rarely used with reference to proposi-
tional knowledge (“he knows well that it is like this”) but that it was quite
common in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English. Here are several ex-
amples from the OED:
A man . . . shall sometimes hear ignorant men differ, and know well . . . that those which so
differ, mean one thing. (1625)
We know well that the primitive church . . . were but voluntary congregations of believers.
(1650)
I know well that publication is necessary to give an edge to the poetical turn. (1786)
I know well enough that the bishopricks are sometimes acquired by unworthy methods.
(1790)
Phrases like the clear evidence of reason, the evidence of clear reasons,
the evidence of faith, the evidence of our own intuitive knowledge, and the clear
evidence of his own understanding show that for Locke evidence was not
restricted to the senses (to sight in particular). At the same time, sight was for
him clearly the point of reference for certain and clear knowledge, and when
evidence was used without modification indicating other sources, it appears to
have referred to the senses (especially sight).
The distinction drawn here between things that people “can’t not know”
(stage I) and those that they “can know well” (Stage II) seems to correspond to
that drawn by John Wilkins, the founder of the Royal Society, between evidence
linked with “physical and mathematical certainty” and that linked to “moral
certainty.” Of “physical” and “mathematical” certainty Wilkins wrote thus
(1969 [1693], 3):
I call that physical certainty which does depend upon the evidence of sense, which
is the first and highest kind of evidence of which human nature is capable.
Nothing can be more manifest and plain to me than that I now see somewhat which
has the appearance of such a colour or figure, than that I have in my mind such a
thought, desire, or purpose, and do feel within my self a certain power of determin-
ing my own actions. . . .
I call that mathematical certainty, which does more eminently belong to mathemat-
ical things, not intending hereby to exclude such other matters as are capable of the
like certainty.
“Moral certainty” was different insofar as it did not necessitate everyone’s assent:
I call that Moral Certainty, which has for its object such Beings as are less simple,
and do more depend upon mixed circumstances. Which though they are not capable
of the same kind of Evidence with the former, so as to necessitate every man’s
Assent, though his judgment be never so much prejudiced against them; yet may they
be so plain, that every man whose judgment is free from prejudice will consent unto
them. And though there be no natural necessity, that such things must be so, and that
they cannot possibly be otherwise, without implying a contradiction; yet may they be
so certain as not to admit of any reasonable doubt concerning them. (ibid., 7–8)
Locke developed a similar classification of the types of knowledge, certainty,

and “evidence.” Thus, in a chapter of his Essay titled “Degrees of Knowledge”
Locke distinguished between three such degrees, which he called “intuitive,”
“demonstrative,” and “sensitive.” In each of these, “there are different degrees
and ways of evidence and certainty” (Locke 1975 [1690], 538). The three first
semantic stages of evidence posited in this chapter correspond, to some extent at
least, to the three “ways of evidence” that Locke distinguished. The first of these,
according to Locke, is “irresistible, and, like the bright sunshine, forces itself
immediately to be perceived” (ibid., 531). This corresponds to our stage I:
“people can’t not know it (that it is true).” What Locke calls “the next degree
of knowledge” is also certain, “yet the evidence of it is not altogether so clear and
bright, nor the assent so ready, as in intuitive knowledge” (ibid., 532). This
corresponds to our stage II: “people can know it well.” Finally, Locke’s third
degree of knowledge can be linked with our stage III: “people can know it,”
which is discussed in the next section.
Of course, Locke’s purposes were philosophical, not semantic, and there is
no reason why the semantic distinctions drawn here on the basis of linguistic
analysis should correspond exactly to those that he wished to draw on the basis of
philosophical argument. Nonetheless, the fact that some correspondence exists
between the two constitutes indirect support for the linguistic reconstruction
attempted here.
Before turning to stage III in the semantic development of evidence, it
should be noted that in many registers of English, collocations like infallible
evidence, incontestable evidence, irrefragable (irrefragable: “undeniable, not to
be withstood,” Bailey 1969 [1721]) evidence, indubitable evidence, indisput-
able evidence, and the like were common throughout the eighteenth and indeed
the nineteenth century. Here are a number of examples from Literature Online:
It is founded in what seems to be the most infallible of all evidence: the written confession
of her daughter. (1801)
A closer examination of the study and sleeping-room afforded indubitable evidence that
the late occupant abandoned them in desperate haste . . . (1874)
This seemed to be an undeniable evidence of her veracity. (1726)
One kind friend assured me that he was ready to produce irrefragable evidence, founded
on parallel passages, to prove that the Lorgnette was written by the author of a late popular
romance. (1850)
Again, as an irrefragable evidence that there is a difference in connectives arising purely
from idiom, let it be observed, that we find it sometimes taking place among conjunctions
of some order. (1776)
Collocations of this kind suggest that evidence is used in the sense described here
as stage II (“people can know well”). Gradually, however, evidence appears also
to be increasingly used in an epistemologically weaker sense linked with the
component “people can know.” This is our hypothetical stage III.
3.2.4. Stage III: Knowledge based on observation

The third stage can be illustrated with the following examples from the OED:
They are as good evidence to prove where they were born, as if we had the deposition of
the midwife, and all the gossips present at their mothers labours. (1661)
The touch . . . gives almost as good evidence as the sight, and the ringing of a metal is . . . a
very common experiment. (1702)
All our monuments bear a strong evidence to this change [in the laws]. (1757)
The scruples of reason, or piety, were silenced by the strong evidence of visions and
miracles. (Gibbon 1788)
The conduct of this minister carries with it an internal and convincing evidence against
him. (1769)
This stage can be linked with a formula similar to that posited for stage II but
implying less confidence in the reliability of the relevant knowledge. The expli-
cation that we can propose for this stage is essentially the same as that for stage II
(IIB) but omitting the word well in the phrases know well and see well:
[III] people can know that it is like this

because they can know something else
like people can know some things about something when they can see it
At this stage, evidence tends to collocate with adjectives like good, strong,
and convincing rather than incontestable, infallible, invincible, and demonstra-
tive, as in Locke’s writings. Furthermore, it appears that in the course of the
eighteenth century evidence was increasingly used in more cautious and skepti-
cal-sounding collocations such as all the evidence they had, they had no other
evidence than, without some further evidence, or simply no evidence:
Its evidence not being so convincing and satisfactory as it might have been. (OED 1736)
There is no evidence that any forgeries were attempted. (OED 1794)
This evidence they magnified thus extravagantly because they had no other. (Newton,
early 1690s)
Now all the evidence that this Council was Arian is only this . . . (Newton, early 1690s)
Athanasius and his friends had no other evidence of Arsenius being alive . . . outside that
letter . . . (Newton, early 1690s)
[He] saw that the letter of Arsenius without some further evidence would not any longer
support the belief that Arsenius was alive . . . (Newton, early 1690s)
This stage may well have been the result of the growing prestige and
popularization of science and scientific discourse, as represented and promoted
by the Royal Society and its journal, Philosophical Transactions (cf. Atkinson
1999; Shapin 1994).
Perhaps in the new intellectual climate attention gradually moved away from
the distinction between “knowing something well” (as one can when one can see
something well) and simply “knowing something” toward a distinction between
“knowing something” (as one can know something through observation) and “not
knowing it.” Perhaps the ideal of “clear and certain knowledge” was gradually
being replaced by the ideal of “empirical knowledge”—more cautious, more
“scientific,” and more concerned with the legitimacy of its sources than with
the certainty and truth of the results—a trend that continued in the next stage.
Consider, for example, the following sentence from the OED:
The plain evidence of the facts is superior to all declarations. (1769)
This sentence implies that people can know something because they can know
some facts: The evidence has to be proper and factual. It is no longer, it seems, a
question of “knowing something well” but rather of “knowing something in a
certain way”—like people can know some things about a thing when they see it—
or perhaps even as people can know something about something when they know
it because they see this thing.
It is, of course, impossible to determine retrospectively whether in a particu-
lar sentence from the past a phrase like plain evidence referred to something “that
people can know well” or to something “that people can know.” Nonetheless, the
overall direction of change from the kind of evidence that Locke could describe
as “invincible” and “infallible” to the kind that can be seen as limited and
questionable seems quite clear. Or rather, alongside “evidence” that one could
describe as “infallible” or “irrefragable” there developed a new way of looking at
“evidence” linked with a greater epistemological caution, less certainty, and a
shift in emphasis from “truth” to “facts” (cf. Shapiro 1983, 2000; Franklin 2001;
Van Leeuwen 1963).
To take a quick glance at the use of the adjective evident during that period,
we might note that, judging by the data in the OED, evident still implied certainty,
as is shown by collocations such as an evident demonstration (1665), plain and
evident (1677), undeniably evident (1678), and unquestionably evident (1678).
At the same time, a new collocation appears to have spread in the second half of
the seventeenth century (the first example recorded in the OED is dated 1660),
which became even more commonplace in the eighteenth century: evident by,
which seems to imply a process of reasoning rather than an immediate ,“clear
perception.” Consider the following examples:
The false Prophet mentioned in chap. 16 and 19 is the same with the two-horned Beast in
chap.13. This is evident by the agreement of their descriptions. (Newton 1670–1680, 21,
prop. V)
It is evident by inoculation that the smallest quantity of matter mixed with the blood
produces the disease. (OED 1732)
It is certainly noteworthy that several examples of evident by exist in Newton’s

writings, but none in Locke.2 The appearance of this collocation can be seen as
related to the new developments in the use of evidence discussed here as stages III
and IV.
3.2.5. Stage IV: “Grounds for belief ”

Stage IV represents the decisive shift from “knowledge” to “belief”: Here one
can indeed speak of “evidence” as “grounds for belief”—a nineteenth- (and to
some extent eighteenth-) century view of “evidence” projected by the editors of

the OED on all the earlier centuries.
Consider, for example, David Hume’s statement in his Enquiry concerning
Human Understanding: “A wise man . . . proportions his belief to the evidence”
(2000 [1748], 84). It seems clear that for Hume evidence is a matter of belief
rather than knowledge. It is true that in Locke’s writings, too, we saw some
references to “degrees of evidence,” but as discussed earlier, in phrases of this
kind evidence was used in a different (though of course related) sense of “evi-
dentness” (“how evident something is”). In the nongradable usage, evidence was
for Locke a matter of clear and certain knowledge, as reflected in collocations
like infallible evidence, incontestable evidence, invincible evidence, or demon-
strable evidence. No such collocations, however, appear in Hume’s writings.
Hume divides all the objects of human inquiry into two kinds: relations of
ideas and matters of fact. “Of the first kind are the sciences of geometry, algebra,
and arithmetic” (e.g., “the truths demonstrated by Euclid would forever retain
their certainty and evidence” [i.e., “evidentness,” ] (Hume 2000 [1748], 24). This
is not the case, however, with “matters of fact”:
Matters of fact . . . are not ascertained in the same manner; nor is our evidence of their
truth, however great, of the like nature with the foregoing. The contrary of every matter of
fact is still possible. (24)
In our reasonings concerning matters of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of
assurance . . . (84)
The senses alone are not implicitly to be depended on; . . . we must correct their evidence
by reason . . . (113)
A similar caution in accepting evidence as knowledge is reflected in the

following nineteenth-century examples from the OED:
The evidence of sight is corrected by the judgment. (1816)

Evidence is not that which the mind does or must yield to, but that which it ought to yield
to. (J. S. Mill 1846)
Clearly, we have by now come a long way from Shakespeare’s “ocular

proof” and even from Locke’s “clear evidence of the senses”: evidence is no
longer that which the mind must (or does) yield to, and the conclusions we draw
from it may need to be corrected. At the same time, the perception that “the
evidence of sight” is not infallible and may need to be “corrected by the
judgment” does not mean that “empirical data” have come to be valued less
than logical arguments. On the contrary, alongside a shift from “certainty to
doubt” (cf. Bromhead 2009) we observe in the history of evidence (and in the
history of English in general) an overall rise of “empiricism” (see section 3.4): the
“evidence of the senses” may need to be corrected by the judgment, but a
judgment not grounded in the “evidence of the senses” is not to be trusted, either.
Both are needed, and both must be treated with caution.
John Stuart Mill’s sentence about “evidence” is quite revealing both in its
epistemic caution and its epistemic optimism. The mind must yield to a proof,
and it does yield to a logical argument, but it neither must nor does yield to
empirical evidence. At the same time, the mind ought to yield to empirical
evidence—not because it is perfectly reliable and trustworthy but because on
the whole it is reasonably reliable and trustworthy and because it is always
valuable.
While I have assigned here both the language of Hume (1711–1776) and that
of J. S. Mill (1806–1873) to stage IV, there is in fact some evidence of further
developments in the use of the word evidence in the intervening period. It is
certainly striking that while both Hume and Mill link evidence with facts, Mill, in
contrast to Hume, repeatedly combines the word evidence with the words
sources, observation, experience, and scientific, which Hume does not. Consider
these examples:
We have evidently arrived at a question of fact and experience, dependent, like all similar
questions, upon evidence. It can only be determined by practiced self-consciousness and
self-observation, assisted by observation of others. (Mill 1972 [1863], 292)
The common charge against him is of relying too exclusively upon such deductions and
declining altogether to be bound by the generalizations from specific experience . . . My
own opinion (and, as I collect, Mr. Spencer’s) is, that in ethics, as in all other branches of
scientific study, the consilience of the results of both these processes, each corroborating
and verifying the other, is requisite to give any general proposition the kind and degree of
evidence which constitutes scientific proof. (ibid., 59)
It is also extremely interesting to note that Mill uses the word empirical,
which (as far as I have been able to verify) does not occur in either Locke’s or
Hume’s writings. For example, he speaks about “empirical generalizations from
the observed results of conduct” (ibid., 58) and defines “an empirical law” as “an
observed uniformity” (OED).
The ascendancy of the concept linked today with the word empirical (dis-
cussed briefly in chapter 1) deserves more study, but it is clearly a phenomenon
closely related to the changes in the meaning of evidence and to those in the
understanding of human knowledge. The earliest citation for the phrase empirical
knowledge (or, strictly speaking, knowledge empirical) to be found in the OED is
dated 1836–1837:
Knowledge a posteriori is a synonym for knowledge empirical, or from experience.

(Sir W. R. Hamilton)
Thus, in the course of the nineteenth century “empirical knowledge” came to be

seen as a kind of knowledge that was defined not so much in terms of its certainty
or otherwise but rather in terms of its sources.
As mentioned earlier, for Locke, knowledge based on sight (and by extension
on other senses) was the prototype of clear and certain knowledge of any kind.
The fact that he could use the word evidence in collocations like the clear
evidence of reason, as well as the evidence of the senses, indicates that for him
these two kinds of evidence were comparable (because both would lead to clear
and certain knowledge). However, in the course of the eighteenth or nineteenth
century, phrases like the evidence of reason ceased to be used (the latest example
cited in the OED is dated 1662 and in Literature Online, 1823: “I am sure that she
makes the proper distinction between reason and the evidence of reason” [Neal
1823]), and the word evidence gradually became confined to what could now be
called “empirical evidence.” Arguably, this linguistic fact indicates that knowl-
edge derived from observation was now seen as different from that based solely
on reason (or on anything else).
The OED rightly notes that in the nineteenth-century translation of the New
Testament, the word evidence, which had been used in an early seventeenth-
century version, was replaced by the word assurance:
Now faith is . . . the evidence [1887 assurance] of things unseen. (1611)
Clearly, in the second half of the nineteenth century evidence could no longer be
dissociated from what could be observed (whether by sight or other senses). The
new meaning of evidence, no longer possible in phrases like the evidence of
reason, can be portrayed as follows:
[IV] people can think that it is like this

because they can know something well,
like people can know some things about something well when they see this thing,
not if they have never seen this thing
Consider, for example, the following nineteenth-century sentences from the OED:
The Swiss archeologist has found abundant evidence of fishing gear. (Lyell 1863)
We did not see much evidence of a wish to barter. (Livingstone 1865)
Abundant evidence of massive waste may be seen on any visit to the seaside. (Huxley
1877)
Thus the rocks exhibit much evidence of a silification. (1889)
All these sentences imply an interest or a desire to know which can

be satisfied by inferences drawn from observations rather than speculations.
Sentences of this kind, where evidence refers to inferences from observations,
are also common in twentieth-century and present-day English. The word
evidence is often combined in them with the verb to see, as in the quotes from
Livingstone and Huxley presented above. The Collins COBUILD English Lan-
guage Dictionary (1991) illustrates the present-day meaning of evidence with
the following sentence:
In China, we saw evidence everywhere that a real effort was being made to promote
tourism.
The meaning illustrated by this sentence is defined by the dictionary as follows:

“anything that you see, experience, read, or are told causes you to believe that
something is true or has really happened.”
Collocations characteristic of stage IV include experimental evidence (the
earliest example in the OED is dated 1860), which underscores the desire to
know, and evidence from, which highlights a special interest in the source of
knowledge. Consider these examples:
It was the same interest to obtain experimental evidence for the molecular weight of
azobenzol. (1860)
Geologists and paleozoologists are generally unprepared to weigh the evidence from fossil
plants. (1897)
As the material in the COBUILD corpus shows, an extraordinary expansion

of descriptive modifiers has also occurred in recent times, specifying the
source of the given evidence (e.g., photographic, video, expert, psychiatric,
statistical). An interest in the sources of evidence is also characteristic of
another meaning of evidence that developed in the course of the nineteenth
century and is arguably even more salient in present-day English than that
described here as stage IV. This most recent meaning—stage V—is dis-
cussed in the next section.
3.2.6. Stage V: Support for a claim

Stage V in the evolution of evidence can be illustrated by the following late
nineteenth-century example:
The weight of evidence appears strongly in favor of the claims of Cavendish. (T. Huxley
1878)
What is distinctive about this instance of evidence is that it is used here in relation
to a claim, that is, to someone’s saying about something: “it is like this.”
Since the seventeenth century, Anglo culture has distinguished between
“matters of fact” and “matters of opinion” (a distinction parallel to the earlier
legal distinction between “matter of fact” and “matter of law”; see Shapiro 2000;
Shapin 1994). When people disagree about matters of opinion, there is no
problem because one of the most salient cultural norms of modern Anglo culture
is that “everyone is entitled to their own opinion” (cf., e.g., Carbaugh 1988;
Wierzbicka 2003a [1991]). The same does not apply, however, to “matters of
fact.” If people disagree about these, it is expected that they will try to resolve
their differences, and it is assumed that this can be done only (or primarily) with
reference to “the evidence.” Hence, the prominent place of the question “What is
the evidence?” (and its variants) in most contemporary discussions and debates.
The rise of this latest meaning of evidence appears to be in fact related to the
rise of the meaning of the word claim, as illustrated in Huxley’s sentence. As the
OED entry for claim shows, before the nineteenth century, this word was used
mainly in the sense of “to demand something to which one is entitled.” In the
course of the nineteenth century, however, a view appears to have evolved
that, when one makes assertions about factual matters, the hearer is entitled to
some supportive factual information, that is, “evidence.” No doubt “evidence”
as factual information that can be presented on demand when one’s “claims”
are challenged was initially just a contextual variant of “evidence” described
here as stage IV. In time, however, the idea that factual assertions require
supportive statements appears to have become encoded in the meaning of
evidence itself.
Consider, for example, Hillary Clinton’s celebrated reply to an accusa-
tion of ill practice (in the context of the so-called Whitewater scandal):
“There is no evidence.” It seems clear that she was not saying, “people can’t
think like this about me” but rather “people can’t say this about me”: they
cannot say this because they do not have enough “evidence.” Used in this
new way, evidence is usually contested: even if it is not a matter of
accusations and defense (as in Hillary Clinton’s case), a claim is looked at
from two sides.
Thus, evidence in the sense that has emerged at stage V can be represented as
follows:
[V] people can say about it: “it is like this”

because they can say this about something else:
“people can know something about it well,
like they can know some things about something well when they see this something,
not like they can know something about something
if they have never seen this something”
I illustrate this use of evidence with an extended example from a 2005

issue of the New York Review of Books, which includes a brief exchange
of letters on the Terri Schiavo case, a much-discussed case of legally
sanctioned euthanasia (Didion 2005). In the space of one page, the word
evidence occurs six times in this debate. It would be virtually impossible to
conduct such a discussion in contemporary English without using the word
evidence.
Two instances of evidence in the Terri Schiavo exchange fall into the
category described here as stage IV:
In those settings, the power of the initial authoritative academic diagnosis may be
difficult to overcome in the face of episodic and inconsistent evidence of self,
environment, or others, which is characteristic of MCS [minimally conscious
state].
Notations by hopeful families who observe evidence of awareness can be too
easily dismissed as wishful thinking or denial. (ibid., 63)
In these two sentences evidence refers to something that people can think (about
something) on the basis of what they can observe. In other sentences, however, it
refers to something that people can say in an argument, discussion, debate, or a

court case. Here are some examples:
This was not the case for Ms. Schiavo, who was sufficiently evaluated by neurol-
ogists for the Florida Supreme Court to rule that there was clear and convincing
evidence that she was in a persistent or permanent vegetative state. (ibid., 63)
When the standing of the courts is questioned and clinical diagnoses are
perceived as value choices and not the evidence-based assessments they are, civil
society is weakened. (ibid.)
I wanted to examine the way in which the inflammatory climate surrounding
this case led to a general hardening of convictions based on thin or no evidence. (64)
Even though in the last example the word conviction may seem to refer to
what people can think, the expression hardening of convictions suggests that in
fact reference is being made to what people say (in polemical exchanges). The
expression evidence-based assessments implies that the doctors who made the
assessment based what they said about something that they knew about the case
in the way people can know something about something on the basis of observa-
tion, not on the basis of speculation or, more generally, thinking (however clever,
sophisticated, or seemingly logical that thinking might be). In the exchange of
letters about Terri Schiavo, the two medical practitioners are trying to dismiss the
arguments raised by social critic Joan Didion as based—in contrast to their
own—on thinking rather than on evidence. The implication is that people can
validly say, “it is like this” only if they can support such statements with
reference to some relevant knowledge based on observation. (Further evidence
for meaning [V] is presented in section 3.3.)
Finally, here is a caveat. The history of evidence outlined here has been
presented as a steady movement “from certainty to doubt.” This presentation
could be misleading if it is not supplemented by a mention of a certain movement
in the opposite direction: toward a new kind of certainty. This movement can be
seen as associated, in the first place, with the rise of a faith in facts (cf.
Wierzbicka 2002b, 2006) and the emergence of the concept of findings.
It is certainly striking that in the brief exchange of letters about the Schiavo
case, in which the word evidence occurs six times, the word findings occurs even
more often: eight times.
The word findings, too, expresses a concept unique to modern Anglo culture.
For example, it has no counterpart in French, where the closest translation
equivalent appears to be les conclusions ‘conclusions’. There is a crucial differ-
ence between the two, however, because the word findings refers to the conclu-
sions that emerge from an empirical investigation, whereas les conclusions, like
its English counterpart (conclusions), can also apply to a mathematical or logical
inquiry. Thus, here as elsewhere, English draws a special lexical distinction
between empirical and any other kind of knowledge, a distinction that other
languages do not make.
Furthermore, here, too, it is only modern English that draws such a distinc-
tion and pays, so to speak, a special tribute to empirical knowledge. While the
word findings appears in seventeenth-century English, at that time it did not have
the connection with empirical knowledge that it does now. For example, the OED
cites the following sentence from Milton:
When a man . . . in the deep mines of knowledge has furnished out his findings.
(OED 1644)
In today’s English, one does not arrive at “findings” by searching in the deep
mines of knowledge but rather by carrying out certain procedures aimed at
discovering “the facts of the matter.” Consider, for example, the following
sentences from “The Terri Schiavo Case: An Exchange”:
Does she [Didion] feel she has a sufficient command of complicated neurological
conditions to refuse to accept two pathologists’ findings? (T. A. Madden, MD, in
Didion 2005, 64)
Dr. Madden and Dr. Bergen describe Mrs. Schiavo’s condition as presented in
the autopsy’s findings as “incompatible with any desirable state of existence.” This
is not a judgment I would attempt to make, which is by no means to say that
I “refuse to accept” the autopsy’s findings. Of course, I accept those findings. They
neither originated in a courtroom nor ventured to designate a “desirable state of
existence, ” as did so much else in this case. (ibid.)
As these sentences illustrate, the word findings implies some authoritative

knowledge arrived at empirically by means of scientific procedures. The medical
practitioner Madden emphasizes the expert knowledge involved in arriving at the
“autopsy’s findings,” whereas the social critic (Didion) points out that judgments
about a “desirable state of existence” are not empirically based and therefore do
not qualify as findings. Both sides assume that findings must be empirical, based
on scientific procedures, and that (unlike evidence) they must be accepted.3
Thus, at the same time (roughly speaking) that evidence became problematic
and questionable, there emerged another concept—‘findings’—which implies
confidence in the reliability of at least a certain kind of knowledge.
Is this a contradiction? I do not believe it is. Milton’s metaphor of “deep
mines of knowledge” gives us a key to the solution of the apparent paradox. From
the outset, the prototype of evidence has lain in “what people can see” (in what is
“evident”). The word findings, on the other hand, implies a long and laborious
search that requires doing something for some time in order to “see.” But,
whereas for Milton this search could have been carried out in libraries, for
contemporary English it requires certain procedures of the kind that scientists
engage in when they investigate “external reality.” Here, too, there is a reference
to seeing but not to seeing something that “is evident.” Rather, it is a reference to
seeing something that is “not evident” but hidden and can become known only as
a result of “doing some things” and “doing them in some ways, not in other
ways,” that is, as a result of a scientific or quasi-scientific inquiry.
The emergence of the concept of findings reflects both the great prestige of
science in modern Anglo culture and a confidence in empirical knowledge
arrived at through scientific procedures. The decline of faith in what is “evident”

can also be linked with the development of modern science and its status in Anglo
culture, reflected in the development of the English language. Far from pointing
in two different directions, the two phenomena—caution in accepting what is
“evident” and confidence in scientific (and other similar) “findings”—are in fact
two facets of the same trend.
3.3. Linguistic Evidence
In several contemporary examples cited at the beginning of this chapter the word
evidence was used with highly positive adjectives like overwhelming, convinc-
ing, and strong. Looking more broadly at how evidence is used in present-day
English, one must conclude that such usage is not typical of contemporary
discourse. In fact, in the article from the New Republic quoted in section 3.1,
Coyne (2005) seeks to crush Darwin’s opponents with negative expressions like
no evidence, no direct evidence, and lack of evidence, and such a negative or
skeptical attitude toward “evidence” is much more common in contemporary
usage. For example, when one examines the collocations of evidence in a large
database such as the COBUILD corpus, one is struck, above all, by the critical and
skeptical attitude reflected in them.
To begin with, of all the adjectival collocations, including evidence, by far
the most frequent is no evidence. Thus, of the 2,106 occurrences of evidence,
nearly a quarter fall into this group. By comparison, in the Helsinki corpus (1500–
1710), there are 39 occurrence of evidence and only one of no evidence (that is,
less than 3 percent). Further, in Locke’s writings (in the three volumes that I have
been able to access electronically [Locke 1824, vols. 1, 2, and 5]), there are 228
occurrences of evidence but only six of no evidence (that is, less than 3 percent).
Newton’s theological writings have 26 occurrences of evidence but none of no
evidence.
Second, the second largest group of adjectival collocations, including evi-
dence, in COBUILD is some evidence—a collocation not attested at all in the OED
before the nineteenth century. As far as I have been able to ascertain, there are no
examples of it in Locke, Newton, or Hume. Literature Online provides only five
results for the eighteenth century and fifty-five for the nineteenth. By implication,
some evidence, too, involves a negative assessment: To say that there is some
evidence is to imply that there is not a lot.
The third most frequent quantifier collocating with evidence in COBUILD,
namely enough (fifty-seven occurrences), is also not as positive as it might
seem: Nearly half of them (twenty-six) refer in fact to a situation where “there
is not enough evidence,” and many others refer to hypothetical situations (“if
there is enough evidence” and the like). Thus, the high frequency of the colloca-
tion enough evidence reflects, above all, a concern about whether there is enough
evidence rather than a positive assessment. This concern—“is there or isn’t there
enough evidence?”—is all the more striking given that the collocation enough
evidence appears to be very recent. In any case, the Helsinki corpus has no
examples of it, and in the OED material the earliest example is dated 1924.
Repeated Google searches yield a similar picture: the negative collocation no
evidence is by far the most frequent among all the quantitative ones, and the
positive ones, like plenty of evidence, lot(s) of evidence, and a good deal of
evidence, are the least frequent, as the following figures (February 15, 2007)
illustrate:
no evidence 13,100,000
some evidence 1,350,000
lack of evidence 1, 280,000
little evidence 1,190,000
enough evidence 1,140,000
much evidence 1,070,000
plenty of evidence 676,000
lot of evidence 452,000
great deal of evidence 247,000
lots of evidence 144,000
good deal of evidence 82,000
Thus, the material in COBUILD, as well as the results of Google searches,

indicates caution and skepticism with respect to evidence. This is in stark contrast
to earlier periods, when adjectival collocations emphasized either the indubitable
existence of “evidence” or its quality rather than its quantity.
Even positive assessments of quantity like much evidence, abundant evi-
dence, and plenty of evidence appear to have come into English only in the
nineteenth century. The isolated earlier examples of these collocations such as
the following two do not refer to quantity but emphasize “how very evident”
something is:
The command must need come with much evidence when it wrapped the will into such a
height. (OED 1641)
’Tis abundant evidence how much Christianity loses by these contests of under-factions.
(OED 1667)
The new critical and skeptical spirit with respect to “evidence” is also
evident in emphatically negative collocations such as not a shred of evidence
and not a scrap of evidence, which apparently spread in English in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. An expression like not a shred of evidence appears to
have a polemical edge and to be directed at something that someone else has said.
Another striking feature of the present-day phraseology of evidence has to do
with the choice of verbs with which evidence can combine. In present-day
English it combines particularly readily with the verb suggest: “Evidence sug-
gests that . . . ” Judging by the data from the OED, this collocation first appeared
in the twentieth century. A search for quotations in the OED containing both
evidence and suggest has yielded forty-seven examples from the twentieth
century but none for the seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth centuries, despite
the fact that the verb suggest is well attested in English from that time, as the
following examples illustrate:
One idea may suggest another to the mind. (Berkeley 1709)

A certain kind of sound suggests immediately to the mind a coach passing in the street.
(1764)
A search for quotations combining evidence and show has yielded twenty-one
examples, beginning in the early nineteenth century, and a search for quotations
containing evidence and prove has yielded thirty-two examples, beginning in
the mid-seventeenth century. The general trend seems to be clear: from prove to
show to suggest. (A search at Literature Online has produced similar results for
the combinations of evidence with suggest, show, and prove: Prove begins in
1635, show in 1719, and suggest in 1798.) In the COBUILD corpus, the frequency
for the collocations evidence suggests is ten times higher than that of evidence
proves, and in a Google search (August 27, 2008), twenty times higher.
Among qualitative assessments of evidence, the most frequent ones in
present-day English (judging by both COBUILD and Google searches) include (in
addition to empirical evidence) clear evidence and hard evidence. Of these two,
the former goes back to the seventeenth century, although not necessarily in the
same sense. The latter, however, appears to be quite recent. In the OED database,
the earliest example of it is dated 1958, and in Literature Online, 1990.
The rise of the collocation hard evidence appears to be related to the advent
of stage V in the semantic evolution of evidence, that is, of the stage in which
evidence is linked with what people say rather than what they think. To see this,
consider the following sentences from COBUILD, in which hard evidence cannot be
substituted for clear evidence:
X-rays reveal clear evidence (*hard evidence) of alteration in the underdrawing of both
paintings.
From beneath the soil at Drumanagh, clear evidence (*hard evidence) has emerged of a
Roman coastal fort of up to forty acres.
Today’s growing problems are clear evidence (*hard evidence) that the end of this system
of things is near.
The reason why hard cannot be substituted in these sentences for clear is
this, I suggest: hard evidence implies that it is hard (difficult) to dispute some-
thing that somebody else is saying, whereas these sentences cannot be construed
as referring to something that someone is saying. Clear evidence suggests here
that people “can’t not think” (because of what they see) that there was some
alteration in the underdrawing of both paintings, that there was a Roman fort at
Drumanagh, and that the end of a certain system of things is near. No one can
raise objections to something that people can see; one can, however, object to
something that someone says. Whenever evidence can be construed as a possible

objection to something that someone says, the phrase hard evidence can be used,
implying that “it would be hard to say anything against it.” Consider these
examples from COBUILD:
Syria says it won’t take action against any Palestinian group unless and until hard
evidence linking it to the Lockerbie incident is presented.
These officials have yet to produce hard evidence to back up their assertion.
The most vexed issue in the Old Testament is the absence of hard evidence to substantiate
the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt . . .
In these examples, the implication is that if somebody challenges the assertion in

question, evidence has to be produced—which would be hard for anyone to
challenge in turn. The same applies to the “allegations” and the “view” in the
following sentences:
The concern has been that there is little hard evidence around to prove allegations.
Is there any hard evidence to support your view of yourself/the world/other people?
The allegations and the view can easily be challenged; to defend them, the first
speaker has to come up with something that would be hard for anyone to dispute.
Both collocations, hard evidence and clear evidence, have a high frequency
in present-day English (a Google search yields well over a million occurrences
for each one). This suggests that stage V evidence coexists with stage IV evidence
and that stage IV is still quite prevalent.
3.4. The New Discourse of Evidence
As I mention at the beginning of this chapter, English has now developed a rich
new discourse of evidence based on the most recent (stage V) meaning of the
word evidence. This discourse centers on supporting what one says (especially
one’s claims but also hypotheses, suggestions, and allegations) and challenging
what somebody else says (especially someone’s claims, assertions, hypotheses,
and allegations). I illustrate this with a number of extended excerpts from
Australian TV and radio programs, as well as media discussion forums, followed
by brief comments.
1) Lateline: TV current affairs program (a debate between two journalists about the
prime minister’s case for Australia to go to war against Iraq [March 14, 2003])
TONY JONES [ HOST ]: Andrew Bolt, you’ve made the claim that there is direct
evidence, so perhaps you can tell us what it is because the PM has been unable so
far to provide to the Australian public that direct evidence. What is it?
ANDREW BOLT : I just did. There’s been evidence of meetings in Sudan . . .
DAVID MARR : What’s the evidence?
ANDREW BOLT : Look, you can have a look at the book—Rohan Gunaratna’s
book—you can have a look at the book by the head of the . . .
DAVID MARR : What’s the evidence?
ANDREW BOLT : There’s been intelligence.
DAVID MARR : What is all the evidence? You have been asking me—what is the
evidence?
ANDREW BOLT : Look, I’ll send you all the footnotes. There are books written on the
subject, David. Please read.
DAVID MARR : What is the evidence?
The persistent demand for evidence (“what’s the evidence?”) recurs here like
a refrain. The combinations of evidence with the words claim and provide are also
highly characteristic of this new discourse, in which evidence has to be provided
(given, produced, presented) to back up a claim, as in the following excerpt:
2) A radio program on cloning (an interview with leading genetic scientist Alan
Trounson, who disputes claims made by the maverick American scientist Dr. Panos
Zavos [August 30, 2004])
NICK MCKENZIE [ REPORTER ]: The statement that this doctor [Dr. Panos Zavos] has
taken the first step to cloning a dead human being—do you think [it] should be
completely disregarded, or should we have an element of, “Well, we’ll wait and see
what he has to produce to back up his claim?”
ALAN TROUNSON : No, I don’t think we should take any notice of this claim. I think
he hasn’t given any evidence that he’s done this. He’s just simply said that that’s
what he’s done.
The challenge expressed with the (often) aggressive/defensive phrase

“what’s the evidence?” is frequently accompanied by the triumphant and dismis-
sive phrases “there is no evidence” and “you have no evidence,” as in the next
excerpt:
3) Lateline: TV current affairs program (Kernot [Labor Party politician] accuses

[government minister] Abbott of a smear campaign [October 12, 2001])
CHERYL KERNOT : . . . I have to say to you that I am aware that Mr. Abbott has been
conducting backgrounding, and Mr. Dutton has as well on an illegally obtained
document on the amount of stamp duty I paid when I bought my unit at the Gold
Coast.
TONY ABBOTT : What’s your evidence for that, Cheryl?
CHERYL KERNOT : Journalists, Mr. Abbott.
TONY ABBOTT : Who? Which journalists? . . .
CHERYL KERNOT : Yes, aided and abetted by you, Mr. Abbott.
TONY ABBOTT : Well, what’s your evidence, Cheryl? Who [sic] have I allegedly
spoken to?
CHERYL KERNOT : We won’t get into a war of words over journalists.
TONY ABBOTT : Well, that’s because there is no evidence. You have no evidence.
This is just the product of an overheated imagination.
CHERYL KERNOT : Oh yeah, I just made all of this up.
The basic formula (“what’s the evidence?”) has many variants and elabora-
tions, some of them ironic or sarcastic, while at the same time overtly polite and
seemingly interested in precision rather than controversy. They include “just
what is the evidence?” and “what is the evidence precisely?” as in the following
two exchanges:
4) The Health Report: a radio program on the comeback of radiotherapy in the

treatment of various conditions (an interview with radiation cancer specialist Luther
Brady [October 25, 1999])
LUTHER BRADY : Well, I think historically, when you didn’t have antibiotics or
other drugs, radiation was used for treatment of almost anything that you can
imagine: infections, rheumatoid arthritis, a whole vast array.
NORMAN SWAN [ REPORTER ]: I don’t want to go through a whole list, but let’s pick
out some of the ones that are quite interesting and indeed quite common, and just
what is the evidence?
5) Saudis in the USA: a radio program on the allegations that American intelligence
agencies are turning a blind eye to terrorist funding on U.S. soil (May 15, 2002)
JOHN LOFTUS : The money originated in Saudi Arabia with wealthy businessmen
close to the Saudi royal family . . . . Every time they saw the Israelis and the
Palestinians getting close in peace talks, the Saudis would pour more money
through their murder-for-hire network, and more hitmen would go out to take out
the Palestinians that wanted to work for peace.
STEPHEN CRITTENDEN : John, what is the evidence precisely?
Another phrase that can be quite aggressive but is nonetheless widely used in
media discussions is “where is the evidence?” It carries the assumption (some-
times spelled out, as in the first example at the outset of this chapter), that it is
easy to say these things. Excerpts 5 and 6 illustrate this:
6) The World Today: radio news program (interview with Australian prime minister
John Howard about his decision to commit Australia to the war in Iraq [October 3,
2003])
JOHN HOWARD : . . . We had clear intelligence assessments that Iraq had a
weapons-of-mass-destruction capability. That was unambiguous. It was clear, and
that was the basis of the judgment that we made at the time we joined the coalition,
and I don’t retreat from that one iota.
JOURNALIST : Prime Minister, where is the evidence of that, though?
JOHN HOWARD : Well, you make judgments on the basis of the information
available to you at the time . . . there were clear intelligence assessments which
we did not exaggerate publicly, which justified the decision we took . . .
7) The 7:30 Report: TV current affairs program (on the allegations of an unfair trial
of the leader of the One Nation Party, Pauline Hanson [August 26, 2003])
CHRIS NYST [ LAWYER ]: Well, . . . there were various things that came out of the trial
that probably require answers to be given, but that’s really not my concern.
KERRY O ’ BRIEN : But you are at least implying that very strongly, aren’t you?
CHRIS NYST : Not implying. We said it quite directly during the trial.
KERRY O ’ BRIEN : So where is the evidence of a conspiracy?

CHRIS NYST : Well, the evidence is there in the trial. . . . It’s as simple as that.
KERRY O ’ BRIEN : What exactly are you alleging there about the way in which those
charges were dropped?
CHRIS NYST : What I’m alleging there is that, from day one, there was no evidence
against Pauline Hanson, and she was charged in the lead-up to her district
court trial.
In “Anglo” public discussions, it is regarded as important for the participants

to show deference to the personal judgment of the members of the audience. It is,
therefore, particularly interesting to note the sentence “people can see for them-
selves exactly what the evidence is” in the next excerpt: “evidence” has to be
produced by those who make claims, and it is important that other people be able
to “see for themselves” and assess by themselves just how convincing and strong
the evidence is.
8) Saudis in the USA (the radio program quoted in excerpt 4)

STEPHEN CRITTENDEN : John, what is the evidence precisely?
JOHN LOFTUS : Well, some staggering evidence. The chief money launderer is a
professor named Sami al-Arian. He was actually cheeky enough to take home
movies of all his terrorist conventions, and the FBI seized Sami’s home movies,
and I have copies. I’m going to be putting them up on my . . . so people can see for
themselves exactly what the evidence is. . . .
STEPHEN CRITTENDEN : Have you uncovered any evidence of funds going to Al-
Qaeda, Osama bin Laden . . . ?
JOHN LOFTUS : Certainly, funds to Al-Qaeda. . . .
STEPHEN CRITTENDEN : . . . There’s a lot of evidence. It’s well known that Saudi
money has been used to fund radical Wahabbi-style Islam all over the world to build
mosques and schools and so forth in America.
JOHN LOFTUS : Not just in America. We found there’s some evidence of it in Asia,
Canada, and in Europe. . . .
STEPHEN CRITTENDEN : Your argument also seems to hinge on the idea that the
Saudis were effectively stabbing the Palestinians in the back, that they didn’t want
peace with Israel under any circumstances.
JOHN LOFTUS : That’s very true.
STEPHEN CRITTENDEN : What evidence do you have for that? . . .
JOHN LOFTUS : Well, the idea is that the Saudis got caught with their fingers in the
cookie jar. There’s absolutely dramatic evidence of them laundering money to
terrorist groups through charities in the US.
But if there is a strongly felt need to see and to assess the evidence in political
discussions, this need is even more strongly insisted on in science and popular
science. As an Australian TV program (Science Show 2005) characteristically put
it, “Due respect for fact and evidence is at the core of modern science tradition.”
In popular science programs, especially discussions and debates, and in other
genres as well, the word evidence runs through like a red thread, with all of its
characteristic permutations, but especially with the question “what’s the
evidence?” I illustrate this with some questions and answers from a popular
science Web site called “Ask an Expert”:
9) Humans, Hobbits, and Neanderthals (2007)

(The expert is Professor Colin Groves of the Australian National University.)
Q : There is a current theory that all modern humans evolved from a small group in
southern Africa. What is the evidence for this, and how convincing is it?
A : The current model is that modern humans evolved from a small group in sub-
Saharan Africa. The group had to be reasonably small because there is
strong DNA evidence to suggest that the common ancestor in the female line
goes back to only two hundred thousand years ago. You would expect it
to be much longer ago if the group was large. There is strong DNA evidence
to support this . . .
Q : Did Homo sapiens and Homo erectus coexist in Southeast Asia, and if so, for
how long and up until when?
A : Well, it’s a little bit controversial. . . . We need more evidence before we can
say conclusively that they coexisted.
Q : I have read that Homo erectus made it to Australia before Homo sapiens.
Is there any evidence to support this theory?
A : There is absolutely no evidence to support this.
Q : Is there any evidence that enormous radiation spikes may be involved with
mass extinctions and evolutional mutation . . . ?
A : There has been a suggestion that massive radiation from supernova may have
caused a mass extinction or two in the past. [The] trouble is [that] such a cause
would leave no direct evidence.
Other scholarly discussions and debates are even more dominated by appeals
and counterappeals to “evidence,” as the following fragment from a radio debate
on “megafauna extinction” in Australia illustrates. Here, the director of the
Australian Museum in Sydney, Michael Archer, is arguing against Tim Flannery,
author of The Future Eaters; An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands
and People (Flannery 1994) and coauthor (with Bert Roberts et. al. 2001) of a
paper arguing that the arrival of humans in Australia coincided with the extermi-
nation of big animals:
10) Megafauna Extinction: Did People Wipe Out the Megafauna?: radio program
(September 8, 2001)
MIKE ARCHER : . . . The evidence for direct killing of the megafauna, you know,
the sort of smoking gun stuff, doesn’t seem to be there. . . . You’d really want to see
good evidence before you assumed that you could accuse them [the ancestors of
present-day Australian indigenous people] of this dreadful bit of vandalism . . . The
second thing that concerns me a bit is that I’m not sure if there is any evidence that
any other means for blitzkrieg [existed], because if it wasn’t direct killing—and
there’s no direct evidence for that—what evidence is there for indirect methods
of killing the fauna are there [sic]? And in fact, again there’s no hard evidence
for that. It’s all circumstantial stuff that’s fraught with improbabilities or
probabilities. . . . I think you’d have to question the other end of the argument [in
the aforementioned paper by Roberts and Flannery]: that evidence that the
megafauna died out at 46,400 years. The paper . . . claims all the evidence in the
paper is based on twenty-eight dates, but in fact, the argument’s actually based on
nine sites, not twenty-eight sites. And so the basis for the confidence in this
argument’s getting a bit thin . . . .
TIM FLANNERY : I’d like to answer three points. The first one is the one that Michael
began with, saying, “where’s the evidence?” . . .
Mautner’s Dictionary of Philosophy (1996) defines evidence as “that which

provides a ground for a belief or theory” and “the quality of obviousness, intuitive
certainty.” In ordinary language, however, the latter meaning is now obsolete,
and the former covers only the older, though still existing, usage (our Stage IV).
The most prominent present-day meaning refers not to the grounds for belief but
to the grounds for claiming something—that is, roughly, for saying something
controversial. For example, when two Australian politicians argue about the
evidence for their respective claims and counterclaims, they are not talking
about grounds for a belief or theory. “Evidence” is for them not grounds but
a weapon. And even in scientific discourse and popular science, appeals to
evidence often appear to function not as references to “grounds for belief ” but
as requests for supporting statements, claims, and arguments (a fact highlighted
by the frequent co-occurrence of the word evidence with the word support; see,
for example, excerpt 9).
Thus, the new English “discourse of evidence” is primarily a discourse about
discourse: It is concerned with what can be legitimately said, what degree of
certainty can be legitimately expressed, and what level of assent to what one says
can be reasonably expected. As unbelievable as it might seem to native speakers
of English (and especially to Anglo scientists, who live by the concept of
evidence), there is no such discourse in other languages and cultures.
To join the global scientific discourse, as well as many other types of
conversations in English-speaking countries and in the increasingly English-
speaking world, those from non-English-speaking backgrounds have to learn to
think, speak, and often act in terms of “evidence.” As the examples from Russian
and French to be presented shortly illustrate, in other languages people rely on
other concepts and strategies.
For example, Russian has no word corresponding to evidence, and English-
Russian dictionaries usually gloss evidence as either očevidnost’ (‘obviousness’),
dokazatel’stvo (‘proof’), or pokazanie (‘testimony’). As the Russian National
Corpus illustrates, in Russian, arguments, discussions, and debates comparable to
those that rely on “evidence” in English, depend above all on the word dokaza-
tel’stvo (plural dokazatel’stva), from the verb dokazat’ ‘to prove’. Dokazatel’stvo
means ‘proof’, but it can also be applied to what in English would be usually
described as “empirical evidence.”
At this point, of course, one could ask whether the Russian dokazatel’stvo
really means the same thing as English proof and also whether it does not have
two distinct meanings: ‘proof’ and ‘evidence’. But there is no evidence at all for
any polysemy of this Russian word: Russian simply does not draw any distinction
between “empirical evidence” and “proof” in some broader sense.
In fact, the English word proof (as it is used in present-day English) is not
restricted to knowledge based on logical reasoning, either: it can be used in
reference to mathematical certainty and to conclusions drawn from what one
has seen or heard (cf. also the expression living proof). The COBUILD corpus
provides numerous examples of such usage, which matches the broad use of
the Russian dokazatel’stvo. Here are two examples:
Fishermen say they knew of fishing being used by Asians to catch mudcrabs, so they are
not ruling out the possibility that cyanide fishing is being practiced. However, they point
out that at the moment there is no solid proof, and even if there was, they did not have any
authority to do anything about it. (COBUILD)
He was a gambler who saw the singer as a meal ticket and determinedly courted her in the
late 1930s. Ella fell deeply in love and refused to listen to her fellow band-members’
concerns. They hired an investigator and presented her with proof of his criminal past. The
marriage was annulled. (COBUILD)
The word proof could be replaced in these passages by evidence—if the speakers
cared to emphasize the empirical character of what was being offered in support
of the claims in question. In Russian, however, there is no such option, and so
challenges comparable to those framed in English as “what’s the evidence?” and
“where is the evidence?” tend to be expressed (judging by the Russian National
Corpus) in phrases like gde dokazatel’stva? (‘where are the proofs?’). Here are
three examples:
Kogda kogo-libo obvinjajut, neobxodimo, čtoby obvinenie bylo obosnovannym. Nužny fakty,
nužny svideteli, nužny dokazatel’stva, inače obvinenie v besčestnosti samo po sebe stanovitsja
bessovestnym. Gde že fakty, gde svideteli, gde dokazatel’stva? Gde oni? (2002)
‘When people make accusations, these accusations have to be justified. There have to be
facts, there have to be witnesses, there has to be proof; otherwise, an accusation of
dishonesty becomes dishonest itself. So where are the facts, where are the witnesses,
where is the proof ? Where are they?’
Vse ėto xorošo, Gedevan Aleksandrovič, no ėto slova. A gde dokazatel’stva? (1986)
‘All this is very well, Gedevan Aleksandrovič, but these are words. And where is the
proof?’
A kto skazal, čto oni [vse ėti prestuplenija] točno [svjazany s Čečnej]—gde
dokazatel’stva—esče ved’ ni odnogo dokazatel’stva net—v ėtom vse delo. (2000)
‘And who said that they [all these crimes] are definitely [linked with Chechnya]—where is
the proof—there isn’t yet a single proof—this is the crux of the matter.’
It is particularly interesting to note the frequent occurrence of the locution ne

trebuet dokazatel’stv (‘this does not require any proof’), which is used in support
of many assertions that speakers regard as “obviously right.” An expanded
version, ėto očevidno i ne trebuet dokazatel’stv (‘this is obvious and does not
require any proof ’) is also common.
Asking for dokazatel’stva may even be perceived as rude and arrogant, as in

the following example (where the verb erepenit’sja is highly colloquial, even
slangy):4
Gde dokazatel’stva? —zajavil Danilov i sam sebe udivilsja: čto on erepenitsja? (1980)
‘Where is the proof ? demanded Danilov, surprising himself: Why is he being so stubborn,
so aggressive?’
In English, on the other hand, asking for evidence is usually regarded as a

legitimate move in a discussion or a debate.
Another locution that frequently recurs in polemical discourse (as evidenced
by the Russian National Corpus) is na kakom osnovanii? (‘on what basis?’)
(plural: na kakix osnovan’jax?), as in the following corpus quotation from the
subsequently murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaja:
Da na kakom osnovanii? (Novaja Gazeta, September 1, 2003)

‘But on what basis?’
In some contexts, this locution may seem to correspond in meaning to the English
phrase what’s the evidence?, as in the following example:
Čtoby ob’’javit’ čeloveka narusitelem, neobxodimo ukazat,’ na kakom osnovanii, pri

kakix ulikax.(2002)
‘To declare that someone has broken the law, it is necessary to demonstrate on what basis,
with what incriminating facts.’
However, when one considers a wider range of examples, one can clearly see that
na kakom osnovanii? does not mean ‘what’s the evidence?’ because this locution
often challenges someone’s right to do something rather than to say something.
Here is an example:
Na kakom osnovanii g-n Pereverzin kupil na den’gi Litfonda Rossii inomarku za sem’sot
tysjač rublej, čtoby ezdit’ na nej i krasovat’sja pri obsčej pisatel’skoj nisčete? (2002)
‘On what basis did Mr. Pereverzin buy, with money from the Russian Literary Fund, a
flashy foreign car for seven hundred thousand rubles, so that he could drive it and cut a
dashing figure, while other writers live in dire poverty?’
Turning now to French, to judge by the material in the French COBUILD

corpus, the flavor of present-day French arguments, debates, and discussions is
often different from that characteristic of Russian polemical discourse (again,
judging by the excerpts in the Russian corpus), but French, too, appears to rely
above all on the semantic equivalent of the English word proof (and Russian
dokazatel’stvo), that is, on the word preuve (plural preuves). As already
noted, the present-day English word evidence has no counterpart in French,
or to put it differently, French does not make a lexical distinction between
‘proof’ and ‘empirical evidence’. Not surprisingly, the French word preuves
is often translated into English as evidence, but this only shows how
important the distinction between ‘proof’ and ‘evidence’ is for English speak-
ers (including translators), not that in some contexts preuves really means
“evidence.”
One locution that is commonly used in French to challenge someone else’s
assertions and allegations is quelles sont les preuves? (‘what are the proofs?’), as
in the next two examples. The first refers to a statement made by a new magistrate
in Nice, Mr. de Montgolfier, referring to widespread claims of the extensive
influence of “Masonic networks” in the region, and the second, to accusations of
financial malpractice:
Simon Giovannais, Grand Maıˆtre du Grand Orient de France . . . nous a declare: “Ces
declarations à l’emporte-pièce me paraissent maladroites et malheureuses. Quelles
preuves M. de Montgolfier apporte-t-il?” (COBUILD, from Le Monde 1999–2000)
‘Simon Giovannais, Grand Master of the Great Orient of France . . . told us: “These ill-
considered statements seem to me tactless and unfortunate. What proofs does Mr. de
Montgolfier provide? ” ’
Alors, vous me direz, M. Mèry, quelles sont les preuves que vous avez de tout ce que vous
avancez? (COBUILD, from Le Monde 2000/2001)
‘Well, then, tell me, Mr. Mèry, what proofs do you have for all of these things that you are
claiming?’
A cursory examination of a number of recent political exchanges reported by

the newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur also points to the central role of the word
preuve (‘proof’) and preuves (plural). For example, in the following excerpt, the
then French interior minister and presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy com-
ments that “la compassion” (‘compassion’) of his socialist opponent and political
rival Ségolène Royal “n’est pas une politique” (‘is not a policy’). Asked about the
allegations concerning the high cost of his program, he replies:
“Qu’on m’en apporte les preuves.”

‘Let them show me the proofs of this.’ (February 20, 2007)
Here is another example, this time from a debate about Darfur (October 7,
2005):
C’est cela que vous appelez une preuve? Une personne parle, raconte une petite histoire
qui vous fait plaisir et cela vous suffit, c’est du pain benit?
‘You call this a proof? Someone talks, tells you a little story that pleases you, and this is
enough for you, it’s a godsend?
Remarkably (from an Anglo point of view), even French discussions about

the theory of evolution are conducted in terms of preuves (‘proof’). For example,
Cyrille Barrette, in his (2000) book Le miroir du monde (“The mirror of the
world”), describes “Les sept preuves de l’évolution” (‘the seven proofs of

evolution’). An online article discussing this book (Cloutier 2000) is titled
Quelles sont les preuves de l’evolution? (‘What proofs are there of evolution?’).
From an Anglo point of view, there is no proof of evolution; there is only
evidence. In fact, the aforementioned online article that discusses “les sept
preuves de l’évolution” also acknowledges that “il n’y a pas vraiment de preuves
tangibles” (‘there really is no tangible proof’) for the theory of evolution.
“Nonetheless,” it adds, “there are some indirect proofs” (“il y a cependant des
preuves indirectes”).
Thus, since French does not distinguish lexically between “empirical evi-
dence” and “proof” in a broader sense, including that based on logical argumenta-
tion, even debates about evolution are framed in terms of preuves, that is, in terms
of a word that can also be used with reference to mathematical and logical proofs.
As these examples illustrate, the new English discourse of evidence is indeed
a language-specific phenomenon—but one with important implications for the
world at large.
3.5. Sources of the Modern Concepts of Evidence in

Law, Theology, Philosophy, and Science
Earlier I quoted Ian Hacking’s assertion that “until the seventeenth century there
was no concept of evidence with which to pose the problem of induction”: until at
least the time of Glanvill and Hobbes, he suggests, “there was no concept of
evidence available.” Hacking does not refer in this context specifically to the
English language, but it is certainly striking that the semantic path of the English
word evidence diverged in the seventeenth century from the common source that
evidence and evidence had in the medieval Latin evidentia and that, as Bentham
(1978 [1827], vol. 1, 17) noted two centuries later, in taking that path English
developed “an instrument of discourse peculiar to itself.”
I suggest that while the purposes of historical semantics and the history of
ideas may be different, in fact, semantic analysis of cultural keywords like
evidence can not only complement observations derived from philosophy and
the history of ideas but also make them more precise.
For example, Hacking links the modern concept of evidence with the “inter-
nal evidence of things,” which he contrasts with the “external evidence of
people”: “People provide the evidence of testimony and of authority. . . . what
was lacking, was the evidence provided by things” (Hacking 1975, 32). As this
chapter shows, however, the semantic history of the word evidence is actually
quite complex and multilayered and cannot be adequately portrayed by means of
a simple distinction between “people” and “things.”
Part of the problem is that in interpreting earlier texts, historians of ideas tend
to draw their analytical tools from their own language and often rely on words
whose meaning has changed over the centuries, thus unwittingly projecting their
own ways of thinking onto earlier periods.
For example, Henry Van Leeuwen in his book, The Problem of Certainty in
English Thought: 1630–1690 (1963), writes about Joseph Glanvill, the author of
The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1665), as follows: “In addition to his negative thesis
[i.e., “uncertainties are not science,” ], Glanvill has a positive one, that science is
certainty, by which is meant a provisional assent, an assent meted out in accordance
with the available evidence” (82). This sounds as if Van Leeuwen and Glanvill
shared the same concept of evidence (“available evidence”). Restating Glanvill’s
statements containing the word evidence, Van Leeuwen repeatedly uses the word
evidence himself without noticing (or noting) that Glanvill’s evidence and his own
usage are not equivalent. Consider this example: “The key to the establishment of
such scientific truth as is possible is to proportion assent to evidence: ‘If a man
measures out the degrees of his assent to Opinions, according to the degrees of
Evidence . . . He stands upon a firm basis’ ” (ibid., 83–84).
The very fact that Glanvill spoke of “degrees of Evidence” rather than “the
amount (or weight) of evidence” (as one might speak today) is an indication that
he was not using the term evidence in the same sense as Van Leeuwen. Conse-
quently, the constant use of the word evidence in Van Leeuwen’s description of
Glanvill’s views is misleading.
The title of Glanvill’s book on witches, Sadducismus Triumphatus: or Full
and Plain Evidence concerning Witches and Apparitions (1681), may sound to
the modern ear as if the book was concerned with “evidence” of the existence of
witches—and it is, but not in the modern sense of evidence. For example, when
Glanvill (ibid., 4) writes: “I must premise that this, being matter of fact, is only
capable of the evidence of authority and of sense, and by both these the being of
witches and diabolical contracts is most abundantly confirmed,” he is talking
about credible (authoritative) testimony of eyewitnesses, not about evidence in
the sense in which this word came to be used in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries and would be used nowadays. This is also apparent in the following
passage:
We have the attestation of thousands of Eye and Ear-Witnesses, and those not of the
easily deceivable Vulgar only, but of wise and grave Discerners. . . . such Cases
have been often determined near us, by Wise and Revered Judges, upon clear and
convictive Evidence: and multitudes in our Nation have suffered death for their vile
Compacts with Apostate Spirits. (Glanvill 1667, 5)
Van Leeuwen comments on these passages using the modern expression

“empirical evidence”: “The denial of existing empirical evidence would, he
[Glanvill] says, make romance of history which is full of authenticated accounts
of witnesses, make murderers of judges who have sentenced witches, and liars of
witnesses who have testified concerning their behaviour” (1963, 87). However,
the concept of empirical evidence was clearly alien to Glanvill, and under his pen
evidence did not mean what it came to mean, for example, to nineteenth-century
scholars like geologist Charles Lyell or biologist Charles Darwin.5
I mention Lyell and Darwin here advisedly because they were both extreme-
ly popular and widely read nineteenth-century scholars whose writings were full
of evidence in a modern (stage IV) sense of the word and because their use of it is
likely to have contributed to the wider diffusion of the concept of evidence (in
their sense) in modern Anglo culture. The abundance of evidence in the writings
of Lyell and Darwin may also help us to reconstruct the disciplinary pathways
along which the more recent meanings of evidence spread in English discourse,
becoming as a result a key feature of the modern Anglo-English intellectual
landscape.
Hacking (1975, 35) has speculated thus on these pathways:
It will be my claim . . . that the concept of internal evidence of things is primarily a

legacy of what I shall call the low sciences, alchemy, geology, astrology, and in
particular medicine. By default these could deal only in opinio. They could achieve
no demonstrations and so had to resort to some other mode of proof. The high
sciences, such as optics, astronomy, and mechanics, still lusted after demonstration
and could, in many cases, seem to achieve it. They could scorn opinio and any new
mode of argument. New models of argument arose, perforce, among the students of
opinion.
A detailed historical study of the use of evidence in what Hacking calls “low” and
“high” sciences is beyond the scope of this chapter, but a few observations are in
order.
It is certainly striking that in Newton’s use (in his work written in English)
evidence occurs many times in his theological manuscripts but hardly ever in his
scientific writings (I have found one example in his Opticks and none in his
Papers and Letters on Natural Philosophy or his scientific manuscripts). The
word experiment occurs in them very frequently, but evidence does not: evident-
ly, as a scientist, Newton did not think in these terms.
Nor have I been able to find many occurrences of evidence in the scientific
writings of the eminent eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century scholars
Joseph Priestley or John Dalton—both chemists, that is, representatives of
the “high sciences” in Hacking’s sense and both singled out by Halliday
(1988) as important figures in the development of the language of physical
science. On the other hand, as mentioned earlier, in the works of Charles Lyell
and Charles Darwin (both representatives of the “low sciences,” geology and
biology), the use of evidence is extremely frequent and thoroughly modern
(Stage IV). Indeed, in the scientific works of Charles Darwin’s grandfather,
Erasmus Darwin (also a biologist), there are also some occurrences of evidence
in this sense, for example:
The fruit of the fig is not a seed-vessel, but a receptacle inclosing the flower within
it. As these trees bear some male and others female flowers, immured on all sides by
the fruit, the manner of their fecundation was very unintelligible, till Tournefort and
Pontedera discovered that a kind of gnat produced in the male figs carried the
fecundating dust on its wings, . . . and, penetrating the female fig, thus impregnated
the flowers; for the evidence of this wonderful fact, see the word Caprification, in
Milne’s Botanical Dictionary. (E. Darwin 1973 [1791], 159)
This is consistent with Hacking’s hypothesis: early physicists and chemists

thought in terms of “experiments” and “demonstrations,” whereas biologists and
geologists tended to think in terms of “observations” and “evidence.” Certainly,
Charles Darwin’s great enterprise of theory building based on observation rather
than experiment was associated in his writings (for example, in The Origin of
Species) with a massive reliance on the word evidence.
Before Darwin, however, was his forerunner Charles Lyell—a man to whom
Darwin acknowledged an enormous debt. While obviously less known today than
Darwin, in his time Lyell was so popular with the general public that he “became
the first person to make his living as a science writer” (Gribbin 2002, 327). His
key work, Principles of Geology (1830), ran into twelve editions, and his hugely
popular lectures on geology (at the time a subject of great interest to the educated
public) reached a very wide audience not only in England but also in the United
States. Lyell’s book, titled (characteristically) Geological Evidences of the An-
tiquity of Man, opens with a statement alluding to that public interest and
significantly hinging on the word evidence:6
No subject has lately excited more curiosity and general interest among geologists
and the public than the question of the Antiquity of the Human Race—whether or no
we have sufficient evidence in caves, or in the superficial deposits commonly called
drift or “diluvium,” to prove the former coexistence of man with certain extinct
mammalia. (Lyell 1863, 1)
In their history of scientific discourse, in a chapter titled “Argument in the

19th Century,” Gross, Harmon, and Reidy (2002, 159) assign an especially
important place to geology in the nineteenth century: While at the time “all of
the sciences are . . . moving towards the explanation of facts by carefully articu-
lated theorizing,” it is first of all in geology that “the whole enterprise undergoes a
shift from description to theory, from a science of facts to a science of causes.”
This observation is consistent with the reliance on the new concept of evidence in
the writing of nineteenth-century scholars like Charles Lyell.
As the opening statement from his Principles of Geology illustrates, for
Lyell, geological questions were closely related to paleontological ones and to
the origin of species, and the question of the “antiquity”—the time depth of the
hypothesized changes—was a key issue. The same was true of Darwin, who in his
Origin of Species wrote:
We should bear in mind that many genera in all classes are of ancient origin, and the
species in this case will have had ample time for dispersal and subsequent modifi-
cation. There is also reason to believe, from geological evidence, that within each
great class the lower organisms change at a slower rate than the higher; consequent-
ly they will have had a better chance of ranging widely and of still retaining the
same specific character. (Darwin 1859, 407)
In his acclaimed book Science: A History, 1543–2001 (which I have already

quoted), John Gribbin (2002) refers to what he calls “a popular myth” about
Darwin: “that he was a dilettante young gentleman who was lucky enough to go
on a voyage around the world, where he saw the rather obvious evidence for
evolution at work and came up with an explanation that any reasonable intelligent
contemporary might have thought of in the same circumstances” (339). Yet when
one compares the nonoccurrence of evidence in Newton’s scientific writings with
the massive use of this word in Darwin’s, one must wonder whether that “popular
myth” did not include a kernel of truth.
Of course, Darwin was not “a dilettante young gentleman” who went on a
voyage, saw some things, and came up with “an explanation that any reasonable
intelligent contemporary might have thought of in the same circumstances.”
Rather, as Gribbin rightly points out, he was a deep and original thinker who
was also “unusually hard-working, painstaking and persistent in his search for
scientific truth across a wide range of disciplines” (ibid.). On Darwin’s own
account, however, his theory was indeed the fruit (ripened, of course, through
the subsequent work and thought) of the wonder and astonishment he experi-
enced during that eye-opening voyage.
Significantly, for him as for Lyell, geological observations were a starting
point for thinking about the origin of species: it was the realization of the
enormous time depth of the geological changes that he observed during the
voyage (or deduced from what he saw) that convinced him of the viability and
indeed truth of the theory of evolution by natural selection. As Gribbin notes, “by
the time he returned from his voyage, there was no question in Darwin’s mind
that evolution was a fact” (ibid., 347).
Given the popularity of Darwin’s writings, one could venture the hypothesis
that his theory of evolution played a significant role in the spread of the new
(stage IV and even V) concept of evidence in English discourse and Anglo
culture. Documenting these observations would require a separate study, but a
few examples of the use of evidence in Darwin’s writings are in order. Here is one
that appears in what came to be known as The Voyage of the Beagle (relating to
Darwin’s geological observations and arguing from what one can see to what one
can think, that is, evidence Stage IV):
It required little geological practice to interpret the marvellous story which this
scene at once unfolded; though I confess I was at first so much astonished that
I could scarcely believe the plainest evidence. I saw the spot where a cluster of fine
trees once waved their branches on the shores of the Atlantic, when that ocean (now
driven back 700 miles) came to the foot of the Andes. (Darwin 1913 [1845], 354)
A good example of evidence Stage V, also from The Voyage of the Beagle, is
provided by the following case of arguing from what one can see to what one can
say (“our theory”):
It is evident, on our theory, that coasts merely fringed by reefs cannot have subsided
to any perceptible amount; and therefore they must, since the growth of their corals,
either have remained stationary or have been upheaved. Now, it is remarkable how
generally it can be shown, by the presence of upraised organic remains, that the
fringed islands have been elevated: so far, this is indirect evidence in favour of our
theory. (Darwin 1913 [1845], 505)
The most characteristic contexts in which evidence occurs in Darwin’s writ-

ings are those that include the phrase we have (or I have) (e.g., “we have good
evidence,” “we have conclusive evidence”); the words amount or body (e.g., “a
large amount of evidence” or “a large body of evidence”); the preposition from
(either before or after evidence) (e.g., “from geological evidence,” “evidence from
our domestic animals of many kinds”); the words weigh, weight, or balance (e.g.,
“to weigh the evidence on both sides,” “the balance of evidence”); the phrase
supported by (e.g., “supported by evidence”); and many negative contexts (e.g.,
“I have no good evidence,” “our evidence is fragmentary,” “the evidence is far
from conclusive,” “the evidence was very weak” or “there is no evidence”).
In his letters, Darwin complains that in order to pass his BA examination,
he had to “get up Paley’s Evidences of Christianity,” and he remarks: “Science
has nothing to do with Christ, except in so far as the habit of scientific research
makes a man cautious in admitting evidence” (F. Darwin, ed., 1887, vol. 1,
277). Comparing Darwin’s own use of the word evidence with that in earlier
books like The Evidences of Christianity, we can see that the caution of
scientific researchers like Darwin himself has contributed not only to greater
caution in “admitting evidence” but also to a change in the meaning of the word
evidence itself.7
Undoubtedly, however, earlier books like The Evidences of Christianity have
also contributed in their own way to the key role of the word evidence in modern
Anglo culture: Along with law and philosophy, religion was another important
early pathway that led to the emergence and growth of “evidence” in the world of
thought associated with the English language.
Indeed, for many early scientists (writing in English) evidence had at least as
much to do with God as with science (and for Newton, as we have seen, more).
For example, Dwight Atkinson (1999, 17), the author of Scientific Discourse in
Sociohistorical Context, writes as follows about Robert Boyle, whom he calls
“the leading light of the Royal Society and Restoration Science”: “[He] was a
highly public embodiment of a Christian virtuoso, who found his life’s purpose in
uncovering the ‘argument by design’—evidence of God’s will in the intricate
workings of nature” (emphasis added, ).
In her groundbreaking book Culture of Fact (2000), Barbara Shapiro
links the rise of “fact” in modern English discourse to the English Protestants’
desire to establish the truth of Scripture rationally and to distance themselves
from the Roman Catholics’ reliance on the doctrine of infallibility and the oral
tradition. While Shapiro’s discussion focuses on the word fact rather than evi-
dence, both her own comments and the seventeenth-century quotes that she
provides are full of the word evidence as well. (See also Shapiro 1983.)
Since the leading exponents of this rationalist and anti-Catholic theology
were often leading jurists, it is not surprising that they tended to draw on the
traditions of English common law and English legal language:
By the 1670s, to be convincing to most literate English audiences, religious argu-

ments had to be rational, not claims based on authority or divine inspiration. A well-
known and well-established legal tradition for reaching traditional belief in “matters
of fact” was readily adopted by rational theologians such as Edward Stillingfleet,
John Tillotson, Robert Boyle, and Gilbert Burnet. (Shapiro 2000, 170)
The word evidence comes up in such contexts again and again. For example,
Shapiro summarizes Stillingfleet’s comments on the miracles in the New Testa-
ment and the testimony of the Apostles as follows: “The greatest evidence which
can be given to the matter of fact is the attesting of it by those persons who were
eye-witnesses of it” (ibid.). Similarly, of Tillotson she writes:
In a work designed to shore up Protestant belief in Scripture against Roman Catholic

oral tradition, John Tillotson, another rationalizing theologian, also adopted legal
approaches to evidence and assent to issues relating to “faith.” . . . The best evidence,
he admitted, was immediate sense of perception, which he, like the virtuosi, some-
times labeled “ocular demonstration.” Next came the evidence of witnesses, applica-
ble to both religious and secular events and acts. (Shapiro 2000, 172)
What English Protestants were particularly interested in was showing that

the scriptural accounts of the Creation and the Flood were true. For example,
Shapiro notes that in this context, English jurist and theologian Matthew Hale
used the same language that characterizes his legal writings and also discussed
both the need for credible and authentic witnesses and the nature of believable
testimony. Writing about the “Origination of Man,” Hale repeatedly used the
phrases many evidences and evidences of fact:
Hale . . . not only cited several “Instance(s) of Fact” to show that mankind had a
beginning in time but presented eight “Evidence(s) of Fact” to show the “reason-
ableness of the Divine Hypothesis touching the origination of the world and
particularly of Men.” Admitting that each of his eight varieties of “fact” taken
“singly and apart . . . possibly may not be so weighty,” he argued that the “concur-
rence and coincidence” of “many Evidences” carries “a great weight, even as to the
point of Fact . . . ” He conceded that in arguments like the one he was trying
to prove, “which is touching a matter of fact that Evidences of Fact can be no
more than topical and probable.” He nevertheless insisted, “In these Evidences of
Fact . . . it is sufficient that they be probable and indicative of Credibility, though
not of Science or Infallibility.” (ibid., 177)
Hale’s account of the “origination of man” is a characteristic example of the

attempts to provide a unified account of biblical and natural history or of what
Shapiro calls “physicotheology” (and, one might add, “geotheology”). For scho-
lars like Hale, it was important to achieve consistency between scientific knowl-
edge and biblical accounts, and in this endeavor, the language of English law, in
which both fact and evidence were key terms, played a significant role. As
Shapiro (ibid., 179) puts it, “If the ‘rational’ in rational theology of the period
was not dependent solely on arguments from ‘fact,’ the appropriation of the
language of ‘fact,’ witnessing, and circumstantial evidence provided a substantial

support for rationalist religious arguments.” As a result, “by the end of the
seventeenth century . . . English Protestant Christianity would integrate the legal
concept ‘fact’ and legal language of establishing ‘facts’ into its very fabric, thus
deepening the impact of fact on English culture.”(ibid., 179)
I suggest that the same can be said about evidence, and it is symptomatic that
in Locke’s Reasonabless of Christianity the word occurs many times. Here is an
example: “The evidence of Our Savior’s mission from heaven is so great, in the
multitude of miracles he did, before all sorts of people that what he delivered
cannot but be received as the oracles of God, and unquestionable verity” (Locke
1997 [1696], 135). Today one might say that Christ’s miracles were evidence of
his divine mission, but this is not exactly what Locke says: he is talking about the
evidence of Christ’s mission as shown in the multitude of miracles he performed.
His “evidence” is still close to “evidentness”: it is to be recognized rather than
critically examined. Yet it is such use of evidence in “natural theology” that
appears to have been later adopted (and adapted) by English naturalists, resulting
in eighteenth-century uses like those cited earlier from Erasmus Darwin and then
in the veritable explosion of the use of evidence in the nineteenth-century
writings of scholars like geologist Charles Lyell and above all Charles Darwin.
The fact that the plural form evidences (not used by Locke but frequently
used by other “natural theologians”; see, for example, the quotes from Hale in
this chapter) has remained to this day a term of Anglo-American Christian
apologetics is a reminder of this particular strand in the history of the English
word evidence. It is a characteristic term of the literature on the “natural history of
creation” from the seventeenth century to the present (cf. Theobald 2005). As
titles such as Charles Lyell’s Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man
(1863) and Thomas Henry Huxley’s Evidence as to Man’s place in nature (also
1863) illustrate, it was also widely used in nineteenth-century geology and
biology.
Again, the semantic history of the plural form evidences requires further
detailed study. For the purposes of this chapter, suffice it to say that this form is
now widely perceived as archaic and that it is incompatible with what has been
described here as Stage V in the semantic development of evidence.
According to Shapiro (2000), the concept of fact, first borrowed by English
natural philosophy and natural sciences from law and history (where it mainly
referred to human deeds) and transformed by them into “scientific fact,” subse-
quently influenced English discourse outside the natural sciences and became
central to modern Anglo-English discourse in general: “In the hands of John
Locke, ‘fact’ would provide one of the foundations of all empirical knowledge.
By the early eighteenth century ‘fact’ was so widely displayed in so many diverse
enterprises—legal, historical, religious, and scientific—that we can reasonably
speak of England as a ‘culture of fact’ ” (ibid., 167).
Again I suggest that something similar happened to the concept of evidence:
first borrowed (or heavily influenced) by English natural philosophy and natural
theology from the language of law, in time it influenced English discourse outside
the natural philosophy, acquired a key place in the natural sciences, and became
central to modern Anglo-English discourse in general (including criminology and
forensics), so much so that by the twentieth century we can reasonably speak of
Anglo culture as a “culture of evidence.”
The fact that Jeremy Bentham was able to state in 1827 that “a great part of
the business of science in general may be resolved into a research after evidence”
(1978 [1827], vol.1, 21) indicates that science had played an important role in this
rise of evidence even before the Darwinian revolution.
Shapiro (2000, 192) emphasizes that even though “during the seventeenth
century legal concepts played an important role in shaping empirical philoso-
phy,” in the eighteenth century, “empirical philosophy as formulated by Locke
and his successors came to influence legal writing, creating a symbiosis between
epistemology and the law of evidence.” She also notes that the first legal treatise
on evidence, Sir Geoffrey Gilbert’s Law of Evidence (1979 [1754]), explicitly
“introduced the English law in the context of Lockean epistemology” and that
“the intellectual relationship connecting epistemology, the law of evidence, and
‘fact-finding’ was a close and even symbiotic one throughout the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries” (Shapiro (2000, 192).
Arguably, the reverse direction of influence discussed by Shapiro in relation
to fact has its parallel in the history of evidence: the concept of evidence, which
developed in empirical philosophy and science (initially, it seems, under the
influence of the language of law) in turn influenced the language of law, bringing
at least some uses of evidence (especially in criminology and forensics) closer to
the way this word is now used in science.
But if Shapiro is right in suggesting that it was “Locke, more than any
other single figure, [who] helped to give the legal and Baconian ‘fact’ philosophical
legitimacy and general currency” (ibid.), it was perhaps Charles Darwin who
helped, more than any other single figure, to give general currency to an epistemo-
logically cautious concept of evidence, one that has become a hallmark of modern
Anglo English intellectual discourse. To be sure, in Locke’s writings, too, both fact
and evidence were extremely frequent and significant terms, with no fewer than 110
occurrences in the Essay alone, so no doubt here, too, Locke was very influential.
But Locke’s use of evidence is quite different from the ones familiar to us from
twentieth-century discourse (Stages IV and V). Darwin’s use of evidence, on the
other hand, is by and large thoroughly modern (Stage IV and even Stage V).
Since the modern English concepts of evidence (stages IV and V) have no
equivalents in other European languages, any historical explanations of their
emergence must refer to some unique (or at least distinctive) features of Anglo
history and culture. The following are four such features:
1. British empirical philosophy, with its focus on facts and fact finding
2. the rise of the natural sciences and their popularization through the Royal
Society and the writings of naturalists
3. English Protestantism, with its rationalist slant
4. English common law, with its system of jurors
Since the distinctive English concept of evidence appears to have taken shape
first in the legal arena, in the context of the English common law, it is important
to consider here, however briefly, the sources of the key differences between
English law and law on the Continent.
As discussed by Baker (1990), Van Caenegem (1988), and others, after the
Lateran Council of 1215 forbade ordeals, many European countries chose torture
as a means of establishing guilt by confession, and in addition, a complex system
of evaluating witness testimony developed throughout Europe. It was only in
England that a common law developed that placed “matters of fact” into the
hands of jurors, entrusting them with a critical sifting through and assessment of
the testimony. As Baker (1990, 580) notes, trial by jury, which “rapidly became
[in England] the almost universal form of trial . . . was revered in centuries to
come as the palladium of English liberty.”
Van Caenegem (1988, 71) shows that “in England the jury was from the start
at the heart of the Common Law and remained there.” This common law was
empirical rather than based on systematic theory and logical deduction from
general premises, like the law on the Continent:
English law prefers precedent as a basis for judgments and moves empirically from
case to case, from one reality to another. Continental law tends to move more
theoretically by deductive reasoning, basing judgments on abstract principles; it is
more conceptual, more scholastic and works more with definitions and distinctions.
(ibid., 88)
The continental law, Van Caenegem points out, was “professors’ law, marked by
exegesis and commentaries on learned books and glosses” (ibid.). By contrast, in
the common law of England a key role belonged to jurors, who relied not on legal
learning but on their own assessment of the “evidence” put before them.
The definition of jury in John Cowell’s dictionary of law, published in 1607,
is a good illustration of the fact that by the end of the sixteenth century, the
concepts of jury and evidence had become intimately linked: “Jury: . . . signifies
in our common law a company of men as 24, or 12, sworn to deliver a truth upon
such evidence as shall be delivered them touching the matter in question” (Cow-
ell 1970 [1607]). It is in this context, it appears, that in the English language,
“evidence” became a well-established category, one with which the general
public became quite familiar. Shapiro (2000, 9) has this to say:
The quite widespread experience and familiarity with legal institutions and the
language of fact and methods of fact determination thus brought facts easily to the
attention of the English so that they became part of the “furniture of the mind.”
I suggest that it was precisely this familiarity and this confidence in juries that made
“fact” so easily transportable to a variety of nonlegal contexts.
For my part, I suggest that the same applied to evidence—a word that, as noted
earlier, frequently co-occurred in seventeenth-century legal records and writings
with the word fact.
The use of the term evidence in English law must have been well established
in the sixteenth century since, in his 1607 law dictionary, Cowell was able to
write: “Evidence (Evidentia) is used in our law generally for any proof, be it
testimony of men or instrument [legal document, ].” Cowell quotes in this context
a well-known sixteenth-century writer and public figure, Sir Thomas Smith,
Queen Elizabeth’s ambassador to France and the author of a famous work titled
De Republica Anglorum. In it, Smith speaks inter alia of eyewitnesses’ oral and
written statements, “which we call in our language Evidence against the male-
factor,” and also remarks that “evidence here is called writings of contracts
authentical after the manner of England” (1970 [1583], 80).
It is striking how conscious those sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wri-
ters were of the specifically English character of the legal notion of evidence
used in the law of England: “after the manner of England,” “in our law,” “in our
language,” “in our common law”—the awareness of distinctiveness is
unmistakable.
The word evidence was used in so-called law French, which was used in
the law courts in England between the thirteenth and the seventeenth centuries
(cf., e.g., Baker 2004, 251). But this was an English “French,” not a French
French. As Baker (1990, 4) notes:
It was, of course, the French of Westminster Hall, not a foreign importation. In a

relatively short space of time—mainly under Henry III and Edward I—the English
bench and bar had used Anglo-French to create an entirely new legal vocabulary,
the basis indeed of a new jurisprudence, by giving special meanings to ordinary
words. . . . By the middle of the fifteenth century there was a marked difference
between the French of English lawyers and the French of France. A century later,
the divergence was total.
Baker comments further: “Most of the terminology of the common law, even
today, is of law French origin; and yet very few of the terms have any close
equivalents in the French of France” (ibid.).
Turning briefly to the distinctive character of British empirical philosophy
(as epitomized by Locke), I note only that, in it, the emphasis on fact finding was
linked with an emphasis on the limitations of human knowledge and a distrust of
“pure thinking” unsupported by “the hand” and “the eye.” The eminent seven-
teenth-century scientist and “curator of experiments” at the Royal Society,
Robert Hooke, characteristically contrasted “the Philosophy of discourse and
the disputations . . . that chiefly aims at the subtilty [sic] of its Deductions and
Conclusions” with “a sincere Hand, and a faithful Eye,” which are able “to
examine, and to record, the things themselves as they appear” (Hooke 2003
[1665], preface, unpaginated).
“The hand and the eye” could not produce irrefutable proofs such as those
which could be achieved in geometry, mathematics, or logic and they could not
provide absolute certainty of the kind that, for example, Descartes was after; they
could, however, produce the limited certainty that Locke saw as a realistic and
“reasonable” goal of human endeavor.
Significantly, the philosophers and scholars associated with the Royal Soci-
ety frequently contrasted their own attitudes with what they saw as Descartes’
excessive trust in and reliance on reason, and Joseph Glanvill’s ironic references
(in his Vanity of Dogmatizing) to Descartes as “that wonder of men, the Great
Des-Cartes,” “the most ingenious Des-Cartes,” “that miracle of men, the illustri-
ous Des-Cartes” are symptomatic in this regard.
Clearly, the scientific ideal of “evidence” embodied in the modern English
language has one of its sources here. It is an ideal distinct from that of “proof,”
which depends on reasoning (methodical thinking) and as noted at the outset, has its
lexical exponents in all European languages. The lexical distinction between “proof”
and “evidence,” characteristic of English alone, matches that between knowledge
attained by reason (emphasized by Descartes) and knowledge dependent on observa-
tion (emphasized by Locke and the English naturalists from Hooke to Darwin).
At this point I return briefly to the semantic difference between the English
word evidence and the French word evidence, which was noted at the outset. As
we have seen, the meaning of evidence changed between Glanvill’s “evidence
concerning witches” and Darwin’s “evidence in favour of our theory.” Howev-
er, neither Glanvill’s nor Darwin’s evidence is equivalent to the French
evidence—as it is used now or as it was used, for example, by Descartes and
Pascal. It is misleading, therefore (though sometimes hard to avoid), to translate
évidence as evidence and even more misleading to equate the two in the history
of ideas.
For example, in his otherwise highly illuminating book, The Science of
Conjecture: Evidence and Probability before Pascal, James Franklin (2001,
253) writes the following: “On the matter of evidence for the Christian religion,
Pascal seems to have thought that, uncertainty being a condition of fallen nature,
the truth in religion ought to be blindingly obvious but that in all honesty it could
not be claimed that it was.” This sounds as if Pascal had been interested in
“evidence for the Christian religion,” but in fact, Pascal did not think in such
terms, and the notion of “evidence for” was alien to him. What he did care about
was “les preuves de notre religion” (‘the proofs of our religion’) and not “the
evidence for” it. To be sure, he used the word evidence as well, but when he did,
he contrasted it with l’obscurité ‘obscurity’:
The prophecies, even the miracles and proofs [preuves] of our religion, are not of
such a kind that they can be said to be absolutely convincing, but they are at the
same time such that it cannot be said to be unreasonable to believe in them. There is
thus evidence [evidence] and obscurity, to enlighten some and obfuscate others.
(Pascal 1966, 286; 1962, 347)
Thus, for Pascal, evidence meant ‘clarity, obviousness’ (recall the seventeenth-
century dictionary definition of evidence quoted earlier). It had its opposite in a
‘lack of clarity’ (obscurite), not in a ‘lack of evidence’.
As Franklin himself says, Pascal expected evidence to be “blindingly obvi-
ous” (in keeping, I would add, with the meaning of the word evidence itself), and
he clearly was not using this word in the sense of, roughly speaking, ‘empirical
evidence’, as the phrase “evidence for the Christian religion” might suggest to the
modern English reader.
Franklin writes: “The few remaining years of Pascal’s life until his death in
1662 at the age of thirty-nine, were mostly occupied with prayer, illness, and the
composition of a major work on the evidences for Christianity [i.e., Pensees, ]”
(Franklin 2001, 273). However, the phrase evidences for Christianity does not
belong to the language (or thought world) of the Pensees. It is an amalgam of the
older English phrase evidences of Christianity (used, for example, in the title of
Paley’s book mentioned in the quote from Darwin and in several other book
titles) and the more modern phrase evidence for, which spread widely in the
nineteenth century and even more widely in the twentieth century.8 Pascal was
interested not in “evidences” but in proofs (preuves).
One might argue that when one is writing about Pascal in English, there is
no reason not to use the English word evidence in describing Pascal’s inten-
tions. As I see it, however, it is both misleading and unnecessary to do so: as it
happens, English has a word that corresponds in meaning to Pascal’s preuves,
namely proofs.
As the preface of the Port-Royal edition of the Pensees put it, Pascal under-
took to prove (prouver) the religion by the prophecies”; he tried to “derive the
proofs (preuves) of its truth from the Gospel”; he cited “many proofs (preuves)
from the person of [Christ], from his miracles, from his doctrine and from the
circumstances of his life”; and so on (Pascal 1962, 33). In the text of the Pensees
itself, the words prouver and preuves appear again and again. The following is a
quote from an English translation, where preuves has been translated as proofs,
and prouver as prove:
We know God only through Jesus Christ. . . . All those who have claimed to know
God and prove his existence without Jesus Christ have only had futile proofs to
offer. But to prove Christ we have the prophesies which are solid and palpable
proofs. By being fulfilled and proved true by the event, these prophesies show
that these truths are certain and thus prove that Jesus is divine. In him and through
him, therefore, we know God. Apart from that, without Scripture, without original
sin, without the necessary mediator, who was promised and came, it is impossible
to prove absolutely that God exists, or to teach sound doctrine and sound
morality. But through and in Christ we can prove God’s existence, and teach
both doctrine and morality. Therefore Jesus is the true God of men. (Pascal 1966,
286; 1962, 347)
While Pascal did not regard all such proofs (of the Christian religion) as
“absolutely convincing” (absolument convaincants) and believed that they need-
ed to be complemented by faith and grace, he nonetheless thought of them as
“proofs” (preuves), not as “evidence” or “evidences.”
Evidence is a keyword in Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity. A key-
word in Pascal’s Pensées is preuves. The concept of evidence (or rather, the
family of concepts associated with this word in modern English) is peculiar to the
English language, and so is the mode of thinking associated with it.
3.6. Concluding Remarks: Semantics, Culture,

and Society
The story of evidence told in this chapter is, of course, incomplete, and it raises a
host of questions for future research. In particular, it is important to find out how
the keyword evidence is used in different varieties of English (e.g., American
English vs. British English), different registers (e.g., scientific, political, reli-
gious), different modalities (e.g., oral vs. written), different genres (e.g., public
debates, interviews, informal academic discussions, encyclopedic exposition),
and so on. It is also important to study in more detail the use of evidence in
various thematic domains and diverse professional “languages”—for example, in
legal discourse, medical discourse, philosophical discourse, and sociopolitical
discourse.
Much more work also needs to be done on the semantic history of
evidence and on the gradual emergence and differentiation of the discourse
of evidence in different genres, registers, and varieties of English. The
interaction between philosophical uses of evidence and its use in literature
and everyday language in a variety of periods is also a fascinating subject
for future study, as is the use of evidence in “new Englishes” such as Indian
English and Singapore English.
But it is not the purpose of this chapter to say everything that can be said
about evidence in relation to English and “Englishes,” and it would be foolish to
try to do so. The focus of this chapter is on the meanings of the word evidence in a
historical and cultural perspective and on the new discourse of evidence, which
plays a fundamental role in modern English across a wide range of genres,
registers, and domains. The topic addressed here is, I believe, of great interest
and importance, both theoretical and practical, and while this study acknowl-
edges its limitations, it does not seem necessary to apologize for them.
The study demonstrates, plainly and in detail, the close links between
semantic change, cultural history, and the history of ideas, and it shows how
these links can be studied in a rigorous and illuminating way through the use of a
semantic methodology (NSM) particularly suited to the needs of cross-linguistic,
cross-cultural, and cross-temporal research. It also shows how the unique Anglo
concept of evidence—puzzling or even incomprehensible to cultural outsiders—
can be explained in an intelligible way to learners of English who may need to
master it to be able to flourish socially, academically, and professionally in the
modern world.
In his study of a “semantic history of common sense” sociologist Frits van
Holthoon (1987, 102–103) writes:
The history of words, semantic history, seems to offer exciting possibilities of

exploring unknown paths of historical culture, but endeavours in this field are
very often disappointing. Either they remain lexicographical exercises from which
no further-reaching conclusions can be drawn or they become arbitrary affairs
because the author of such a study switches from the word (or term) he is studying
to the concept presumably underlying the word and then looks for other words
presumably expressing that concept.
As this book (along with its predecessor, English: Meaning and Culture)
demonstrates, the semantic history of words, especially cultural keywords, in-
deed offers exciting possibilities of exploring unknown paths of historical cul-
ture, but it needs an effective semantic methodology. Such a methodology is now
available in the NSM approach to semantics in general and cultural and historical
semantics in particular (cf. Bromhead 2009).
Summing up the historical investigation of evidence reported here, we can
say that the emergence of the new concepts and the new discourses of evidence
described here is the result of two distinct though related historical processes.
One process can be summed up by the phrase “from certainty to doubt”; the other,
in the phrase “from truth to empirical facts.”
The earliest occurrences of evidence implied clarity and certainty
that Locke compared with bright sunshine. Evidence was then associated
with light and truth. The “brightness” of truth was seen as the source of “evi-
dence” (initially close in meaning to “evidentness”), as the following quotes
illustrate:
Certain Truths, that have in them so much light or evidence . . . it cannot be hidden. (OED
1665)
When all things sensible are shut out, it is then that the Spirit enlarges . . . and sees by a
light whose evidence is beyond that of the Sun. (Literature Online 1770)
Judging by the material in the OED and Literature Online, the collocation
the evidence of (its) truth was common in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, rare in the nineteenth century, and no longer used in the twentieth.
Here are a few examples:
An experimental evidence of this most known truth. (1633)

Moreover those . . . are a most pregnant evidence of this irrefragable truth. (1633)
Upon the clear evidence of truth and reason. (1662)
They then concluded, as he had intended they should, that he was drowned; those remains
of his being, as they thought, but too sure evidence of that fatal truth. (1671)
For by endeavouring to perplex the Cause, and darken the evidence of Truth, a Man is
often-times smother’d in his own Smoke. (1708)
The “evidentness” of some truths was seen as comparable to the “evident-

ness” of what one can see with one’s own eyes, and such luminously “evident”
truths were not restricted to any particular domain or kind: the truths of faith or
mathematical truths were described in terms of “evidence,” as was “the evidence
of the senses.” It appears, however, that evidence gradually started to collocate
less with light and truth and more with facts, as in the following examples from
the OED:
The plain evidence of facts is superior to all declarations. (1769)

Authentic facts, and unquestionable evidence. (1782)
These facts are supposed to furnish pretty strong evidence that the organ described as
oosporangium is a real oogonium. (1889)
Nothing that any psychologist may say about the general “mobbishness” of savages can
weigh against the evidence of facts in such a case. (1975)
But although “the evidence of facts” was often seen as “strong,” even “unques-
tionable,” the certainty derived from factual (and ultimately sense-related)
knowledge did not seem as absolute as that previously linked with faith, “mathe-
matical truths,” or indeed, an “ocular proof”: as Locke put it, “certainty and
demonstration, are things we must not, in these matters, pretend to” (Locke 1975
[1690], 557).
Locke’s views on these matters were no doubt symptomatic of a wider mood
of the British Enlightenment, and above all, they were themselves hugely influ-
ential: it is widely acknowledged that epistemic caution and modesty preached by
Locke had an enormous impact on his contemporaries and on many subsequent
generations of his readers (cf., e.g., Ashcraft 1991; Porter 2000). A cautious and
epistemologically “modest” tone became a hallmark of modern Anglo discourse,
especially in British English, but also more generally:
I am apt to doubt that, how far soever human industry may advance useful and
experimental philosophy in physical things, scientifical will still be out of our
reach. . . . Distinct ideas of the several sorts of bodies, that fall under the examina-
tion of our senses, perhaps, we may have: but adequate ideas, I suspect, we have not
of any one amongst them. And though the former of these will serve us for common
use and discourse, yet whilst we want the latter, we are not capable of scientifical
knowledge; nor shall ever be able to discover general, instructive, unquestionable
truths concerning them. Certainty and demonstration, are things we must not, in
these matters, pretend to. (Locke 1975[1690], 556–57)
The semantic history of evidence is a good illustration of the more general

trend “from certainty to doubt” and from “truth” to “matters of fact,” “experi-
ence,” and sense-related “empirical” knowledge.
The fact that in American English evidence is now used in the same cautious
way and with the same frequency as it is in British English is an illustration of the
pervasiveness of Lockean epistemological attitudes in modern Anglo discourse.
For example, in the COBUILD’s two corpora, UK books and US books, the
frequency of evidence is roughly the same: 17 and 15 per million words,
respectively.
Ironically, even a sworn opponent of British empiricism like Noam Chomsky
strongly relies on the concept of evidence (and also empirical)—whether he is
presenting his own theory or arguing against the empirical tradition. Here are
some examples from Language and Mind (1972):
This idealization must be kept in mind when one is considering the problem of
confirmation of grammars on the basis of empirical evidence. (27)
The native speaker has acquired a grammar on the basis of very restricted and degenerate
evidence; the grammar has empirical consequences that extend far beyond the evidence.
(ibid.)
There is some evidence that a similar principle of cyclic application applies also on the
syntactic level. (45)
Evidence in support of this approach is provided by the observation that interesting
properties of English sentences can be explained directly in terms of deep structures
assigned to them. (106)
As these quotes (which can easily be multiplied) illustrate, one may con-
sciously choose one philosophical attitude and oppose another, while at the same
time unconsciously allowing some concepts created within that other tradition to
shape one’s own conceptual framework. This is often the way our native lan-
guage influences our thinking even when we imagine that we are totally free and
independent of it. The only way to truly liberate ourselves from such pressures (or
to give in to them consciously) is to adopt a cross-linguistic approach to our own
conceptual tools.
The philosophical underpinnings of different languages at the various stages
of history are easy to miss because every language allows its speakers to choose
between different philosophical positions. For example, one French philosopher
may be an “empiricist” (in some sense of the word), and another, an “antiempiri-
cist” (or a “rationalist”), and the same holds, of course, for British and American
philosophers. Ergo (it is argued), there is no link between languages and philo-
sophical orientations, and suggestions that there may be are often dismissed as
groundless stereotyping (cf., e.g., Sériot 2005). For example, in The Oxford
Companion to Philosophy the author of the entry on “empiricism,” Alan Lacey
(1995, 228), writes the following: “The traditional contrast between ‘British
empiricists’ and ‘continental rationalists’ cannot be regarded as anything but a
rough label of convenience, however true it may be that . . . empiricism in partic-
ular reached a zenith among the former.”
There can be no quarrel with the statement that “British empiricists” and
“continental rationalists” are “rough labels of convenience” if one acknowledges
at the same time that “empiricism reached its zenith among the former.” It should
also be recognized, however, that this is not the whole story and that “British
empiricism” left a profound mark on the English language. Given the present
position of English as a global language, such philosophical and cultural under-
pinnings of this particular language are especially important to acknowledge.
(For a fuller study of theses underpinnings, see my English: Meaning and Culture
(2006) and also my earlier studies such as Wierzbicka 2002a, 2002b, 2003b.)
In their history of scientific discourse “from the 17th century to the present,”
in a chapter titled “Argument in the 20th century,” communication scholars
Gross, Harmon, and Reidy (2002, 187) write:
To do science is to assert that a fact or a theory is true of the natural world and to
defend that assertion. We call such assertions “knowledge claims.” Any assertion is
open to challenge: even for a statement as apparently innocent as “It rained today,”
the question can always be asked, what is your evidence? In our terminology,
however, a knowledge claim is an assertion explicitly open to such challenge, one
for which its author must offer appropriate evidence. (emphasis in bold added)
Thus, the question “what is your evidence?” is seen as crucial both in daily life
and in science—but especially in science: the concept of science is defined here
through the concept of evidence.
This is, indeed, a twentieth-century view—and one that depends on the
English language (as it developed from the seventeenth century to the present).
At the risk of belaboring the point, I point out again that English makes a
conceptual and lexical distinction between “evidence” (empirical and open to
challenge) and “proof” (not necessarily empirical and in principal not open to
challenge), whereas, for example, French and German do not and that, as Jeremy
Bentham noticed nearly two centuries ago, in the word evidence, “the English
language possesses an instrument of discourse peculiar to itself” (Bentham 1978
[1827] vol.1, 17). When we trace the semantic path of this word over several
centuries, we see that the modern concept of evidence, seemingly so “scientific”
and (one might imagine) universal, is in fact eminently “made in England” (cf.
Malouf 2003) and that it is the product of a complex history of ideas, culture, and
society.
Discussing the cultural baggage inherent in the English language, literary
scholar David Parker warned of the ethnocentrism inherent in viewing English as
culturally neutral:
Western modernity has a long history of discursively constructing itself, using

vocabularies largely derived from the Enlightenment, as the template for the future
of mankind. This is why it is so important to understand Western modernity not as a
universal destiny but as a particular historical formation, with its own multifiliated
traditions, and not least the vocabularies of disengaged rationality and universalism
that are internal to these traditions. These, as we all know, can be precise and
necessary instruments for the sciences, law, or administration, but to use them rather
than be used by them requires an understanding of their history, as part of the
“traditionary content” handed down through the English language. (Parker 2004,
31–32)
The concept of evidence is an important part of that “traditionary content”

handed down through the English language. To use it rather than be used by it,
one needs to recognize this fact and to reflect on its implications.
PART III
SENSE
4
The Discourse of Sense and the

Legacy of “British Empiricism”
4.1. Sense, Senses, and Modern English Speechways
Sense is one of the most common abstract nouns in the English language. Judging
by the data in the COBUILD corpus, it is substantially more common than reason or
view, twice as common as economy, politics, color, or fight, and thirteen times as
common as logic. It has many interrelated meanings, most of them without exact
(or even approximate) equivalents in other languages, and it lies at the center of
an extremely rich family of collocations, including a sense of humor, a sense of
reality, a sense of freedom, a sense of responsibility, a sense of self, a sense of
right and wrong, moral sense, common sense, practical sense, and to make
sense—most of which, like sense itself, have no equivalents in other languages
and are yet seemingly indispensable in Anglophone societies.
To see how modern English discourse—both spoken and written—is often
dominated by the concept of sense (a concept that is barely visible to the native
speaker), consider the following extract from a book review (Williamson
2007, 5):
Tomorrow, Swift’s latest [novel], is . . . following McEvan, also concerned with

generational change and its effects. . . . The pill, multiple partners, new social
mobility and a general sense of sex as adventure . . . form the faintly utopian
backdrop to the couple’s courtship. . . . Her [the heroine’s] voice sometimes betrays
a sense of regret at what has been lost since that earlier time—a certain stoicism
and resilience . . .
151
152 SENSE
To start with the second reference to sense, the phrase a sense of regret
would have to be translated into other languages in the same way as a feeling of
regret. But Australian literary critic Geordie Williamson prefers to say a
sense of regret, thus unconsciously or only semiconsciously validating the
heroine’s perspective. Presented as “a sense,” her regret is more than a purely
subjective, unexamined, and quite possibly irrational emotional response. In
being called a “sense,” Paula’s feeling of regret is linked with her conscious
experience and implicitly validated to some extent. Her “sense” is private, but it
connects to something in the external situation—the loss of a certain stoicism and
resilience—and potentially at least, it connects with a similar “sense” of some of
her contemporaries. The combination of individual experience with a potential
for intersubjectivity grounded in an external situation links the modern English
sense of the word sense with the meaning of the older phrase the senses: sight or
touch are similarly individual and yet potentially a source of intersubjectively
valid knowledge about the place where one is and about the events happening in
that place.
Let us consider in turn the other reference to sense in the same extract: a
general sense of sex as adventure. Here, the intersubjective character of the
“sense” in question is made clear by the use of the adjective general. Paula
looks at sex as adventure, and this outlook is somehow validated for her by
a quasi-bodily feeling that accompanies her habitual thoughts on the subject. This
quasi-bodily feeling is no doubt private and individual, but it is not totally
subjective because it is as it were grounded in the body and thus likely to be
reflecting something real, something that can also be valid for other people. The
phrase a general sense of sex as adventure highlights this combination of an
individual perspective based on individual experience with a claim to reality and
intersubjectivity: one person’s “sense” of sex as adventure can connect with a
similar “sense” in other people, and such a shared “sense” is likely to reflect “the
way things are.”
Undoubtedly, sense is a cultural keyword, so important to English ways of
speaking and thinking that both its centrality in English discourse and its unique-
ness appear to have gone unnoticed: it seems to be as invisible to most speakers of
English as the air they breathe. And yet, as I demonstrate here, it is a word that
almost more than any other helps speakers of English to make sense of the world
and to orient themselves in it.
British empiricism, which permeates contemporary English language, is
grounded in the basic trust in the “five senses”; and “common sense” represents
the touchstone of Anglo-English folk philosophy and folk ethics. Furthermore,
the “senses” (as the faculties of the body) and “sense” as the capacity to think and
act “sensibly” are obviously related in speakers’ linguistic consciousness. The
expressions to take leave of one’s senses (10 occurrences in COBUILD), to come to
one’s senses (22 occurrences in COBUILD), and to bring someone to his/her senses
(10 occurrences in COBUILD) epitomize the continuing role of the word sense as
the linchpin between good thinking, good doing (acting), and good powers of
observation and perception.
SENSE AND THE LEGACY OF “BRITISH EMPIRICISM” 153
Thus, judging by the lexical and phraseological cluster of sense, the folk
philosophy embedded in English does not posit any Cartesian gulf between mind
and body, between “cogito” and the senses. “Taking leave of one’s senses”
implies losing, all at once, one’s ability to perceive (with one’s senses), to
think, and to act (“sensibly” and “reasonably”), and “coming to one’s senses”
means retrieving all three capacities: to perceive, to think, and to do what needs to
be done.
The French dictionary Collins-Robert (1995) glosses the English expressions
based on the English keyword sense through the French word raison ‘reason’ as
follows:
to take leave of one’s senses—perdre la raison (lit. ‘to lose reason’)

to come to one’s senses (become reasonable)—revenir à la raison (lit. ‘to come back to
reason’)
to bring someone to his (her) senses—ramener quelqu’un à la raison (lit. ‘to bring
someone back to reason’)
This difference between the English senses and the French raison in these
expressions epitomizes the two traditions, one that goes back to Locke, and the
other, to Descartes. The French raison has nothing semantically to do with the
five senses, but the English word senses (as used in these expressions) combines
“reason” with “sanity” and preserves some link with those five senses: in English,
there is no gulf between “the senses” and “reason,” and in fact, the word sanity
(also untranslatable) is another manifestation of this conceptual linkage. People
who can observe what is going on around them can think (in ways that matter)
and can therefore know what to do—this is the message conveyed by the
semantic and phraseological cluster centered in the English word sense.
When William James affirmed that “a sense of humor is just common sense,
dancing,”1 he was articulating his “sense” that the two values and the two
expressions are related. “Sense of humor” has often been described by English
speakers as the “sixth sense,” alongside various other putative “sixth senses.”
The tradition of treating various meanings of sense as related goes back at
least to the early eighteenth century, as the following extract from a play in
Literature Online (a grandmother’s description of London) illustrates:
Why, my Grand-mother says, ’Tis the wicked’st Place under the Copes of Heav’n,
and the Filthinesses she has seen there, have made her frigid to Mankind; she says,
young Fellows are greedy after young Wenches, and make a scoff at old Folks; Men
of Quality have no sense of well-doing, and Women o’Quality no sense of Self-
denial; your highflown Gentry, no sense of Humility, and the Common People no
sense of good Manners; mid-night Collonels [sic], no sense of Sobriety; Vintners
no sense of Honesty; City Wives, no sense of Chastity, and their Husbands, no
sense at all. (Baker 1708, 224)
The titles of Jane Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility and John Austin’s
philosophical classic Sense and Sensibilia may play on different senses of the
154 SENSE
word sense, but they both reflect the importance of this word in Anglo-English
discourse and the impression that these different senses, which in different ways
connect thinking with embodied experience, somehow speak to each other.
In his book The Faces of Jesus the contemporary American writer Frederick
Buechner reflects on how Christians may have come to believe that Jesus was
both human and divine:
The truth of the matter is that like all doctrines it was an experience first, in this case
the experience of the simple folk who had actually known him. Having talked with
him and eaten with him, having seen him angry, sad, merry, tired, and finally dead,
they had no choice but to say that he was human even as they themselves were
humans. But having found in him an undying power to heal and transform their
lives, they had no choice but to say that he was God too, if only because there was
no other way of saying it. (Buechner 2005, 35)
Buechner takes it for granted that this is what “knowing people” entails:
having been with them for some time, having done some things with them, and
having seen them in different situations. Not surprisingly, the word sense prompt-
ly makes its appearance in this context: “If the doctrine of the divinity of Christ is
paradoxical, it is only because the experience was paradoxical first. . . . If we are
determined to speak the plain sense of our experience, we must be willing to
risk the charge of speaking what often sounds like nonsense” (35–36).
In “the plain sense of our experience” we can catch here an intuitive
connection between “experience” and “plain sense”: Our experience leads us to
plain sense, and the value of speaking that “plain sense of our experience” is
accepted as a shared assumption. English speakers may agree or disagree about
the divinity of Jesus, but it is assumed that they all agree about the values of
experience and plain sense and about the importance of having seen something,
having been somewhere, and having been with someone as a basis for deciding
what to think and do.
While there are numerous categories of sense-related expressions in English,
two major classes can be distinguished on the basis of a grammatical property:
the presence vs. absence of an article. Sense (in every sense of the word) is
semantically related to a sense (in every sense of the word), but the two classes
also show significant differences. The cultural importance of sense (without an
article) can be documented in various, more or less complex, ways (see chapter 7,
“Moral Sense” and chapter 8, “Common Sense”). The cultural importance of a
sense, on the other hand, can be demonstrated in a very simple way: by pointing
out the range and the frequency of collocations linking a sense with adjectives of
positive evaluation.
To be able to appreciate the high frequency of the expression a good sense
(of) in English, it is good to compare it with its closest counterparts in some other
languages and in particular in French, given that the French word sens is often
regarded as a conceptual equivalent of the English sense.
Thus, there are sixty-three occurrences of a good sense (of) in the English
COBUILD, whereas in the French COBUILD (which is roughly twice as big), there are
only three occurrences of un bon sens (quite possibly isolated calques from
English).
English has a whole range of evaluative adjectives that combine with a sense
of, some of them inherently positive and indeed, superlative, like wonderful and
tremendous, and others often positive in this particular combination: great, strong,
real, fine, clear, deep, high, keen, sharp, vivid, distinct, acute, and others (many of
them, e.g., keen, acute, sharp, and vivid, are obviously related to sensory percep-
tion). Hundreds of such combinations with a sense of appear in the English
COBUILD. In the French COBUILD, apart from bon ‘good’, only one adjective occurs
in comparable collocations with sens: grand, lit. ‘big/large’. (Altogether, the
French COBUILD has twenty-five instances of un grand sens de [du].)
Thus, both the high frequency and the wide range of evaluative adjectives
co-occurring with the phrase a sense of in the English COBUILD testify to the great
value that modern Anglo culture places on quasi-sensory, experiential knowledge
associated with this phrase all across the wide spectrum of its uses. Evidently,
modern Anglo culture considers “a sense” an important practical guide—not
infallible, but nonetheless very valuable in almost any situation.
Not “reason” (too abstract, too cerebral), not “intuition” (too “mystical”), not
“faith” (“where is the evidence?”), and certainly not other people’s “teachings,”
traditions handed down from the past, pronouncements of authorities, and the
like. Although not to be fully relied on either, “a sense” may ultimately be more
trustworthy than any of the above, or so the folk philosophy embedded in the
modern English lexicon, phraseology, and discourse patterns implies (along, of
course, with a great body of English-language writings from the seventeenth
century on—in philosophy, religion, science, literature, and so on). “Evidence” is
public, “a sense” is private, but they are both anchored in “experience,” and (from
an Anglo point of view) it seems only common sense to rely at different times and
in different ways on both.
It is important to emphasize that while the phrase a sense of and related
expressions can be seen as epitomizing the impact of “British empiricism” on the
English language, this phrase is now as characteristic of American English as it is
of British English. For example, in Barack Obama’s (2006) book The Audacity of
Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream there are literally dozens of
references to “a sense of purpose”, “a sense of outrage”, “a sense of belonging”,
“a sense of community”, “a sense of commitment” and so on .
Truly “sense” is one of the most significant, though hidden, conceptual
features of Anglo English as a whole.
4.2. The Five Senses
The Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary (1991) defines the word senses
in its countable sense (as in the phrase the five senses) as follows: “Your senses
are the physical powers that make it possible for you to know about things outside
your own mind and body. You have fives senses. They are your senses of sight,
smell, hearing, touch, and taste.” The following examples illustrate this
156 SENSE
definition: “All knowledge comes to us through our senses . . . These dogs have an
excellent sense of smell. . . . For these men, sight is the most important sense.”
If we compare the Collins COBUILD definition with those that can be found in
books on science or popular science, it is clear that the everyday meaning of the
word senses is different from the scientific one. For example, the Penguin classic
The Senses of Animals and Men opens as follows: “The world is known to us
through many senses, not just hearing, smell, vision, and, at close range, touch
and taste. Aristotle recognized these five, setting a pattern that has been followed
for more than two thousand years” (Milne and Milne 1962, 13).
So what are those “many senses”? A book on cognitive science mentions,
in addition to the classic five, “heat and various interoceptive and propriocep-
tive senses,” explaining that “interoception focuses on inner sensation of
the process of digestion,” whereas “proprioception involves feelings of move-
ment . . . and features feedback from muscle systems in particular” (Nuallain
2002, 69).
As the Collins COBUILD definition shows, the meaning of senses in ordinary
language is incompatible with phrases like “interoceptive and proprioceptive
senses,” and it is this ordinary meaning with which we are concerned here.
The Collins COBUILD’s definition contains some important elements of the
meaning of senses as this word is used in ordinary language, but it is not
sufficiently clear, accurate, or explicit. For one thing, the notion of “physical
powers” is mysterious; what sort of “physical powers”?
The semantic prime KNOW used in the definition is its clearest and most
secure part. If we replace physical with the primes BODY and PART, powers with
the prime CAN, make with the prime BECAUSE, and outside with the prime PLACE,
we have six clear and secure building blocks, but we will not yet have a fully
explicit definition.
From a substantive point of view, Collins COBUILD’s definition does not
explain why my senses do not allow me (in Canberra) to know about things in
New York or Tokyo or even in Melbourne or Perth, that is, things that are not
only well and truly outside my mind and body but also in other places, not in the
place where I am.
My own hypothesis, then, is that the key to the understanding of “the senses”
lies in the recognition that our bodies can, so to speak, tell us something about the
place where we are and in particular, about what is happening in this place. For
example, my own senses can tell me right now about the flickering light in my
office, the voices outside my door, the smell of coffee still hanging in the air, the
feel of the wooden armrests of the chair in which I am sitting as I write this, and
the taste of a piece of candy that I am moving around in my mouth.
To generalize from these examples I propose the following explication:
The senses ¼
peoples’ bodies are like this:
when people are in a place where some things are happening
something can happen in some parts of these people’s bodies because of it
because of this, these people can know that these things are
happening in this place at that time
when people are in a place where there are some things,
if these people do something (to these things) with some parts of their bodies,
something can happen in these parts of their bodies because of it
because of this, these people can know something about these things
When one examines this explication in detail, various possible objections come to
mind that need to be carefully considered. First of all, there is the question of the
spatial relation between a person’s body and the things that this person’s senses
can report on.
I can see a cat licking its fur right next to me, but I can also see the stars
twinkling in the sky. Sight is a sense. So how can the notion of “a sense” be linked
with finding out about some things in the place where one is?
I can hear distant thunder. Thunder is something happening somewhere, but
in this case it is happening far away from me. Yet hearing is a sense. So how can
the notion of a “sense” be linked with the place where one is?
To see that these difficulties are more apparent than real, we need to note that
when people talk about “the senses,” they are not talking about the sum total of
people’s capacities to see, hear, smell, touch, or taste something but only about
their common denominator. Arguably, this common denominator boils down to
what some parts of our bodies can tell us about things that either are located in the
place where we are or are happening here and now (at the time when the
knowledge is being acquired).
It is true that we can see things that are distant, but the proposed definition of
“the senses” does not deny that. Rather, it implies that when we call sight “a
sense,” we are focusing on our capacity to acquire knowledge about things that
either are located in or are happening in the place where we are and to derive this
knowledge from what happens in our eyes. It is an undeniable fact that some parts
of our bodies (e.g., eyes) can be a source of knowledge about our environment
(however broadly conceived), and arguably, this is what speakers focus on when
they call the eyes “the organs of a sense (sight).”
“Taste” may seem to be a potential source of knowledge about something
inside our mouth rather than something in the place where we are, but
arguably here too, the construal can also refer to the place outside one’s
body. For example, when I come across some mushrooms and want to test
their edibility by taking a small bite, I am trying to find something out about
some things that are in the place where I am, and the “sense” of taste allows
me to do that.
The five senses are different from one another in various respects. Some of
them (smell, taste, and touch) refer to what a person feels in particular parts of the
body. Others (sight and hearing) do not refer to any bodily feeling but to
processes (seeing and hearing) which are conceptually distinct from ‘feeling’.
This means that the notion of “senses” in general cannot be reduced to bodily
feelings (as a source of knowledge about one’s environment). But, all of these
158 SENSE
modalities—feeling, seeing, and hearing—can be subsumed under a more gener-

al umbrella: that of something happening in some parts of a person’s body. After
all, when we see something, something happens in our eyes; when we hear
something, something happens in our ears; when we smell something, something
happens in our nose; when we taste something, something happens in our mouth;
and when we feel something with our hands, something happens in our hands. It
is at this very abstract level that we can talk about our bodies in terms of “senses.”
We also need to consider, however briefly, two further points arising from
the proposed explication: first, the distinction between things that are happen-
ing in a place and things that simply are in a place, and second, the relevance of
the fact that the experiencer may be doing something with certain parts of the
body. From a scientific point of view, all five senses may well involve things
that are happening in the experiencer’s environment, but from a naı̈ve point of
view reflected in language, the senses can tell one either what is happening in
one’s surroundings or what some things in one’s surroundings are like. For
example, when I hear voices outside my door, I know that people are talking in
the corridor, but when I see or smell some flowers, I can know what these
flowers are like (say, pink and sweet smelling). The notion of senses refers to
both of these capacities.
As for “doing something,” it seems clear that taste, in particular, is a capacity
to find out what some things are like, which normally involves doing something
to these things (with one’s mouth). Finding out what some things look like, smell
like, or feel like may also involve doing something to these things: looking at
them, smelling them, moving one’s hand while touching them. This is why I have
included a reference to “doing something” in the second half of the explication:
“If these people do something to these things with some parts of the body,
something can happen to these parts of the body because of it.”
As for hearing, it normally refers to things that happen in a place rather than
to things that are simply there, and typically, it does not require doing something
(“pricking up one’s ears,” as it were). Nonetheless, English has the verb to listen,
related to to hear in the same way as to look at is related to to see. One could,
therefore, ask: Shouldn’t “doing” be mentioned either in both parts of the
explication (the one referring to what is happening in a place and the one
referring to certain things that simply are in a place) or in neither? After all,
one can see something without looking, one can hear something without listen-
ing, and one can smell something without sniffing.
Nonetheless, experimenting with other versions of the explication does not
seem to lead to results that would be intuitively more convincing. The current
version has a simple, naı̈ve logic: if something is happening in a place where one
is, it is clear that some parts of one’s body can be affected by it; if, on the other
hand, there are some things in a place where one is, it is not clear how these things
would affect a person’s body unless something started happening to these things
or unless the person did something (to them) with some parts of the body.
The explication of the senses proposed here is, in a sense, based on certain
prototypes. It defines the senses in terms of their salient potential to bring people
some knowledge about some aspects of their environment, and there is no “if and
only” about either of its parts: they are both phrased in terms of prototypes.
The most important point to note about the English word senses (in the
relevant sense) is that, while the notion expressed by this word is not specific to
English but rather constitutes part of a shared European intellectual heritage, in
English alone did this notion become a starting point for an extensive conceptual
family, a lens through which to look at the world, and a cornerstone of a culture-
specific folk philosophy, orientation, and outlook.
4.3. The Verb to Sense
To sense is a unique English verb that has no semantic equivalents in other

European languages—a verb that crystallizes in its meaning the empiricist bent
of Anglo culture. To see this, let us consider an example sentence (from COBUILD)
about dogs:2
He’s not one of these wonderful intuitive dogs who amazingly sense that their masters are
leaving and mope and pine and hover near and look on with soulful eyes.
The dogs do not really know that their masters are leaving, but they sense it: they
feel something in their bodies, and they can know something because of it.
They feel something in their bodies or in their hearts (minds)? And if in their
bodies, where? Obviously, a dog’s sensing that its master is leaving is not as
localized as a person’s sensations of smell, taste, or touch. Nor is it spread all over
the body, as a person’s pain or fatigue can be. It would be more appropriate,
therefore, to see the feeling in question as quasi-bodily rather than bodily strictly
speaking. I return to the question of the exact nature of that quasi-bodily feeling
later.
The link between sensing and knowing, or rather, between sensing and being
able to know is particularly clear in sentences with the collocation could sense,
especially if the complement is a noun phrase. Consider this sentence, for
example:
On the surface everybody seemed friendly, but throughout the evening Autumn could
sense the family’s disapproval.
This sentence implies that the disapproval was real, not imagined: Autumn felt
something, and because of this, she could know that the family disapproved.
Sense is different in this respect from feel, as the following examples show (the
asterisk means unacceptable):
When she came into the front hallway, she could sense (*feel) the older children’s fright
and alarm at seeing her.
The plan was working. She could sense (*feel) his fear.
160 SENSE
He was thrilled to have our table—you could sense (*feel) his desire just in the way he
worked a cork from a bottle.
The room seemed to ring with his presence. I could sense (*feel) his personality there, the
way one hears a diminishing echo.
One cannot feel other people’s emotions, but one can sense them. This confirms
the semantic link that exists between the verb to sense and the noun sense in its
countable sense (as in the five senses). Our senses can give us knowledge about the
external world, and so can our capacity to sense certain things and goings-on.
When the verb to sense is not combined with the modal can, it does not
necessarily imply knowledge, but it strongly suggests it: what one “senses” is in
all probability real. Here are some examples:
Despite your energy, your vision, your tireless campaigning for social justice, it’s difficult
not to sense that your story is marked by disappointment.
If it is going well, you just shut up. Silence can be equally golden in a one-on-one
interview. Again, the interviewer’s role is predictive. . . . There is the fruitful silence,
where you sense that if you allow the pause to continue, the guest could have
something more to say, maybe something of a deeper nature.
Step by step, Trifles builds to a climax: a moment, usually coming late in a play, when
tension reaches its greatest height. At such a moment, we sense that the play’s dramatic
question . . . is about to be answered.
These measures have the potential to transform society in Northern Ireland and to end
inequality, discrimination, injustice, and violence. Most people sense that the benefits of a
settlement are great.
To translate such sentences into other European languages, one would have to
render sense as “feel” or “be aware”: It is, so to speak, halfway between “feel”
and “know.”
But how can a mere feeling be seen as a potential source of knowledge about
the external world? More specifically, how can the “feel” component of sense be
seen as a potential source of knowing something about the external world if the
verb feel by itself does not have such implications? For example, how can one
sense other people’s emotions if one can’t feel them?
The etymology of the verb to sense suggests an obvious hypothesis: one can
sense other people’s emotions if these people are in the same place where we are
and if we can obtain some information about them through some sensory (i.e.,
bodily) channels (see section 4.2, The Five Senses). More generally, one can
sense what is happening in the place where one is if one’s body picks up some
vibes in this place—that is, if one can feel something in one’s body because of
something that is happening in this place. Here are some suggestive examples
pointing in this direction:
Eileen said she could sense the negative vibes.

The smell of the bear grew almost overpowering near Blake’s head, and he could sense the
beast snuffling and grunting as it stood on its hind legs.
Here and there he could sense animals rustling through the underbrush.
To her rear she could sense rather than see the hovering presence of a hospital
administrator.
He could sense the acid indigestion this snack was going to produce just from looking at it.
You could sense the tension, and you knew something wonderful was on the cards [in the
works].
There can be no doubt that sensing is related to the here and now: a sentence
like “I could sense the tension” implies unequivocally that there was tension and
that it was in the place where the speaker was. How else could one sense the
presence of a hospital administrator hovering behind one’s back if not through
one’s senses—that is, through the effect of this hovering presence on one’s body?
The link between “feeling” and “knowing” implied by the verb to sense is
particularly clear in sentences where it takes a noun or a noun phrase rather than a
that-clause as a complement. Some examples:
Animals can sense your anxiety and become anxious, too.

In nature, there are a number of cases where animals clearly can sense these very low-
energy fields. Sharks and rays, for example, navigate in the ocean by using information
from the fields.
You could envision a situation where the baby is sleeping face down on the bedding—you
know, it doesn’t get enough oxygen. A normal baby can sense that. A SIDS [sudden infant
death syndrome] baby may not be able to sense that.
To account for such uses, I propose the following explication:

Animals (children, students) can sense your anxiety/hostility.
animals can know that something is happening in the place where they are
(e.g., that someone in this place is anxious)
they can know it because, when this is happening, they can feel something because of this,
like people can feel something in some parts of their body
when something is happening in these parts of their body
because something is happening at that time in the place where they are
Sentences where the verb to sense takes a that-clause as a complement may

seem to be different because a that-clause may seem to suggest the presence of a
thought. For example, it might be suggested that if a dog senses that its master is
leaving, this implies that the dog thinks: “My master is leaving.” In fact,
however, it is not only more parsimonious but also makes more sense to refrain
from positing such thoughts in the dogs’ minds and restrict ourselves to positing
potential knowledge based on a quasi-bodily feeling, as in the following
explication:
The dog senses that its master is leaving.

the dog can know that something is happening in the place where it is (its master is leaving)
162 SENSE
it can know this because, when this is happening, it can feel something because of this,
The claim that the verb to sense always refers to the place where the
experiencer is at the time may seem too strong because the place is often not
mentioned explicitly. A closer examination of numerous examples indicates,
however, that even if a place is not mentioned, sameness of place is taken for
granted. For example, the sentence “The city [Baghdad] waited, sensing catas-
trophe,” clearly implies that the catastrophe is expected to happen in the same
city, not anywhere else. Similarly, the sentence:
Sensing that the public was losing its patience with Congress, President Bush recently
called lawmakers “a privileged clan of rulers.”
implies that the president senses something that is happening in his own country.
It is true that sentences that refer to “remote sensing” are not impossible, as the
following example illustrates:
The team is convinced that remote sensing is the most convenient (and probably the
cheapest) way to rapidly survey large areas of land.
But such sentences represent an extended use of the verb to sense (restricted
to the gerund sensing), and they highlight the fact that when used without an
adjective, “sensing” is not remote (even if the place where the experiencer is
and where the process in question is occurring is as large as the United
States).
In the case of the Bush example, one might be tempted to propose an alternative
version of the explication by including a “thinking” component, along the following
lines: “he thought like this: the public is losing its patience with Congress.” However,
nobody would want to posit such a component for sentences like “the baby senses that
there isn’t enough oxygen,” so positing it for sentences like the one about Bush would
mean positing polysemy of the verb to sense (one sense with a “thinking” component
and another one without it). Since nothing forces us to posit such a polysemy, it seems
to make more sense to interpret all sentences with the verb to sense in terms of
knowing and feeling, without any reference to thinking. As we will see, the noun
sense (as in, e.g., a sense of defeat or a sense of regret) is different in this respect from
the verb, and it would be far less likely to be used about an animal.
4.4. A Sense of What Is Happening
One of the most commonly used frames with the word sense is a sense of what.
Other so-called embedded questions are also possible as complements of a sense
of (a sense of where . . . , a sense of when . . . , a sense of how . . . ), but a sense of
what is by far the most frequent one. The least frequent among them appears to be a
sense of why (no examples in COBUILD), and this might offer us a clue to the
semantics of those combinations of a sense of and embedded questions which are
more common. In essence, the explanation lies once again in the sensory model of
knowledge.
For example, through bodily perception I can know what is happening in the
place where I am; I can also know what I can do with parts of my body (by
exercising them); and I can know what I have to do when I have various irresistible
bodily urges. But neither bodily perception nor internal bodily sensations can give
me any knowledge as to why something happened. I suggest that this explains why
sentences with the phrase a sense of why are rare in English discourse.
Sentences that include the phrase the sense of what may at first seem
endlessly and unpredictably diverse; on closer inspection, however, one can see
that they fall into a number of categories. The most prominent among these types
can be schematically portrayed as follows:
a sense of what is happening (here now)

a sense of what one is doing (now)
a sense of what one can do
a sense of what one wants to do
a sense of what one should do
a sense of what it is like (when something is happening to someone)
As these characterizations indicate, all these types are anchored in somebody’s

concrete situation. I briefly survey these types one by one.
A sense of what is happening here now

Examples
It’s been very helpful talking to you actually, and it’s given [me] a lot more of a sense of
what’s going on here.
Market research can be rather like, you know, riding along looking in the mirror . . . it tells
you what’s going on behind you . . . what’s going on in front of you . . . so we use it, you
know, sparingly and rarely to just get a . . . sense of what’s happening or how people are at
any given moment.
In sentences like these, someone wants to know “what is happening here now,”
and they can know it not only theoretically (“with their minds”) but also instinc-
tively, in a quasi-bodily manner. More precisely, the meaning in question can be
represented as follows:
Explication
She has a sense of what is happening.
a. she thinks like this:

“it is like this: I know what is happening here now”
164 SENSE
b. when she thinks like this, she can know that it is like this,
like people can know what is happening in a place when they are in that place
c. she can know it because when she thinks like this she feels something,
like someone can feel something in some parts of their body
because something is happening at that time in the place where this someone is
The first chunk of this explication refers to a quasi-sensory feeling that a person
alert to his or her surroundings may have when thinking about the current
situation. The second chunk refers to the bodily model of perception: I can
know what is happening in the place where I am (e.g., that it is windy, that it is
raining, that there is a lot of pollen in the air) because what is happening is
affecting some parts of my body (e.g., my nose, my throat, my eyes), though
I cannot know it well (on that basis).
A sense of what one is doing

Examples
Someone who slaps or hits another adult or knowingly insults her is aware of
hurting her. Even if he doesn’t know why he is doing it, he has some sense of what he is
doing.
You have immediately fully employed those individuals. . . . They are full on, and
their sense of what they are doing is as regular full-on [full-fledged] employees.
[Hansard, House of Representatives Committee, Melbourne, September 25, 1996]
Explication
He has a sense of what he is doing.
a. he thinks like this:

“it is like this: I know what I am doing”
b. when he thinks like this he can know that it is like this,
like people can know what they are doing with some parts of their body
when they are doing it
c. he can know it because when he thinks like this he feels something,
when this someone is doing something with these parts of their body
because this someone wants to do it at that time
Here, the bodily model refers to one’s awareness of what one is doing with
various parts of one’s body. For example, as I am writing this (in longhand), I feel
my hand, which is holding a pen moving as I want.
A sense of what one can do

Examples
They have a sense of what they can and cannot do.
It needs to be tempered with some sense of what is achievable.
Here, those who have the sense in question want to know what they can do—and,
again, they can know it not theoretically but instinctively:
Explication
She has a sense of what she can do.

“it is like this: I know what I can do”
like people can know what they can do with some parts of their body
when they are doing something with these parts of their body
because they want to do it at that time
Here, the bodily model refers to one’s awareness of what one can do with
some parts of one’s body—for example, what I can do with my hand when I want
to move it in a certain way.
A sense of what one wants to do

Examples
At least I had a sense of what I wanted to do careerwise.
She knows what she wants to do and where she wants to go. . . . Polly has a very definite
sense of what she wants to be, and she wants as much input and control over what’s being
used to represent her as possible.
Explication
She has a sense of what she wants to do.

“it is like this: I know what I want to do”
like people can know what they want to do with some parts of their body
when they want to do it
when this someone wants to do something with these parts of their body
because something is happening to their body at that time
Here, we find a bodily prototype in a situation when, for example, one wants
to change the position of one’s legs because one feels some discomfort in them
due to their current position. Hunger and sex provide other, even more obvious,
bodily prototypes.
166 SENSE
A sense of what it is good to do (what one should do) (or say)

Examples
Be honest, but also develop a sense of what you should and should not tell her.
He had no social skills and lacked a sense of what was appropriate conversation.
Explication
She has a sense of what she should do.

“it is like this: I know that it will be good if I do something now, I know what”
like people can know what they can do with some parts of their body
when something is happening to their body
when something is happening in those parts of their body
because something is happening to this someone’s body at that time
What kind of bodily prototype can there be for a sense that one should do
something? When people move parts of their bodies, it is usually because they
want to, and if they obey various bodily urges (for example, to sneeze or cough),
it is because they have to. So when can people think that they should (rather than
want or have to) do something with some parts of their bodies?
It seems to me that such a thought is plausible in various situations when
something is happening in the place where one is that makes one feel uncomfortable
or seems to call for some preventive action. For example, if a tie on one’s neck feels
too tight, one might think: “I should loosen it” (“it will be good if I loosen it”); when
one feels that there is something like a small pebble in one’s shoe, one may think:
“I should take it out”; and when one feels the first drops of rain on one’s face,
one may think: “I’d better go inside” or “I should take my umbrella out of my
backpack.”
Thus, arguably, all the types of sentences with the phrase a sense of
what . . . can be seen as anchored in the sensory model of knowledge: they
all liken the kind of knowledge to which they refer to a kind of knowledge
derived from the senses and more generally, from current bodily perception.
The relevance of this bodily model is confirmed by the fact that in all the
types that we have examined, the complement of the phrase a sense of what refers
to the present: either to what is happening here now or to what I can/want/should
do now.
But do all sentences in the a sense of what frame without exception refer to
the present? Examining the material in a large database like COBUILD, one quickly
comes across counterexamples (or apparent counterexamples) to such a putative
generalization. Here is one:
But it’s our hope that by coming up here, we can have just a sense of what it was like on
Wednesday morning, June 3, fifty years ago.
One cannot now smell, touch, or taste things that no longer exist, and one cannot
now see or hear things that happened fifty years ago. So if having “a sense” of
something were really based on the model of sensory perception, how could
anybody have “a sense” of what happened fifty years ago?
The answer is that one cannot really “have a sense” of what happened fifty
years ago, at least not unless the sentence is elliptical: one can only “have a
sense” of what it was like (for someone) when something happened fifty years
ago. In fact, judging from the material in COBUILD, sentences of this kind are quite
common in English. Here are three more examples:
I knew the role of cattle cars in transporting Jews from transit camps to the death camps.
But it was only by actually being in this car and remembering that one hundred or more
people were stuffed into a car like this for days on end that one—that I really got some
sense of what it was [like] for so many people to be enclosed in such a small . . . space.
We took another few steps until the darkness enveloped us completely, and at any moment
we might have plunged into the abyss. So we stood there, at the very edge of chaos, and
allowed the atmosphere to penetrate us. We tried to get some sense of what it must have
been like for Don Quixote.
The series . . . quotes extensively from diaries, eyewitness accounts, and official documents
to convey a sense of what it really must have been like to have been there.
These examples are quite illuminating in the way they explicitly link the past
with the present: to get “a sense” of what something that happened many years
ago must have been like for the people to whom it happened, it is good to touch
with some parts of one’s body some of the objects that were there at the time at
the scene of those past events. It is good to re-create if not the situation then at
least the atmosphere and to try to experience with one’s body something like
what happened in that place a long time ago.
Having “a sense” of what something in the past was like involves an exercise
in imagination: one imagines that one is present at the scene of those past events,
and one lets something happen to one’s body now in order to feel something now
and thus to come to know, in a quasi-bodily way, what it felt like for those to
whom these things happened a long time ago.
Thus, a sentence like “she has a sense of what it was like (for those people at
that time)” can be seen as an abbreviated version of the sentence “she has a sense
of what it would be like if something happened to her now like what happened to
those other people at that long-ago time.”
Explication
She has a sense of what it was like (for those people to whom it happened).

“it is like this: I know what it was like”
like people can know what is happening to their body when it is happening
168 SENSE
because something is happening to this someone at that time
Here, the bodily prototype seems obvious: I can know what it feels like when
something is happening in some parts of my body (for example, when I focus on
my toothache or on my dry throat).
Thus, despite various apparent counterexamples, we can still maintain that a
sense of what sentences are generally grounded in the present and are based on
the model of sensory perception.
It is of course not possible to consider here every putative counterexample to
this hypothesis that one could imagine. One final observation, however, is in
order: sometimes a sense of what can be followed by what looks like an abstract
sentence unrelated to anybody’s experience in the here and now. Consider, for
example, the following sentence:
As the bingeing and purging becomes more frequent, sufferers often have difficulty in
identifying sensations of hunger and lose all sense of what constitutes a normal amount of food.
On the surface, the question of “what constitutes a normal amount of food”

seems to be thoroughly abstract and impersonal. When seen in context, however,
it is in fact highly personal and situation-based : it is a question of “how much
I should eat now.” Here is another example:
The thinking of the revolutionary is a cold kind of thinking; he has a realistic insight into
history; he has, above all, a sense of what power is, what it’s for, both as a means of
governing other men and as a means of personal expression.
At first sight, it might seem that the sentence is about the abstract issue
of the nature of power. On closer inspection, however, it turns out to be about
the revolutionary’s own experience: what power means in his own life. The revolu-
tionary’s thinking might be detached, but his “sense of power as a means of personal
expression” is grounded in a feeling that accompanies his thinking on the subject.
This feeling may be as cold as the feeling in the hand of someone touching a block of
ice, but it is a feeling nonetheless—or so the word sense (of) implies.
The same applies to various philosophical sentences about the meaning of
being a man or a woman or the meaning of life, of which there are quite a few in
the COBUILD corpus. Here is an example:
Women’s and men’s roles are changing rapidly in most industrialized societies. But our
stereotypes about men and women and our own inner sense of what it means to be
“male” or “female” have not always kept pace.
Here the question appears to be, “What can I, being a woman (or a man), do in
life?” and perhaps “What should I, being a woman (or a man), want to do in life?”
Finally, consider the following sentence, which refers explicitly to “life”:
India is the most vibrant country in the world, with a keen sense of what life is really
about.
Here, too, the question “What is life really about?” appears abstract and
theoretical. Seen in context, however, it is not: it implies that when people in
India ask themselves what they want to do in life and what they should do, they
can know it, and they can know it because when they think about it, they can feel
something like people can know what they want to do and what they should do
when they feel something in some parts of their bodies in a concrete situation at a
particular time.
4.5. To Have a Sense That . . .
The noun sense is frequently used in English to refer to something like experiential
knowledge. It is similar in this to the verb to sense, and in certain contexts, the two
can be used interchangeably (though not with exactly the same meaning). Nonethe-
less, the range of use of the noun is broader and needs to be studied in its own right.
Consider, for example, the following passage from a speech by former
president of Ireland Mary Robinson, given in 1996 at a meeting with the then
president of the United States, Bill Clinton:3
And so in having a sense of history, I have a sense that this is a moment when the
long friendship between Ireland and the United States has come to a fruition, has
come to a particular stage of development when it is so important for us certainly in
Ireland. And I sense that it also means a great deal to the very many here in the
United States who cherish their Irish heritage and their bond with Ireland.
What Mary Robinson “senses” is clearly linked with a specific place: the country
where she is as she speaks. She “senses” something about “very many [people]
here in the United States.”
The noun sense in the extract from Mary Robinson’s speech is also linked
with being in a particular place at a particular time. Thus, her sense of history
makes her aware that her meeting with the president of the United States is a
historical event: something memorable is occurring in this place at this time.
Furthermore, her sense that this meeting means a great deal to numerous Amer-
icans of Irish descent refers to something happening “here in the United States,”
where Robinson is giving her speech and at the time when she is doing it.
The importance of the elements “here” and “now” to many “sense” sentences
is particularly clear in sentences that refer to somebody’s presence, as in the
following sentence from Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain (1961, 111):
The sense of his [Merton’s dead father’s] presence was as vivid and as real and as
startling as if he had touched my arm or spoken to me.
In the situation described in this sentence, Merton’s father is not physically

present, but Merton has no doubt that his presence is nonetheless real, and
170 SENSE
“presence” in this context unmistakably implies “here and now.” The thought in
the experiencer’s (Merton’s) mind can be portrayed as follows: “it is like this: I
know it; he is here now,” and the same thought would be implied by a “sense
that” version of the sentence: “The sense that he was present was as vivid and real
as if he had touched my arm.”
The sentence about Merton’s sense of his father’s presence is instructive in
other ways, too, as it highlights the feeling-based character of the experiential
knowledge referred to by the word sense (in the relevant sense).
If young Merton saw his father or heard his voice, he would not be able to
say, “I had a sense of his presence” (or “I had a sense that he was present”). The
fact that the father was dead is not crucially important here because a blind
man or a patient waking up after general anesthesia could use the same phrase
in relation to a living person. What matters is that the realization (“it is like
this: I know it; he is here now”) is not based on more usual and publicly
verifiable channels of perception (seeing, hearing) but rather on a quasi-bodily
feeling.
At the same time, the experiencer regards this private, quasi-bodily feeling as
reliable (“it is like this: I know it”), and if the speaker is different from the
experiencer, the speaker, too, is prepared to treat it as at least potentially valid
(“he could know that it was like this”). But let me start by explicating Merton’s
original sentence, in which the experiencer and the speaker coincide:
I had a sense of his presence. (I had a sense that he was present.)
a. I thought like this at that time:

“it is like this: I know it; he is here now”
b. when I thought like this, I could know that it was like this,
like people can know something about a place when they are in this place
c. I could know it because when I thought about it like this, I felt something,
We can now extend this approach to third-person sentences, in which the

speaker is different from the experiencer, such as the following one, in which
“having a sense” that something is the case is contrasted with “wanting to
believe” that it is so:
Everyone has a sense that your partner is having an affair, but you want to believe he is in
love with you and faithful and happy in the relationship.
Evidently the speaker implies here that those who “have a sense” that their
partner is having an affair are more in touch with reality than the person who
wants to believe otherwise. But what exactly would “being more in touch with
reality” mean in this situation?
One important difference between “having a sense” and “wanting to believe”
is that the former, in contrast to the latter, implies a feeling of some sort, and
indicates that because of this feeling, the person in question is on to something or

at least can know that something is the case.
Obviously, however, this cannot be the whole story: first, this initial
formula does not explain why the person in question feels something, and
second, it does not explain how a subjective feeling can cause this person to
be able to know something about a situation that does not concern them
personally.
Remarkably, sentences of this type—of which there are many in the English
corpora—cannot be translated without a loss or distortion of meaning into other
European languages. For example, the closest thing one could say in German
would be “Ich habe das Gefühl, er habe eine Affäre” (‘I have a feeling that he’s
having an affair’). In French, it would be difficult to come even that close to the
English meaning, as one would be likely to say j’ai idée (‘I have an idea’) rather
than j’ai le sentiment (‘I have a feeling’), and one would certainly not say j’ai le
sens (‘I have a sense’).
In other contexts, one could translate I have a sense that into French as j’ai le
sentiment que (‘I have a feeling that’), but in English, one can make a distinction
between I have a feeling that and I have a sense that, and this distinction cannot
be rendered in either German or French.
Again, the idea conveyed by the expression I have a sense that is a purely
Anglo idea—a unique “habit of the mind ”. As I demonstrate in NSM explica-
tions, this habit of the mind interprets quasi-bodily feelings that accompany some
thoughts as a potential source of knowledge comparable to knowledge derived
from the senses. Moreover, the seemingly subjective basis of the putative knowl-
edge derived from quasi-bodily feelings that accompany certain thoughts is often
treated in English discourse as a fairly reliable and potentially valuable source of
information about what is going on in the world (and even as a basis for action).
Here is an example from COBUILD:
“I would draw a distinction between genuine refugees and those who are coming
here—near delivery—with the sole purpose of having a baby in the [Irish] Republic.
The situation is being abused. You have a sense that you have to fit the delivery of
the baby in between air flights.” Dr. Declan Keane, master [director] of Dublin’s
Holles Street maternity hospital, where 150 non-EU nationals gave birth last year—
has informed the Department of Health of his suspicions.
To account for both the cautious, undogmatic ring of the phrase I have a
sense that and its implied claim to experiential knowledge, I propose the follow-
ing explication:
Everyone [here] has a sense that your partner is having an affair.
a. when people here think about it, they think like this:
“it is like this: I know it: he is having an affair”
b. when they think about it like this, they can know that it is like this,
like people can know that something is happening in a place
when they are in that place
172 SENSE
c. they can know it because when they think about it like this, they feel something,
because something is happening at that time in the place where these people are
A “sense” that something is happening somewhere can also refer to a place

that one is no longer in but has recently visited, as in the following extract
from an interview with the chief of operations for the UK High Commission
for Refugees, who had, at the time of the interview, recently visited the former
Yugoslavia:
WERTHEIMER: Do you have a sense that Srebrenica is close to falling?

HOLLINGWORTH: I think it probably is, very sadly.
The reporter is speaking here (or, strictly speaking, is asked to speak) with
the authority of someone who has recently been in a particular place and because
of this has an experiential—quasi-bodily—knowledge of it. Here I propose the
following explication:
I have a sense that Srebrenica is close to falling.
a. when I think about it, I think like this:

“it is like this: I know it: [Srebrenica is close to falling]”
b. when I think about it like this, I can know that it is like this,
like people can know something about a place
if they were in that place a short time before
c. I can know it because, when I think about it like this, I feel something,
Can a sense sentence refer to past events? This seems unlikely unless the
speaker sees those past events as having some tangible consequences in the
present. In fact, the only examples that I have been able to find in the COBUILD
corpus are present perfect ones, which indicate the present continuation or
relevance of something that started in the past:
The government is very very unpopular. People have a sense that the government has
deceived the people for a very long time and is covered all over with sleaze.
The that-clause refers here to the past, but this past clearly has present conse-
quences. In this example, people see the government as “covered in sleaze” now:
it has been deceiving them for a long time, and as a result, that is what it is like
now in people’s eyes. An intended reference to the present, linked with the phrase
a sense that, is unmistakable.
People [in Britain] have a sense that the government has deceived people for a long time.
a. when people in Britain think about it, they think like this:
“it is like this: we know it: the government [here] has deceived people [here]
for a long time”
b. when they think like this, they can know that it is like this,
c. they can know it because when they think like this, they feel something,
But while some present relevance appears to be indispensable to all sense-

that sentences, a reference to a place (“here”) is not always essential. Consider,
for example, the following passage from COBUILD:
But, for me, having children was something I always wanted to do, and I loved having
them. I always look at my children and have a feeling of joy and amazement that I had
something to do with them. I’ve a sense that I’ve completed some kind of fundamental
task in having my children.
In this example, the speaker feels that she has already completed some funda-
mental task, and while this completion is in the past, she sees it as defining her
present: “that’s where I am now,” and this is why she uses a present perfect rather
than a simple past tense.
The sentence can be explicated as follows:
I have a sense that I have completed some fundamental task (in raising my children).

“it is like this: I know: I have completed some fundamental task”
like people can know that they have done something if they have done
this something
c. I can know it because when I think about it like this, I feel something,
when something is happening to these parts of their body
because they are doing something with these parts of the body
A sentence in the frame I have a sense that can also refer to the vibes one
may get when one is with another person. Consider, for example, the following
snippet from a magazine:
Bernard’s not blind to beauty. I wasn’t there with Andrea Roche when she competed
in the Miss Universe final in Hawaii. But I had a sense that she would wow the
judges when I spoke to Blind Date celebrity Bernard McHugh. He was in Honolulu
174 SENSE
doing a programme on the event for ITV when he met Miss Ireland, Andrea, for
the first time.
How could the writer “have a sense” that Miss Ireland, Andrea Roche, “would
wow the judges” in the Miss Universe final in Hawaii? Apparently, it was on the
basis of talking about her with Bernard McHugh, star of the television series
Blind Date. Yet the writer’s “sense” was not based on hearsay but rather on what
he experienced while talking to McHugh.
It is worth noting that although this example refers to the future, when it is
seen in context, it becomes clear that it is in fact compatible with a construal in
terms of the present time: the speaker “has a sense” that Andrea Roche’s victory
is inevitable and that Blind Date celebrity Bernard is already “wowed.”
The same applies to the following examples, in which the person spoken of
has a “sense” that she is seeing her friend for the last time:
As they parted after tea, Joni has a sense that the next time they met they would be in
heaven.
I have a sense that she [Andrea Roche] will wow the judges.

“it is like this: I know it: she will wow the judges”
like people can know something about someone when they are with this someone
c. I can know it because when I think about it like this, I feel something,
because this someone is with someone else at that time
Thus, sentences in the frame “I have a sense that” are always anchored in
some way in the real situation in which they are uttered. Most frequently,
perhaps, this anchoring takes the form of an (explicit or implicit) reference to
“here” and “now,” but it can also be provided by an (explicit or implicit)
reference to the current state of the speaker/experiencer. The following minimal
pairs highlight this need for some deictic anchoring of have a sense that
sentences:
1. A. I have a sense that Srebrenica is falling.

B. ?I have a sense that the Warsaw uprising took place in 1944.
2. A. I have a sense that in raising my children I have accomplished some fundamental
task.
B. ?I have a sense that in raising her children, my cousin has accomplished some
fundamental task.
3. A. I have a sense that I have never really emigrated from Poland.
B. ?I have a sense that I emigrated from Poland in 1972.
4. A. I have a sense that my dog can understand my feelings.
B. ?I have a sense that dogs can understand people’s feelings.
In each pair, sentence A can be interpreted as anchored in the here and now or in
the “me now” and is acceptable, whereas B cannot be so interpreted (or not
easily) and is either far less acceptable or not acceptable at all.
Thus, in 1A, the events referred to are current, and they are happening in a
place that the speaker has recently visited. In 2A, the speaker is thinking about the
impact of her past action on who she is now. In 3A, the speaker is alluding to what
she did in the past (emigrating) while focusing on her current sense of herself as
someone who has never really left her homeland for good. In 4A, the subject is
referring to her own current feelings.
It is particularly instructive to note that this need for anchoring sets the
phrase “I have a sense that” apart from its counterparts with purely intellectual
words like think, believe, know, and view:
I think that dogs can understand people’s feelings.

I believe that dogs can understand people’s feelings.
I know that dogs can understand people’s feelings.
In my view, dogs can understand people’s feelings.
?
I have a sense that dogs can understand people’s feelings.
When one combs English corpora for I have a sense that sentences, one
comes across cases where, on first sight, this frame appears to introduce an
abstract belief that is not deictically anchored. On closer inspection, howev-
er, it becomes clear that those sentences, too, are in fact anchored in some
way in the speech situation and in the person of the experiencer, as it is at
the time of the experience. Consider, for example, the following exchange
from an American radio discussion (part of a current affairs program,
example from COBUILD):
EDWARDS: So why doesn’t the United States have a family leave policy?
DOWD: I think part of it is that socially and culturally we have a very strong tradition
that family is a private matter and a private responsibility. We don’t have this
strong sense that children are a social responsibility and a social concern and a
social benefit.
How exactly can people “have a sense” of whether or not children are a
social responsibility—how can anyone claim any experiential knowledge of such
matters? The basis for such a sense may not be clear to cultural outsiders, but
native speakers of English seem to take it for granted that it is indeed possible to
“have some sense” about such matters and that such a “sense”—distinct from
views, opinions, conjectures, or impressions—has a certain epistemic and practi-
cal validity.
This validity is not based on evidence or on compelling logical arguments
because the phrase I have a sense that conveys a lack of both evidence and
arguments. Rather, it is based on an existential link with the place that is being
discussed. Thus, what is at issue in the preceding extract is not a purely abstract
question of whether children are a private or a social responsibility but rather a
176 SENSE
question of family-related policies in the United States. The implication is that

people in the United States can have a “sense” of what an appropriate family
policy in their country is because they live in that country—as people in a place
can know something about a place because they are in that place. Thus, a
conceptual link with the five senses is present here, too: one can have a view
on any subject whatsoever, but one can have a “sense” only in relation to the
place where one is, the people one is with, and oneself.
4.6. There Is a Sense That . . .
The phrase there is a sense in many ways mirrors the uses of the phrase to have
a sense, but it has its own peculiarities and deserves to be looked at separately.
The two main frames in which it occurs are there is a sense that and there is
a sense of. I discuss here only the first one. Here are a few preliminary examples
from COBUILD.
There is a sense in this country that things are moving toward a new South Africa.
There is a sense here now that—that he clearly does have the nomination.
“There is a sense he is accommodating positions he does not really believe in,” Chuck
Underwood, a retired insurance executive, said.
There is a sense that a certain subject is being avoided.
There is a sense not so much that Mrs. Thatcher is wrong to fight her corner, but that the
way in which she fights her corner in Europe is actually pinning us into a difficult
negotiating position.
The phrase there is a sense normally refers to “people in this place,” and
this reference to a place is either explicit, as in the first three examples,
or merely implied, as in the other two. Normally, the that-clause refers to
“what is happening” in this place and also to what can be expected to happen
in the near future. The whole sentence refers, in each case, to what the people in a
place think, feel, and perhaps know about a particular point. Here as elsewhere, the
word sense points to a prototype based on bodily perception. I propose the following
explication:
There is a sense in this country that things are moving toward a new South Africa.
(There is a sense that a certain subject is being avoided.)
a. people in this place think about this place like this:

“it is like this: I know: something is happening in this place now”
b. when these people think like this, they can know that it is like this,
when they are in this place
c. they can know it because when they think like this, they feel something,
Does the phrase there is a sense that always refer to “things that are
happening”? And do the things in question have to be in the present? Typically,
this is indeed the case, although when examining the data in a corpus like
COBUILD, one also finds examples that at first at least do not seem to fit these
generalizations. Here is one:
There is a sense that Tony Blair is every bit as much a prisoner of metropolitan bias as
John Major.
At first glance, this sentence appears to be about Tony Blair rather than about
what is happening in Britain. It is not difficult, however, to paraphrase it in a way
that would show that in fact it is a sentence about what is happening in Britain:
the government grants favors to big cities at the expense of other parts of the
country.
Let us consider, in turn, the following sentence, which appears to refer to the
future, possibly a distant future:
In Great Falls [Virginia], the Japanese program is popular mostly for the excitement it
brings to the kids. But there is a sense that teaching foreign languages, especially
Japanese, will help the country catch up with what the world has become.
In fact, this sentence, too, refers to the present, as well as to the future, and
arguably, to the near future, as well as a distant one: what is now happening in the
country (the teaching of Japanese) will help bring advantages later (starting
perhaps very soon).
A that-clause with a verb in the past tense is also possible in combination
with a there is a sense phrase, as the following example illustrates:
[The] City of Culture scheme- that’s an Arts Council initiative that starts next year
in Birmingham and will involve other British cities in the rest of the decade. And it
was picked up on the back of Glasgow. There was a sense in the Arts Council that
the European City of Culture scheme in Glasgow did several valuable things.
This quote refers to the past (to what was done in Glasgow), the present, and the
future. “There was a sense” in the Arts Council that several valuable things were
happening and were going to happen because of what had been done in Glasgow.
It seems, then, that the phrase there is a sense that typically (and perhaps
always) refers in some way to the current situation in the place spoken about. It is
not difficult to understand why the phrase there is a sense that should differ
somewhat in this respect from personal phrases like I have a sense that: an
individual can “have a sense” about another person from talking to that person,
but such a scenario is much less likely in the case of the entire population of a
place. For example, while one can say:
From talking to my grandmother, I have a sense that she never really loved her
husband.
178 SENSE
a plausible counterpart with there is a sense that is difficult (if not impossible)
to construct, and in fact the phrase there is a sense that does not combine
with phrases like “from talking to (these people).” Nor is it possible to say,
“There is a sense of what it was like,” as one can say, “I have a sense of what it
was like.” This, too, suggests that the phrase there is a sense that requires a
complement that refers to the present.
Admittedly, one can also find examples of the phrase there is a sense that
being used with abstract complement clauses. Sentences of this kind, however,
appear to have policy implications for the local population. Consider, for exam-
ple, the following sentence adapted from COBUILD:
There is a sense in Britain that children are better off with their mothers.
This statement implies that this is what people in Britain see as a desirable policy
for present-day Britain.
In conclusion, it appears that the phrase there is a sense that always implies
present relevance and indeed carries with it the component “something is hap-
pening here now” even if this component does not correspond straightforwardly
to the content of the that-clause as such.
4.7. Give Us a Sense of . . .
When asked about her religious beliefs, writer Barbara Thiering is reported to
have said that we “need no longer use first-century cultural concepts in order to
give us a sense of the presence of God,” thereby replacing “first-century cultural
concepts” with one of the central cultural concepts of present-day English: that of
“a sense.”
The value of “having a sense” of something that one cannot have full
knowledge of is reflected in a whole range of English expressions, one of
which is “giving [someone] a sense” of something. For example, in literary
criticism, writers may be praised for “giving [the readers] a sense” of what
something was like, as in the following two sentences:
In The Secret River, a novel that was recently shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Kate
Grenville sets off not only to capture through fiction the next phase of the unhappy
relations between settlers and original inhabitants but [also] to give a more immediate
sense of the convict story. (Morehead 2006)
Few eyewitnesses give us so keen a sense of actual life on the battlefront as the author of
The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane, born after the war was over. (from a magazine
article)
The importance of “giving [others] a sense” of something that they cannot

know experientially is reflected in a striking way in the conversational routine
(common in interviews) based on the question “Can you give us a sense of,” as in
the following examples from Web sites:
Can you give us a sense of how both of you responded at that time to what was happening
around you?
Can you give us a sense of the feeling in the Parliament when you heard that news?
Can you give us a sense of what it was like to help those people?
In these particular examples, the addressee knows something from personal

experience in a particular situation (in a particular place at a particular time),
whereas the speaker, who was not a part of that situation, does not and cannot
have the same kind of knowledge but would like to obtain a glimpse of it and, as it
were, a taste of it.
In many sentences of this kind, the phrase can you give us (me ) a sense of is
followed by what it was like, as in the last of the examples above. Instances of this
kind are instructive because they highlight the speaker’s desire for a kind of
knowledge that is comparable to the addressee’s experiential knowledge. As a
first approximation, we can represent this as follows:
I want to know what it was like

I know that I cannot know it well like you can know it well
at the same time, I know that I can know something about it if you say
something about it
I believe that this first approximation captures some aspects of the meaning
in question reasonably well but that it does not fully capture this meaning. What
is missing is a specific yardstick of what “knowing something well” means in this
context, a yardstick that is provided by the word sense (in the frame a sense of),
with its references to something like “senses” and “sensations.” To spell out
those implicit references, I propose the following expanded and more accurate
explication:
Can you give me a sense of . . . ?
a. I want to know something about it

b. I know that I cannot know it well,
like people can know well what is happening in the place where they are
when they feel something in some parts of their bodies
because these things are happening in that place at that time
c. at the same time, I know that if you say some things about it,
I can know something about it,
like people can know something about a place when they are in that place
d. I want to know something about it in this way
because of this, I want you to say something about it
According to this hypothetical formula, two models of experiential knowledge

are linked with the word sense (a sense): one associated with internal sensations
and one with external perception.
180 SENSE
As far as my sensations go, I can know what they are reasonably well, and no
one else can. What I perceive in my environment, on the other hand, can also be
perceived, in principle, by other people, though only by those who are in the same
place at the same time. Thus, people’s perceptions about the place where they are
at a particular time are also privileged (in comparison to hearsay), but they are not
as privileged as one’s own internal sensations, to which no outsiders can have
access at all.
What I am suggesting, then, is that, in asking for “a sense” of some-
thing or other, one is asking for a bit of knowledge comparable to experi-
ential knowledge—not of the most reliable kind (such as the knowledge
based on one’s own bodily feelings) but a valuable kind, nonetheless (like
the knowledge that people can have about a place when they are in that
place).
Let us consider, in the light of these considerations, one further example
(from a White House Press briefing, October 6, 2005, White House Web
site):
A. José Padilla, if you remember, was involved in plots involving the possibility of a dirty
bomb, and then Iyman Faris was . . . captured with plots looking at blowing up or
destroying a New York bridge. And then there are other incidents that are still
classified.
Q. You can’t give any more details?
A. Well, those are two public matters that would be in reference . . . And then in terms of
the other ones we’ll continue to make information available publicly, as we are able to
do so.
Q. Can you give us a sense of what they were, or how recently these were averted?
Here, the interviewee has some privileged knowledge that is not necessarily
based on experience. He cannot give a detailed answer because the matter
concerns classified information. The interviewer is aware of that and seeks
something less, something general—not necessarily something based on the
interviewee’s personal experience but on that person’s inside knowledge. This
is not incompatible, however, with the proposed explication for the phrase can
you give us a sense because this explication does not specify that the addressee
has to have some experiential knowledge of any kind but only that the speaker
would like to have some qualitative knowledge comparable to one kind of
experiential knowledge.
It would be possible, of course, to devise a leaner semantic formula for uses
where the addressee has no firsthand experiential knowledge of the matter in
question. Such a formula could simply omit a reference to bodily sensations
altogether and acknowledge the addressee’s privileged access to knowledge in a
more general way:
I want to know something about it

I know that I cannot know it well , like you can know it well
at the same time, I think that if you say some things about it, I can know something about it
because they are in that place

I want to know something about it in this way
because of this, I want you to say some things about it
It would be difficult, however, to draw a line between those uses of the

formula can you give me a sense of in which there is an implicit reference to
bodily sensations and those where there is not. On balance, therefore, it seems
more justified to opt for a unitary formula, which would have to refer to bodily
sensations as a model of firsthand knowledge that the speaker (the requester) does
not and cannot have.
When asking someone to give us “a sense” of something that this person
knows well, one is not asking for very much, and often minimizers like just and
some are used in this context:
Just give me some sense of what kind of relationships you have to the neighborhood.
Nonetheless, one is asking for something concrete and reliable—the kind of

knowledge that could provide a foothold for the imagination. As noted
earlier, the phrases kind of and what it was (is) like are often used in such
contexts:
I was just wondering if you know if you can give me a kind of sense of the kind of change
that there’s been in that time.
Could you give me some sense of what you know [about] what it’s like . . . living around here.
In these examples the words kind and like show that what is sought is not
explicit, verbalizable knowledge (information) but knowledge of a different,
qualitative kind. This applies even to sentences in which the words kind and
like are not used overtly, as in the following extracts from radio interviews, one
with a shopper, and another, with an author:
—I do the family shopping usually once a week at Sainsbury’s . . . and I do my

personal shopping as seldom as I can.
—When you say personal shopping, can you give me a sense of the range of goods
that you include?
—I think within those silences, there are reverberations of things gone past, and
that’s what I wanted to explore with the character as well, in—in exploring her
silences—because they do run deep.
—Can you give me a sense of what Lilly might be thinking in some of those silent
moments?
—She’s aware of who she is, and she is developing a sense of her power, I think.
In the first of these passages, the interviewer wants to know what kind of goods
the interviewee buys and, in the second, what kind of thoughts the character
might be thinking. The interviewer is aware that she cannot know these things as
well as the interviewee can, but she expects nonetheless to get a “feel” for the
kind of thing that is involved in each case.
182 SENSE
This brings us to the question of the relationship between “sense” (in the
sense under discussion) and “feel.” Does “a sense” given to us by someone else
imply “a feeling”?
In the example from the interview with Barbara Thiering with which we
began (to give us a sense of the presence of God), a sense clearly implies “a
feeling”: A person who has “a sense of the presence of God” feels that God is
present. On the other hand, the interviewer who wants to be given “a sense” of the
range of goods included on the interviewee’s shopping list is presumably not
expecting to feel anything as a result.
Arguably, then, in some contexts and in some grammatical frames, sense can
be “bleached” in comparison with those contexts and frames where it does imply
a feeling. In particular, the routinized request can you give us a sense of . . . does
not appear to include any “feeling” component—except as a point of reference in
the prototypical scenario.
It would be a mistake, however, to think that such a routinized request is also
“bleached” of any references to “senses” and experiential knowledge. A person
who asks, “Can you give me a sense of . . . ” is not asking for a brief description, a
summary, or some selected snippets of information but rather for the kind of
knowledge that one can have about a place when one is in that place. The formula
is routinized, but it is not divested of a link with bodily perception as a model of
valuable, though limited, knowledge.
At first sight, giving someone a sense (of something) may seem to be,
roughly, causing this someone to have a sense (of that something), but in fact,
there is no such simple causative relation between the two expressions. If you
have a sense that (i.e., a sense with a that-clause) Andrea Roche will wow the
judges (see section 4.5 “To Have a Sense That . . . ”), I cannot ask you to “give”
me that “sense” so that I, too, can have a sense that she will wow the judges.
In fact, it does not seem possible to give someone a sense that something is the
case; one can only “give” someone a sense of something.
If I have a sense that something is the case, I feel something in my bones
when I think about it. If you give me a sense of how something happened (e.g.,
how the meeting went) by telling me about it, you cannot cause me in this way to
similarly feel something in my bones. You can cause me to have some qualitative
knowledge (of the kind that people can have about a place when they are in that
place) but not the kind of qualitative knowledge that is supported by some bodily
sensations.
This important difference between having a sense and giving a sense is
reflected in the range of adjectives with which either expression combines. For
example, I can have a strong sense (that something is the case), but I cannot ask
someone else to give me a strong sense (of how something happened); at the
most, I can ask them to give me a rough sense (of how it happened). The adjective
strong refers to a “strong feeling,” and this is one reason why it does not normally
combine with the phrase give me a sense (in the relevant sense), whereas the
adjective rough does not refer to any feeling but rather emphasizes the limitations
of the knowledge that is being asked for. This is why it can readily occur in
combination with this phrase.
In fact, collocability with different adjectives allows us to establish that the

phrase give us a sense can be used in two different meanings. In the two examples
from literary criticism cited at the outset of this chapter, this phrase was com-
bined with the adjectives immediate and keen (“to give us a more immediate
sense of the convict story,” “few eyewitnesses give us so keen a sense of actual
life”). Neither of these adjectives can be used in the routinized question “Can you
give us (me) a sense of . . . ?” (*Can you give us an immediate/keen sense of how
the meeting went?) Clearly, the use of give us a sense that is combinable with
such adjectives requires a separate explication, one that is closer to those of have
a sense and get a sense.
These differences between having a sense and giving a sense (as in “can you
give us/me a sense of . . . ?”) support the reality of two different standards (or
reference points) of experiential knowledge linked with the word sense (a sense):
a weaker one linked with being in a place and thus with being able to perceive
something about this place, and another, stronger one linked with bodily sensa-
tions and thus with being able to know that something is happening in that place.
5
A Sense of Humor, a Sense of Self,

and Similar Expressions
5.1. A Sense of Humor
Among all of the English phrases in the a sense of frame, a sense of humor
occupies pride of place. Statistically, it is the most common one, as the following
figures for the eight most common such collocations in the COBUILD corpus
illustrate (absolute numbers):
sense of humor 516 sense of urgency 49

sense of security 85 sense of responsibility 49
sense of community 57 sense of loss 46
sense of relief 56 sense of guilt 43
Google searches yield broadly similar results, and the figures for sense of humor
are several times higher than for any other such collocations.
Furthermore, among all the sense of phrases that can combine with the
adjective good, the predominance of a good sense of humor is staggering. The
figures are as follows: there are eighty-three occurrences of good sense of, and
of these, sixty-six are instances of good sense of humor; All the other collocates
(e.g., good sense of balance, good sense of direction, good sense of time, good
sense of politics) are single occurrences.
Again, Google searches yield broadly comparable results, and the figures for
good sense of humor are incomparably higher than those for good sense of
balance/direction/time/politics (or any other collocations with good sense of).
184
A SENSE OF HUMOR AND SIMILAR EXPRESSIONS 185
Apart from being the most common collocation, a good sense of humor is
also one of the most culture-specific English expressions and an indicator of one
of the values central to Anglo culture. To see the value that Anglo culture places
on “a good sense of humor” it is enough to look at a random selection of personal
ads, where “a good sense of humor” is the recurrent, central motif (both in
describing oneself and in stating what kind of person one is looking for). Here
are some examples:
Must have commitment, be outgoing, and good looking! Also must have a good sense of
humor.
Any age (21), good sense of humor important.
Looking for someone with a good sense of humor.
Sense of humor, feminine, genuine, sincere, honest, caring, looking for similar 24–34.
Looking for friendship and romance, has a good sense of humor.
Female 34, 50 3, lovable, kind, good sense of humor, looking for same.
SEEKING GOOD SENSE OF HUMOUR: attractive 32, looks much younger.
Young looking with a good sense of humor.
The prominent place of “a good sense of humor” in personal ads is reflected in the
standard abbreviation GSOH, which in Britain and Australia is treated as self-
explanatory:1
British Personal Ads with GSOH

Attractive, warm, friendly, glamorous lady, seeks good-looking, tall, lively male to light
up my life, 48–60 with gsoh, for possible LTR. NW/Mancs/Lancs.
Attractive, petite widow, 64 with gsoh, wltm kind, caring man for friendship and good
companionship. Ldn/NW.
Modern, attractive orthodox lady, widow, 50s wltm attractive gentleman of similar age
with gsoh, kind, and caring, for companionship and possible relationship. Liverpool.
Australian Personal Ads with GSOH
48 yo female Catholic, divorced, employed (2 children 1 employed 1 studying), slim,
attractive, outgoing, N/S, N/D, GSOH. Enjoys music, dancing, dining out, & travel.
Seeking male aged 49–53 yrs
20 yo young Catholic female, slim, attractive, loves music, dancing, dining out, travel, N/
S, N/D, GSOH. Seeking male 23–25 yo with similar interests, medium build, caring,
honest, sincere, open for friendship and possible relationship.
In her book Watching the English, popular writer Kate Fox writes: “There is
an awful lot of guff talked about the English Sense of Humour, including many
patriotic attempts to prove that our sense of humour is somehow unique and
superior to everyone else’s” (Fox 2005, 61). Distancing herself from such
“patriotic attempts,” Fox argues that “while there may indeed be something
distinctive about English humour, the real ‘defining characteristic’ is the value
we put on humour, the central importance of humour in English culture and social
interactions” (ibid.)
186 SENSE
The point about the central importance of humor in English culture is

indisputable, but the scornful dismissal of the claim that the English sense of
humor “is somehow unique” is too quick. Above all, Fox’s discussion does not
mention the fact that the very concept of a sense of humor is a unique creation of
the English language and Anglo culture.
Like many other English writers, Fox links the value of a sense of humor
with Englishness. Those speakers of English who feel “British” rather than
“English” tend to link it with being British, and Americans often link it
with being an American. Here are a few characteristic quotations from Internet
sites:2
We British possess one quality on which we actively pride ourselves, our sense of
humour. No other nation holds wit in such high regard. As John Cleese once said, “An
Englishman would rather be told he is a bad lover than that he has no sense of humor.”
(Bill Bryson)
I sometimes think that the saving grace of America lies in the fact that the overwhelming
majority of Americans are possessed of two great qualities—a sense of humor and a sense
of proportion. (Franklin D. Roosevelt)
Whatever else an American believes or disbelieves about himself, he is absolutely sure he
has a sense of humor. (E. B. White)
A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting
things done. (Dwight D. Eisenhower)
So, is a sense of humor a specifically English value, or is it one shared by England

(or the United Kingdom) and the United States (and other traditionally Anglo-
phone countries)?
Judging by linguistic evidence of the kind that can be found in large corpora,
a sense of humor is important both in England (and the UK) and the United States
but is more important in the UK. For example, in the COBUILD corpus of UK
Books, there are 14 occurrences of sense of humour (humor) per million words,
whereas in US Books, there are only 4 per million. If we include other corpora
(UK Ephemera and BBC, as well as US Ephemera and National Public Radio) in
the comparison, the figures are, respectively, 8 and 4 per million. Thus, the
greater frequency of a sense of humour in the UK corpora is consistent across
genres.
The fact that in the UK people appear to talk about a sense of humor more
often than in the United States suggests that the topic is more important for people
in the UK. This conclusion is greatly strengthened when we compare the frequen-
cies of (a) good sense of humour (humor) in the UK and US Books subcorpora. The
UK Books subcorpus includes 20 occurrences of (a) good sense of humour
(humor), that is, 4 per million words, whereas the US Books subcorpus has none.
This fact thus suggests that “a good sense of humor” is a more salient cultural value
in Britain than in the United States.
At the same time, a good sense of humor and (especially) a great sense of
humor appear in American personal ads, such as the following two:
I’m just a laid back, easy-going guy. I’m a lot of fun to be around and have a great sense of
humor. I’m smart and witty, with a kind of a cynical edge.
Interested in finding a guy who’s motivated, has a great sense of humor, intelligent,
attractive, kind, and has similar interests to me.
Statistical evidence of this kind must, of course, be treated very cautiously,

but it is remarkable how well this evidence tallies with the more impressionistic
perceptions and views expressed, for example, in Kate Fox’s book. In a section
titled “The Importance of Not Being Earnest Rule,” in which she opposes
“humor” to “earnestness” (absence of humor), she writes:
At the most basic level, an underlying rule in all English conversation is the
proscription of “earnestness.” Although we may not have a monopoly on humour,
or even on irony, the English are probably more acutely sensitive than any other
nation to the distinction between “serious” and “solemn,” between “sincerity” and
“earnestness.” . . . To take a deliberately extreme example, the kind of hand-on-
heart, gushing earnestness and pompous, Bible-thumping solemnity favoured by
almost all American politicians would never win a single vote in this country—we
watch these speeches on our news programmes with a kind of smugly detached
amusement, wondering how the cheering crowds can possibly be so credulous as to
fall for this sort of nonsense. When we are not feeling smugly amused, we are
cringing with vicarious embarrassment: how can these politicians bring themselves
to utter such shamefully earnest platitudes, in such ludicrously solemn tones? We
expect politicians to speak largely in platitudes, of course—ours are no different in
this respect—it is the earnestness that makes us wince. (Fox 2005, 62–63)
This is consistent with the evidence from the corpora.

But if the statistical evidence is intriguing, semantic evidence has an even
greater weight, and the fact that the concept of a sense of humor is language
specific is particularly revealing.
The importance of linguistic evidence in discussions of cultural values is
seldom adequately recognized. For example, when Bill Bryson says that “no
other nation holds wit in such high regard [as the British],” he may well be right,
but the statement is not supported with evidence. What is demonstrably valued in
traditionally Anglophone countries is not wit but a sense of humor (as the
linguistic evidence discussed in this section illustrates).
It goes without saying that what people may regard as a good sense of humor
in the United States may not necessarily be regarded as such in England and vice
versa, and a great deal has been written on the subject. Australians, too, pride
themselves on a distinct sense of humor (see, e.g., Murray 1999; Goddard 2006),
and the differences between various kinds of humor valued and widely practiced
in different English-speaking countries have often been discussed in the literature
(cf. Renwick 1980; Willey 1984; Jones and Andrews 1988; Knight 1990;
Goddard 2006). But the expression a sense of humor is used widely throughout
traditionally Anglophone countries, and clearly all these countries share the
concept and the value.
188 SENSE
Culturally unique concepts like a sense of humor (shared by England, the

United States, and other traditionally Anglophone countries) can, of course, be
borrowed by other languages, but first, such borrowing is often linked with
semantic modifications, and second, it frequently carries with it a stamp of the
country of origin. Let me illustrate this with the concept of le sens de l’humour in
French.
The English word humor was originally a loan from the French humeur
(itself a continuation of the Latin humor). However, the meaning linked today
with the English humor was born in England, not in France, and in due course
French itself borrowed this English word. As the historical French dictionary Le
Robert puts it, in English, the original meaning of l’humeur (disposition à la
gaite, ‘a disposition to merriness’) “evolved and came to designate in the course
of the XVIIIth century the capacity to present reality in such a way as to show its
pleasant, unusual or absurd aspects, with an attitude marked by detachment” (Rey
et al. 1995, vol. 1, 983).
The concept of l’humour, borrowed by French from English, is often char-
acterized in French as humour anglais ‘English humour’ and is often described in
French literature as akin to irony and focused on comical aspects of reality (in
contrast, one might add, to concepts like the French esprit or the older English
wit).
Furthermore, despite the appearances, the phrase le sens de l’humour does
not mean exactly the same as the English sense of humor: Not only the English
humor and the French humeur but also the English sense and the French sens are
des faux amis, ‘false friends’. To see this one needs only to note that the range of
use of sense and sens (in the relevant sense of these words) is quite different.
In many contexts, the English word sense has to be rendered in French as
sentiment ‘feeling’ rather than sens, and in others, the French sens cannot be
rendered in English as sense. Here is one example from the French COBUILD,
where sens is combined with three substantivized adjectives, of which only one
could combine in English with sense:
Jacques Brel est . . . un artiste de la caricature. Pour le suivre, il faut posséder le sens du
laid, du difforme, du ridicule.
‘Jacques Brel is . . . a caricature artist. To understand him, one needs to possess a sens of
the ugly, the shapeless, and the ridiculous.’
A sense of the ridiculous sounds fine in English, but a sense of the ugly and a
sense of the shapeless do not (and a sense of ugliness or a sense of shapelessness
would not be acceptable either, although a sense of beauty is possible). I return to
the semantic differences between the English sense and the French sens later. For
the moment, it is sufficient to note that even a conceptual loan from English like
le sens de l’humour does not correspond exactly to its English source.
Thus, when Kate Fox pokes fun at what she sees as English people’s
conviction that they “have a better, more subtle, more highly developed sense
of humour than any other nation” (Fox 2005, 63), she is overlooking the point that
both the concept of humor and that of a sense of humor are conceptual creations
of the English language and Anglo culture. Furthermore, when she goes on to say,
“Humour is universal; irony is a universally important ingredient of humour: no
single culture can possibly claim a monopoly on it” (ibid., 65), she is simply
mistaken: irony is by no means universal (cf. Haiman 1998), and neither is the
concept of humor in the English sense of the word. What is universal is laughter,
but laughter is not the same thing as humor.
But if humor is a quintessentially Anglo concept (“l’humour anglais”), a
sense of humor is doubly so. French has to some extent borrowed both humor
(l’humour) and a sense of humor (le sens de l’humour), but it has not gone so far
as to borrow the English concept of a good sense of humour, and in fact, this
phrase cannot be translated into French at all: One cannot qualify le sens de
l’humour as bon (‘good’). Thus, while there are sixty-six occurrences of the
phrase a good sense of humor in the English COBUILD, in the French COBUILD there
is only one occurrence of un bon sens de l’humour (which in French sounds, in
fact, like a clumsy calque from English). Nor can one render in French the
meaning of phrases like a great/terrific/excellent/lousy sense of humor.
So how does the key cultural concept of a good sense of humor fit into the
network of English conceptual schemas linked with the word sense?
The main point to realize here is that many constructs can be linked with the
universal human capacity for laughter. The old English “wit” represents one of
them; the French “esprit,” another; and the modern English “humor,” yet another.
As the French dictionary Le Robert (1995) says in its commentary on the
loanword l’humour, the English concept of humor is essentially situational rather
than, for example, verbal: roughly speaking, it represents an ability to see the
funny side of any situation. If wit can be linked with an ability to say clever things
that can make people laugh, humor is linked with people’s ability to see that
something is funny and to laugh at it.
The reality of the conceptual link between “humor” and “situation” is
reflected in untranslatable English phrases like the humor of the situation or the
humor in the situation (e.g., in French, l’humour de/dans la situation would be
out of the question). Two examples from COBUILD:
O’Callaghan told Dublin’s High Court how his secret Garda contact had driven him from
Mallow, Co[unty] Cork, to a north Dublin pub for a meeting to prepare for the Royal
attack. The officer saw some black humour in the situation, saying: “Here I am taking
you to plot to blow up Charles and Diana.” O’Callaghan added: “And then he laughed.”
The students of the Ethiopian College, who had provided the choir for the Mass,
enthusiastically continued to beat drums, clash cymbals, and rattle castanets while
frantic secretaries vainly waved their arms at them. Paul seemed to enjoy the humour
of the situation.
Thus, as in so many other sense expressions, here, too, the focus is on a

concrete situation, on what is happening here and now—and this is why the
English word humor collocates so readily with the word sense (in contrast, for
example, to the word wit: *a sense of wit). Accordingly, I propose the following
explication for a sense of humor ([M) stands for a semantic molecule):
190 SENSE
She has a sense of humor.
a. she often thinks like this about the place where she is:
“it is like this:
I know that something is happening here now, I know that people can
laugh [M] because of this”
like people can know that something is happening in a place when they
are in that place
c. she can know it because when she thinks like this, she feels something,
The word laugh needs, of course, to be explicated separately, but it is

semantically simpler than humor (and, for example, children use it well before
they use the word humor). Essentially, what this explication is saying is that to
have a good sense of humor means to be able to see the funny aspect of any given
situation—to know what is funny about this situation and to know it not through
intellectual analysis but instinctively. The sensory prototype is obvious: the
bodily impulse to laugh is triggered by something perceived in the situation.
Needless to say, I am not suggesting that a sense of humor cannot manifest
itself also in an ability to laugh at other people’s jokes: The phrase “something
is happening here now” can apply to what is happening on television, in a story,
or right in front of me, as when I witness a practical joke or listen to a verbal
one.
People can also be credited with a sense of humor if they are seen as having
the ability to make other people laugh (for example, by means of witty remarks).
But such a capacity to amuse others can be regarded as derived from a more basic
capacity, described by The Longman Dictionary of the English Language (1984)
as “a capacity for discernment and appreciation,” above all, for discerning and
appreciating something amusing in a given situation—or so the English expres-
sion a sense of humor implies.
Finally, it is worth noting that while some languages may seem to have an
exact equivalent of the English expression a good sense of humor, such an
impression may in fact be illusory. For example, Polish has the expression
dobre poczucie humoru, literally, ‘a good feeling/sense of humor’, which seems
to be very close to its English counterpart. In fact, however, there are significant
differences between the two expressions.
To begin with, Polish distinguishes poczucie, wyczucie, czucie, and uczucie
(all nouns based on the verb czu c ‘to feel’ and meaning, roughly speaking,
‘feeling/sense’). For example, one could say uczucie głodu ‘a feeling of hunger’;
czucie w nogach ‘feeling in one’s legs’; wyczucie sytuacji ‘a sense of the situa-
tion’; and poczucie czasu ‘a sense of time’. Of these four, wyczucie implies that
c (rather than
one is truly detecting something that is real, and it is the verb wyczu
poczu c) that could translate the English verb to sense in sentences like “the dog
can sense that his master is leaving.” Thus, the Polish expression poczucie
humoru does not imply any ability to detect something about the situation
(something that is objectively funny) as the English sense of humor does.
Second, neither poczucie nor any of its cognates (wyczucie, uczucie, czucie)
coincides with the word for “the five senses,” which is zmysły (sg. zmysł). Thus,
even if the potential cognitive value of a “feeling” is recognized to some extent
by the word poczucie (as in poczucie humoru, ‘a feeling/sense of humor’), this is
not linked with sensory perception as the English sense of humor is.
This brings us back to the French expression le sens de l’humour as discussed
earlier. When one examines the whole range of the word sens (in the relevant
meaning), it is clear that this word is not linked in any way with the model of
sensory perception. For example, the French expression le sens du tragique (‘le
sens of the tragic’) has nothing to do with the here and now, as the English sense
of tragedy does. Expressions like le sens du tragique refer to what a person can
know about a subject (for example, about life) on the basis of a feeling—but not a
quasi-bodily feeling comparable to a bodily sensation or sensory perception.
The high frequency of the expression a sense of humor in English discourse
reflects the cultural value of an ability to see the funny side of a concrete situation,
not an ability to see and think about the comic aspects of life in general. When Kate
Fox says that “the English may not always be joking, but they are always in a state
of readiness for humour” (Fox 2005, 66) and when she affirms that “the value we
[the English] put on humour, its central role in English culture and conversation” is
“the main defining characteristic” of “Englishness” (ibid., 72), she may be exag-
gerating, but she clearly has a point. In any case, linguistic evidence is on her side.
In the light of linguistic evidence, however, it is important to add that it is not
just humor that matters here but a sense of humor as well: judging by the role that
the word sense plays in Anglo-English discourse, the sensory model of knowl-
edge linked with trust in the reliability of the senses (and sensations) is also one of
the defining features of Anglo culture as reflected in the English language.
This brings me back to the semantic differences between the English sense
and the French sens, mentioned earlier, and to the contrasts in acceptability
between a sense of the ridiculous, *a sense of the ugly, the shapeless, and le
sens du laid, du difforme. A sense of the ridiculous sounds fine in English because
it can refer to a ridiculous situation and be linked with a quasi-bodily impulse to
laugh or smile. A sense of the ugly/shapeless, on the other hand, sounds strange
because it is difficult to see how a situation or a place could be shapeless or ugly.
Finally, a sense of beauty is possible because it can be readily interpreted as an
ability to see beauty in the here and now and to react to it with a quasi-bodily
movement of the heart.
The fact that one cannot say in French (the equivalent of) a good sense of
humor epitomizes the difference between the French sens and the English sense,
and it highlights the semantic uniqueness of the English concept of a sense of
humor.
As with many other English cultural key concepts expressed in English
words and phrases, a sense of humor is widely taken to be a culture-independent
tool for discussing human behavior and human psychology in general. For
example, in a single issue of Humor: International Journal of Humor Research
192 SENSE
(2004, 17[1–2]), whose table of contents is reproduced below, the term sense of
humor occurs in six articles out of the seven included:3
Sense of Humor and Physical Health: Theoretical Issues, Recent Findings, and
Future Directions (by Rod A. Martin)
Sense of Humor, Physical Health, and Well-being at Work: A Three-year
Longitudinal Study of Finnish Police Officers (by Paavo Kerkkånen, Nicholas A.
Kuiper, and Rod A. Martin)
Thoughts of Feeling Better? Sense of Humor and Physical Health (by Nicho-
las A. Kuiper and Sorrel Nicholl)
The Significance of Sense of Humor, Life Regard, and Stressors for Bodily
Complaints among High School Students (by Sven Svebak, K. Gunnar Götestam,
and Eva Naper Jensen)
Do Cheerfulness, Exhilaration, and Humor Production Moderate Pain Toler-
ance? A FACS Study (by Karen Zweyer, Barbara Velker, and Willibald Ruch Page)
The Prevalence of Sense of Humor in a Large, Unselected County Population
in Norway: Relations with Age, Sex, and Some Health Indicators (by Sven Svebak,
Rod A. Martin, and Jostein Holmen)
Humor Is Not Always the Best Medicine: Specific Components of Sense of
Humor and Psychological Well-being (by Nicholas A. Kuiper, Melissa Grimshaw,
Catherine Leite, and Gillian Kirsh)
Evidently the contributors assume that a sense of humor is a universal human

characteristic and that the concept of a sense of humor can safely be used for
analyzing human psychology, regardless of language and culture. Like many
other similar assumptions widely accepted by contemporary English-dominated
science, this one is based on an illusion: in all societies, people laugh, but they do
not all look at the human capacity for laughter through the prism of the same
concept—the one encoded in the English expression a sense of humor.
5.2. A Sense of Self
In modern English discourse one often comes across expressions like a sense of
self and a sense of identity, as well as phrases in which the complement of sense
includes the adjective own (e.g., a sense of one’s own worth).
Remarkably, such complements must refer to the same person who has the
“sense” in question: a sentence like “Mary had a strong sense of her worth” must
refer to Mary’s own sense of her own worth, and while one can say “she had a
strong sense of self,” one could not say “she had a strong sense of his self.” A
sentence like “She had a strong sense of his presence” is, as noted earlier, possible
in English (especially in reference to someone who is dead ), and so is “She had a
sense of his vulnerability,” but not “she had a sense of his self.” One can also say,
“She had an exaggerated sense of her own importance” but not “she had an
exaggerated sense of his importance.”
Obviously, phrases that can refer only to something about the experiencer
belong to a type (or types) of expressions that are different from those that can
refer to other people. As a starting point, we can note that sentences that refer
(explicitly or implicitly) to a place (“here”) can easily refer to someone else,
whereas those that do not refer to a place at all may be restricted to something
about the experiencer him- or herself .
For example, the sentence “Mary had a strong sense of his [her dead father’s]
presence” clearly refers to the place where Mary was at the time, whereas the
sentence “Mary had a strong sense of self” does not refer to any place at all. The
two sentences are concerned with two different questions: in one case, “I want to
know what is happening here now,” and in the other, “I want to know who I am.”
The reality of the link between the word sense and the implicit question
“Who am I?” in the semantics of some English expressions is supported by
corpus sentences like the following ones (examples from COBUILD):
Young adolescents . . . have little experience against which to judge what happens to them,
and often they have a shifting sense of who they are.
They have little permanent sense of who they are.
You have a better sense of who you are.
Both the phrases a sense of self and a sense of identity clearly reflect the
cultural theme of “knowing who you are.” Here are some examples with a sense
of self from COBUILD:
A mother needs an especially strong sense of self.

Very few of us regard a strong sense of self as anything but an asset.
For a full sense of self, the toddler must also understand herself to be an object in the
world.
He was exactly what she needed to restore her sense of self.
All of these women display quite a sturdy sense of self.
Sentences with the phrase a sense of self are particularly common in popular
psychology and often refer to women. They tend to combine with adjectives like
strong, sturdy, healthy, clear, stable, coherent, and heightened (but also reduced
and fragmented) and with verbs like gain, develop, maintain, restore, and raise
(but also diminish and threaten).
Sense of identity, on the other hand, is used more broadly and can refer to
groups, as well as individuals. As a result, it can combine with adjectives like
individual and personal and also with the word belonging and the phrase a
sense of belonging. It is also often linked with what a person or a group does,
whereas a sense of self is normally linked with how they think. Here are some
examples:
A lot of his sense of identity was wrapped up with his golf.

I think the problem is that we’ve put so much emphasis on people getting their sense of
identity from what they can buy for consumption.
It is easy to see why so insecure a republic [Albania] should try to reinforce its sense of
identity by picking a fight with an outside enemy.
194 SENSE
They are out of touch with their real feelings and lack a sense of identity. If you don’t feel
a sense of yourself, you are going to feel empty.
He did not have an individual sense of identity (in our sense) that could have given him
support, but he felt supported by the group.
Your sense of identity, of who you are and where you belong, may open up
considerably.
Can this type of sense expressions, too, be explained by an analogy with

a bodily model of sensory perception? I believe that it can, as in the case of some
well-known delusions in which people have mistaken beliefs about their own
bodies. One such delusion is called “mirrored-self misidentification.” In this type
of delusion, a person may look in the mirror and say, “The person in the mirror is
not really me.” In another type, called “asomatognosia,” a person may say, “This
arm [the speaker’s left arm] is not mine; it is yours; you have three arms”
(Coltheart and Davies 2000, 1). Normal people, on the other hand, know who
the reflection in the mirror is (“it’s me”) or what their left arm is (“it’s a part of my
body”), and they know it not on the basis of observation and deduction but as it
were from inside. For example, I know that this arm is a part of my own body
because I can feel something in it; when I want to move it, I can feel that it moves
even if I close my eyes and cannot see it moving. It is not so with somebody else’s
arms: to know whose they are, I need to see that they are attached to this person’s
body or to find it out by touch.
This unique access to knowledge about the parts of one’s own body can
serve, I suggest, as a conceptual model for a person’s sense of self or sense of
identity. I propose the following explication for a sense of self:
She has a (strong) sense of self.
a. she often thinks like this:

“it is like this:
I know who I am, I know who I want to be, I am me , I want to be me”
like people can know what they are doing with some parts of their body
c. she can know it because, when she thinks like this, she feels something,
when they are doing something with their body for some time
because they want something to happen
The self-knowledge implied by the expression a sense of self cannot be put

into words: when one thinks “I know who I am,” one can feel a strong feeling of
certainty without being able to define it for other people. The situation with a
sense of identity is different, however. For example, if people in Scotland are said
to have “a highly developed sense of identity,” this suggests that they can think:
“I know what I am: I am Scottish,” so their sense of identity can be put into words
(“I know what I am: I am Scottish”). Similarly, the sentence:
When a man loses his job, it deals a sickening blow to his ego and sense of identity.
suggests that a man tends to think about himself like this: “I know what I am: I am
a mechanic (or teacher, actor, bus driver, etc.).” In other words, a sense of identity
implies knowing what one is (often easily defined in terms of nationality,
profession, faith, and so on). This leads us to the following explication:
She has a (strong) sense of identity.

“it is like this:
I know that there are many kinds of people, I am someone of one kind
I want to be someone of this kind”
like people can know what they are doing with some parts of their
body when they are doing it
when they are doing some things with their body for some time
because they want something to happen
Moving now to sense expressions with the word own, we note that the range
of their possible components is quite restricted. They include, above all, evalua-
tion words like importance, worth, self-worth, and value and words of negative
evaluation like shortcomings, foolishness, incompetence, and inadequacy. First,
here are some examples with “value”-type words:
Superwoman exists only in the minds of cartoonists and Hollywood producers. Inevitably
something has to give. And inevitably that something is a woman’s sense of her own
worth.
Surely one of the purposes of the course is to give them a sense of their own value.
Aim to build up a sense of your own value that does not rely upon success or other
people’s approval.
The school-age child also begins to see her own (and other people’s) characteristics as
relatively stable, and for the first time she develops a global sense of her own self-
worth.
This intensely private sense of being too heavy is self-defining, defeating both the
woman’s self-esteem and her sense of her own sexual worth.
The last example is particularly telling as it explicitly links the question of

one’s “worth” with that of one’s “self-definition”: the question “who am I?” is
linked here with the question “what am I worth?” The adjective global in the
preceding example is also symptomatic: it is a question of a “global” sense of
who one is.
The negative examples point in the same direction. People’s sense of their
own inadequacy, shortcomings, or failures can be self-defining: the question
196 SENSE
“Who am I?” can be answered by “I am a failure,” “I am someone inadequate,” or

“I am someone full of shortcomings.” Some examples:
Peter Sellers has a similar habit, and his friends always said that he did it out of some sense
of his own inadequacy.
She has an exaggerated sense of her own failure.
Suddenly she had a sense of deep defeat, a sense of her own foolishness.
A sense of failure is bad enough, but it is not as self-defining as a sense of

one’s own failure. Similarly, a sense of achievement is great, but it is not as self-
defining as a sense of one’s own worth or one’s own importance. As the same
time, such a self-defining or globalizing sense of one’s own value is less rooted in
facts than a more limited sense as in a sense of achievement or a sense of failure—
and it is often seen as a less reliable guide to reality. This explains why it is this
self-defining, globalizing sense that tends to collocate with adjectives like
exaggerated or inflated:
I deflate these people—they have an exaggerated sense of their own importance.

His status as Rachel’s “blue-eyed boy” gave him an overinflated sense of his own
importance.
Cat food is more expensive, commensurate with a cat’s inflated sense of its own worth.
But cat keepers are, as rule, richer and more finicky than those who live with dogs.
To account for the globalizing and self-defining nature of expressions

like “she had a sense of her own X,” I propose the following partial explication:
She has a sense of her own worth/power/importance/inadequacy.
she often thinks like this:

“it is like this:
I know what I am, I know that people can think very good/very bad things about me
because they can know that I can/can’t do some things”
The reference to “people” and to what people “can think/know about me”
requires some justification. Does one’s sense of one’s own worth really depend to
some extent on what one thinks one’s image in other people’s eyes is ? I contend
that it does and that it is not an accident that a sense of one’s own importance
(often described as “exaggerated” or “inflated”) is the most common example of
the type under consideration. Even a sense of one’s own worth implies a kind of
(justified) pride: “people can know good things about me.” Similarly, a sense of
one’s own inadequacy appears to imply a kind of (justified) shame or humiliation:
“people can know some bad things about me,” or “people can know that I am
someone inadequate.”
The intuitively felt link between one’s sense of self, sense of identity, sense
of one’s own value, and one’s body image is highlighted in the following passage
from COBUILD:
. . . undesirable physical characteristics put the adolescent at risk for teasing, ridi-
cule, or exclusion. One reason for this central focus on body image is that the
teenager hasn’t yet identified a clear sense of his or her own identity as a person, so
that, to the teenager, “what I look like” and “how others see me” equate very
strongly with “who I am.” Another reason is that most younger adolescents haven’t
yet developed a broad enough sense of self.
An exaggerated sense of one’s importance does not imply that those afflicted
with such a sense are not important; it implies only that they are not as important
as they think they are. Similarly, an exaggerated sense of one’s own failure does
not imply that those in question have not failed; it implies only that they have not
failed as badly as they think they have.
Given that the type of sense discussed here can be described as “exagger-
ated” or “inflated,” can one maintain that this sense, too, has an analogue in
bodily perception? I argue that it can and that an exaggerated sense of one’s value
or lack of value has an analogue in a “distorted body image.” Normally, people
have some sense of what their body can be like in other people’s eyes, and
normally, this sense is more or less realistic; in the case of a distorted body image,
however, this sense is inaccurate.
This brings us to the following explication:
She has a sense of her own worth/power/inadequacy/failure.

“it is like this:
I know who I am, I know that people can think some very good/very
bad things about me
because they can know that I can/can’t do some things”
like people can know that other people think good/bad things about them
when these people are looking[M] at them for some time4
like someone can feel something in [some parts of] their body
when someone else is looking[M] at some parts of their body
because this someone else is thinking something good/bad about their body
Thus, from the speaker’s point of view, the sense of one’s own worth (or
inadequacy) can be as reliable—or as unreliable—as our sense of what other
people think about our body, based on what we feel when these people are
looking at us and appear to be thinking about our body.
198 SENSE
5.3. A Sense of Freedom (Confidence, Achievement,

Competence)
When one scans hundreds of sentences with the collocation a sense of, one can
become thoroughly bewildered by their great diversity. Indeed, one can come to think
that “anything goes.” This is, however, an illusion. For example, it is hard to imagine
a context in which it would be acceptable to talk about a sense of divorce, a sense of
childhood, or a sense of work. What, then, is the semantic common denominator of
those words or phrases that can combine with sense in the frame a sense of? Why can
people talk about a sense of history but not a sense of biology, a sense of frustration
but not a sense of pleasure, or a sense of purpose but not a sense of result?
In my view, to make sense of such contrasts one has to first recognize a
number of themes that are compatible with the frame a sense of and second, try to
understand why these particular themes are compatible with it, whereas others are
not. One such theme that appears to be highly compatible with this frame is,
I suggest, that of “being able to do something.”
For example, if I have a sense of freedom or a sense of confidence, I feel that
I can do what I want to do. This implication is due in part to the meanings of the
words freedom and confidence, but the fact is that a sense of collocates readily
with words of this kind and also with their opposites: phrases like a sense of
hopelessness, a sense of helplessness, and a sense of impotence sound as natural
as a sense of freedom, a sense of confidence, and a sense of competence.
Similarly, a sense of failure sounds as natural as a sense of achievement or a
sense of accomplishment.
Formally, the sense of a sense that is at work in expressions of this kind can
be distinguished from that in expressions like a sense of direction by its compati-
bility with the word feel and its (relative) incompatibility with the word good. For
example, one can feel a sense of confidence (or frustration), whereas one cannot
feel a sense of time, and while one can have a good since of direction, one is less
likely to have a good sense of confidence or a good sense of frustration (see,
however, section 6.4 on a good sense in chapter 6).
Whether (or to what degree) such clues from collocations are reliable
remains to be established, but they are certainly more reliable than any lexical
clues. For example, while words like freedom, confidence, and competence
imply, by virtue of their meaning, that someone can do something, the expression
a sense of can also collocate readily with words that do not carry such a semantic
component themselves but are compatible with it in context.
Similarly, the word hope does itself not imply that someone can do some-
thing, but it can imply this in a particular context, and in such a context a sense of
hope sounds perfectly appropriate, as in the following examples from COBUILD:
He might not be the petit Mozart his Grandma Suzanne had foreseen, and he was still a
long way from envisioning himself playing Cyrano de Bergerac. But now Gerard had a
strong sense of hope—hope that one day he could overcome some of the educational and
cultural handicaps that just a few months before he had believed to be insurmountable.
On the negative side, one can note that not only collocations like a sense of
frustration and a sense of hopelessness (which include an “I can’t do” component
in their meaning) but also certain others (e.g., a sense of guilt) can point, in
context, to an awareness that one cannot do some things:
The family also exposed the fact that mothers, basically, have a choice of exhaustion with
a double workload or constant financial stress and a sense of guilt toward their children
whichever choice they make.
Arguably, in this context “guilt” does not refer to any past failings but to an
ongoing thought: “I can’t do these things” (referring to things that one thinks one
ought to be doing).
I suggest, then, that one semantic configuration that allows the use of
the phrase a sense of can be defined in terms of the thoughts “I can do some
things” and “I can’t do some things” and also that, despite various apparent
counterexamples, these thoughts always refer to people’s present capacities or
capabilities rather than to what they were or were not able to do in the past.
For example, phrases like a sense of achievement and a sense of accomplish-
ment may seem to refer exclusively to something achieved or accomplished in the
past; in fact, however, sentences in which these phrases are used are usually also
forward looking. Some examples from COBUILD:
Prime Minister Paul Keating said Australians could derive a sense of achievement from
the National strategy on AIDS.
This jigsaw’s so challenging that you’ll be howling before it’s finished. But imagine the
sense of achievement when you manage to fit all those fiendish felines together. There are
only 529 pieces, but the same picture appears on the back as the front.
Opportunities are eagerly grasped by pupils with the encouragement and guidance of
skilled instructors whose aim is for each individual to feel a sense of achievement and
personal satisfaction.
The sense of freedom and personal achievement stimulated by exploratory travel is
intense.
In all these sentences, the achievements are not just past but ongoing, and they all
imply a current thought: “I can do some things.”
Similarly, a phrase like a sense of loss appears to refer to something in the
past (“I lost something”), but in fact, the larger context usually makes clear the
present relevance of the past loss, as in the following example:
A sense of loss that they missed out on those fundamental freedoms pervades the essays in
Eric Liu’s Next.
The sense of loss refers here to the absence of certain fundamental freedoms; that
is, it is related to the thought “we can’t do some things now.”
200 SENSE
The same applies to other common phrases such as a sense of relief, as in the
following example:
When you first become unemployed, it is bound to be a shock. You may well feel a sense
of relief, even euphoria, that you are free, perhaps for the first time for years, from the daily
routine.
By itself, relief does not imply the thought “I can do some things,” but it is
compatible with it, and in this particular context it seems to imply it.
Here as elsewhere, a sense differs from a feeling in an implied link with
reality and with knowledge: a feeling of achievement is just a feeling, but a sense
of achievement is a feeling anchored in reality and implying a certain claim to
knowledge. Thus, a partial explication of phrases of this kind could look as
follows:
She had (felt) a sense of achievement (confidence, hope).
she thought like this at that time: “it is like this: I know that I can do some things”
when she thought like this, she could know that it was like this
she could know it because when she thought like this, she felt something
But this is only a partial explication because it gives no hint as to where

the implied link with reality comes from: why should a mere feeling be seen
as a potential source of knowledge if it is not seen as such in the frame a
feeling that?
Again, an obvious hypothesis that suggests itself here is that this sense of
sense, too, is somehow related to the senses and to the knowledge derived from
the senses. The feeling referred to in phrases like a sense of achievement or a
sense of freedom is a quasi-bodily feeling or a feeling that is trustworthy (to some
degree), as an analogous bodily feeling is trustworthy.
Bodily feelings can be seen as a potential source of knowledge about one’s
environment because they can be due to bodily events caused by what is
happening in one’s environment. Similarly, when I try to do something with
certain parts of my body, I can feel something in them because of this, and as a
result I can know that something is (or is not) happening to particular parts of my
body when I want to do something with them. Thus, just as the senses of smell
and touch can give us some information about our surroundings, so the internal
sense of what we can do with some parts of the body can give us some informa-
tion about our own bodily abilities, and both these channels of information can
serve as conceptual models and points of reference for a nonbodily sense that or
sense of.
For example, if I “have a sense” that other people despise me, this is based on
some (putative) vibes from other people, analogous to the feelings in some parts
of my body that tell me about the heat, the smoke, or the smells in a place where I
am. If I “have a sense of freedom,” this is analogous to the feelings in some parts
of my body telling me, when I try to move them in certain ways, that I can (or
cannot) move them as freely as I want. Here are the proposed explications:
She had (felt) a sense of freedom/achievement/control.

a. she thought like this at that time:
“it is like this:
I know that I can do some things”
b. when she thought like this, she could know that it was like this,
like people can know that they can do something with some parts of their body
c. she could know it because when she thought like this, she felt something,
when they want to do something with these parts of their body
if something happens at that time to these parts of their body as they want
She had (felt) a sense of helplessness/hopelessness/impotence/failure.

“it is like this:
I know that I can’t do some things”
like people can know that they cannot do something with some parts of their body
c. she could know it because when she thought like, this she felt something,
if something does not happen at that time to these parts of their body as they want
When one considers the central role that sports have long played in Anglo-
phone societies not only as an activity but also as a way of life and a way of
thinking, one might wonder whether sports may have contributed to the prolifer-
ation of sense of expressions of the “I can” type in Anglo discourse. Perhaps the
quintessential sense of achievement for many speakers of English is athletes’
sense that they can do something with some parts of their bodies as they want. Be
that as it may, however, the prototypical sense of in the sense under discussion
also undoubtedly draws on a more general human experience of being able to
move parts of one’s body as one wants.
In his Mind: A Brief Introduction, John Searle (2004, 206) notes: “I con-
sciously decide to raise my arm, and my arm goes up.” This experience, accord-
ing to Searle, lies at the heart of the human sense of free will and of our sense that
we can have a real impact on the physical world. Searle refers in this context to
the research of Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield:
Penfield found that by stimulating the motor cortex of his patient, he could cause their
limbs to move. The patient invariably said, “I didn’t do that, you did it.” In this case,
the patient has the perception of his arm moving but he does not have the experience
of voluntary action. The basic distinction is this: in the case of perception (seeing the
202 SENSE
glass in front of me, feeling the shirt against my neck) one has the feeling, I am
perceiving this, and in that sense, this is happening to me. In the case of action (raising
my arm, walking across the room) one has the feeling, I am doing this, and in that
sense, I am making this happen. (ibid., 142)
Searle concludes that “it is experience of voluntary action, more than anything
else, that gives us the conviction of our own free will” (ibid.).
According to Searle, such an experience of efficacious bodily action is in
some ways similar to and in others different from the experience of perception
(as in the case of “somebody bumping into you”): “In both these cases, in both
action and perception, it seems to me quite common, indeed normal, that we
perceive a causal connection between objects and states of affairs in the
world and our own conscious experiences. In the case of action we experience
objects and states of affairs in the world causing perceptual experiences in us”
(ibid., 204).
Searle’s account tallies well with the model reflected in the use of the word
sense in English expressions like a sense of in general and a sense of freedom
(competence, power, confidence) in particular. It seems significant that although
Searle’s favorite analytical tool for interpreting the mind is the word experience,
the word sense also plays a significant role in his account—and not only in
phrases like the reality of common sense (302) and a world of common sense
(304) but also in those like a sense of self (e.g., 298), a sense of a passage of time
(293), and a sense of alternative choices open to you (217), that is, a sense of what
you can do.
Once again, the interpretive lens, operating through the English lan-
guage, in Anglo folk philosophy, finds its echo in Anglophone academic
philosophy and appears to influence its portrayal of the human mind. At the
same time, Searle’s account of the sensory basis of people’s sense that they
can do some things lends support to the semantic hypothesis put forward in
this chapter.
5.4. A Sense of Obligation (Duty, Responsibility,

Urgency)
Another common theme in the family of sense expressions has to do with the
thought that one ‘has to (can’t not) do something.’ One could say that the thought
“I can’t not do something” represents the flip side of the thought “I can do some
things” (as in a sense of confidence), except that there is also the thought “I can’t
do some things” (as in a sense of helplessness). A sense of obligation can spur
people to action, and in this it is similar to a sense of confidence rather than a
sense of helplessness. On the other hand, a sense of obligation, like a sense of
helplessness, includes the component “I can’t,” and in that sense it can be said to
be the opposite of the type based on the component “I can.” Some examples
from COBUILD:
Oakley said the AFL had no timetable on mergers but indicated there was a developing
sense of urgency.
“I feel a strong sense of duty to act as a unifying force as we become one council, sharing
a common vision for a new tomorrow,” he said.
She’d gone to visit mostly out of a sense of obligation.
The expression a sense of urgency implies the thought “I have to do some

things now.” The expressions a sense of duty, a sense of obligation, and a sense
of responsibility are not so obviously time bound (i.e., tied to the present
moment), but they, too, imply the thought “I have to do some things”
(“I can’t not do these things”), and in a particular context they, too, may be
bound to the present. In fact, expressions of this kind are often used to refer to a
duty that has already triggered an action, as in the following examples with a
sense of duty:
He entered the leadership race driven less by personal ambition than by a sense of duty.
Some joined in out of a sense of duty to their adopted land.
Untiring, driven by an iron sense of duty . . . this remarkable woman steered the little party
westward.
A sense of duty, not a sense of enjoyment, took him there.
The same applies to a sense of obligation:
Sexual receptivity may be triggered by guilt or a sense of obligation.

Clare, 48, said . . . the only thing keeping her at the show was a sense of obligation.
Both sense of obligation and sense of duty frequently combine with adjec-
tives like keen and strong, as well as with the participle driven—facts that
point in the same direction: a sense of duty or obligation tends to trigger an
action.
To account for such uses of a sense of, I propose the following partial
explication:
She felt a sense of urgency/obligation/responsibility/duty.

she thought like this at that time:
“it is like this:
I know that I can’t not do some things now”
when she thought like this, she could know that it was like this,
like people can know that they can’t not do something with some parts of their body
Let us once more consider the question of the relationship between the sense
of sense in expressions like a sense of urgency and that in expressions like the
sense of smell: what could be the bodily prototype for the thought “I have to do
something now”?
204 SENSE
Once the question has been raised, the answer seems obvious: the thought
“I have to do something now” can refer to urgent bodily needs such as a need to
urinate or defecate or to pressing bodily urges such as an urge to sneeze, cough,
scratch oneself, change the position of one’s body, and the like.
We are now are in a position to propose a full explication for the type under
discussion:
She felt a sense of urgency (obligation, responsibility, duty, etc).

“it is like this:
I know that I can’t not do some things now”
like people can know that they can’t not do something with some parts of their body
when they are doing something with these parts of their body
because they can’t not do it
In this case, the sensory model is not related to what is happening in a

person’s environment but to what is happening in this person’s body. Here,
too, there is a quasi-sensory feeling associated with experiential knowledge,
but this time it is not knowledge about what is happening in the place where
someone is but a realization that one has to do something and that one has
to do it now. This model licenses a separate type of have a sense sentence,
the primary examples of which are a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation,
and a sense of duty.
5.5. A Sense of History, a Sense of Time and Place, a

Sense of Reality
It is perfectly acceptable in English to speak of a sense of history (twenty-

six examples in COBUILD) but not of a sense of biology (no examples).5 Why
is that?
In a nutshell, the answer is, I believe, that history refers to place and time,
whereas biology does not: our senses can tell us about what is happening in the
place where we are, at the time when we are there, and the extended senses of
sense in expressions like a sense of history build on that basic model of sensory
perception, anchored in the here and now.
In support of this overall explanation I first note that (as English
corpora like COBUILD show) the expressions a sense of place, a sense of
time, and a sense of place and time are quite common in English discourse
(unlike, for example, a sense of animals, a sense of plants, or a sense of rocks,
which are not attested in COBUILD).6 Here are some examples with a sense of
place:7
Literature grows out of a sense of place.

People here have a great sense of place.
Our vision is for a creation of a definable sense of place and identity within a series of
discrete communities.
Dillard evokes a vivid and palpable sense of place in his cinematic attention to detail.
This does not mean that his reliefs or his canvases have no sense of place. He is firmly
linked with Cornwall, as Constable is with Suffolk.
What these examples imply is that people who are in a certain place can know
what this place is like and also that this can be re-created in art.
It is interesting to note the adjectives that frequently collocate with sense in a
sense of place: above all, strong, but also distinct, vivid, palpable, tangible, and
keen. Such adjectives highlight the analogy with the five senses, sensory percep-
tion, and bodily feelings: “strong” feelings, “vivid” and “distinct” images, a
“keen” sense of smell.
Turning now to a sense of time, let us first consider examples in which time
co-occurs with place:
The success or failure of a potential seller [i.e., a book] depends on the ability of an author
to draw the reader into an imagined world. To do this they need to create bold
characterization, a strongly developed sense of time and place, and a dramatic,
involving plot.
It is the sense of time and place that is perhaps the best feature of this work. Set in 1987 on
the eve of the collapse of the Soviet empire, Deighton does a magnificent job in re-creating
the atmosphere of late-1980s’ East Germany and Poland.
In the first of these examples, the reader can imagine being where the
action is (obviously, at the time of the action), and in the second, the viewers
can feel the atmosphere of late 1980s’ East Germany and Poland as if they were
there at that time. What matters, then, is the feel that one can get of a place and
a time that one can normally get by being in that place at that time—a kind of
sensory or quasi-sensory knowledge. Roughly speaking, when people watch
this movie, they can think that they know what it was like at the time when the
action takes place, like they can know what it is like in a place when they are
there.
The expression a sense of time can also be used in some other ways, notably,
to refer to a quasi-bodily knowledge of what time it is or how much time has
passed, as in the following examples:
He had an accurate sense of time.

My sense of time was mixed up; I didn’t know how long I’d been out of the house.
He still had no sense of time that allowed him to estimate how long it takes spaghetti to
boil or a hamburger to grill.
Chief among these [problems] . . . could be the distortion of the sixth sense, the sense of
time.
206 SENSE
Sentences of this kind can be explicated along the following lines (cf. section 6.4
on a good sense in chapter 6):
She has a good sense of time.

“it is like this:
I want to know now what time it is now
I want to know it well”
b. when she thinks like this, she can know it after a very short time,
because they are doing something with these parts of their body at that time
When the focus is not on the question “what time is it?” but more specifically on
“how much time has passed?” the first part of the explication can look as follows:
she often thinks like this about a time:

“it is like this:
I want to know how long this has been happening
Returning now to the sense of history, we can recognize the same motifs of
time, place, quasi-bodily feelings, and qualitative knowledge. Here are two
examples:
Captain Blake was considering how this meticulously reproduced replica had transported
him, as if by some cosmic time capsule, all the way back to 1770. Then something
happened that was quite unfair to anyone with an acute sense of history . . . : His
mobile phone rang, blast the confounded thing.
Cars are restricted to just a few. Every street brings a surprise— . . . an inviting archway or a
stunning vista. Like all visitors I take too many photographs and, realizing my own meager
sense of history, wonder how it must feel to be born into such a vibrant working museum.
When the mobile phone rings, Captain Blake is, in his imagination, in another
place and another time, and his feeling of that distant time is as if it were not
distant but present. That kind of feeling is clearly related to knowledge—the kind
of knowledge that cannot be stated in sentences but can be acquired by someone
at a particular time.
People with an acute sense of history could think like this about a place (e.g.,
a medieval town) that they are visiting: “This place was like this a long time
ago—I am in this place now,” and when they think like this, they can feel
something because of this. Because they can feel like this when they think like
this, they can know something—for example, as the second example above
suggests, they can know how it felt to live in such a place a long time ago. If,
on the other hand, they have a meager sense of history, they cannot know that.
A somewhat different but closely related use of the expression a sense of
history is illustrated by the following example:
When Churchill entered the chamber to take his seat among the Opposition, the
Conservatives rose as one man and roared out “For he’s a jolly good fellow.” The
Labour members were silent—with one exception: Ellen Wilkinson’s sense of history
overcame her party loyalties.
Evidently Ellen Wilkinson had a sense of history—presumably in the following

sense:
She has a (keen) sense of history.

a. she can think like this about the place where she is:
“it is like this:
I know that something is happening here now
many people will know about it a long time after this time”
like people know that something is happening in a place
because something is happening in the place where this someone is at that time
A sense of history can also be linked directly with places rather than with
people, as in the following example:
The sense of history that many guests claim is the hotel’s main attraction is enhanced by
the knowledge that its rooms provided temporary asylum for three deposed monarchs.
Here, it is a place—a hotel—that has a sense of history. An explication of such

sentences could start as follows:
when someone is in this place, they can think like this about this place:
“it is like this:
I know that I am here now
many people can know that some things happened here a long time before”
This brings us back to the expression a sense of place, with which we started.
Often this expression is used in contexts that suggest “belonging to a place” or
“being like a part of a place”:
208 SENSE
The Aboriginal people draw our spirituality from the land, the sunset, the moon, the
rain . . . My old grandfather used to say, “I can’t understand those white people. They’re
not connected with anything. They wander. They have no sense of place.”
A person’s sense of place (in this sense) can, I suggest, begin with the following
component: “Someone can think like this about a place: I am like a part of this
place.”
However, the expression a sense of place can also be used in a different
way—especially in relation to a work of art (a book, a painting, a film, or a song)
that can give people who have never been in a particular place a sense that they
know this place as if they had been there:
At the end of it [a book] I felt I understood what life was like on an Australian sheep
station. It had a very powerful sense of place.
An explication of a sentence like this book has a sense of place could start as
follows: “when someone reads this book, they can think like this: I know now
what this place is like.”
Finally, it is worth noting that the expressions a sense of place and a sense of
time are cognate not only with a sense of history but also with a sense of reality:
Arguably, having a sense of reality entails knowing instinctively what is happen-
ing here and now. Here are two examples linking a sense of reality with being
(and doing something) in a place:
Her most vivid memory of Florence relates to a song she learnt about a young woman who
threatened to throw herself off the Ponte Vecchio bridge if her father wouldn’t let her
marry. After the class, she found herself walking across that very bridge with her husband.
“It brings a sense of reality to what you sing when you have seen these places for
yourself,” she said.
It should be said that small hotels are now always geared up to “Western” standards.
Sometimes the expected facilities are rather meager; perhaps there is no hot water, or
a light bulb or shower doesn’t work! But there are other, more down-to-earth
compensations—including a closer sense of reality and a better feeling for the
locale.
Thus, having a sense of reality is seen as having a close link with being (or having
been) in a place, and the same can apply to time, as the following example
illustrates:
There are no public clocks and nothing ever shuts. The sidewalks shine in the glare of
mighty neon displays when the sun isn’t there to do the job. As day slides into night, then
back again into day, it’s all too easy to lose a sense of reality.
In a place where there are no clocks and where one never knows what time it is,
one can easily lose one’s sense of reality.
This is not to say that the expression a sense of reality is always explicitly
linked with a place and a time. In the following example it does not seem
to be:
At Broadmoor, as in the majority of treatment programmes, there is great emphasis on the

overcoming of “cognitive distortion,” the blurred sense of reality with which many
offenders insulate themselves from the pangs of conscience.
In this example, the sense of reality is linked with knowing what one has
done rather than knowing what is happening or exactly where one is. Nonethe-
less, the notion of reality seems to be intimately linked with the ideas of place
and time, of here and now, and these ideas arguably lie at the core of the
prototypical scenario on which the notion of reality is also based. In any case,
insulating oneself from “pangs of conscience” relates not only to what one did in
the past but also to what is happening now and how one views one’s present
situation. Just as a sense of achievement refers to what “I know (now) I can do,”
so a sense of reality can refer to where I am now. To quote writer Frederick
Buechner (2005, 4), “no past, no future, but only the present, because only the
present is real.”
5.6. A Sense of Joy
A sense of combines readily with words for emotions—perhaps not all emotions
but a wide range of them. A collocation like a sense of joy or a sense of frustration
evidently refers to a feeling. Nonetheless, a sense of joy does not mean the same
as a feeling of joy, or a sense of frustration, a feeling of frustration. Let us explore
the difference by examining in some detail an example from COBUILD:
After my supper I . . . sat in front of the stove. It was drawing well, and I had its doors
open. The chair was comfortable, and as I sat there smoking, I had a very real sense of
happiness. A good meal and creature comfort after a long and tiring day had something
to do with it, but more came from a recollection of that good family down there at the
farm.
The speaker could have, of course, said a feeling of happiness, but the overall
meaning of the passage would then have been different. The fact that speakers of
English seldom if ever speak of “a very real feeling” (no occurrences in COBUILD)
but speak quite readily of “a very real sense” (thirteen occurrences in COBUILD)
points to one significant difference between the two: “a sense” is somehow more
in touch with reality than “a feeling” is; feelings can be purely subjective, but “a
sense” lays a claim to something real.
The tacit claim to a link with reality conveyed by a sentence like “I had a
very real sense of happiness” has something to do with the experiencer’s body, as
well as with his or her thoughts. Certainly, in the passage cited above a particular
210 SENSE
thought (“a recollection of that good family down there at the farm”) is relevant
to that “sense of happiness,” but so are the sensations due to the good meal, the
warm stove, the comfortable chair, and the cigarette. The overall happiness that
he is experiencing is not disembodied and ethereal but, on the contrary, “embod-
ied” and quasi-sensory.
Without explicating happiness, we can represent this aspect of a sense of
happiness as follows:
He felt a sense of happiness.
a. he thought like this at that time:

“it is like this:
I know that something very good is happening to me now”
b. when he thought like this, he could know that it was like this,
like people can know that something is happening to their body
when it is happening to their body
c. he could know it because when he thought like this, he felt something,
The adjective real (very real) emphasizes here that the feeling was, as it
were, “tangible,” “palpable,” and unmistakable. This feeling could not have been
imagined; it was really there, as physical pain is unmistakably there when we are
afflicted with it. Sentences like “I got a rush of adrenaline, a sense of power,”
which explicitly link the mental sense with something happening in the body, are
quite telling in this respect.
In addition to the very real feeling, however, there is also some very real
knowledge: in recognizing in himself “a very real sense of happiness,” the
experiencer is conscious of something about himself—again, something more
than a subjective feeling.
A person who feels physical pain in a part of the body can know, on
account of this pain, that something is happening to that part of the body.
Similarly, if one detects in oneself a very real sense of happiness, one
appears to be finding out something real about oneself. Consider also the
following sentence:
Mr. Heath is regarded here as perhaps the most respected elder statesman to visit Baghdad
since the crisis began. He arrived with a list of more than fifty sick and elderly hostages
whose freedom he’d hoped to win. There’s a real sense of optimism here that all of them
will now be freed.
Optimism as such could be misplaced, and hopes could be false (false hopes), but
a sense of optimism cannot be entirely misplaced and demonstrably false. The
journalist who reports this sense of optimism appears to be lending it some
support: “It can be like this: perhaps all of the hostages will really be freed.”
No doubt the basis for the optimism lies to some extent in the people’s (and the
reporter’s) assessment of the situation, but it also appears to lie in some measure
in that palpable, quasi-sensory feeling that they have when they think about the
place where they are.
But how can a feeling, no matter how “palpable,” give anyone any informa-
tion about the world? In the case of a place (e.g., Baghdad), optimism about what
will shortly happen in that place may be based on previous sensory experience
linked with being there. In the case of a very real sense of happiness, one is not
detecting anything about other people, but one can detect something about
oneself (or so the phrase implies).
I cannot have a sense of somebody else’s happiness, just as I cannot have a
sense of optimism about a place that I have never visited. I can have a sense of
what it is like for somebody else to be happy but not have a sense of this other
person’s happiness. My own case, however, is different (or so the word sense
implies): I know myself; I can trust my own body; I can rely on my bodily and
quasi-bodily feelings as potential sources of information about myself—a limited
and by no means fully reliable one, to be sure, but in practice potentially
instructive nonetheless.
One can “feel a sense” of sadness, joy, happiness, or relief, but a “sense” is never
just a “feeling.” This is why it would not be possible to replace feeling with sense in a
sentence like “It was the most wonderful feeling I have ever had in my life.” One
cannot say, “It was the most wonderful sense I have ever had in my life” because
sense, like awareness, always points to something other than the feeling itself.
A phrase like a strong sense of academic hierarchy suggests that there is an
academic hierarchy among the people who have that “sense.” A sentence like
“she [a widow] still feels a keen sense of loss” suggests not only that the
husband’s death caused a feeling of loss for the wife but also that the sharp,
quasi-bodily feeling that she had made her continually aware of her loss (a real
loss). A great sense of liberation suggests not only a “feeling of liberation”
but also an awareness that one is liberated. Essentially the same applies to
combinations of a sense with a term of emotion, as in a sense of happiness or a
sense of joy.
6
A Strong Sense, a Deep Sense, and

Similar Expressions
6.1. A Strong Sense (of Something)
6.1.1. A strong sense of purpose and related expressions

Judging by the data in COBUILD, after good, strong is the adjective most commonly
used to describe a sense. The range of use of a strong sense, however, is quite
different from that of a good sense. While a good sense is used primarily to refer
to a certain faculty (in phrases like a good sense of humor, a good sense of time, a
good sense of direction), a strong sense is seldom used in this way.
To see how it is used, let us consider a selection of examples from COBUILD:
The combination of angular form and the strong sense of independence has caused some
critics to call her a Gallic Katharine Hepburn.
She never felt homesick because home had given her such a strong sense of confidence.
He has a strong sense of fair play and will be honorable and open in all his dealings.
He’s a politician who still feels a strong sense of mission.
A strong sense of academic hierarchy exists, and many French employers favor
graduates from the grandes écoles, seeing them as being more appropriately trained for
their needs than a graduate from a French university.
As these examples illustrate, a strong sense often refers to feelings that

motivate people’s actions: a sense of confidence, independence, mission, fair
play, and so on cause people to act in certain ways. Just as a “strong person” can
(and presumably does) do many things by overcoming all sorts of obstacles, so
212
A STRONG SENSE, A DEEP SENSE, AND SIMILAR EXPRESSIONS 213
a “strong sense” can motivate a person to do many things and can also help a
person to overcome obstacles of various kinds.
This impression, which arises from an examination of the material in CO-
1
BUILD, is strongly supported by the results of Google searches, which show that
common collocations with a strong sense prominently include the following:
strong sense of responsibility

strong sense of commitment
strong sense of purpose
strong sense of justice
strong sense of loyalty
strong sense of right and wrong
It is also significant that, while collocations with strong constitute a substan-

tial proportion of all instances of a sense of commitment or a sense of responsi-
bility, other adjectives that often co-occur with sense, such as deep and clear, can
readily co-occur with them, too, although in many cases not nearly as often as
strong. See table 6.1.
TABLE 6.1.
strong deep clear
sense of commitment 40,000 15,000 6,000
sense of loyalty 34,000 13,000 1,700
sense of responsibility 115,000 35,000 11,000
There are good semantic reasons, I believe, for the fact that sense of
commitment, sense of loyalty, and sense of responsibility attract deep, as well
as strong, but even for these noun phrases the attraction to strong is stronger.
Sense of purpose is unusual in this group in that it shows a strong attraction to
clear, as does (on a more modest scale) sense of right and wrong, but here, too,
there is a marked attraction to strong. See table 6.2.
TABLE 6.2.
strong clear
sense of purpose 70,000 100,000
sense of right and wrong 34,000 17,000
It goes without saying that any statistical data derived from a Google search
must be treated with great caution. As very rough indications of proportions and
magnitudes, however, they can have a considerable heuristic value. In this case,
214 SENSE
the results from Google searches suggest that when a sense is combined with
nouns that describe goals and values, resulting noun phrase tends to attract the
adjective strong rather than any of its competitors, for example, the adjective
deep. See table 6.3.
TABLE 6.3.
justice strong sense 64,000 deep sense 800
right and wrong strong sense 34,000 deep sense 3,500
loyalty strong sense 34,000 deep sense 11,000
On the other hand, for many emotional states, a strong sense is less common
than a deep sense (in some cases, much less common). See table 6.4.
TABLE 6.4.
strong sense deep sense
sadness 8,000 12,000
gratitude 12,000 45,000
guilt 1,000 12,000
loss 700 43,000
When these searches were repeated over a period of two weeks in March 2008,
the figures varied, but the proportion was always the same: the figures for deep
sense were always much higher than those for strong sense.
It is particularly interesting to note that sense of justice strongly attracts
strong and, one might say, repels deep, whereas for sense of injustice this is not
the case. See table 6.5.
TABLE 6.5.
strong deep
sense of justice 64,000 800
sense of injustice 900 1,000
When these searches were repeated over a two-week period in March 2008,
the figures for deep sense of justice varied considerably on different days, but the
preference of sense of justice for strong over deep was always clear. There was no
such clear pattern in the case of sense of injustice.
A sense of justice implies that one wants to do something (to bring
justice to people), that is, that one feels active and strong, and this, I suggest, is
why it attracts strong; a sense of injustice, on the other hand, implies that one
is suffering injustice (i.e., that one feels neither active nor strong), and this
is the reason, I suggest, that it does not attract strong. These differences
in the interpretation of the two phrases cannot be directly predicted from
the meaning of the words justice and injustice as such. Rather, they illu-
strate the reality of the semantic patterns associated with the collocation a strong
sense.
Thus, while a sense of commitment and a sense of loyalty can be readily
described as deep, as well as strong, and a sense of purpose can be described as
clear even more readily than strong (see section 6.9 on clear sense), there can be
no doubt that, as a group, will- and goal-related nouns like commitment, justice,
responsibility, and purpose all clearly attract strong.
I must stress that I have included in these numerical comparisons only those
expressions with sense whose absolute numbers are very high. In the case of less
frequently used collocations a relatively high proportion of strong could be
accidental, but in the case of those running into tens of thousands of occurrences
(like the ones included here), it must be regarded as significant.
Building on the observation that (a) strong sense (of) tends to co-occur
with will- and goal-related nouns like responsibility, commitment, and
purpose, I propose for a strong sense (in one of its uses) the semantic
component “I want to do something.” Since the word strong in combination
with will- and goal-related phrases like a strong sense of responsibility/commit-
ment/purpose also implies a determination and a strong desire to do something,
two further components suggest themselves: “I can’t not want it” and “I want it
very much.”
In fact, the figurative use of strong in expressions of the kind considered here
may well be related to and ultimately anchored in the notions of wanting something
very much and wanting to do something very much. Arguably, it is this latter group
that lies at the heart of all the collocations with a strong sense.
Consider, for example, the following sentences from novels:
She was so beautiful that she could no more be passed unnoticed than a star. He realized
himself as surprised and stirred, but he was not a young man whom a girl’s beauty can
rouse at once to love. He had, moreover, a strong sense of honor and duty. He realized
Maria was his legal wife (Freeman 1907).
At times—again, only at times—he was conscious of a sweeping passion of admiration for
her that well-nigh robbed him of his self-control. But a strong sense of honour held him in
check—he never forgot that he was her paid employee (Corelli 1921).
In both of these examples, a strong sense of honour dictates what different people
want to do and what they believe they have to do. In addition, it makes them
conscious that they cannot and do not want to give up the desire to do it and also
that this desire is “very strong” (that is, that they want to do something very
much). Thus, arguably, the explication of will-based uses of a strong sense can
start with the following cognitive scenario:
216 SENSE
She had a strong sense of purpose/commitment/justice/loyalty/responsibility.
she often thought like this:

“it is like this:
I know that I want some things to happen
I want to do some things because of this
I can’t not want to do these things
I very much want to do these things”
The expression I want to do it (or these things) very much does not sound
entirely felicitous in English, but its literal counterparts in many other languages
(e.g., Russian) sound perfectly idiomatic:
ja očen’ xoču ėto sdelat’

I very (much) want.1sg. pres. this do.inf.
As this Russian example makes clear, the English expression very much has its
equivalent in a single word in Russian, očen’. This fact is of no semantic signifi-
cance: in some languages, like Russian, the semantic prime VERY is realized in all
grammatical contexts as a single word; in other languages (e.g., English, French), it
has different exponents in different grammatical contexts (very and très in combi-
nation with adjectives; very much and beaucoup in combination with verbs).
Returning to the English phrase “I want to do it very much” (or “I want very
much to do it”), in English it would be more idiomatic to say “I have a strong
desire to do it” (i.e., to use a phrasing that implies not only wanting but also
feeling). Nonetheless, the phrasing “I want to do it very much’” is intelligible in
English, too, and in fact one can find in COBUILD examples like the following one:
I had already broadcast it on BFN when it went through Hamburg, and I wanted very
much to do it in my Standard Eight.
Furthermore, if asked (in English), “Do you want to do it?” one could felicitously
answer “Yes, very much,” as in the following example from COBUILD:
—I mean, is that something you’d want to do still?

—Oh, yes, very much so.
In addition to a cognitive scenario, collocations such as a strong sense of

purpose and a strong sense of commitment also imply an insight arising from a
quasi-bodily feeling associated with a given pattern of thoughts. What could
a plausible bodily prototype be in this case?
It seems reasonable to suggest that we can find such a prototype in situa-
tions when one exerts oneself for some time because of a strong desire to
achieve some goal. This exertion may well be unpleasant, tiring, or difficult
to keep up, but one keeps it up for some time because one very much wants to
achieve one’s goal and realizes that one cannot achieve it without an effort. For
example, I may be pushing a car to get it started when the battery is dead
because I very much want the car to move. Since the car that I am trying to push
is very heavy, I cannot make it move as I wish without a sustained and
determined effort involving my whole body. If, however, I persist and exert
myself for some time, then I can hope to achieve my goal. This is, I suggest, the
experiential model at the heart of all the will- and goal-related collocations
involving the expression a strong sense. In an NSM explication, this model can
be represented as follows:
when she thought about it like this, she could know that it was like this,
like people can know what they are doing with their body when they are doing it
she could know it because, when she thought like this, she felt something for some time,
like someone can feel something in their body for some time
when they are doing something to something with their body for some time
because they very much want some things to happen to this thing
Here, too, we may note that the last component (“because they very much
want something to happen to this thing”) sounds somewhat unusual in English,
but even in English one occasionally finds sentences with phrases of this kind, as
in the following examples from COBUILD:
We very much want Jo to come back after she has had her baby.
Oxfam very much wants you to carry on knitting these blankets.
Paul very much wanted this conference to succeed.
She had a strong sense of purpose/commitment/responsibility/loyalty.
a. she often thought like this:

“it is like this:
c. she could know it because when she thought like this, she felt something for some time,
like someone can feel something in some parts of their body for some time
when they are doing something with their body for some time
because they very much want some things to happen
218 SENSE
6.1.2. A strong sense of self and related expressions

Apart from will- and goal-related collocations like a strong sense of commitment/
purpose, there is another class of collocations with a strong sense that, judging by
Google searches, are very common in English. This class prominently includes
the following expressions:
a strong sense of self

a strong sense of identity
a strong sense of community
a strong sense of family
a strong sense of belonging
One generalization suggested by this list is clear: they all seem to be

concerned, in different ways, with “who I am” or “what I am.” A (strong) sense
of self implies the thought “I know who I am”; a (strong) sense of identity, the
thought “there are people of many kinds, I am someone of one of these kinds”;
and a (strong) sense of family, community, and belonging, the recognition “I
know what I am, I know that I am a part of something (a family, a community, a
group of people).” But when one examines the contexts in which such colloca-
tions are used, an additional generalization suggests itself: they are all concerned
not only with who or what one is but also with who or what one wants to be. To
start with a strong sense of family, here is an example from a novel:
Every branch of the clan was represented at the ceremony. Even Henry Moritz was
there, which surprised no one more than it did his sister-in-law, Leona. . . . Leona
allowed herself to glance at her brother-in-law, who caught her eye and smiled.
The same old handsome charming Henry! But unlike his twin, Frank, the sort who
let people down. Leona hadn’t seen him since Sarah’s final birthday party, the last
time he did the family the favour of showing up. Frank, on the other hand, had a
strong sense of family. But they were not identical twins in any way. (Mosco
1989)
Clearly, Henry does not often think of himself as a member of the clan, and
he does not attach much importance to being a member of it. His brother, Frank,
on the other hand, is very different, and his actions suggest that he thinks about
himself along the following lines:
it is like this:
I know that I am a part of this family
I want to be a part of this family
I can’t not want it
I want it very much
The same applies to the following example from an interview, in which the
interviewee (an Australian of Chinese ancestry) describes her “strong sense of
family and belonging” both as a source of a strong sense of identity and as

something she treasures:
“Take the TV show and books away from me, and my restaurant, do I still know
who I am? Well, yes I do. I’m not just Ms. Billy Kwong [the name of her restaurant].
I think you need that distinction and a lot of people don’t and it’s why they get into
trouble.” Where does that attitude, that self-assurance, come from? “It goes back to
that great-great-grandfather who had four wives and 23 children,” she says. “I know
where I come from and I have a very strong sense of family and belonging. So
I don’t feel alone in the world.” (Faulkner 2004)
An analogous interpretation seems apposite in the case of a strong sense of

identity, as in the following example (from the Web site of a Jewish organization
at an American University called the Hillel Jewish Studies Center):
Hillel is essential to ensuring that Jewish students leave college with a strong sense of
Jewish identity and a commitment to the Jewish community.
Here it is not a question of what particular group of people someone

identifies with but rather what kind of people: if someone has a strong sense of
identity as a Catholic, a Moslem, or a Jew, they identify with an open-ended
category (kind) of people rather than with a more or less closed group (e.g., a
family, a community). In this case, then, the first part of the explication could
be formulated as follows:
it is like this:
I know that there are many kinds of people, I am someone of one kind,
I want to be someone of this kind
I want it very much
In the case of a strong sense of self, the situation is slightly different, but
here, too, are some common threads. For example, when one compares a strong
sense of self with a clear sense of self, one can see that a clear sense emphasizes
“knowing well” who one is, whereas a strong sense puts the emphasis on a
person’s will—a difference highlighted in the following passage from a self-help
book titled The Seeker’s Guide to Building a Christian Marriage (Finley 2000,
24–25):
Psychologist Michael E. Cavanagh sees an authentic sense of self-esteem as the first

of seven skills necessary for a successful marriage. His second skill is closely
related to the first: a clear, strong, flexible sense of self. . . . For example, with a
clear sense of self, Heather would know who she is and what she needs to grow and
flourish as an individual. . . . With a strong sense of self, Heather would not allow
anyone to restrict who she is or how she wishes to grow. She would have a strong set
of basic values that define who she is. Her life choices would be well grounded in
those basic values.
220 SENSE
In my terms, the distinction between a clear sense of self (rare) and a strong
sense of self (common) that is referred to in this passage can be represented as
follows (partial explications only):
She has a clear sense of self.

“it is like this:
I know who I am, I know who I want to be, I am me, I want to be me
it will be good if I always know these things well
I know these things well now”
She has a strong sense of self.

“it is like this:
because of this, I want to do some things
Collocations that include a strong sense of family (community, belonging,

etc.), a strong sense of identity, and a strong sense of self form a cluster that
shares a common theme of choosing who or what one wants to be and are
conceptually related to collocations like a strong sense of purpose insofar as
they all imply potentially achievable and strongly desired outcomes.
Turning now to the quasi-bodily feeling implied by collocations like a
strong sense of family, identity, and self, here, too, a bodily model based
on sustained bodily effort is applicable, although arguably one based more
generally on doing some things with one’s body rather than on doing something
with one’s body to something (a specific target). For example, if one has
a strong sense of family, one needs to do some things (e.g., participate
in family gatherings, take an interest in what happens to other family
members), but it is more a matter of doing some things than of doing something
to something:
like people can know what they are doing with their body
she could know it because when she thought like this,
she felt something for some time,
like someone can feel something in their body for some time
What could the potential knowledge derived from a combination of a thought

and a quasi-bodily feeling be in this case? For example, what possible insight
could one derive from one’s quasi-bodily feelings linked with a strong sense of
commitment, independence, loyalty, or purpose? Presumably, the content of the
relevant desires and aspirations is known to us from the start, and it is known on a
conscious level, not on the basis of quasi-bodily sensations that accompany
certain thoughts. What one might not be consciously aware of is the strength of
one’s desires and aspirations—that is, just how much one wants to do those things
that one has set oneself as one’s goals, commitments, responsibilities, and so on.
Thus, the knowledge component in the explication of will- and goal-related uses
of a strong sense (“she could know it because, when she thought like this, she felt
something”) could be interpreted as referring, above all, to how much she wanted
to do it.
Since collocations like a strong sense of family and a strong sense of identity
have also been explicated here in terms of wanting something very much, there is
no reason why a similar (though not identical) final component could not be
assigned to them, too. If I have a strong sense of family, then being a part of this
family matters to me, and the quasi-bodily feeling I experience when I think
about it can give me a better insight into how much it matters to me. This brings
us to the following overall explications:
She had a strong sense of family (community).

“it is like this:
I know that I am a part of this (family . . . )
I want to be a part of it
I want it very much”
like someone can feel something in their body
She had a strong sense of identity.

“it is like this:
I know that there are many kinds of people, I am someone of one kind,
I want to be someone of this kind
I want it very much”
222 SENSE
She had a strong sense of self.

it is like
“ this:
because of this, I want to do some things
like someone can feel some things in their body
6.1.3. A strong sense of shame and related expressions

Let us consider in turn how the expression a strong sense can be interpreted in
sentences that refer not to desires or aspirations but to emotions, as in the
following passage (from an anonymous letter placed on the Web site of a
suicide-prevention center, www.whitewreath.com):
A large part of the reason for my suicidal depression is a skeleton in my closet . . . I feel a
strong sense of guilt and shame over what I did . . . I really want to rebuild my life, and in a
sense, I think things are shaping up [e.g., I’m beginning a PhD, I’ve found a girlfriend, my
photography], but there are times when I still feel such a strong sense of shame and guilt
over what I did in the past that there are times when I wonder if I should commit suicide as a
form of redeeming myself.
What exactly is a strong sense of shame, and how does it differ from the
more usual a deep sense of shame? Loosely speaking, both phrases imply that
the person was very ashamed. But why should the author of the letter have chosen
the word strong rather than deep in this context?
One intuition that seems fairly clear is that there is something irresistible,
perhaps even overwhelming, about a strong sense of shame and that just as a
strong sense of commitment implies that “I can’t not want to do this,” so a strong
sense of shame implies that “I can’t not feel like this.” In the case of negative
emotions like humiliation or shame, one would rather not experience the feeling
in question, and one would try to construe the situation in a way that would not
lead to such feelings, but if I have a strong sense of shame, humiliation, or guilt,
then “I can’t not feel like this.”
The component “I can’t not feel like this” links phrases like a strong sense
of shame with those like a strong sense of commitment (“I can’t not want to do
this”), and at the same time it distinguishes them to some extent from their
counterparts with deep (a deep sense of shame). As I discuss in section 6.2 on
a deep sense, the cognitive scenario of a deep sense of shame includes the
components “I can’t not feel like this for a long time” and “other people can’t
know how I feel.” By contrast, the cognitive scenario of phrases like a strong
sense of shame presents the shame not as hidden from view and long-lasting but
as irresistible:
She felt a strong sense of shame (guilt, humiliation).

“it is like this:
I know that something very bad/very good is happening to me now
I feel something very bad/very good now
I can’t not feel like this”
Anticipating the discussion in section 6.2 on deep sense, I would add that
there appears to be one further difference between strong sense and deep sense
(of shame, guilt, relief, etc.) and that it is related to the metaphors of depth and
strength. A deep sense (of shame, etc.) appears to imply the thought “something
(very bad/very good) happened to me” as a root cause of a prolonged and hidden
feeling. By contrast, a strong sense (of shame, etc.) appears to imply instead the
thought “something (very bad/very good) is happening to me now.” The validity
of this distinction, though hard to prove conclusively, is supported, for example,
by the strong preference that a sense of loss and a sense of gratitude have for
deep—both emotion terms implying an initial event that triggers a prolonged
emotional state.
A strong sense, with its implications of something irresistible and over-
whelming, is more consistent with a thought focused on the experiencer’s
current situation than with one focused on some event in the past. A deep
sense, with its implications of a hidden and prolonged emotional state, seems
more consistent with a thought focused on an initial trigger that cannot be
forgotten for a long time.
So why could the author of a letter admits to suicidal impulses prefer to speak of
a strong sense of guilt and shame rather than a deep sense? On the analysis
developed here, such a formulation indicates that, at the moment of writing the
letter, the author was focusing on what was happening to him then and on how
irresistible his current impulse seemed to him rather than on the long-term nature of
his emotions and on their hiddenness from other people’s view.
Given the tendency of a strong sense to combine with words for negative
rather than positive emotions, one might suggest that only the word bad should
be used in this cognitive scenario, as a characterization of what one feels: “I feel
something very bad” rather than “I feel something very bad/very good.”
224 SENSE
However, while a strong sense occurs more frequently with negative emotion
terms like shame or guilt, it can also co-occur with positive ones like relief, as in
the following example from a novel:
I begin this, my third and probably my final dispatch to the Record upon the
Manderson murder, with conflicting feelings. I have a strong sense of relief, because
in my two previous dispatches I was obliged, in the interests of justice, to withhold
[certain] facts . . . These facts I shall now set forth. But I have, I confess, no liking
for the story of treachery and perverted cleverness which I have to tell. It leaves an
evil taste in the mouth, a savour of something revolting in the deeper puzzle of
motive underlying the puzzle of the crime itself, which I believe I have solved.
(Bentley 1913)
Generally speaking, a strong sense of relief appears to be particularly plausible

in the context of mixed feelings, as in this literary example: the narrator does not
like having to tell that story, which leaves an evil taste in his mouth, but at the
same time he cannot not feel relief that he is now able to set forth the facts.
Since a strong sense can, in principle, combine with words for positive
emotions like relief, it would be inappropriate to phrase the cognitive scenario
exclusively in terms of bad feelings. At the same time, we should also account for
the tendency of this phrase to combine predominantly with words for negative
emotions. We can do this through the third part of the explication, which refers to
a bodily analogue of the “strong sense” under discussion (that is, in expressions
like a strong sense of shame).
The experience of one’s own physical exertion linked with a sustained attempt
to overcome some obstacles (e.g., the resistance of heavy objects or other people’s
bodies [in a physical struggle]) does not seem relevant here. On the contrary, when
I experience a “strong sense” of shame or humiliation, I perceive myself as neither
strong nor determined. Rather, it is the emotion that is strong, and I am the “victim”
or passive recipient of that strong emotion.
When I have a strong sense of purpose, I may feel like a strong or determined
agent who is able to overcome all obstacles, but when I have a strong sense of
humiliation (or even relief ), I do not feel I can overcome anything: rather, a the
emotion has the upper hand and may even overwhelm me. Accordingly, in the case
of emotions, the third part of the explication of a strong sense cannot be simply a
replica of its counterpart in will- and goal-related expressions such as a strong sense
of purpose. A plausible bodily analogue relevant in this case is that of a strong pain
(for example, a strong headache)—a prolonged very bad feeling in some parts of
one’s body due to something (very) bad happening in these parts of one’s body for
some time—usually something that one cannot help being aware of all of the time:
she could know it because when she thought like this, she felt something for some time,
like someone can feel something very bad in some parts of their body for some time
when something bad is happening in these parts of their body for some time
To describe a pain as “strong” is not an attempt to convey its quality.

A strong pain is different in this respect from a sharp pain or a throbbing pain
(Nicholls 2003). The latter expressions offer certain images that convey the
qualitative aspect of a particular pain. The expression a strong pain, on the
other hand, seeks to convey a quantitative aspect of a pain: it is a “big” or an
intense pain, one that is there all the time and cannot be ignored. Mutatis
mutandis, the same applies to a strong sense of an emotion that commands
one’s full attention as much as a strong pain does.
This analogy with a strong pain may seem inappropriate in the case of phrases
that refer to positive feelings, like a strong sense of relief. I would argue, however,
that it is not: the feeling that accompanies the thought (in the top line) is
not characterized as bad; it is only characterized as being in some ways like that
of a persistent, intense pain that cannot be ignored. A strong pain is unmistakable,
and so is a strong sense of shame and even a strong sense of relief: the analogy
may consist not in the badness of the feeling but in the fact that one cannot
be oblivious to it.
This brings us to the following overall explication:
She felt a strong sense of shame/guilt/humiliation/relief.

“it is like this:
c. she could know it because, when she thought like this,
she felt something for some time
The phrase “strong pain” is often used in English in contexts like “relief for
strong pain” or “strong pain medications”, which imply that one feels something
very bad in one’s body for some time, and that one cannot not be aware all of the
time that something bad is happening in one’s body.
226 SENSE
The bodily analogue assigned here to a strong sense of shame is quite

different from that of a deep sense of shame, which refers to what is happening
deep inside the body and cannot be known to outsiders. At the same time, the
component of potential insight is the same in both cases.
6.1.4. A strong sense that . . . (e.g., I was intended for other

things)
Given the semantic diversity of nouns that can serve as a complement of a strong
sense and the danger of attributing to this phrase semantic components that may
be contributed by the complement noun, it is instructive to consider the use of this
phrase in sentences in which it takes a that-clause rather than a noun as its
complement. Here is one such example from a novel quoted in Literature Online:
I had no instantaneous corresponding sense that it was my duty to follow this call.
I was (I will confess it) a little dazzled; but as soon as that wore off, I felt an
indescribable reluctance to undertake the task, a consciousness of not being equal to
it, a strong sense that I was intended for other things. (Benson 1905)
Here, the thought underlying the protagonist’s “strong sense” appears to be

explicitly formulated: “I was intended for other things.” Such a formulation of the
underlying thought, however, does not give us a sufficient basis for explaining
why strong rather than deep or clear may have been chosen in this case to
describe the sense in question. To understand this, it is helpful to recall that not
only a sense but also a conviction or a belief can be described as “strong.” If
I have a strong conviction that I was intended for other things, I not only “think
like this” but also “can’t not think like this.” It seems clear that this component
would also make sense in the case of a sentence like “I had a strong sense that
I was intended for other things.”
Generally speaking, a strong sense that appears to imply that the thought
specified by the that-clause is a fixture in the experiencer’s mind: “Try as I might,
I can’t get this thought out of my mind.” The semantic component “I can’t not think
like this” is an obvious parallel to the component “I can’t not want to do it” posited
here for collocations like a strong sense of purpose and also for the component
“I can’t not feel like this” posited for those like a strong sense of humiliation. All
these components link the phrase a strong sense with something irresistible in the
experiencer’s mind: a wanting, a thought, or a feeling. But the other cognitive
components are in each case different. In the case of a strong sense that, the
“irresistible” component “I can’t not think like this” appears to be associated with a
willingness to embrace the irresistible’ thought—or rather, with an unwillingness
to try to resist it. This leads us to the following partial explication:
He had a strong sense that (e.g., he was intended for other things).
he often thought like this (about something):

“it is like this:
I think that I know something (e.g., that I was intended for other things)
I can’t not think like this
I don’t want not to think like this”
At first sight, the last component of this partial explication may seem
insufficiently justified, in particular, in comparison with the preceding compo-
nent (“I can’t not think like this”). However, if we were to delete this last
component, the thought in question could be interpreted as obsessive and unwel-
come, whereas in fact, the phrase a strong sense that is not compatible with such
an interpretation. In support of this last component (and of the partial explication
as a whole), I would note that in databases like COBUILD the phrase a strong sense
that does not usually introduce purely factual sentences but rather sentences
expressing views to which the experiencer appears to be committed (more
often than not, value judgments). Some examples:
There was a strong sense that racism was an unpardonable offense wherever it occurred.
Among other countries in the region, as well as the United States, he said there was broad
agreement—a strong sense that negotiation and respect for democracy and human rights
were needed.
As negotiators, we were driven on by a strong sense that the status quo was not an option.
We don’t have this strong sense that children are a social responsibility and a social
concern and a social benefit.
[Adam] Smith is a realist and a skeptic . . . somebody who crosses those lines that we’ve
come to see as being very sharp and divisive, between the lack of public intervention and
active public intervention in politics. Read Smith, and you get a very strong sense that
these are not mutually exclusive options.
These examples are consistent with the following scenario: one has started with a
certain way of thinking, and one has considered the possibility of abandoning it in
favor of other options, but one’s original way of thinking proves irresistible and
in the end, one neither can nor wants to abandon it.
Given this characterization of the experiencer’s thoughts, what bodily
prototype could we plausibly propose for the accompanying feelings? It
seems clear that the model assigned to will- and goal-related sentences is not
apposite here: there is no basis here for an analogy to doing something with
one’s body for a long time because of a strong desire to achieve a goal. On the
other hand, the model linked with a strong sense of relief or a strong sense of
humiliation seems applicable here, too: a strong sense that can be plausibly
likened to a bodily feeling that—like a strong pain—is so persistent and so
strong that it cannot be ignored and is due to bodily processes independent of
what one is doing and what one wants to do. We can thus propose the following
explication:
He had a strong sense that (e.g., he was intended for other things).
a. he often thought like this (about something):
“it is like this:
228 SENSE
I think that I know something (e.g., that I was intended for other things)
I can’t not think like this
I don’t want not to think like this”
b. when he thought like this, he could know that it was like this,
c. he could know it because when he thought like this, he felt something for some time,
like someone can feel something very bad in some parts of their body
for some time
6.1.5. A strong sense of the sadness of the occasion (and

similar expressions)
Although our discussion of a strong sense cannot be exhaustive and cover all the
uses of this phrase, there is one other salient use of it that we need to consider
here: roughly speaking, a strong sense of certain realities that we take for granted,
as a given. This “givenness” is usually signaled by the definite article preceding
the complement noun: a strong sense of the . . .
Here is an example from a newspaper article—an interview with
the new Anglican archbishop of Melbourne, Philip Freier. As the interviewer
explains, one key influence in Freier’s life was his Irish grandmother, who
one day, when he was a child, showed him a picture of Christ with the crown
of thorns:
“That was a powerful image to me,” Freier remembers. “I had a strong sense then of the
sufferings of Christ and the seriousness of being a Christian.” That sense stayed with him
during adolescence. (Rothwell 2006)
The sentence implies that for Freier, the reality of Christ’s sufferings is not
a matter of opinion but something that he takes for granted. He does not think,
then, “I think Christ suffered”; rather, he thinks: “I know that Christ suffered.”
What the phrase a strong sense appears to add in this case is that the image of
Christ with the crown of thorns made that knowledge so vivid as to be irresistable
at that time. It is not so much that Freier could not stop thinking about that
suffering or about the seriousness of being a Christian as that he could not stop
himself from being aware of those things. Nor did he want to: that awareness was
a fixture in his mind, and he did not want to get rid of it.
The knowledge that can arise from such a realization can be represented in
the same way as that which can arise from a strong sense that (something is the
case): “because of this, he could know at that time that it was like this,” and
presumably, the quasi-bodily feeling, too, can be represented in the same way as
in the case of a strong sense that. However, the first chunks of the two explica-
tions appear to call for a certain differentiation: “I can’t not think like this” and
“I don’t want not to think like this” in the case of a strong sense that, vs. “I can’t
not know it” and “I don’t want not to know it” in the case of a strong sense (of
+ noun).
Consider also the following sentence (A, from COBUILD) and its hypothetical
counterpart with a that-clause (B):
A. She had a strong sense of the sadness of the occasion.

B. She had a strong sense that it was a sad occasion.
In the version with a that-clause (B) the woman could have been mistaken about
the putative sadness of the occasion, but in the first version (A) she could not
because the sadness of the occasion is taken for granted: it is not a matter of
opinion but a given. In this version (A) the woman does not think “it is a sad
occasion” or “I think it is a sad occasion”; rather, she realizes not only that it is so
but also that she neither can nor wants to ignore it:

“it is like this:
I know something (e.g., that this is a sad occasion, that Christ suffered)
I can’t not know it
I don’t want not to know it”
This leads us to the following overall explication:
She had a strong sense then of the . . . (e.g., sadness of the occasion, the sufferings of
Christ).

“it is like this:
I know something (e.g., that this is a sad occasion, that Christ suffered)
b. when she thought about it like this, she could know that it was like this,
c. she could know it because when she thought like this, she felt something for some time,
230 SENSE
6.1.6. Concluding remarks on a strong sense

Summing up, it appears that while there is a wide range of collocations involving
a strong sense, they all share (in their first cognitive chunk) the component
“I can’t not.” Depending on the type of complement, this can be interpreted
as “I can’t not want this,” “I can’t not feel like this,” “I can’t not think like
this,” or “I can’t not know this.” There is an obvious logic to this: a strong sense is
an irresistible one. If one has it, one cannot not want, think, feel, or know
something as this strong sense dictates. In addition, collocations with a strong
sense also imply that the experiencer is not putting up a struggle against the
strong sense.
In the case of will- and goal-related collocations like a strong sense
of purpose, the experiencer’s will is, in fact, fully aligned with the
irresistible impulse: “I can’t not want it; I want it very much,” and the same
applies to identity-related ones like a strong sense of family or a strong sense of
identity.
In the case of opinion-related collocations (a strong sense that . . . ), the
irresistible thought is also one that the experiencer decides not to try to dismiss
(“I can’t not think like this; I don’t want not to think like this”). Similarly, in the
case of awareness-based collocations (a strong sense of the . . . ), the experiencers
decide not to try to dismiss what they are clearly aware of (“I can’t not know it;
I don’t want not to know it”).
In the case of emotion-related collocations, the experiencer is not putting up
a struggle against the irresistible feeling, either: if one feels, for example, a strong
sense of humiliation, one might well wish to be able to suppress the feeling, but
one cannot, and if one feels, for example, a strong sense of relief, there is no
reason why one should want to suppress it.
The bodily model of a strong sense as represented here takes two main
forms. The predominant form, associated with the most common collocations,
is that of intentional bodily effort. The other form, associated with relatively
rare uses of a strong sense, is that of persistent bodily feelings that are assoc-
iated with involuntary bodily processes and are so strong that they cannot be
ignored.
The potential insight that might arise from a strong sense can be interpreted
differently for various types of collocations. Those that imply “wanting some-
thing very much” also imply that one might learn from that strong sense just how
much one wants the desired outcome. For those that refer to opinions and
knowledge, one can have an insight that “it really is like this” (as one cannot
help thinking it is or as one realizes it is). For those referring to emotions, there
can be a resulting insight into one’s current situation and the nature of one’s
current feelings.
The literal meaning of the word strong is clearly relevant in various ways to
all the different uses of a strong sense: There is a whole web of semantic relations
here, and the various threads in this web can be traced under the microscope of
NSM explications.
6.2. A Deep Sense (of Something)
Judging by the data from both COBUILD and Google searches,2 deep is one of the
most common adjectives co-occurring with sense (Google searches for deep
sense yield well over a million occurrences). In some contexts, deep may seem
to be interchangeable with strong, and both may appear to mean something
like “intense.” But if one compares the results of Google searches for strong
sense of justice and deep sense of justice, one finds that the former is incompara-
bly more common than the latter, which suggests that there is a significant
difference in meaning between strong sense and deep sense—a difference that
would explain why justice strongly attracts strong sense and repels deep sense
(see table 6.6).
TABLE 6.6.
Total strong deep
sense of justice 1,000,000 55,000 800
sense of injustice 200,000 900 1,000
These figures mean that (according to these searches) deep sense of

justice occurs once in more than a thousand occurrences of sense
of justice, whereas strong sense of justice appears as often as once in twenty
instances of sense of justice. This is a substantial difference. The proportions
of strong sense of injustice and deep sense of injustice are much more variable
(in Google searches), but they never show the same preference for strong
over deep.
Another interesting fact is that the semantic implications of deep sense of
injustice are different from those of deep sense of justice and that deep sense of
injustice tends to refer to the victim’s rather than somebody else’s sense. A strong
sense of justice, and even a strong sense of injustice, may drive a person to act on
behalf of other people (who are the victims of injustice), as in the following
example from a tribute to a politician:
His political conviction grew from experience as a barrister representing farmworkers . . . He

developed a strong sense of injustice because of the way in which farmworkers were dealt
with by landowners—treated like serfs, often paid in kind, these people often came to Roy
Fagan for legal advice.
By contrast, a deep sense of injustice is far more likely to refer to the grievances
of one of the victims themselves, as in the following examples (the first one is
from COBUILD; the other two are from Google Book Search):
232 SENSE
The attorney general argued that if the court allowed the Bhopal factory’s multinational
parent company, Union Carbide, to avoid criminal proceedings, it would leave a deep
sense of injustice among the victims.
Marginal offenders, on the other hand, may be dealt with harshly and left with a deep
sense of injustice.
[He was a] . . . very angry man with a lot of bitterness, a deep sense of injustice, and a very
deep hatred for all the well people because it seemed so unfair to him.
A deep sense of injustice implies that “something bad happened to me”; a strong
sense of injustice, on the other hand, implies that “I want to do something.”
Examining the twenty-eight examples of sentences with (a) deep sense in
COBUILD, one cannot help noticing that the great majority refer to something
painful suffered by the experiencer:
a deep sense of shame

a deep sense of frustration
a deep sense of (personal) failure
a deep sense of inadequacy
a deep sense of insecurity
a deep sense of betrayal and abandonment
a deep sense of injustice (among the victims)
a deep sense of not belonging
a deep sense of sorrow
a deep sense of guilt
Of the twenty-eight occurrences of a deep sense in COBUILD, twenty-two are

of this kind. A Google search leads to results consistent with those suggested by
COBUILD. Collocations with deep sense, which are both very common (thousands
of collocations) and constitute a significant proportion of their counterparts
without deep, include the following (these figures mean that, for example, there
are twelve thousand occurrences of deep sense of sadness and that they constitute
9 percent of all the instances of sense of sadness):
deep sense of sadness 12,000 (9 percent)

deep sense of shame 16,000 (3 percent)
deep sense of guilt 13,000 (2 percent)
This is not an exhaustive list of common collocations with deep sense of (others
are discussed later). For the time being, however, it is useful to focus on those
included in this list. It is easy to see that all these collocations evoke painful and
long-lasting experiences and suggest that the experiencer is a “patient” rather than
an agent: When one feels a deep sense of something, more often than not one is not
doing anything but something is happening to one, and often it is something painful.
The nonagentive character of experiences described as a deep sense is also

reflected in the fact that many nouns that very frequently co-occur with strong
sense tend to have relatively low frequencies in combination with deep sense.
This applies, above all, to many collocations that imply high agentivity, like
sense of responsibility and sense of purpose.
For example, strong sense of purpose is much more frequent than deep sense of
purpose, and strong sense of direction, than deep sense of direction. As table 6.7
illustrates, depending on the noun, strong sense may be five, ten, or even two
hundred times more frequent in such combinations than deep sense. Differences
of such magnitude are unlikely to be accidental and require explanation.
TABLE 6.7.
strong deep
sense of responsibility 117,000 32,000
sense of commitment 39,000 14,000
sense of purpose 67,000 11,000
sense of direction 24,000 3,500
sense of self 180,000 1,000
As table 6.7 shows, expressions like deep sense of purpose, deep sense of
responsibility, and deep sense of commitment are not impossible in English, and I
explore their semantics later. What matters right now, however, is that they are
far less frequent than their counterparts with strong.
What could explain that strong tendency of a deep sense to be used in
connection with painful and long-lasting experiences that assail and deeply
wound a person? The way I have formulated this question hints, of course, at a
possible answer: it is an image of something entering the body from the outside
and affecting (perhaps injuring) the body deeply. The effects of the external events
in question are not skin deep; rather, they affect the person deeply (probably in
terms of both how painful they are and how long they can last). A deep sense (one
might say like a deep wound) is linked with something that has happened to us, not
something that we are doing, and the feelings associated with this event are likely
to last for a long time (again, perhaps, like the pain of a deep wound).
There are many conventional metaphors in English that link the body with
depth: skin deep, deep-seated (e.g., anxiety), deep-rooted (e.g., fears), deep
heat (ointment), taking a deep breath, looking deeply into someone’s eyes,
innermost feelings, cutting someone to the quick, getting dangerously close to
the bone, and so on. Such metaphors are revealing: they all suggest an image of
the human body as something having a depth, not as a container can be deep
(from top to bottom) but as an object with an inner core can be deep (from surface
234 SENSE
to the core). The metaphor of a deep sense is in keeping with that set of bodily
metaphors: it is an image of something entering the body through the skin and
going deep inside.
Significantly, when emotion terms are not introduced by the word sense, the use
of deep is much less frequent. For example, in a Google search (May 15, 2007), deep
sadness constituted only 1.5 percent of all instances of sadness, whereas deep sense
of sadness amounted to 10 percent of all instances of sense of sadness. For deep
TABLE 6.8.
shame 50,000,000 deep shame 50,000
(i.e., 1 in 1,000 occurrences of shame)
sense of 460,000 deep sense of shame 16,000

shame (i.e., 1 in 30 occurrences of sense of shame)
TABLE 6.9.
sadness 18,000,000 deep sadness 270,000
(i.e., 1 in 70 occurrences of sadness)
sense of 125,000 deep sense of sadness 12,000

sadness (i.e., 1 in 10 occurrences of sense of sadness)
sense of shame, the differences are even greater (see tables 6.8 and 6.9).
Simply speaking, this means that sense of sadness and sense of shame attract the
adjective deep much more than sadness and shame as such do.
Given that the absolute numbers involved are huge (e.g., 50 million for
shame and 18 million for sadness), such contrasts in frequency are significant:
clearly, even though feelings can be described as deep, describing feelings
through the prism of sense strongly increases the chances of their being so
described. This is consistent with the image of the body as an object with a
certain depth and with the bodily (quasi-sensory) implications of a sense of
(absent from feeling as such): viewing a feeling as a sense introduces the body
into the picture and multiplies the chances of a reference to depth.
Earlier I said that the list of the most common collocations with deep sense
prominently includes negative emotion terms like sadness, shame, guilt, and loss,
but I also noted that other common collocations with deep sense have no negative
implications. It is time to say what those other collocations are and to consider
them in the light of our initial hypothesis linking a deep sense with the image of
something entering deep into the body and producing a long-lasting effect
(perhaps leaving a deep wound).
They are a deep sense of peace, a deep sense of satisfaction, and above all, a
deep sense of gratitude—all very frequent collocations in English. The figures
produced by a Google search (May 15, 2007) are given below. (Percentages here
again refer to the proportion of the collocations with the adjective deep to their
counterparts without an adjective; for example, all the occurrences of deep sense of
gratitude amount to 22 percent of the total number of instances of sense of gratitude.)
deep sense of gratitude 46,000 (22 percent)

deep sense of peace 28,000 (5 percent)
deep sense of satisfaction 22,000 (4 percent)
Some such exceptions to the generalization linking deep sense with painful
experiences can perhaps be partly explained away: a deep sense of peace can be
interpreted as hinting at a preceding period of inner turmoil (the peace is like the
result of a very effective balm put on a deep wound or of a deep-heat ointment
whose effects can reach a deep-seated pain), and a deep sense of gratitude may
hint at a burden of indebtedness.
At first sight, explanations of this kind do not seem to be applicable to a deep
sense of satisfaction. In fact, however, when one examines a number of examples
in context, one can see that even here, deep sense is often linked with prior pain,
as in the following two examples—one from a book titled “A Survival Guide for
Paralegals: Tips from the Trenches,” and the other, “The Crime Victim’s Book”:
Most of us have to do things that are not necessarily fun, but aspects of these activities can
still give us a deep sense of satisfaction (Gelb and Levine 2003).
The trial was an extremely painful experience for Susan, but after it was over she
experienced a deep sense of satisfaction . . . (Bard and Sangrey 1979).
Of course, sentences that mention a deep sense of satisfaction do not always refer
to prior painful experiences that had to be endured or hurdles that had to be
overcome, but neither are they incompatible with them.
Consider also the implications of deep sense in a context in which it is
followed by a positive-sounding noun like privilege:
He never lost that deep sense of privilege of being an MP.
A deep sense of privilege has different implications from, say, a wonderful,

tremendous, or great sense of privilege: like a deep sense of humility or a deep
sense of responsibility, a deep sense of privilege, too, sounds almost like a
burden. Mutatis mutandis, the same applies to the following example, in which
deep sense is followed by a reference to sufferings:
He [Pope Paul VI] wished to enter fully into the history of his own afflicted time: with a
deep sense that he was himself part of that history, he wished to participate fully in it, to
share its sufferings in his own heart and soul (letter to The Tablet [June 29, 1963]).
236 SENSE
Without wishing to press the image of a deep wound too far, I suggest
that the deep sense may be implicitly comparing the long-lasting sense with
a long-lasting bad feeling somewhere (deep) inside a person’s body due to
something that has happened to that person (and not to something that this person
is doing now), a feeling that is intense and prolonged but hidden from other
people.
At first glance, even this generalization may seem at odds with a deep sense
of satisfaction, which implies that the experiencer did something. However, the
action or activity that led to a sense of satisfaction must have been prior to the
sense of satisfaction itself: this sense is the enduring fruit of a prior action rather
than something that accompanies the action itself. Satisfaction differs in this
respect from enjoyment, which implies a good feeling simultaneous with the
action that triggers it.3
This focus on what happened to us rather than on what we are doing may be
logically linked to another important aspect of a deep sense: the implication that
other people may not know the experiencer’s current state. When a person is
doing something, other people may be able to observe it and know about it, but
when something is happening to a person (especially, of course, deep inside that
person), this may be hidden from any potential onlookers.
She felt a deep sense of shame, guilt, insecurity, loss, betrayal, gratitude, satisfaction.
a. she thought like this at that time (about something):

“it is like this:
I know that something very bad/very good happened to me (some time before)
I feel something very bad/very good because of this
I can’t not feel like this for a long time
other people can’t know how I feel”
like people can know that something is happening to their body when it is
happening to their body
c. she could know it because when she thought like this, she felt something for a long time,
like someone can feel something very bad for a long time
in some parts of their body inside their body
when something is happening in these parts of their body for a long time
because something happened to their body some time before
The cognitive scenario articulated in the first chunk of this explication shows
that the experiencer is conscious of an enduring emotional effect of something that
happened to him or her earlier, an effect that is hidden from other people. The
nature of the past event that triggered this hidden but enduring state can vary. For
example, in the case of a deep sense of loss, betrayal, and injustice, I lost someone
or something, someone betrayed me, or someone treated me unjustly. In the case of
a deep sense of gratitude and appreciation, someone did something good for me. In
the case of a deep sense of shame, some shameful act of mine came to light.
In other cases, the nature of the past event is not necessarily obvious and may
need to be gleaned from context. Thus, while both satisfaction and a sense of
satisfaction may be linked to the thought “I have done something good,” a deep
sense of satisfaction may also be linked with the thought “something (very) good
happened to me.” For example, in the case of the woman who had to endure a
painful trial, the victory that resulted from that trial (that is, something that
happened to her) triggered a deep sense of satisfaction. Similarly, I may derive
a deep sense of satisfaction from letters from former students who write to
acknowledge the value of my teaching in their present working lives. My
teaching is something I did, but the arrival of the letters is something that
happened to me.
As already mentioned, the bodily prototype (arguably) refers here to a
long-lasting pain somewhere inside the body due to some kind of trauma.
The explication does not imply that the feeling associated with a deep sense is
painful or unpleasant. It says only that it is long-lasting and hidden from view
like a severe pain deep inside the body can be long lasting and yet hidden from
view.
I now turn to another major type of deep sense expressions, in which the
focus is on wanting rather than feeling. Let us consider, for example, the expres-
sions a deep sense of commitment and a deep sense of responsibility and try to
figure out how they differ in their semantic implications from their counterparts
with strong. A strong sense emphasizes above all how much one wants to honor
one’s commitment or carry out one’s responsibility. A deep sense, however,
emphasizes one’s emotionally charged determination to persevere (a long-term
view), and it implies that one finds oneself in a particular situation and is
determined to act in this situation as one thinks one should.
These considerations lead us to the following cognitive scenario:
She had a deep sense of commitment/responsibility.
she thought like this for some time (about something):

“it is like this:
I can’t not think about it for a long time
I want to think about it
when I think about it, I feel something
For example, examining many corpora examples with deep sense of respon-
sibility and strong sense of responsibility, one gets a strong sense that strong
sense of responsibility implies that one wants very much to carry out what one
sees as one’s responsibility, whereas deep sense of responsibility implies that one
does not want to shirk one’s responsibility, that one wants to maintain this
attitude for a long time, and that one thinks that other people may not know
about it.
238 SENSE
Consider the following example from the Internet:
Many indigenous Australians remain deeply attached to their place of origin, their
“country,” and have a deep sense of responsibility about looking after their land and
traditions (from the Honorable Justice Tony Fitzgerald’s address to the Men’s
Reconciliation Dinner in Brisbane on October 23, 1998).
The phrase a deep sense of responsibility emphasizes here the long-term nature of
the responsibility in question. The word remain highlights the fact that the people
referred to do not want to shirk their responsibility after their personal circum-
stances have changed. It is not a question of wanting very much to look after their
land and traditions but rather of maintaining the same volitional and emotional
attitude toward the land and traditions for a long time. In this case, what happened
to the people who think like this is that they were born in a particular place and in
a particular community.
And another example:
As the committee appointed for the first stage, we have a deep sense of responsibility to
reflect accurately the views that have been put to us and to deal fairly with the issues. We
also have a strong sense of obligation to do justice to the quality of service that has been
rendered by the Defence Force personnel of this country and to the strength of feeling that
has been expressed by many groups of veterans and others associated with Australian
military activities (from the Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Defence Awards,
March 1994, Australian Department of Defence).
Here, the phrase strong sense (a strong sense of obligation) is used in relation
to what the committee members want to do, and it implies that they want to do it
very much. At the same time, deep sense is used in relation to their awareness of
their new status (as a committee) and of the responsibilities that follow from it, in
particular, of the need to do things in a certain way. They know how they want
to think about it (“we want to accurately reflect the view of the veterans and to
always act fairly”), and they know that they feel something because of this. Other
people cannot know that this is the committee members’ innermost attitude, at
least not at the outset, but the members themselves know in their heart of hearts
that this is the case; they know that they cannot not think like this for a long
time (presumably for as long as they remain in office), and they want to think like
this for a long time.
Exploring deep sense and strong sense with Google, one notes many differ-
ences between the two, and they cannot all be discussed here. To mention just one
more, there is a fairly dramatic contrast between strong sense of urgency and deep
sense of urgency: nearly 60,000 (45,000 on March 13, 2008) of the former and
only 4,000 (6,000 on the same date) of the latter. The reason seems clear, and it is
consistent with the analysis of deep sense developed here: one can hardly
maintain a sense of urgency for a long time, as a deep sense of urgency would
imply, according to this analysis.
Ultimately, however, the most important evidence comes from differ-

ences in meaning. Regardless of the respective frequencies of, say, a deep
sense of injustice and a strong sense of injustice, the two expressions do not
mean the same thing, and this difference needs to be articulated—if only for
the purposes of teaching English. Given that, according to estimates, there
are now well more than a billion people around the world who are learning
English, this is not a small “only.” Leaving aside the prototypical bodily
models, the analysis proposed here allows us to explain the key differences
between the two classes of collocations (those with deep sense and those
with strong sense), each in its two main types, in terms of the following
cognitive scenarios:
She felt a strong sense of shame/guilt/humiliation/relief.

“it is like this:
I can’t not feel like this
I can’t not think about this”
She felt a deep sense of shame, guilt, insecurity, loss, betrayal, gratitude, satisfaction.

“it is like this:
I know that something very bad/very good happened to me (some time before)
I feel something very bad/very good because of this
I can’t not feel like this for a long time
She had a strong sense of purpose/mission/justice/injustice.
when she thought about it, she thought like this:

“it is like this:
I want to do these things very much”
She had a deep sense of commitment/purpose/loyalty/responsibility/mission.
when she thought about it, she thought like this:

“it is like this:
I can’t not think about it for a long time
I don’t want not to think about it
when I think about it, I feel something
240 SENSE
To the best of my knowledge, the fact that some apparently very similar
phrases (e.g., sense of justice, sense of injustice) behave very differently with
respect to different adjectives and that for example sense of justice strongly
attracts the adjective strong whereas sense of injustice does not has never been
noticed or discussed in linguistic literature before. The finding seems robust and
it was only possible to reach it by using very large databases such as those which
can be searched by Google.
Findings of this kind must, of course, be treated with caution, and in any case
they cannot replace qualitative semantic analysis—for example, we still need to
establish (on semantic grounds) the difference in meaning between a deep sense
of injustice and a strong sense of injustice. They can, however, assist semantic
analysis—above all as heuristics, but also as corroborative evidence.
Given the world’s current hunger for English and its need for effective
English-based communication, it is high time that we raise such questions and
seek answers to them. As this book demonstrates, NSM offers an effective
methodology for doing so.
A coda: Ban Ki-moon speaks to the United Nations

Frequencies of words and expressions obtained in Google searches can vary from
day to day. Often the range of variation is relatively narrow, and generally
speaking, broad proportions between expressions that occur tens of thousands
of times do not change dramatically overnight.
Sometimes, however, sudden changes do occur overnight, and these, too,
can be instructive. One example relevant to this section is the sudden upsurge in
the frequency of the expression deep sense of mission following the first speech
to the Security Council by the new Secretary General of the United Nations,
Ban Ki-moon, on January 8, 2007. When he addressed the council for the first
time as the Secretary General he said, “Allow me to assure all of you of my
deep sense of mission, duty, and dedication as I assume this high office.” The
media around the world reported on this event with headlines that included the
phrase deep sense of mission, and as a result, the frequency of this phrase
jumped dramatically.
In December 2006 and in the first week of January 2007, Google searches
showed around 500 occurrences of deep sense of mission—as compared with
around 25,000 of strong sense of mission. Following the new UN Secretary
General’s speech, however, the frequency of deep sense of mission jumped, and
on January 12, 2007 (when I first happened to check it after the event), the figure
was 17,000—much closer to that for strong sense of mission.
Rather than disqualifying the use of Google as a heuristic method in the study of
meaning, this statistical anomaly in fact highlights its usefulness. The use of the
expression deep sense of mission echoed in the world’s media highlights the fact that
this expression is semantically more appropriate in the new secretary general’s
address than a strong sense of mission would have been and that the two expressions
do not mean the same. Had the new secretary general assured the Security Council
of his strong sense of mission and his strong sense of duty, that would have sounded
boastful and inappropriate. A strong sense of mission would be inconsistent with his
role which was not that of a strong leader but of somebody who was there to
serve the United Nations. The new Secretary General knew what was in his
heart, and this was something he could appropriately seek to assure the Security
Council about.
To understand the contribution of deep in a deep sense of mission, we need to
unpack the meaning of the word mission itself (as used, for example, in the
following quote from George Bush’s presidential address):
We thought that . . . we could accomplish our mission [in Iraq] with fewer American troops
(January 10, 2007, speech committing an extra twenty thousand U.S. troops to Iraq).
Using NSM, we can portray the thought pattern implied by the word mission as
used in this sentence in the following explication (where “I” can, of course, be
replaced by “we”):
Mission
someone thinks like this:

I want some things to happen
I know this:
it will be very good for many people if these things happen
it can be very bad for many people if these things don’t happen
at the same time, I know this:
these things cannot happen if someone doesn’t do some things for some time
if I don’t do these things, no one else will
because of this, I can’t not do these things
I know that, when I am doing these things, some bad things can happen to me
because of this
I don’t want not to do these things because of this
I want to do these things
The noun sense (in a sense of mission) adds to this the implication of a quasi-
bodily feeling and the possibility of knowledge arising from the combination of
this feeling and the thoughts spelled out earlier. The choice of an adjective (e.g.,
deep, strong) adds a further dimension to the overall semantic package, one that
is different for each adjective.
As section 6.1 shows with regard to a strong sense, a choice of strong
reinforces the component “I want to do these things” by adding to it two related
components: “I can’t not want to do it” and “I want to do it very much.” A choice
of deep, on the other hand, brings with it a different perspective on the mission.
First, the component “something happened to me” refers to the nature of my
involvement and presents it as something to which I am now bound: I have
engaged myself in this particular mission, and I can’t abandon it before it is
accomplished. Second, this event of becoming bound to the mission has triggered
a deep and lasting volitional and emotional attitude in me; other people can’t
know how I think about this task, to which I am now bound, but I know it.
242 SENSE
These differences between the two cognitive scenarios are reinforced by

different bodily prototypes, with images of goal-oriented bodily effort in the case
of a strong sense and of something happening for a long time deep inside the
body in the case of deep sense.
Given the semantic implications of a deep sense of mission outlined here, it is
easy to see why this expression may be particularly useful for making personal
statements in a public arena. It refers to the hidden wellsprings of one’s motivation,
to a sense of being bound to a task for a long time, and to long-term, deep feelings
that may be invisible to external observers but that one can vouch for oneself.
Finally, a coda to the coda: Four months after Ban Ki-moon’s speech to the
United Nations, when it was no longer hot news and many Web sites around the
world may have removed the materials that referred to it, Google again showed
five hundred or so occurrences of deep sense of mission, which was again almost
fifty times less than the figure for strong sense of mission (roughly twenty-four
thousand). In this case, there is a happy ending to the story—a story that not only
cautions us not to rely on Google uncritically but also supports the reliability of
the techniques and procedures used here.
These techniques can be summarized as follows. First, one develops seman-
tic hypotheses on semantic grounds, tests them with large numbers of concurrent
Google searches, and revises the hypotheses in accordance with the results.
Second, one repeats the same Google searches over a long period, restricts
them to collocations that involve very large numbers, and above all, compares
the proportions rather than the absolute numbers. For investigating the semantics
of collocations such techniques can be of inestimable value.
6.3. A Sharp Sense (of Something)
The expression a sharp sense is not particularly common in English, but it is

significant and interesting enough to merit some discussion. At the time of
writing, a Google search yields 142,000 results for this expression.4 This is far
less than the number of occurrences of strong sense (well more than a million) or
deep sense (roughly one million), but still, it is not an insignificant number.
Interestingly, a very large proportion (about 40 percent) of all the occurrences of
sharp sense belong to (a) sharp sense of humor/humour, and about 10 percent to
(a) sharp sense of time. Other collocations seldom exceed a fraction of 1 percent
of sharp sense. Judging by Google searches, the most frequent ones in this last
group are a sharp sense of irony, a sharp sense of loss, a sharp sense of
observation, a sharp sense of disappointment, and a sharp sense of the ridiculous.
An examination of a large number of examples suggests that a sharp sense is
used in two different ways in English, both arguably linked with the image of a
sharp object. One of them appears to have at its (semantic) center a sharp sense of
observation, whereas the other refers to emotions or to events seen as a source of
emotion, as in a sharp sense of loss. In the second of these two categories, in
contrast to the first one, a sharp sense can be introduced by the verb feel, as in the
first two of the following examples, although as the subsequent examples
illustrate, it can also be introduced in other ways. Consider, for example, the
following sentences from novels:
I felt a sharp sense of disappointment. (Mark Twain)

The gauntlet was down and Alexina felt a sharp sense of relief. (G. F. Horn)
By it she realized how far away from her he was; realized it with a little sharp sense of
desolation. (H. L. Wilson)
A sharp sense of nervousness pricked her. (E. M. May)
A sharp sense of unreality stabbed Stella. (E. M. May)
He went, and a sharp sense of relief shot through her. (E. M. May)
To Nedda this tenderness brought a sudden sharp sense of guilt and yearning.
(J. Galsworthy)
As she wound her hair into heavy ropes and braided them, it gave her a sharp sense of joy,
this body of hers, so firm and warm with blood, so unmarked by her sordid struggle.
(R. Herrick)
In these sentences, sharp does not appear to have anything to do with “a

sharp eye for detail” (as in the case of a sharp sense of observation). Instead, the
relevance of “sharpness” seems to lie here in an analogy between the feeling
associated with a “sharp sense” and the feeling described as a “sharp pain.”
It is not difficult to see the conceptual link between a sharp pain and a sharp
knife (cf. Nicholls 2003). Presumably, by describing a pain as sharp, the speaker
is invoking the image of a sharp knife cutting into some parts of a person’s body,
and presumably, a sharp sense of guilt, disappointment, or desolation is building,
in turn, on an analogy with a sharp pain.
It is very noticeable, of course, that the feelings referred to in these literary
examples are not uniformly painful: Although collocations such as a sharp
sense of disappointment, referring to bad feelings, are more common than those
like a sharp sense of relief, which refer to good feelings, the latter are by no means
impossible. At the same time, whereas a sharp sense of relief is plausible, a
sharp sense of peace is not. The following explication seeks to account for all
these facts. It also attempts to account for the tendency of a sharp sense to co-occur
with verbs like stab, prick, and shoot and with adjectives like sudden (as in several
of the examples).
She felt a sharp sense of desolation, disappointment, dislocation, loss, relief, joy.

“it is like this:
I can’t not know that this is happening
I didn’t know before that something like this would happen to me now”
b. when she thought about it like this, she could know that it was like this,
244 SENSE
c. she could know it because, when she thought like this,

she felt something in one moment,
like someone can feel something bad in a part of their body in one moment
when something happens to this part of their body in one moment
because something sharp [M] moves inside this part of their body at that time
This explication does not say that the feeling associated with a “sharp sense” is
necessarily painful or unpleasant—obviously, a “sharp sense of relief” is not.
However, the expression a sharp sense (in the frame “someone felt a sharp sense
of X”) can invoke an image of a sharp object cutting into or pricking a part of a
person’s body without specifying what the analogy consists in. It invites an
inference that the feeling is painful or unpleasant but does not stipulate that this
is necessarily the case. If the complement noun has positive connotations (as
relief and joy do, for example), the analogy can be interpreted as lying else-
where: in the unexpected and momentary character of the sensation and in the
fact that it cannot go unnoticed.
To test the validity of the analysis developed here we can consider the
contrast between a sharp sense and a deep sense drawn, unwittingly, in the
following passage from a newspaper article about children who were passed
over when selections for sports teams were made:
The ritual of trying out for teams, for better or for worse, is steeped in passion and pitfalls.
The players who get picked for teams say they feel a deep sense of satisfaction and
belonging, just as the ones who don’t get selected can feel a sharp sense of hurt and
rejection (Howley 2004).
The deep sense of satisfaction and belonging implies feelings that can last for a
long time, but the sharp sense of hurt and rejection focuses on the initial shock:
the event is unexpected and impossible to ignore; it hits you and cuts you to the
quick. As the article further notes, the rejected players may “suffer lasting
psychological scars from not being issued the uniforms they longed to wear,”
but the expression sharp sense focuses on the initial, short-term impact.
The element of shock often linked with the expression a sharp sense is
highlighted in the following passage from a memoir in which a pious boy is
shocked by a teacher’s irreverent allusion to a well-known, humorous misrender-
ing of the Christmas carol “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks” as “While
Shepherds Washed Their Socks”:
I remember feeling a sharp sense of shock on first glimpsing the heading at the top of the
music master’s sheet music for “While Shepherds Watched.” It simply said, “Sox” (Brown
2002, 135).
The reference to “first glimpsing” highlights the momentariness of the sensation

linked here with a sharp sense of shock. And one last example that also highlights
the suddenness of the sensation described as a sharp sense:
I have a three-by-five up there with this fragment of a sentence from a story by

Chekhov: “ . . . and suddenly everything became clear to him.” I find these words
filled with wonder and possibility. . . . There is a bit of mystery, too. What has been
unclear before? Why is it just now becoming clear? What’s happened? Most of
all—what now? There are consequences as a result of such sudden awakenings.
I feel a sharp sense of relief—and anticipation. (Carver 1981)
Turning now to the category of collocations with a sharp sense that refer to a
permanent quality rather than a momentary emotion and cannot combine with the
auxiliary verb feel, we can start with the following examples from the British
National Corpus:
The students from that time remembered a man with a sharp sense of the ridiculous; [he]
ragged them but was too shy to be intimate with them though they liked him much for his
friendliness and his humour.
Of course this sally and the discovery of our locational ancestry opened the way to
friendship, though we soon realised that we had much more in common, not least a
sharp sense of humour, which we were both going to need.
He was the kind of manager you could approach without hesitation, and he had a sharp
sense of humour.
Others display a sharp sense of personal responsibility and self-reliance.
The collocations a sharp sense of humor and a sharp sense of the ridiculous
may bring to mind expressions like a sharp tongue and be linked with biting
humor, sharp barbs, and sarcasm, but such an interpretation would clearly not be
appropriate in the cases cited here, where both a sharp sense of humor and a
sharp sense of the ridiculous are linked with friendliness.
When we try to pinpoint the semantic import of a sharp sense in such contexts,
we will find it helpful to start with the expression a sharp sense of smell. This is, of
course, a different sense of the word sense, which does not involve self-awareness
and can be applied even to animals like bats or frogs but may nonetheless have been
the point of departure for the more reflective category, including expressions like a
sharp sense of observation, a sharp sense of humor, and a sharp sense of right and
wrong. While a bat or a frog can have a sharp sense of smell but cannot have a sharp
sense of the ridiculous, some semantic element of the phrase a sharp sense may,
nonetheless, be shared in both uses. Roughly speaking, the shared core of both these
uses can be articulated as “they can’t miss it.” Frogs cannot miss certain kinds of
smells when they present themselves in their environment, and people with a sharp
sense of the ridiculous cannot miss something ridiculous when it presents itself in a
situation that they are in.
It is particularly instructive to compare a sharp sense of smell with a keen
sense of smell, given that both these expressions imply an above-average ability
to detect smells. But a keen sense of smell in a dog (for example, a bloodhound)
suggests that the dog is not only able to detect faint smells but also wants (and
perhaps is even eager) to do so, whereas there is no such implication in a sharp
246 SENSE
sense of smell (and in fact, a sharp sense of smell can be a nuisance rather than a
blessing). Furthermore, a sharp sense cannot be replaced with a keen sense in
sentences in which someone’s heightened sensitivity to smells is presented as
undesirable or offensive, as in the following examples (from a Google search):
When a chemically sensitive person—whatever the cause of his or her sensitivity—experiences

chemical assault, it is not the more innocuous meaning we think of as our average sense of
smell. It is a more thorough and penetrating entry of the offending substance in the body and
cells of the individual. It may seem to be an unusually sharp sense of smell. The person’s
sense of smell, as well as other irritating sensations, may be quite heightened.
Immediately after surgery . . . I experienced an extremely sharp sense of smell as I “came
back.” As I regained consciousness, my first sense to return to me seemed to be smell. Though
I was still "out,” the aftershave of an Army medic felt like ice picks jabbing into my nose.
Perfumes disgust me just like makeup freaks me out. . . . Both are awful. I have a sharp
sense of smell, and both offend me. B.O. really annoys me as it doesn’t take that much
effort to get acquainted with soap and water.
Consider also the following sentence (from COBUILD), where a keen sense of
smell is used figuratively to refer to highly desirable powers of detection:
Desmond had a keen sense of smell. He could pick up a cop from a half-mile away.
A strong sense would be less plausible and less felicitous in this context than a
keen sense because what matters here is not only a sensitivity to the presence of
cops but also a desire to know whether there are any nearby.
We are now in a position to propose an explication for a sharp sense of smell
to show how it differs from that of a keen sense of smell and then to proceed to explicate
collocations like a sharp sense of observation or a sharp sense of the ridiculous:
He has a sharp sense of smell.
when there are things of some kinds in the place where he is, he can’t not know it
because he can smell [M] these things
he can know it in one moment
He has a keen sense of smell.
when there are things of some kinds in the place where he is, he can know it
because he can smell [M] these things
he wants to know it
The metaphor of sharpness in a sharp sense of smell appears to link the

unfailing and instantaneous recognition of a particular smell with that of being
jabbed by a sharp object: if a needle or a sharp nail punctures one’s finger, one
cannot fail to notice it, just like the sensory organs of an animal with a sharp
sense of smell cannot fail to instantaneously register the presence of a particular
smell. Despite the important differences between the physical sense of smell and
the cognitive sense in a sharp sense of observation and the like, the same
metaphor is arguably at play in both classes of expressions.
In the case of a sharp sense of smell, the phrase “he can’t not know it”
reflects the observer’s third-person perspective. By contrast, the reflective sense
such as a sharp sense of observation, humor, the ridiculous, propriety, or right
and wrong implies the first-person perspective of someone who is consciously
attentive to what is going on in a situation and who is so sensitive to things of a
particular kind (e.g., ridiculous, funny, improper, morally wrong) that they
cannot miss anything like this.
Furthermore, an examination of a large number of corpus examples suggests
that those with a sharp sense as a faculty are particularly attentive to certain
aspects of human behavior: They have an especially sharp eye for anything
ridiculous, improper, wrong, and the like. I cite here several examples from
Google Books that highlight this:
He was gentle and kindly, though he had a sharp sense of humor.
In this example, a sharp sense of humor is contrasted with “soft” qualities like
gentleness and kindness. One could not say, for example, “he was gentle and
kindly, though he had a great sense of humor.” A sharp sense of humor is likely to
be unwelcome to those who are the target of such humor, as it is likely to focus on
their faults or foibles. Here is another example, in which a participant’s sharp
sense of humor cuts through the deception at a séance:
At the same time, he had a sharp sense of humour. In the middle of a séance, just when
the visitor from the beyond was supposed to appear, Meyrink lit a match so that he could
see him, and that of course was the end of the séance.
The unwelcome character of a sharp sense of observation is highlighted in

the following example from an interview with a novelist:
—You have a sharp sense of observation. Does this ever cause you difficulty?
—Only when people know they’re being observed. No one likes to feel as though they are
under the microscope, so I [have] learned how to camouflage it.
In the next example, a sharp sense of fiscal responsibility suggests a sharp

eye for financial misconduct:
As present prime minister, [he] continues to provide a sharp sense of fiscal responsibility and
an eye for business opportunity. Running a country as diverse as PNG [Papua New Guinea],
and as underserviced in an infrastructural and social policy sense as it is, is a complex task.
In another example a judge’s sharp sense of humor is linked with sarcasm

and with “zapping everybody a little”:
248 SENSE
His day in court, which began precisely at 9:30 AM yesterday . . . revealed only hints
of the sarcastic wit he often employs, especially toward lawyers and journalists.
“I like him—he’s got a sharp sense of humor,” one veteran radio newsman
remarked yesterday. “Of course, he zaps everybody a little bit now and then.”
(New York Times [December 3, 1980])
And one more example (from COBUILD), where sharp sense is linked with satire
and an “acute ear for jargon and pomposity”:
Spark’s novels are enlivened by her sharp sense of the ridiculous. She has an acute ear for
jargon and pomposity and no time for political correctness. . . . Spark is endlessly
observant, seizing on absurdity, trends, and misguided seriousness as material for satire.
Examples of this kind suggest the following cognitive scenario:
She has a sharp sense of humor (the ridiculous, propriety, right and wrong).
she often thinks like this (about things of one kind, e.g., funny, ridiculous, improper, wrong):
“it is like this:
I know that something bad is happening here now
because someone is doing something
I didn’t know before that something like this would happen here now”
The sharp realization that something of particular interest is happening in

one’s surroundings is also very quick. Expressions like needle sharp and razor
sharp used in relation to a sharp sense of observation or a sharp sense of humor
appear to refer to both quickness and a satirical or critical edge of such a sense.
Here are two examples from the Internet:
With a razor-sharp sense of observation, Cécile Slanka produces a collection of cruel,

tender, and often funny texts.
Paul [was] always pushing to make the ideas bigger, and John [was] always pointing out
the cheesy bits with his needle-sharp sense of observation and humor. (“The Beatles’
Songwriting Analyzed”)
The quickness of a sharp sense has not been included, however, in the
proposed cognitive scenario because it does not seem to be the subject of the
experiencer’s reflection but rather an aspect of the quasi-bodily feeling accom-
panying this realization. This leads us to the following overall explication:
She has a sharp sense of observation (humor, the ridiculous, propriety, right and wrong).
a. she often thinks like this (about things of one kind):

“it is like this:
I know that something bad is happening here now because

someone is doing something
I didn’t know before that something like this would happen here now”
b. when she thinks like this, she can know in one moment that it is like this,
c. she can know it because when she thinks about it like this, she feels something in one
moment,
like someone can feel something bad in a part of their body in one moment
when something happens to this part of their body in one moment
because something sharp [M] touches this part of their body in one moment
The bodily model in this explication is not totally dissimilar to that attributed
to expressions like a sharp sense of disappointment: in both cases, there is an
image of a sharp object coming briefly into contact with a part of a person’s body.
In the case of emotions, however, the experience is likened to that associated with
a sharp object (like a surgeon’s knife) moving for a short time inside a part of a
person’s body. In the case of a sharp realization, on the other hand, the experi-
encer’s attention is turned outward rather than inward, and the image associated
with it appears to be that of a sharp object suddenly touching a part of a person’s
body (and perhaps piercing the skin, as a sharp nail might puncture the skin of a
toe or a finger)—no doubt a noticeable event but not necessarily one comparable
to a sharp pain caused by a surgeon’s or an attacker’s knife.
The metaphor of sharpness is used in English in many different ways and a
sharp sense may have associations that go beyond what has been spelled out in
the explications proposed here. For example, people may sometimes associate a
sharp sense of observation with a sharp eye and even a sharp mind, as well as a
sharp sense of humor with a sharp tongue. The physical property of sharpness
(cf. Goddard and Wierzbicka 2007) is involved in the meanings of all these
expressions but in different ways. A sharp tongue implies skill in hurting people
with words (as if words were sharp objects capable of inflicting calculated hurt on
people’s bodies). A sharp mind is as precise and effective in solving mental
problems as a sharp instrument can be in carrying out physical tasks. A sharp eye
is similar to a sharp instrument insofar as it is quick and unfailing in its operation,
and so on.
One could ask then: why should expressions like a sharp sense of observa-
tion not be interpreted via the image of a sharp instrument unfailingly achieving
the agent’s purpose rather than of a sharp object suddenly touching a person’s
body?
Indeed, a sharp sense of observation may well seem comparable in
its implications to a sharp eye and a sharp mind, that is, be seen as an
effective sharp instrument at the service of its possessor or wielder. Consider,
however, collocations like a sharp sense of the ridiculous or a sharp sense
250 SENSE
of propriety. Here, the metaphor of a highly sensitive sensory detector seems

more apposite than that of a sharp instrument. For example, if I have a
sharp sense of the ridiculous, I cannot fail to notice the absurd aspects of
the situation I am in—as I cannot fail to notice that I have stepped barefoot
on a sharp object. In this case, the comparison with a situation in which
one’s body comes into unexpected contact with a sharp object seems
more plausible than that of an agent purposefully using a sharp instrument.
Since this approach can be extended to all sentences with a sharp sense (as a
permanent personal characteristic), whereas the alternative seems applicable to
only some of them, this is the approach that I have followed in the proposed
explication.
6.4. A Good Sense (of Something)
Among all the adjectival collocations with sense, good sense is seemingly the
simplest, and yet this simplicity is deceptive, and in fact, good sense may well be
the most challenging of the whole set. There are a few distinct types of collocations
with good sense. The most salient and probably the commonest type is the one
illustrated by the following sentences from the Internet with a good sense of balance:5
By what age do healthy kids have a good sense of balance?

How could you change the way you walk to safely get across a slippery floor?
No experience is necessary; however, a good sense of balance is required (you must be
able to ride a bicycle).
Roofers must have no fear of height, have a good sense of balance and a better-than-
average sense of safety for themselves and their coworkers.
Our sense of balance is critically important. After all, we need a good sense of balance to
dance well! As we age, our sense of balance decreases unless we exercise it.
If we are going to live both long and well, a good sense of balance is essential. Research
shows that one-third of people over the age of sixty-five fall at least once each year, and
these falls can have devastating consequences.
One could argue that a good sense of balance is like a good sense of smell: an
ability grounded in the body and devoid of any cognitive dimension. When one
considers, however, a larger set of expressions that refer to bodily skills and
present those skills in terms of a “good sense,” one is less likely to altogether
reject the idea of some sort of awareness, however vague. In fact, an examination
of many corpus examples suggests that a good sense of balance, a good sense of
timing, and a good sense of rhythm all imply a certain level of cognitive
awareness—a particular ability to think in sync with one’s body rather than
merely to move it in a specific way.
It is true that a good sense of balance can be attributed to animals:
Because cats have a good sense of balance, people believe that they will always land on
their feet.
But a certain amount of knowledge, as well as some rudimentary thinking,

can also be attributed to animals. It seems that in ordinary language a
good sense of balance can be more easily—and more seriously—attributed to
humanlike animals like apes and monkeys and to pets like cats than to
frogs, mice, or grasshoppers; and sentences that attribute it to birds or insects
sound scientific. It seems likely, then, that, when people attribute a good sense
of balance to animals, they are looking at them through the prism of a
concept that prototypically applies to people and implies some awareness of
what one is doing. The scientific use of the expression a good sense of balance
builds on that:
In order to have a good sense of balance we need to be able to see where we are and be
aware of the position of certain parts of our bodies in relation to the things around us.
Balance is a learned process. If one or more of our balance systems does not work very
well, then the body is very good at compensating for this.
A good sense of balance, rhythm, or time is not necessarily innate, and it can
be developed through practice and conscious effort:
Some of us have a better sense of time than others, while most need some training. The use
of a metronome is very important, as it will help to develop a good sense of time.
Aural perception and musical memory will grow with a strong emphasis on encouraging
good singing voices and a good sense of time.
MV: What do you feel is the best way to develop a good sense of time?
CR: Playing with musicians that have a good time.
Textual examples of this kind suggest that a good sense of time (in the
relevant sense), far from being a purely instinctive physical ability, is based as
much on cognitive reflexes as on purely physical ones. I believe they support the
hypothesis that expressions like a good sense of time (rhythm, balance, etc.)
imply some cognitive content. For example, it appears that a performer with a
good sense of time needs to know, however instinctively, when and when not to
do something and needs to know it throughout the performance. The following
example (from An Introduction to Jazz Improvisation on the Internet) highlights
this aspect of good sense by using the verbs keep and maintain:
Vary your rhythms, and try to keep a good sense of time. In order to maintain a good sense
of melody, think about what you would sing, and use your instrument as an extension of
your voice.
Consider also the following extract from an interview with a blind athlete
who, while running a race, relies on what she calls her “good sense of mechanics”:
RACHEL MEALEY: Marla Runyan was born with macular degeneration of the retina, a
condition called Stagardt’s disease. It means she doesn’t have any central vision but
can see light and movement in her periphery. She says her vision problem means
she tends to use her other senses during a race.
252 SENSE
MARLA RUNYAN: I just, you know, have a really good sense of somebody’s mechanics
when they’re moving next to me or in front of me or . . . well, maybe not behind me, but
I have a good sense of mechanics. Obviously, yes, I can hear breathing, whether it’s
behind me or wherever, so those are all good clues. And I think certain athletes maybe
can use those to [enhance] their abilities, and I definitely use those just instinctively.
(ABC Radio, The World Today [September 27, 2000])
Marla Runyan wants to run well, and she can run well because in the course
of a race she knows (however instinctively) what is happening next to her or in
front of her. She can run well because throughout the race she is carefully
monitoring her own actions and the events accompanying them. This fits in
well with the following explication:
She has a good sense of (balance, rhythm, time, mechanics).
a. she can think like this (about things of one kind):

“it is like this:
I know that I want to do something here for some time now
I want to do it well
I can do it well if I know well all the time what is happening
I can know it”
b. when she thinks like this (about something of this kind), she can do it well
because she can know these things well,
like people can know well that they are doing something
with some parts of their body when they are doing it
c. she can know it because when she thinks like this, she can feel something,
Expressions like good sense of balance, good sense of time, and good sense of
rhythm appear to refer, in most cases, to physical movement that requires some
coordination and ongoing monitoring of what one is doing. But would the same
kind of analysis apply to other common collocations with good sense, for example,
to a good sense of proportion? Let us examine some examples:
Pamela Gray’s screenplay has a good sense of proportion and pacing; the writer also does
a nice job of helping us keep a frame of reference throughout the story’s ten-year time
frame.
These are really good; you have a good sense of proportion. I would prefer to see the
sketches embedded into the thread rather than as thumbnails, though.
Information design relies on a good sense of proportion, an effective use of visual grids to
help guide layout, a judicious eye for color (using it to reinforce consistency rather than to
dazzle the eye), and, above all, a visual logic and ordering that facilitates digestion and
synthesis of information.
Characters are drawn with a good sense of proportion, so the cast looks fun and
reasonable in a cartoonish sort of way.
Most of the firm’s designs are utilitarian and indicate tight budget controls, at the same
time showing a good sense of proportion, discreet handling of decorative elements, and
thorough knowledge of construction technology.
In all these excerpts, a good sense of proportion is linked with a certain

activity, and they all imply that whatever the people involved are doing, they are
doing it well and are carefully monitoring the progress of their activity and its
effects. It appears, therefore, that the same cognitive scenario that we have
assigned to a good sense of balance and a good sense of time is applicable
here, too.
Apart from a good sense of humor, to which I return later, three other
collocations with a good sense deserve special attention as they are both very
common and instructive. They are a good sense of direction, a good sense of
orientation, and a good sense of time (the latter in a sense different from that
already discussed). I start with some examples of a good sense of direction:
He has a good sense of direction. He always makes it back home.

For a moment I’m almost sad that he has a good sense of direction; we land right back
where we started.
I made it only because I was traveling with my ex, who agreed to come with me and has a
good sense of direction.
Like his grandfather, Antonio Pruneda Bill said he, too, has a good sense of direction.
“I never get lost,” said Antonio Pruneda Bill.
There was no one there whom we could ask, but Sam has a good sense of direction, and
Diane and I just followed him.
To say that Rick Shook has a good sense of direction would be an understatement. As a
military pilot for twenty years, Rick navigated his way all over the world.
The expression a good sense of direction seems to imply that when one
wants to know in what direction one should go, one is able to quickly figure it out.
This suggests the following explication:
She has a good sense of direction.
a. she can think like this:

it is like this:
I know that I am in this place now
I want to be in another place
I want to know well where this other place is”
c. she can know it well because when she thinks like this, she feels something,
254 SENSE

One could argue that a good sense of direction implies an ability not only to
know but also to do something well. The explication follows the hypothesis that
of the two, only the first ability is really essential to a good sense of direction, but
the matter is debatable.
A good sense of orientation is closely related to a good sense of direction,
and in some contexts it might seem that the two could be used interchangeably.
On reflection, however, one realizes that there is at least one difference between
the two:a good sense of orientation is, roughly speaking, about wanting to know
where one is (in relation to other places), whereas a good sense of direction
focuses on wanting to know where one’s destination is in relation to where one
is now:
Out on foot we certainly felt exposed and thus somewhat relieved to find our way back to
the car after an hour and a half on foot, even my good sense of orientation shot to pieces,
and dusk rapidly approaching.
The two essential criteria judged throughout the course are a good sense of orientation
and the ability to detect and anticipate obstacles.
I really have a good sense of orientation. I can drive into Budapest and find Keleti station
without a map, having been to the city only once.
The character has a good sense of orientation and is able to keep track of his or her
bearings in the midst of winding trails and turning passages.
In either case, a good map, good trail sense, a good sense of orientation, and a good
command of Greek (to ask the locals for directions) are invaluable tools.
As these examples illustrate, a good sense of orientation is typically linked with

activities such as walking, hiking, traveling, and generally finding one’s way
around in unfamiliar surroundings. But in this case the most salient aspect of the
skill or talent in question is the ability to know something about the place where
one is and to know it well.
She has a good sense of orientation.
a. she can think like this about the place where she is:
“it is like this:
I want to know well where this place is”

because something is happening in the place where this someone is
A patient who wakes up after an operation and wonders “Where am I?” may
be able to quickly answer the question on the basis of various clues, but this
would not be evidence of a good sense of orientation. The reason is, I suggest,
that a good sense of orientation implies a different question: not “Where am I?”
but “Where is this place (where I am now)?” Figuring out, quickly and reliably,
where a place is usually requires some attention to its relation to other places, but
perhaps this does not need to be made explicit in the cognitive scenario as such.
Turning now to a good sense of time in the sense that interests us now, let us
consider the following examples:
I have a good sense of time and therefore don’t wear a watch.

Najib observes that there has been a change in the attitude of today’s ME [Middle Eastern]
tourists. . . . “In recent years, they have become more travel savvy. . . . This is especially so
when they join tour groups—there were complaints from other tourists before that they do
not have a very good sense of time. But in the last one or two years, they have realized that
international tourism requires punctuality.”
He also does not have a good sense of time: At one o’clock in the afternoon, he may ask,
“Have we had lunch yet?”
So degraded was the old town that nobody had a watch. Instead, an old man who was
supposed to have a good sense of time was employed to strike the church bell.
Time sense is the skill of estimating how long a task will take to accomplish. A good sense
of time will help you be more realistic in planning your activities. It helps prevent the
frustration of never having quite enough time to accomplish tasks.
As these examples illustrate, a good sense of time can refer to the ability either
to guess what time it is or to estimate how much time has passed since something
happened. Both these possibilities are reflected in the following explication:
She has a good sense of time.
a. she can think like this about a time:

“it is like this:
I want to know something about this time (now)
I want to know what time it is/I want to know
how long before something happened
256 SENSE
In real life, wanting to know what time it is or how much time has passed is
usually linked with wanting to do something at a certain time. Nonetheless, it
seems clear that the expression a good sense of time (in the relevant sense) does
not inherently imply such a link.
This means that this expression is genuinely ambiguous: a musician who
displays ‘a good sense of time (or timing)’ while performing music may not have
‘a good sense of time’ in the sense of quickly figuring out what time it is or how
much time has passed. The former implies keeping time (by knowing what is
happening); the latter, estimating time (through a quick thought). In both cases,
however, a cognitive scenario is associated with some knowledge about time that
is potentially acquired through a quasi-bodily feeling.
As indicated at the outset, there are a few different uses of the expression
good sense in English, and it is not possible to discuss them all in detail here. One
type, however, needs to be mentioned and illustrated because it involves some of
the expressions discussed in this chapter and because the difference between the
two types requires some clarification.
Consider, for example, the following excerpt from the Internet with a good
sense of balance:
For all its flaws, our health system is a lot better than the health system of most other
countries. And one of the reasons for that is that we have a sense of balance. We
don’t say the health system should be run entirely by the government or by the
public sector, and we don’t think it should be run entirely by the private sector and
be completely in private hands. We have a good sense of balance. We have
Medicare— . . . but we also have a very strong, private health system. . . . in other
words, we get the balance right; we don’t go one way or the other. (address by
Australian prime minister John Howard to a community meeting, April 18, 2007,
from John Howard’s Web site)
This excerpt from the prime minister’s address claims, first of all, that the
government’s health policy is characterized by a sense of balance. Having
made this claim, the prime minister then emphasizes that such a sense of balance
is a good thing—and this additional point is made by means of the expression a
good sense of balance. The point is not that the government’s sense of balance is
good (rather than, for example, poor) but that it is—obviously—a good thing. The
same applies to the following example:
She says her life here has a “good sense of balance”. She means that all aspects have equal
time—so she is not spending all her time studying or working. She also spends time at the
beach or doing other relaxing activities.
What applies to a sense of balance presented as an unquestionably good

thing also applies to the sense of proportion in the following examples:
Barbara Allen, CIC director, attended very briefly to introduce Susan Singleton, the new
director of the Center for Library Initiatives. . . . Barbara felt that Susan’s prior experience
would give her a good sense of proportion about what’s important in the CIC.
Conservative shadow chancellor George Osborne said Mrs. Hodge had vastly overstated
the case. There needed to be a good sense of proportion, he argued, urging the media to
think very carefully before putting the BNP story at the top of the news agenda. The BNP
had only 21 councilors out of a total of 22,000 nationwide, he added.
Pupils are confident, self-assured, and sensitive to the needs of others. . . . They have no
concerns about bullying and keep a good sense of proportion about minor disagreements.
Both entrees were very good renditions of classics. . . . Don’t expect the huge portions of
those old San Francisco haunts, though. Chef Radouane has a good sense of balance and
proportion and doesn’t overburden his plates with the main event.
“A sense of proportion,” too, is presented here as something that is unques-

tionably a virtue. It is not a question of displaying “a good sense of proportion”
but rather of displaying “a sense of proportion” tout court, and it is taken for
granted that this “sense of proportion” is a good thing.
The observation that a good sense (of something) is often used to praise
personal characteristics seen as obviously and unquestionably valuable can help
us to realize that certain common expressions involving sense can be ambiguous
and that speakers may use them without realizing this. This applies, in particular,
to the phrase a good sense of humor, to which I soon turn. Before doing so,
however, let me note that the ambiguity of many collocations with good sense can
also explain some puzzling anomalies in frequencies found in Google searches.
For example, Google searches generally support native speakers’ intuition
that good sense does not readily collocate with emotion terms—especially, of
course, negative ones but in many cases positive ones as well. For example, while
figures for deep sense of shame, deep sense of guilt, and deep sense of sadness
are, relatively speaking, very high, those for the corresponding expressions with
good are practically nonexistent, and in fact, the same applies to a good sense
of gratitude, a good sense of peace, and a good sense of joy (see tables 6.10
and 6.11):6
TABLE 6.10. Deep sense and good sense with negative emotions
deep sense of shame 16,000 good sense of shame 6
deep sense of guilt 12,000 good sense of guilt 4
deep sense of sadness 12,000 good sense of sadness 2
TABLE 6.11. Deep sense and good sense with positive emotions
deep sense of gratitude 45,000 good sense of gratitude 3
deep sense of peace 30,000 good sense of peace 11
deep sense of joy 600 good sense of joy 4

258 SENSE
At the same time, however, the figures for a good sense of pride were very
high, indeed, higher than those for a deep sense of pride. This is in stark contrast
to, for example, a good sense of guilt, which hardly occurs at all (see table 6.12).
TABLE 6.12.
deep sense of pride 22,000 good sense of pride 27,000
deep sense of guilt 12,000 good sense of guilt 4
A possible explanation for this apparent anomaly is that a sense of pride can
be seen as a valuable and healthy personal characteristic comparable to a sense of
self-esteem and that many Internet materials would reflect and even foster such an
attitude toward a sense of pride.
Both a sense of pride and a sense of self-esteem may well be seen as
relatively new targets for promotion and endorsement in educational and psycho-
logical literature and no doubt in feminist writings, as well as important subjects
for discussion.
The hypothesis that both a sense of pride and a sense of self-esteem are
promoted in this way in educational, psychological, and sociological literature is
supported by the widespread use of the adjective healthy in combination with
these two collocations. It is also supported by the fact that a sense of pride can be
used side by side with self-esteem:
Self-esteem and a healthy sense of pride in oneself are central issues with Letter 5.
The individual needs to “shine” in life, to feel “special” in some sense.
Here are some other examples with a healthy sense of pride that speak explicitly
of the need to promote such a sense:
Effective Parenting: Character Development for Children with ADD: Actively promote a
healthy sense of pride for children in themselves and their family.
Girl Scout Council of Buffalo and Erie County, Inc.: Develop interpersonal and teamwork
skills; develop self-confidence, self-reliance, and a healthy sense of pride that comes with
personal achievement.
Teaching Tolerance: A Teachers’ Guide to Understanding and Correcting Racial Hatred
in the Classroom: Pointing out the ethnicity of historical figures gives white students a
healthy sense of pride just as black role models increase the morale of black students.
Sesame Workshop—Gender: Two to Five: In the preschool years parents have a chance to
establish in children a healthy sense of pride in gender, to teach them that it is equally
great to be a boy or a girl.
The phrase a healthy sense of self-esteem is used in similar contexts:
How Can We Strengthen Children’s Self-esteem? How Can We Help Children Develop a
Healthy Sense of Self-esteem?
Amazon.com: Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-esteem: In her [bell hooks’s]
estimation, it has been extremely difficult to create a culture that promotes and sustains
a healthy sense of self-esteem in African American communities.
Self-esteem and children and facts and strategies for parents: Most parents want their
young children to have a healthy sense of self-esteem.
Generally speaking, investigating values and attitudes with Google is a new

venture and an unexamined territory. For careless and overconfident explorers
this territory could prove a minefield. For cautious and patient ones, however, it
could also prove a gold mine.
This brings me back to the phrase good sense of humor, which is the most
common English collocation with good sense. An examination of a large
number of corpus examples suggests that this collocation is used in English in
two different ways—a fact that the writers of personal advertisements using this
phrase or the acronym GSOH may often not be aware of. Roughly speaking, a
person with a good sense of humor can be either someone who is good at
cracking jokes or someone who definitely has a sense of humor, which is a good
thing.
Often these two meanings can be distinguished with reference to their
opposites: a good sense of humor can be contrasted with either a bad sense of
humor or no sense of humor. This diagnostic test is by no means infallible
because bad sense of humor, too, can be used in two different senses: it can
mean, roughly speaking, that someone has a propensity to make bad jokes (or to
make jokes in inappropriate situations) or that someone has no sense of humor at
all. More commonly, however, a bad sense of humor refers to bad humor rather
than to no humor, so to some degree it can indeed be a diagnostic for one of the
meanings of a good sense of humor.
A good sense of humor, understood as a special talent and skill, can be
compared with a good sense of balance, a good sense of rhythm, and a good
sense of timing: it suggests that someone is good at these things. Some examples:
The artists say that living in the rural area of Barmoya . . . aids them in their
artwork . . . “You reflect the landscape you live in and the people you live with . . . It’s
just wonderful because people have a very good sense of humour; it’s a very dry sense of
humour, and it certainly appeals to both of us.”
A group of people who say, “I Love a Good Sense of Humour,” featuring chats, forums,
personal stories, news, polls, recommendations, videos, pictures . . .
A successful illustrator, therefore, must have a good sense of humor so as to make his
work more interesting and popular.
Tim’s Laser Beak Man was one of two hundred works from around the world selected by a
jury for exhibition in the International VSA Arts Festival in Washington, D.C. Jean
Kennedy Smith, founder of the VSA Arts Festival . . . says Tim’s work is “fun” and that
his “good sense of humor” comes through in the adventures of Laser Beak Man.
A good sense of humor of the kind these examples mention is seen as a

special talent and skill. It is the opposite of a bad sense of humor as used in the
260 SENSE
following example, in which a fisherman tells a story of how he “almost ran over
a man bobbing about in the open sea, clinging to a bamboo raft”:
And he was just sort of waving above his head a couple of times, and he waved at
me, so I sort of waved back, and, you know, you get this, what are you doing here?
What are you doin’ here, brother? He said, me trawler sank. I said, geez, you’d be
glad to see me, wouldn’t ya? He said, oh . . . you know, poor bugger, he just, he
wouldn’t have gone too much longer, ey? . . . Anyway, I got him in the boat, we had
a bit of a yarn. I had a bad sense of humour, and I was crackin’ a few jokes ’n’ that,
and he said, oh, me Dad’s missin’, and I just shut up, ya know? (Old Fisherman’s
Tale of Survival, ABC Radio, December 13, 2004)
This fisherman was clearly not lacking in a sense of humor, and he was not
reluctant to exercise it, either, but when he did exercise it, it was, in his own
judgment, “a bad sense of humor.”
The other meaning of a good sense of humor, normally contrasted with no sense
of humor, is illustrated by the following comment on four American presidents:
It’s pretty obvious that Peanut Jimmy has no sense of humor. That’s one of the reasons
Reagan destroyed him in the 1980 campaign. They tell me Bush has a good sense of
humor, but I’ve never seen much evidence of it. Nixon surely had a sense of humor,
although it was of a distinctly Nixonian type.
Here, a good sense of humor is attributed to Bush, whereas Carter is alleged to have
no sense of humor. The claim is not that Bush’s sense of humor was particularly
good (funny) but that, unlike Carter, he was not devoid of such a sense.
Here are a few other similar examples:
A study done at the University of Maryland Medical Center suggests that a good sense of
humor and the ability to laugh at stressful situations help mitigate the damaging physical
effects of distressing emotions.
Clive Barry has been a driver for more than twenty years, and he says you’ve just got to
have a lot of patience and a good sense of humor.
Having a good sense of humor is one of the most important characteristic of all happy and
successful people. A good sense of humor helps you to solve problems, improve your
relationships, and have a positive outlook on virtually every aspect of your life.
A good sense of humor is the least expensive of all medicines to beat stressful moments in
our lives.
A good intelligence officer needs to have a good sense of humor.
I am not suggesting that the expression a sense of humor is ambiguous,

although different people may tend to attribute a sense of humor to others on the
basis of different criteria. In fact, it has been claimed that men’s criteria for doing so
tends to be different from women’s. The two interpretations could be distinguished
as “passive” and “active” or as a receptor’s vs. a producer’s sense of humor:
That sought-after trait in a mate—“good sense of humour”—is more complex than

originally thought. In fact, men and women define it differently. Eric Bressler, a
graduate student at McMaster University who is studying the role of humour in
personal attraction, discovered in a survey of 150 students that, to a woman, “sense
of humour” means someone who makes her laugh; to a man, a sense of humour
means someone who appreciates his jokes. “There’s a difference between producers
(those who make you laugh) and receptors (those who laugh when someone cracks a
joke),” said Bressler. “Women choose men who produce humour 62 percent of the
time; conversely, men choose women who appreciate their humour 65 percent of
the time.” (Medical News Today, http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/
19843.php)
However, even though in the case of a sense of humor different people may
use different criteria for making (or not making) the attribution in question, in the
case of a good sense of humor there appears to be a genuine ambiguity. The
producer’s good sense of humor can be explicated as follows:
He has a good sense of humor.
a. he can think like this (about things of one kind):

“it is like this:
I know that I want to do something here now
[because I want people here to laugh [M]]
I can do it well if I know well how I can do it here now
I can know it”
b. when he thinks like this, he can do it well
because he can know well at that time how he can do it at that time,
like people can know well what they are doing
with some parts of their body when they are doing it
c. he can know it well because when he thinks like this, he feels something,
when something is happening to some parts of their body
A receptor’s good sense of humor combines the meaning of a sense of humor

(explicated in chapter 5) with the additional component “this is good” or “it is
good if someone is like this.”
She has a good sense of humor.
a. she often thinks like this about the place where she is:
“it is like this:
I know that something is happening here now,
I know that people can laugh [M] because of this”
b. when she thinks like this, she can know well that it is like this,
like people can know well that something is happening in a place
262 SENSE

c. she can know it because, when she thinks like this, she can feel something,
d. it is good if someone is like this
6.5. A Great Sense (of Something)
The phrase a great sense (of) can be used in two different ways, depending
largely on the verb: one can have “a great sense of ” (e.g., humor, style, fun,
adventure), and one can feel “a great sense of” (e.g., satisfaction, accomplish-
ment, loss, urgency).
The collocation a great sense of humor is by far the most common among
all these, and it expresses, roughly speaking, the speaker’s enthusiastic praise
for someone’s special gift. I discuss this enthusiastic use of great sense
later. First, however, I examine the other broad category: a “great sense” (of
something) that is “felt” rather than “had ”.
If we search all the phrases, including great sense (of), on Google, we will
find at least eighty nouns that can occur as their complements. At the same time,
we will find that there are great differences in the results for various combinations
and that these differences appear to be far from random. We will also find a small
number of peaks in this wide and diverse range.
Consider, for example, the following contrasts in the number of hits for great
sense of pride and great sense of guilt (see table 6.13):7
TABLE 6.13.
sense of pride 1,200,000
great sense of pride 70,000
sense of guilt 500,000
great sense of guilt 9,000
According to table 6.13, sense of pride is roughly twice as common as sense of

guilt, but great sense of pride is roughly eight times more common than great
sense of guilt. Apparently there is something about sense of pride that attracts the
modifier great, at least in comparison with sense of guilt.
This conclusion is strengthened by a comparison of great sense and deep sense
in relation to both pride and guilt: While both sense of pride and sense of guilt
readily combine with deep, sense of pride clearly prefers great (three times as
common as deep), whereas sense of guilt shows no such preference (see table 6.14).
TABLE 6.14.
great sense of pride 70,000 great sense of guilt 9,000
deep sense of pride 20,000 deep sense of guilt 12,000
There are two possible explanations for these contrasts, not necessarily
exclusive: first, great sense may favor emotions with a public dimension rather
than purely private ones, and second, great sense may favor good feelings over
bad feelings.
The high figures of a great sense of pride and the contrast between pride and
guilt could be linked with the potentially public character of pride and the private
character of guilt. Pride involves thinking about what other people may think or
say about us, whereas guilt does not.
The relevance of the public/private dimension to great sense is also sup-
ported by the marked contrast in results obtained for great sense of community
(common) and great sense of self (rare). Here, the difference in proportions is
staggering (see table 6.15):
TABLE 6.15.
sense of community 1,500,000
great sense of community 114,000
sense of self 1,500,000
great sense of self 11,400
As we have seen in the section on sense of self, this phrase, too, can readily
take some modifiers, especially strong. The results for great sense of self, however,
were nearly twenty times lower than those for strong sense of self. Sense
of community attracts both great and strong, and while strong sense of community
is more common than great sense of community, the latter is also very high—
according to the Google searches done in April 2007 and then again in March 2008,
ten times as high as great sense of self. A sense of community is a sense shared by
many people, whereas a sense of self is obviously individual, not communal, so the
sharp contrast in the results of Google searches for these two expressions is telling.
Our discussion so far leads us to the following cognitive scenarios (partial
explications only):
She felt a great sense of pride (satisfaction, relief, failure, loss).

“it is like this:
264 SENSE
I know that something very good/very bad is happening (to me/here) now
I feel something very good/very bad now
many people can know that this is happening
many people can feel something good/bad because of this”
In addition to this cognitive scenario, the phrase a great sense of also implies (like
other sense of phrases) a feeling comparable to a kind of bodily feeling and some
knowledge arising from it.
What could be a likely bodily prototype of a “public” sense relating to
certain fortunate or unfortunate events? It is reasonable to suggest that such a
prototype is likely to involve a shared physical experience—for example, the
experience of many people watching a football game or a cricket match or of a
crowd at the beach or a nightclub. As for the knowledge arising from such a
mental and physical experience, presumably it must be the knowledge that what
happened was indeed something very good (as in the case of a great sense of
pride or satisfaction) or something very bad (as in the case of a great sense
of loss).
Thus, we arrive at the following two explications (not of all the collocations
with great sense but of its two salient types):
She felt a great sense of relief/satisfaction/loss/failure.
a. she thought like this (about something) at that time:

“it is like this:
I know that something very good/very bad is happening (to me/here) now
many people can know that this is happening
many people can feel something good/bad because of this”
b. when she thought like this, she could know at the same time that it was like this,
c. she could know it because, when she thought like this, she felt something
very good/very bad,
like someone can feel something very good/very bad in their body
because they are in a place where it is happening at that time to
many people’s bodies
The “public” character of great sense posited in these explications is sup-

ported by textual analysis of examples considered in context.8 For example, when
one reads sentences with great sense in COBUILD, one is struck by the collective
character of most of them, especially when seen in a larger context:
Nancy Jarratt, London-based director of Moët et Chandon, tells me that not only she
doesn’t object to the spraying but the French headquarters of Moët actually supply the
champagne. After the driver has won the race, there’s a great sense of relief, and the
champagne expresses how everyone feels, she says. [car races]
Relieved Coyle admitted the Dalymount Park result gave him more satisfaction than his
brace [two goals] at the Brandywell. He said Bohs acted professionally and played the
game the way it should be played. We’ve experienced a great sense of relief. [report of a
football game]
I’ll wear a veil like an Arab girl. I’ll do a striptease. You mean a belly dance? Yeah, I’ll do that.
I swear. . . . They both laughed, a great sense of relief flooding them both. [a shared laugh]
Now, after fifty years apart, mum and daughter have been reunited. “It was the most
wonderful feeling I have ever had in my life,” said Joyce. Christine, whose adoptive
parents are now dead, said, “There were no great tears, just a great sense of relief. It was
amazing. There was a lot to catch up on.” [a reunion]
Other databases point in the same direction. Two examples from Australian
Web sites:
Cycle Queensland gets kids active and gives them a great sense of accomplishment after
completing a long ride. (“Ultimate School Camp,” Cycle Queensland, http://www.bq.org.
au/cq/schools.php)
This is a brilliant art activity to undertake in a rural/bush setting, as it requires no laborious
preparation and increases an awareness of the elements in nature. It creates a total
immersion in the project, and the end results promote self-esteem, team cohesion, and a
great sense of accomplishment for all students. (A Study of Artist Andy Goldsworthy,
Web site of Ccam, Arts, Science, and Technology)
While positive feelings predominate in combination with a great sense—

perhaps because they are more readily manifested in English-speaking cultures—
a shared great sense of loss is also, as mentioned, very common. Here is an
example from COBUILD:
Three minutes later, as pupils were being led to safety, Mr. Smith returned to the room. It
was just like something from a horror film, he said. Everyone is feeling a great sense of
loss. Children have lost a friend, and that is hard to come to terms with. Teacher Graham
Nellist, who had been taking the math class, was comforted by members of the staff after
the ordeal.
Let us consider in turn the following sentence, which refers to a great sense
of confusion that a partially deaf boy displayed at times in a classroom:
She portrays Greg’s moments of success together with his great sense of confusion when
his hearing disability has an impact on his ability to learn.
By itself, a sense of confusion does not imply that other people can be aware of
one’s confusion and can even feel something (for example, malevolence or pity)
because of this, but a great sense of confusion does seem to imply an expectation
that one may be looked at by others. This makes perfect sense in the situation of
the deaf boy. Thus, while a great sense of confusion is not one of the more
266 SENSE
common collocations with great sense, when it is used, it lends itself to the line of
interpretation developed here, and it can be explicated along the lines suggested
earlier.
While it is not possible to undertake here an exhaustive study of all the
common collocations combining great sense with the verb feel, it should be noted
that this phrase does not always imply either good feelings or bad ones: There are
also some collocations with great sense in which the nature of the feeling is
unspecified. The most common ones in this category are a great sense of
responsibility, a great sense of urgency, and a great sense of purpose—all
referring to the experiencer’s intention to do something. A few examples from
COBUILD illustrate the public (or shared) character of this type:
The report needs to be addressed with a great sense of urgency, Tony Hallett, the RFU
secretary who chaired the commission, said.
We may feel a great sense of responsibility toward all our children and do what we
believe is best for them, but it’s impossible to love them all equally or even to share their
interests.
The third perspective the production encompasses is the present day, achieved by Foster
“breaking out” of Inspector Goole mode at the play’s end to speak directly and with a
great sense of urgency to the audience with the full house lights up.
The semantic common core of such collocations, which depends on the

contribution of great, can be explicated as follows:
She felt a great sense of urgency/responsibility/purpose.

“it is like this:
I know that something very good will happen if I do something
many people can know this
many people can feel something because of this
I want to do it”
like people can know that something is happening in a place when
they are in that place
c. she could know it because, when she thought like this, she felt something,
because they are doing something with many other people at that time
It is time to return to the first broad category of great sense expressions with
which we started: that including a great sense of humor. As noted at the outset, “a
great sense of humor” is something that one “has” rather than “feels”, and it is a
special gift for which the speaker is expressing enthusiastic praise. Despite this
fundamental difference between a feeling and a gift, we can now establish that
the two broad classes of great sense expressions share a number of semantic
components and in particular, that they both include a reference to many people.
Let us first consider the difference between a good sense of humor and a
great sense of humor—both extremely common expressions in English.
First of all, a good sense of humor expresses an objective evaluation, whereas
a great sense of humor expresses the speaker’s enthusiasm for the quality in
question. But the enthusiasm that the speaker expresses with the phrase a great
sense of humor implies not only that the speaker him- or herself enjoys and
appreciates someone’s sense of humor but also that many people can appreciate
it. There is something public about a great sense of humor, as there is something
public about a great sense of pride, loss, or responsibility, and the speaker’s
enthusiasm for that great sense of humor appears to be motivated partly by the
fact that this sense of humor is a source of enjoyment for many other people:
Even during the last eighteen months, when mum was really quite poorly and had
additionally contracted MRSA [methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus], she still
had a great sense of humor. We constantly laughed and joked. She never seemed down.
He had a great sense of humor and shared very funny stories with us each week.
Everyone in our family has a great sense of humor. It’s one of the wonderful things about
getting together with each other.
Given the social character of a great sense of humor, it is hardly surprising

that this expression is particularly common in obituaries and other tributes:
Anybody who has met Laurie Baker at least once will never forget him or his great sense
of humor.
To our dear Vibes, you were a fun-loving and selfless person with a great sense of humor,
who encouraged us to work together.
The same applies to the common expression a great sense of fun. First, a great
sense of fun implies the speaker’s enthusiasm rather than an objective assessment,
and second, it means looking at the person so described as an asset to other people,
which would be irrelevant to the person’s psychological assessment.
Like a great sense of humor, a great sense of fun, too, is often used in
obituaries and other public tributes:
She was a strong servant of her country and had great energy and a great sense of fun.
(tribute to Princess Margaret)
We will remember the Queen Mother for her great sense of fun and her zest for life. Her
enthusiasm and humour shone through in all she did.
The impact of somebody’s great sense (of humor, fun, adventure, style, etc.)
on others is particularly clear in examples in which it is listed with other things
that obviously benefit other people:
268 SENSE
They had a great sense of fun, cooked terrific food, taught us to appreciate a river and its
history, and did it in just five days.
Robbie Williams has a great sense of humor, a great sense of style, and a great deal of
class, and, frankly, America, you don’t know what you are missing!
People love to be around her because she is so fun to be around and has a great sense of
adventure. I think she’s the greatest!
A great sense (of humor, fun, adventure) that is a social gift can be “conta-
gious,” “caught,” “given,” or otherwise have an impact on other people:
Steve has a great sense of fun which is contagious.

I think they both [two singers and songwriters] had a great sense of humor in the face of
the disaster. With his sense of humor and through his songs, he gave people hope.
The best part is that Suresh has a great sense of humor, which made the learning all the
more enjoyable—a jam-packed day but extremely worthwhile.
A great sense—for example, a great sense of adventure or a great sense of

fun—is also often attributed to films, books, and other potential sources of shared
good feelings (entertainment, enjoyment, thrills, vicarious excitement, and so
on). It can be conveyed, (“given,” “imparted ”, etc.) to many people jointly or on
different occasions:
Monte Cristo [a movie] is a hell of a lot of fun and most definitely enjoyable, and that’s
sometimes all you want. With its great sense of fun and some lively performances, it’s a
worthwhile diversion. (movie review)
The Solar Challenge is a race between solar car teams from all over the world. . . . The
challenge gives the people involved a great sense of adventure, as well as a sense of
personal journey.
Lowell Thomas would become world famous bringing the story of T. E. Lawrence and
British general Edmund Allenby first to audiences in New York City, then London,
and later around the world. . . . Lowell would stand at the side of the movie screen stage
and narrate the movies he and his cameraman had taken of Lawrence and Allenby. . . . The
narrated movie presentation brought the audience into the war campaign and imparted a
great sense of adventure.
A new boutique hotel, a conversion of four Renaissance and Baroque houses on a quiet
street in Mala Strana [in Prague]. The Alchymist is decorated in a frothily ornate, neo-
Baroque style, which may be too much for some people. Others will love the romance, the
decadence, and the great sense of fun.
Another phrase with sense as an ability that attracts great as a modifier is a

sense of style. Apart from the great sense of humor, which is so frequent that it
can hardly be compared with any of the other great sense expressions, a great
sense of style is the most common collocation with great sense as a special ability
(more common than a great sense of fun and a great sense of timing taken
together). Clearly, a sense of style is an ability that can be assessed and appre-
ciated by many other people. Thus, the high frequency of a great sense of style
also supports the public character of great sense as an ability.9
These considerations lead us to the following explication:
She has a great sense of humor/style/fun/timing.

“it is like this:
I know that I am with other people here now
I want to do something here now
when I do it, I want these people to feel something very good because of this”
b. when she thinks like this about something of this kind, she can do something very well
because she can know something well at that time,
like people can know well that something is happening in a place when they are in
this place
because they are doing something with other people
In the case of great sense as a special ability, the cognitive scenario appears
to refer to “wanting to do something” and also to “other people,” but the bodily
prototype does not appear to refer to “other people.” A great sense of pride,
satisfaction, loss, or urgency refers to a bodily feeling that many people can share
and may well have its prototype (or one of them) in sports. A great sense of
humor, fun, style, or timing, on the other hand, appears to refer to a bodily feeling
that may be purely individual (as the five senses are individual) but leads to
behavior that many other people can recognize and appreciate.
6.6. A Real Sense (of Something)
The phrase a real sense is one of the most frequent of all the sense-phrases in
COBUILD, and it seems to highlight, in a special way, the conceptual link between
sense and reality. Consider, for example, the following sentences from the
Internet:
[Actress Gwyneth Paltrow on what it was like to have to wear a “fat suit” on the set]: “I got
a real sense of what it would be like to be that overweight . . . We all have days [when] we
do not look our best or we don’t feel comfortable in our own skin. But you have no idea
until you get into a 350-pound fat suit what it’s like.”
We got a real sense of the amount [sic] of echoes in that canyon.
Reading an unknown electronic paper for the first time, I have no real sense of its scope or
its stance or its style.
270 SENSE
In all these examples, a real sense seems to refer to real knowledge: In the first, the
speaker “really” got to know what it would “really” be like to be seriously
overweight; in the second, the echoes in the “canyon” (at the scene of John F.
Kennedy’s assassination) were so realistically re-created in a film that the film-
makers could “really” know how much of an echo there was during the historical
event; and in the third, the speaker fails to “really” know what the scope, stance, or
style of the paper is. Consider also the following example from COBUILD:
A centrally mounted speaker transforms the sound of the player when switched on,
conveying a real sense of power and scale that totally eludes many lesser boxes costing
a lot more.
Here, the word eludes makes it clear that the power and scale are real and that the
real sense that detects them brings real knowledge about them.
In examples of this kind, real (as in a real sense) appears to refer to
something real about an external situation (e.g., the scope, stance, and style of
an article). At the same time, however, it seems to refer to the experiencer’s
knowledge: a person who has a real sense of something external appears to really
know something about it and to know it on the basis of personal experience. For
example, one can get a real sense of a place if one can see that place or at least
reads a vivid description of it.
The phrase real sense conveys a curious combination of reliability and
subjectivity. Consider, for example, the following sentences from the Internet:
She has a real sense that she can solve anything.

I have a real sense that Jonathan is looking down on me.
Beside the chair, we have a small monitor TV, and in the TV a caregiver shows up, and the
caregiver talks to the patient . . . so that the patient has a real sense that he or she is always
attended by someone without that person having to move into the home.
I have a real sense that God is guiding me.
All these sentences convey the idea that the experiencers are subjectively con-
vinced that they know something and that they know it well (reliably). At the
same time, such sentences are hardly factual and verifiable.
To account for both the subjective certainty and the nonfactual character of
real sense in sentences like those considered here so far, I propose the following
explication:
She has a real sense that she can solve anything.
a. she thinks about it like this:

“it is like this:
I know that I can solve anything
I know it well, like I can know well that something is happening to me
at the time when it is happening to me”
b. when she thinks about it like this, she can know that it is like this,
According to this explication, a “real sense” has its standard and its point of
reference in one’s current personal experience. In many sentences with real sense,
personal experience is explicitly referred to as the source of the certainty. We could
try to reflect this in the explication by saying something like “I know it well
because it happened to me.” It appears, however, that such a formula would be
too restrictive to account for the whole range of real sense sentences. A formula
that treats personal experience as a standard (like) rather than a direct cause
(because) is vaguer and seems to fit the wide range of this phrase’s use better.
Arguably, the combination of the component “I know it well” with a
reference to the prototype of one’s personal knowledge anchored in a current
experience accounts quite well for the combination of subjective certainty and
objective unverifiability, noted earlier. On the face of it, know well appears to
make a stronger claim than know. In fact, however, this claim is less verifiable
and less factual than that inherent in a bare know. This accords well with the
subjective certainty of real sense.
Consider, for example, the following extract from a university’s recruitment
prospectus:
Come and see for yourself.

The best way to get a real sense of what it will be like living and studying in Bristol is to
visit the university.
How can anybody have a real sense of what is going to happen in the future?
I suggest that, in fact, future-tense sentences with real sense do not refer to future
events as such but rather to the quality of the experience. If people have already
had a certain experience, they may know well what it was like in the past, and they
may be able to project this knowledge into the future. There is an appeal here to
personal experience of the “come-and-see-for-yourself” kind as a touchstone of
authenticity and a basis for certainty even in the absence of objective evidence.
Essentially the same kind of explication would apply to sentences in other
syntactic frames, such as “we got a real sense of the amount of echoes in that
canyon” or “it gives you a real sense of what it would be like to have no water.”
I got a real sense of what it would be like to be that overweight.
a. (something happened to me at that time) I thought like this at that time:

“it is like this:
272 SENSE
I know now what it is like [to be that overweight]

at that time when it is happening to me”
b. when I thought like this, I could know that it was like this,
c. I could know it because when I thought like this, I felt something,
Let us consider in turn how this approach would apply to sentences in which
real sense refers to emotions, such as the following ones from COBUILD:
Caravaggio’s risk-taking intensity still generates a real sense of wonder.

I remember the real sense of terror that they inspired.
I had a very real sense of happiness.
A real sense of wonder/terror/happiness implies that the people in question really

felt wonder, terror, or happiness. At the same time it also seems to imply that
what they felt really was wonder, terror, and happiness in the real sense of these
words—no exaggeration, no hyperbole and no approximation but the very emo-
tions these words describe.
It is noteworthy that the collocation a real sense of the word is in fact very
common in English. Here are some examples from COBUILD:
Most common were gangs of mainly Anglo-Saxon youths formed around current fads or
fashions . . . most were not “criminal” in any real sense of the word.
Dallandra was honestly shocked that her crude and clumsy ruse was working; then she
remembered that they had no mind in any real sense of that word, no reason, no logic, no
introspection, no ability to analyze a situation or tale.
Peters says, “This literally throws everything we have known into a cocked hat—the way
we plan, the way we train, the way we execute, and in particular, the way we empower
front-line people and turn them into strategists in the real sense of the term.”
This is, of course, a different sense of the word sense—one that does not refer
to anyone’s feelings, quasi-sensory or otherwise. Yet collocations like a real
sense of wonder (happiness, terror etc.) highlight a certain conceptual (and
possibly historical) connection between these two senses: In the case of emotions,
a real sense (of a particular emotion) implies a real sense that can be accurately
described with a particular emotion word “in the real sense of the word.”
Presumably, however, those who experience a real sense of happiness not
only feel (really feel) happiness but also know (really know) that they are
experiencing happiness in the real sense of the word.
To account for these somewhat different uses of real (in the phrase real
sense) in precise semantic formulae, we need to distinguish between at least two
different types, one concerned with certain objective realities outside the person
and another, with the reality of the experiencer’s feelings. To some extent, these
two types can be linked with different auxiliary verbs: get, have, and feel. For
example, one person may have a real sense of the scope of a paper, while another
may get a real sense of the amount of echoes in the canyon, and yet another may
feel a real sense of happiness. The diagnostic value of such verbs is somewhat
limited because first, phrases like a real sense of happiness can also co-occur with
have, and second, the phrase a real sense often occurs either without any verb at
all or with one like generate or convey. Nonetheless, the inability to co-occur
with feel offers us a helpful clue, since sentences about external reality are,
generally speaking, not acceptable with feel:
*We felt a real sense of the amount of echoes in that canyon.

*I feel a real sense of its scope or its stance or its style.
For sentences in which real sense refers to emotions I propose the following
explication:
She felt a real sense of happiness/terror.

“it is like this:
I know that I feel something very good/very bad now
For the other type of real sense sentences (i.e., those that refer to an external
situation), I propose the following:
She had a real sense of what it was like (e.g., the scope, stance, and style of the paper).
a. she thought like this at that time (about that paper):

“it is like this:
I know what it is like
I know it well, like I can know well what something is like
when I am doing something with this something”
274 SENSE
because this someone is doing something at that time
She got a real sense of what it would be like (living and studying in Bristol).
a. (something happened to her at that time) she thought like this at that time:
“it is like this:
I know now what it will be like (living and studying in Bristol)
A claim like “I have a real sense of what it will be like” suggests not only a
subjective certainty that there is no mistake but also some kind of existential
authority. A confident claim relating to a future state of affairs could sound
irresponsible without some authentication. The component “I know it well like
I can know well that something is happening to me at the time when it is
happening to me” can be seen as providing such authentication.
Consider, for example, the following sentence from a film review:
You get a real sense of how the relationship between them grew.
What is happening in the movie is not happening to the viewer. How can the
viewer then get a “real” sense of what is happening to the fictional characters? It
would probably be difficult to say in this case that the viewer gets a “deep” or
“great” sense of how the relationship portrayed in the movie grew. One can,
however, get a “real” sense of it. Here, what authenticates this sense can only
be the viewer’s feeling: while watching the movie, the viewer feels something and
is aware of it.
Of course, all the other sense expressions (strong sense, deep sense, and so
on) also refer to the experiencer’s feeling (which is compared to bodily feelings).
In the case of those other sense expressions, however, there is no implication that
the experiencers focus their conscious attention on the feeling at the time when
this feeling is happening. In the case of a real sense, however, the feeling seems
to be part of the cognitive scenario. It goes without saying that the thoughts in
question do not need to be clearly articulated in the experiencer’s mind. None-
theless, if one says, “I had a real sense of how the relationship between them
grew,” one is implying that such thoughts, however dim or even latent, were
indeed present in one’s mind:
I had a real sense of how the relationship between them grew.
I thought like this at that time:

“it is like this:
I know what it was like
I know it well, like I can know well what it is like when something is happening to me
Such thoughts, however unconscious, are particularly understandable in a situa-

tion in which the viewer identifies with the characters: watching a movie, we can
indeed imagine that what is happening to the protagonist is happening to us. But
is such an identification always necessary? In other words, would it be justified to
posit for the cognitive scenario of real sense a further component: “this is
happening to me now” or “something is happening to me now”?
To resolve this question, let us consider an example that concerns reading
rather than viewing:
Reading old books, I get a real sense that in earlier times people used to dream more or to
remember more what they dreamed.
It is noticeable that in this example, too, the “real sense” is anchored in a current
experience: The experiencer gets the “real sense” precisely while reading old
books. In this case there seems to be no need for the reader’s identification with
the people of the past. Nonetheless, here, too, the “real sense” is linked with the
speaker’s own contemporaneous experience: it is when they are reading about the
past that they get a glimpse of what it was like. This is consistent with the
following formula:
I can think like this at those times:

“it is like this:
I now know well what it was like
I know it well, like I can know well what it is like
when something is happening to me
Here, too, we could consider adding a further component or components along

the lines of “I know it because something is happening to me now (when I read
these books)” or “I know it because I know what is happening to me now [when
I read these books].” Arguably, however, this would imply more self-analysis
than what is implied by the expression a real sense as such.
At some point we need to ask, of course : How does real sense relate to other
uses of the adjective real and especially to the adverb really, as in the sentence
“It is really like this”?
276 SENSE
To say that someone “really felt a sense of relief” is to endorse the statement
that this someone “felt a sense of relief.” To say that someone “felt a real sense of
relief” means more, because it also implies endorsing and verifying a perception
reported in the statement. One could even say (perhaps at a stretch) that someone
“really had a false sense of security” but not “a real false sense of security.”
Or consider the following minimal pair:
a. She really had a sense of belonging.

b. She had a real sense of belonging.
In the first example, the adverb really refers to a fact (that she had such a sense)
and emphasizes that this fact really did happen. In the second example, on the
other hand, the adjective real emphasizes something else: not that such a fact did
happen but that the description of the experience reported by the speaker is
accurate (this is what it was: a sense of belonging).
This is not the place to discuss the wide range of use of the word real (and its
derivatives) in modern English. I point out, however, four distinct uses, one of
which is particularly illuminating from the point of view of real sense:
A. This is a real person (not an apparition).

B. These are real flowers (not artificial flowers).
C. This is a real breakthrough/real disaster (no exaggeration).
D. This is a real university (not a pseudouniversity).
(Or: He is a real man—meets the expectations, can do what people can
expect of men.)
A sentence like “this is a real person (not an apparition)” implies, roughly

speaking, existence (in place and time). A sentence like “these are real flowers”
(which can be paraphrased as “these flowers are real flowers”) implies that the
things in question are indeed flowers and not just something like flowers (e.g.,
artificial flowers). Sentences like “it was a real breakthrough” and “this was a real
disaster” (which cannot be paraphrased as “this breakthrough was a real break-
through” and “this disaster was a real disaster”) imply that what happened really
was a breakthrough or a disaster. Sentences like “he is a real man” and “this is a
real university” (which can be paraphrased as “this man is a real man” and “this
university is a real university”) imply that certain exacting standards for someone
or something of this particular kind are met.
It appears that sentences that refer to a real sense build, in a way, on those
like “he is a real man” or “this is a real university” insofar as they, too, refer to a
certain exacting standard. For men, this exacting standard may be manliness; for
universities, it is advanced education that focuses on learning and ideas. Argu-
ably, for “sense” (in the relevant sense of the word), this exacting standard lies in
ongoing personal experience.
The ascendancy of the word real in English over the centuries and even over
the last few decades deserves a much fuller study. In an earlier work (Wierzbicka
2002) I examine the gradual replacement of true by real in some areas of English
discourse and argue that it has its roots in British empiricism. The rise of real
sense as a common English collocation is another facet of the same cultural and
linguistic trend.10
6.7. A False Sense (of Something)
The adjective false is also one of the more common descriptors of “sense” (in
terms of frequency in COBUILD), coming right after good, great, strong, and real.
In COBUILD, by far the most common noun to collocate with a false sense of is
security (twenty-nine uses out of a total of forty-one). At the same time, COBUILD
has only one occurrence of a false feeling of security or indeed, of a false feeling
of anything. Clearly, feelings are not normally described in English as false
because a feeling (for example, a feeling of security) makes no claims about
anything other than itself. By contrast, a sense of security implies, in addition to a
feeling, possible knowledge: because of the quasi-sensory feeling of being secure
implied by a sense of security, those who have such a sense may think that they
can know that they are secure (although they could not know it well on this basis
and indeed, could be mistaken).
In fact, by doing Google searches, one can find a staggering number
of examples of a false sense of security (close to a million)—a fact that
confirms the central role of the collocation a false sense of security among all
those with a false sense. It also confirms that English speakers do not regard
“a sense” as an absolutely infallible detector of objective realities: it is a helpful
detector, indeed an important one, but it could also be faulty and thus is not
absolutely reliable.
This is not inconsistent with the component “when this someone thinks like
this, this someone can know,” included in many of the explications presented in
this chapter, because the phrase “this someone can know” is not equivalent to
“this someone knows”: this someone did not necessarily know but only could
know. If people’s “sense of security” leads them to think: “I am secure,” this
conclusion can be false, and this is why the evaluation “false” can collocate with
a sense of security. A person’s sense of security may indeed be detecting
something real (as a person or an animal can detect a faint smell), but then
again it may not be.
Interestingly, not many collocations with sense combine readily with false.
While many hypothetical combinations that native speakers usually reject can be
found on Google, in COBUILD at least there are no instances of phrases like a false
sense of time, a false sense of direction, a false sense of humor, a false sense of
frustration, a false sense of freedom, a false sense of obligation, or a false sense of
optimism.
The examples that can be found in COBUILD are semantically fairly uniform,
and with two apparent exceptions (which can be explained in terms of the larger
context), they suggest an unrealistically rosy assessment of oneself or one’s
situation:
278 SENSE
a false sense of security

a false sense of safety
a false sense of confidence
a false sense of complacency
a false sense of trust, security, and invincibility
a false sense of superiority
This is reminiscent of the phrase an exaggerated sense, which most commonly

occurs as a part of an exaggerated sense of one’s own importance. It is as if the
quasi-sensory detector of realities posited by the phrase a sense of were prone to
malfunction in the case of self-assessment.
It is not just a matter of “positive thinking” because native speakers
usually reject phrases like a false sense of hope, a false sense of optimism, or a
false sense of trust. Rather, the implication appears to be that the information
provided by people’s “sense detector” may be skewed by their self-interest and
wishful thinking. Judging by linguistic evidence from collocations, this sense
detector is more reliable with respect to purely “external” reality (e.g., to what is
going on in the place where one is) and to purely “internal ” reality (e.g., to what
one feels) than to something in-between, such as one’s personal situation
and position vis-à-vis other people, as in the case of a false sense of security
(and safety), as well as a false sense of complacency, superiority, confidence, and
invincibility.
The two conceptual categories that are linked with false sense can be
represented as follows: “I can know that bad things will not happen to me”
(e.g., a false sense of security) and “I can know that I can do many good things”
(e.g., a false sense of confidence).
While the data from a Google search sometimes contradict native speakers’
acceptability judgments, the data regarding the most frequent collocation with a
false sense found on Google nonetheless support the generalizations emerging
from the study of the data in COBUILD.
It is particularly interesting to note that while a false sense of security is very
common in English, a false sense of danger hardly occurs at all (COBUILD has not
even a single example). A verb that is often used in combination with a false
sense of security is lull, which suggests that the detector described as a sense is
not functioning properly—not so much because it is picking up wrong signals but
because it is not picking up those signals that are there. A sense of danger implies
being alert to what is going on; a false sense, on the other hand, implies a lack of
alertness, and that is why, I suggest, it readily collocates with security (and on a
smaller scale, safety) but not with danger.
In a Google search I carried out on May 31, 2007, a false sense of security
constituted around two-thirds of all instances of sense of security, whereas a false
sense of danger was just a fraction of 1 percent of a sense of danger. Given the
huge numbers involved (roughly one and a half million for a sense of security and
a quarter of a million for a sense of danger), these differences are highly

significant.11
Furthermore, there is practically no true sense of security corresponding to a
false sense of security: By itself, a sense of security invites the inference that this
sense was probably picking up something real. This inference can, however, be
cancelled out by means of the word false.
The functional opposite of a false sense (of something) is not a true sense (of
which there are only five examples in COBUILD) but a real sense (fifty-three
examples, excluding a real sense of the word/term, that is, even more than
there are of a false sense [forty]). For a false sense, I propose the following
two semantic formulae:
She had a false sense of security (safety, trust, etc.).
a. she often thought like this (about something):

“it is like this: I know that bad things cannot happen to me”
b. when she thought like this, she thought that she could know that it was like this,
c. she thought that she could know it because when she thought like this,
she felt something,
d. she couldn’t know that it was like this because it was not like this
she wanted it to be like this
She had a false sense of confidence (superiority, complacency).
a. she often thought like this (about some things):

“it is like this: I know that I can do many good things”
b. when she thought like this, she thought that she could know that it was like this,
like people can know that they are doing something with some parts of their body
if something happens at that time to these parts of their body as they want
c. she thought that she could know it because when she thought like this,
she felt something,
d. she couldn’t know that it was like this because it was not like this
she wanted it to be like this
6.8. A Keen Sense (of Something)
Keen is one of the more common adjectives qualifying the word sense in a variety
of uses (at least in British English). To begin with, there is, of course, the sensory
280 SENSE
use, as in the expression a keen sense of smell (e.g., “Desmond had a keen sense
of smell”), which provides a clue to the semantics of keen sense in nonsensory
uses. Some examples (from COBUILD):
Today I feel a keen sense of responsibility to Stanford.

Our correspondent Peter Hiett, who’s based in Tunis, says there’s a keen sense of
anticipation.
Montini . . . would be autoritarian but with a keen sense of constitutional propriety with
respect to the council.
With such a keen sense of justice, it is unsurprising that Kravitz continues to fly the
sixties’ protest flag.
His succession celebration of 1660 (1666) evinces the same keen sense of observation as
that in the portrait.
A keen sense of smell implies a heightened ability to detect smells. But the
use of keen in a sense close to eager (as in keen to do something) suggests that a
keen sense of smell may be associated not only with an ability but also with a
desire to detect smells and by extension, other states of affairs and also that one
has a goal: to do something on the basis of what one detects.
Thus, Cardinal Montini’s keen sense of constitutional propriety signals that
he is not only able to detect what is proper and what is improper but also that he is
keen (eager) to do so. Similarly, someone who feels a “keen responsibility” to
Stanford not only recognizes that he is responsible to Stanford (which, the full
passage notes, offered him “an outstanding education”) but also wants to recog-
nize it and presumably to act accordingly.
Apart from phrases like a keen sense of smell, which do not refer to thinking
at all, there appear to be three main categories of collocations with keen sense,
and the combination of “perceptiveness” and “eagerness” (eagerness to know and
to do something) appears to be associated with them all. As our primary repre-
sentatives of these three categories (which may be more common in British
English than in American English) we can choose a keen sense of observation,
a keen sense of justice, and a keen sense of anticipation.
6.8.1. A keen sense of observation (and similar collocations)

The first of these categories includes collocations that refer to a certain more or
less permanent faculty. Just as a keen sense of smell implies that someone has a
special gift for detecting smells (with the nose), so a keen sense of observation or
timing implies that someone has a special gift for detecting hidden aspects of the
current situation (with the mind, assisted by a quasi-bodily feeling).
As already indicated, there is a further link between an image like that of a
hunting dog endowed with a keen sense of smell and that of a person endowed
with a keen sense of observation: In both cases, the detection is linked with an
intended action. Just as a hunting dog with a keen sense of smell wants to do
something (to catch a rabbit, say) on the basis of olfactory detection, so those who
have a keen sense of observation want to do something with what they have
observed—for example, to record it in a work of art, as in the first three examples
of the following excerpts from various Web sites:
I never thought that I would write a book of limericks.

A self-proclaimed voracious reader, Nandana had always had a predilection for humor and
comedy. As a literature student, she had developed a keen sense of observation, studying
human nature, noticing people’s moods, emotions, expressions, and foibles. And it was this
sense that brought out the dormant Edward Lear, or shall we say, the Sukumar Ray in her.
Largaespada is . . . painstakingly meticulous—he photographs every object in the collaged
pieces, down to the snow resting on a windowsill. . . . But it is his keen sense of
observation that most often translates into an aesthetic carnival on print.
“I am always recording the trees, pictures, faces, and architecture that I see going about my
daily life,” Largaespada said.
Seasoned artists have developed a keen sense of observation for the essential elements of
their subject. Learn to draw the figure through exercises that sharpen the sense of
observation. . . . Live models are scheduled for each session.
Like photographers, the farm families in People Sustaining the Land possess a keen sense
of observation in the toolbox of scientific skills they apply in their daily lives of caring for
the land, the crops, the animals, their family, and their local community.
However, people who are exercising a keen sense of observation are not
simply honing their artistic or practical skills for future use but are also intending
to do something here and now: for example, to do a life drawing or to mentally
record how things are here and now in order to be able to draw on that knowledge
in the future. Thus, consider the following examples from various Web sites:
Mr. Levine combines Germanic concern for structure with a keen sense of drama: He is,
after all, a man of the theater. He drove the chorus and orchestra to a frenzied climax at the
end of part 3.
If [Tom Moyer] is right—and his six-year-old Fox Tower shows that he has a keen sense of
downtown’s potential—he’s paving the way for something Portland’s never seen in its
history: a high-rise downtown that serves as the undisputed cultural and business center for
the state and one of North America’s most sophisticated and eclectic places to work and shop.
Their strengths melded perfectly . . . Barbera brought [to animated cartoons] the comic
gags and skilled drawing, while Hanna brought warmth and a keen sense of timing.
A good humorist . . . has a keen sense of audience and knows his or her target group.
A humorist who has a keen sense of audience wants to do something here and
now (to amuse and entertain the audience, i.e., the people “in this place at this
time”) and because of this wants to know the mood of the audience (here and
now). The mayor who has a keen sense of downtown’s potential wants to do
something in this place now. The director of the orchestra who has a keen sense of
drama exercises it when conducting the chorus and orchestra here and now.
Finally, the cocreator of animated cartoons who has a keen sense of timing can
282 SENSE
think at the right time: “I want to do something now.” In addition, all those
described here as endowed with a keen sense of something (the humorist, the
mayor, the conductor, and the cocreator of animated cartoons) want to do
something well, and they all appear to have a heightened awareness of what
they want to achieve and what they need to know to be able to do so. Thus, all the
examples considered here so far appear to be consistent with the following
cognitive scenario (partial explication only):
She has a keen sense of observation/timing/audience/drama/downtown’s potential/humor.
she often thinks like this [about things of one kind]:

“it is like this:
because of this, I want to know some things about this place at this time
I know that someone else may not want to know things like this at a time like this
Let us now test the cognitive scenario developed here so far against some
Internet examples of the use of another common collocation with keen sense as an
ability, a keen sense of style:
The Web designer should have a keen sense of style, color, and form and understand how
those characteristics can work together to frame financial content online.
The hypothetical Web designer envisaged in this sentence wants to do something

in a Web site (a place), wants to do it well, and because of this will pay close
attention to how various elements of the design will work together. The focus on
place is also clearly visible in the following example:
Her keen sense of style and design assists her in the creation of distinctive and beautiful
Asian interiors.
The designer wants to do something here and to do it well and for this needs to
think a lot about various aspects of the proposed interior and visualize how they
will fit together.
The same applies to a keen sense of style in designing clothes (e.g., bridal
wear, business wear) and in choosing one’s clothes for a particular situation (i.e.,
place and time):
Gemini females have a keen sense of style, and when they are in business mode, they prefer
to dress up as the office “queens” complete with power suit, pearls, and expensive watch.
Again, the situation is hypothetical: when a “Gemini female” is heading for a

place like an office, she wants to do something (dress up), she wants to do it well,
and because of this she wants to know that her appearance will suit the place and
the business situation.
Let us consider in turn the use of the common collocation a keen sense of
timing in the following examples from the Internet:
The keen sense of timing and rhythm in the performers were admirable.
Feltman fires up the audience with an exuberant encore.
All was done with a keen sense of timing, making this a tour of works varied in their
selection but all put on display as great art.
Ron James, award-winning comedian and satirist: “I was particularly impressed with your
professionalism, your ability to read the audience, and your keen sense of timing.”
Humor requires a keen sense of timing, which develops with practice. For instance, joke
tellers may take too long to hit the punchline.
In these examples, an artist wants to do something in front of an audience, that is,

in a particular place at a particular time. In order to do it well, the artist has to be
able to read the audience—to know its mood, interests, current expectations, and
so on.
Finally, let us test the proposed interpretation of a keen sense as a faculty
against the common expression a keen sense of humor, which at first may seem to
be pretty much synonymous with a good sense of humor. Here is an example
from the British National Corpus:
He’s got a keen sense of humour, and there’s a perpetual twinkle in his eye.
The reference to the “twinkle in the eye” highlights the implication of

the keen sense that the person spoken of “wants to do something”: he is
eager to find in most situations an opportunity to laugh and to make others
laugh—even in those situations in which other people would not find anything
to laugh at.
The same implications can be gleaned in the following examples (also from
the British National Corpus):
She retains a liveliness of mind which is quite extraordinary under the circumstances, and
she still displays a keen sense of humour and a warmth of contact despite the fact that she
has to use a machine.
And Matt Camplisson, a recently retired bus inspector, will also be there with his keen
sense of humour.
. . . will be missed for his keen sense of humour.
A keen sense of humor is displayed in a particular situation—presumably by

doing something that has an impact on other people present; they notice and
enjoy it.
While both a keen sense of humor and a good sense of humor refer to a kind
of personal gift, a keen sense of humor also implies an attitude: a person so
described not only can see the funny side of things but also wants to see it (even
in situations that other people would regard as not lending themselves to humor)
284 SENSE
and, moreover, wants to do something because of it. Here are two more examples
from the Internet:
Mr. Orman brings a keen sense of humor and intensity to his role.
In his 1996 biography, “A Reporter’s Life,” Mr. Cronkite wrote, “I attribute the longevity
of our marriage to Betsy’s extraordinary keen sense of humor, which saw us over many
bumps (mostly of my making), and her tolerance, even support, for the uncertain schedule
and wanderings of a newsman.”
In other contexts, Mr. Orman’s sense of humor could no doubt be described

as good rather than keen, but in this context keen seems to sound better because
the example focuses on what the actor is doing in a particular situation. The same
applies to the second example. The word extraordinary highlights the rather
unusual character of Betsy Cronkite’s attitude implied by keen sense as such. The
wife’s (or husband’s) good sense of humor would no doubt be an asset in any
marriage, but a keen sense of humor is probably more likely to “see the marriage
over many bumps,” as it implies a determined attitude and an unusually keen eye
for the funny side of the bumpy situations.
When considered in isolation, expressions like a keen sense of observa-
tion, a keen sense of style, a keen sense of timing, or a keen sense of humor
may not necessarily seem to support the cognitive scenario developed here.
When considered in context, however, they appear to be always consistent
with it. The overall explication for this category of a keen sense, therefore, is
as follows:
She has a keen sense of observation/timing/style/humor/audience.

“it is like this:
because of this, I want to know some things about this place at this time
I know that someone else may not want to know things like this at a time like this
b. when she thinks like this (about something of this kind)
she can do something well at that time because she can know
something about it at the same time,
like people can know that something is happening in a
place when they are in that place
The explication assigned here to keen sense of observation differs

significantly from that assigned to sharp sense of observation in the section
on sharp sense, even though the two expressions may at first seem
interchangeable. It is worth noting, therefore, that keen sense of observation

belongs to a class of collocations many of which have virtually no counterpart
with sharp.
For example, a Google search for keen sense of audience (April 2, 2008)
yielded several hundred results, whereas that for sharp sense of audience yields just
a few. For keen sense of style and sharp sense of style the difference is similarly
very large. Such contrasts support the differences in cognitive scenarios posited in
these two sections. In particular, the components “I want to do something here
now; I want to do it well,” posited here for keen sense but not for sharp sense, make
sense in relation to a sense of audience and a sense of style and thus explain why
these expressions combine readily with keen but not with sharp.12
6.8.2. A keen sense of justice (and similar collocations)

Expressions like a keen sense of justice, a keen sense of propriety, and a keen
sense of responsibility also refer to a more or less permanent property, but here,
this property is above all a matter of a special attitude and not necessarily one of a
special skill. A person who has a keen sense of observation or a keen sense of
style can do some things well. This is not necessarily the case, however, with a
person who has a keen sense of justice or a keen sense of responsibility. Here, the
keen sense may sharpen a person’s powers of detection (of what is going on) and
their desire to ensure that bad things do not happen in their sphere of influence.
Here are some examples with a keen sense of responsibility:
So we have a keen sense of responsibility for safety. As we are dealing with highly public,
as well as hazardous, substances, our duties are strictly controlled by regulations by means
of conducting double and triple checking systems.
He was a meticulous observer of facts with a keen sense of responsibility for his patients.
In some cases, young adults may also feel a keen sense of responsibility for their brother
or sister with autism, which makes it difficult for them to leave home and begin an
independent life.
She had a keen sense of responsibility and believed in performing the smallest of the
tasks to the best of her ability.
A keen sense of responsibility to care for the earth and create a healthy environment
underlies all of our work.
The person who has a keen sense of responsibility for safety and is dealing
with hazardous substances needs to be highly attentive to what is happening, as
well as be willing to act promptly and appropriately, and the same applies to the
doctor who has a keen sense of responsibility for his patients and who is a
“meticulous observer of facts.”
The same combination of a need for attention to details (which might be
overlooked by other people) and a willingness to act upon whatever is noticed or
discovered appears in the following examples with a keen sense of injustice (or
justice):
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Because of his independence and his keen sense of justice and fairness, Judge Thomas
looks at all sides of issues, when others might be content to examine only one.
Charles had a keen sense of injustice in matters of both race and business. In the early
1960s, he was the first musician to refuse to play segregated concerts in the South. This
cost him a lot of money (the state of Georgia banned him from performing there “for life”),
but he was adamant.
A keen sense of injustice and the urge to do something about it—is a basic part of social
life.
A keen sense of injustice led him to challenge the outcomes of three murder trials.
Grappling with his own baffled, battered young heart and his keen sense of injustice,
Lyle’s desperate, instinctive response is to fight back in a passionate attempt to shield the
people he loves from the wrongdoing that assaults them as relentlessly as the raw winter
wind assails their small, tarpapered house.
On the basis of all these examples I propose the following explication for this
category of keen sense expressions:
She has a keen sense of propriety/justice/responsibility/injustice/duty/right and wrong/fairness.

“it is like this:
I know that some bad things can be happening here now
I want to know what these things are
I want to do something because of this
I know that someone else may not want to know about things like this
b. when she thinks like this she can know that it is like this,
c. she can know it because when she thinks about it like this, she can feel something,
In this context the noun commitment and nouns like responsibility, justice,
and duty behave differently with respect to keen sense even though all of them
appear to be concerned with “wanting to do something” and collocate readily
with strong sense. This disparity supports the hypothesis that keen sense com-
bines a will to do something with a focus on what is happening. For example, a
keen sense of duty implies not only wanting to do one’s duty but also not
overlooking things that it might be one’s duty to do. Similarly, a keen sense of
responsibility—for example, for an autistic sibling, as in one of the examples
cited earlier—implies attentiveness to the needs of vulnerable siblings, as well as
a desire to do good things for them. By contrast, a strong sense of duty or a strong
sense of responsibility implies a determination not to fail to do what one per-
ceives as one’s duty or responsibility without implying at the same time a
determination not to fail to notice the needs of people whom one is taking care
of or for whom one feels responsible.
This is why, I suggest, the word commitment, which focuses exclusively on

will and motivation and not on attention to what is happening, does not readily
collocate with keen sense. The same applies to a sense of self, which readily
combines with the adjective strong but not with the adjective keen. Using
numerical data from Google searches, these contrasts can be dramatized in
table 6.16 (the numbers have been rounded off ):
TABLE 6.16.
strong sense 1,400,000 keen sense 1,000,000
strong sense of 40,000 keen sense of 2,000

commitment commitment
strong sense of self 200,000 keen sense of self 1,000
According to the results of the search recorded in table 6.16, the phrases strong
sense and keen sense are roughly comparable in frequencies, but strong sense of
commitment is much more common than keen sense of commitment, and strong
sense of self, incomparably more common than keen sense of self.
6.8.3. A sense of anticipation (and similar collocations)

The third category of keen sense expressions, those describing emotions, does
not refer to any permanent characteristics and may have a focus on both
attention and motivation. For example, an expression like a keen sense of
anticipation or a keen sense of enjoyment may be implying a desire not to
overlook what is happening to one and to think about it while it is happening.
Similarly, a keen sense of loss might be implying that the experiencers want to
pay attention to their loss and to dwell on it in their thoughts. This suggests the
following cognitive scenario:
She felt a keen sense of anticipation/loss/enjoyment.

“it is like this:
I know that something very good/very bad is happening to me now (or: here now)
I want to think about this now
I know that someone else may not want to think about things like this at a time like this
I don’t want not to think about it”
Here are some examples:
We went to bed last night with a keen sense of anticipation, looking forward to today’s
climb over the Col du Mont Cenis into Italy.
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I approached this book with a keen sense of anticipation. The combination of the subject
matter—surely Melba was one of the most interesting of all singers—and the superb
scholarship of William R. Moran, which has been demonstrated time and again, held much
promise.
Saturday, May 12, 2007, Visit to Nottingham Arboretum. . . . With an attractive public park
with a lake, all you need is a brolly [umbrella] or sunshade [parasol], comfortable shoes for
paths and grass, maybe a small notebook, and a keen sense of anticipation.
Having studied Christianity and Islam for some time, I eagerly purchased this book with a
keen sense of anticipation to read the author’s own personal analysis of Islam.
The fact that a keen sense of anticipation often co-occurs with words like curiosity,
interest, eagerly, and look forward supports the references to “wanting to know”
about one’s experience and “wanting to think” about what is happening to one.
Often the experience described with the phrase keen sense is collective rather
than individual. In such cases, the cognitive scenario requires a slight modifica-
tion: it is then not a matter of “what is happening to me now” but rather of “what
is happening here now”:
There is a keen sense of anticipation of the opportunities that lie ahead.

The keen sense of anticipation that customarily greets the beginning of a new Supreme
Court term is tempered this first Monday in October by a sense of anxiety over the scope
and velocity of the court’s shift of direction on civil rights and federal authority.
The two-day extravaganza thus aroused a keen sense of anticipation and curiosity.
For such collective experiences the cognitive scenario could look as follows:
There was a keen sense of anticipation/loss (in that place at that time).
many people in this place thought like this at that time (about something):
“it is like this:
I know that something very good/very bad is happening here now
I feel something very bad/good now
I want to think about this now
I know that some people (in other places) may not want to think about
things like this at a time like this
Significantly, there are emotion terms that (judging by Google searches)

rarely co-occur with keen sense. For example, a keen sense of anger, a keen sense
of anxiety, and a keen sense of fear show truly negligible figures and are usually
rejected by native speakers. At the same time, a strong sense of anger and a deep
sense of anxiety or a deep sense of fear are quite common. We must ask, then,
what makes keen sense virtually incompatible with emotion terms like fear,
anxiety, and anger, and what makes it so much more compatible with terms
like anticipation, enjoyment, and disappointment?
My hypothesis, reflected in the proposed cognitive scenarios, would make

sense of such contrasts in frequency and acceptability, while at the same time
accounting for the intuitively felt semantic links between the different uses of
keen sense, that is, between keen sense as a faculty (e.g., a keen sense of
observation), keen sense as a permanent attitude (e.g., a keen sense of responsi-
bility), and keen sense as an emotion (e.g., a keen sense of anticipation).
Compare, for example, the expression a keen sense of fear with two of its
competitors, a strong sense of fear and a deep sense of fear. According to the
results of a Google search recorded in table 6.17 (in rounded figures), strong
sense of fear occurs, on average, once for every 7 occurrences of sense of fear,
and a deep sense of fear, once for every 14 occurrences of sense of fear, whereas
keen sense of fear occurs on average only once per 36,000 occurrences of sense
of fear:
TABLE 6.17.
sense of fear 300,000
strong sense of fear 40,000
deep sense of fear 20,000
keen sense of fear 8
For sense of anxiety and sense of anger the proportions are similar (tables 6.18
and 6.19):
TABLE 6.18.
sense of anxiety 100,000
strong sense of anxiety 10,000
deep sense of anxiety 7,000
keen sense of anxiety 3
TABLE 6.19.
sense of anger 70,000
strong sense of anger 16,000
deep sense of anger 11,000
keen sense of anger 5

290 SENSE
What matters here is not the absolute numbers, which, since they are from Google
searches, may change from day to day, but the order of magnitude of the
differences. Such huge differences in proportions indicate that expressions like
keen sense, strong sense, and deep sense have different meanings and that these
meanings interact with those of various emotion terms: for example, fear,
anxiety, and anger “repel” keen sense (while attracting strong sense and
deep sense).
For comparison, see tables 6.20 and 6.21, concerning two emotion terms that
do not repel the expression keen sense:
TABLE 6.20.
sense of anticipation 150,000
strong sense of anticipation 4,000
deep sense of anticipation 1,500
keen sense of anticipation 2,500
TABLE 6.21.
sense of enjoyment 70,000
strong sense of enjoyment 5,000
deep sense of enjoyment 2,000
keen sense of enjoyment 1,500
As these tables show, emotion terms like anticipation and enjoyment

do not repel keen sense in the way fear, anxiety, and anger do but actually
(to some degree at least) attract it. While the exact figures from Google searches
indeed vary from day to day, the differences in the proportions shown in tables
6.17–6.21 are so great that it would be foolish to simply dismiss them as
accidental.
It is not possible to discuss here in detail the meanings of different emotion
terms and the differences between anticipation, enjoyment, and loss, which
readily combine with a keen sense, and fear, anxiety, and anger, which do not
(for detailed discussion see Wierzbicka 1999). One key difference, however, is
clear: keen sense is readily combinable with emotions that can be interpreted in
terms of “something good/bad is happening (to me) now” and not with those that
are incompatible with such an interpretation.
Thus, fear and anxiety are prototypically associated with the thoughts “some-
thing bad can happen (to me)” and “I don’t want it to happen,” and anger, with
the thoughts “this someone is doing something bad” and “I don’t want things
like this to happen.” This means that none of these words includes in their
cognitive scenario the component “something very good/very bad is happening
to me now,” stipulated as part of the cognitive scenario of a keen sense.
By contrast, enjoyment, loss (as a term of emotion), and anticipation all include
this component in their respective cognitive scenarios. We can show this
schematically as follows:
She felt fear.

she felt something bad
like someone can feel when they think like this:
“I don’t know what will happen
some bad things can happen
I don’t want these things to happen
I don’t know what I can do”
She felt anxiety.

“I don’t know what will happen
maybe something bad will happen to me
I don’t want this to happen
I can’t do anything now”
She felt anger.

like someone can feel when they think like this about someone:
“this someone is doing something bad
I don’t want this someone to do things like this
I want to do something because of this”
On the other hand, the words enjoyment, anticipation, and loss are all
consistent with the cognitive scenario posited here for a keen sense, as the
following explications illustrate:
She felt enjoyment [she enjoyed it].
she felt something good at that time

“something good is happening to me now because I am doing something now
I want it to be like this”
292 SENSE
She felt anticipation.
she felt something good at that time

“something good is happening to me now
I know that something will happen in a short time
I want it to happen”
She felt a loss.
she felt something bad at that time

“something bad is happening to me now
something was like a part of me
this something is not like a part of me anymore
I don’t want it to be like this”
These considerations support the following overall explication of keen sense in

combination with words for emotions:
She felt a keen sense of anticipation/loss/enjoyment (*fear, *anxiety, *anger).

a. she thought like this at that time (about something):
“it is like this:
I know that something bad/good is happening to me now (or: here now)
I feel something good/bad now
I want to think about this
I know that someone else may not want to think about things like this
at a time like this
c. she could know it because, when she thought like this, she felt something
6.9. A Clear Sense (of Something)
It seems clear that the collocation a clear sense is closely related to other
epistemic uses of the word clear and implies, roughly speaking, “clear knowl-
edge.” In fact, clear sense often co-occurs in the same passage or exchange with
the phrase it is clear or with the adverb clearly, as in the following two examples
from Australian Web sites (The 7:30 Report, 19/03/03, ABC television, interview
with reporter Kerry O’Brien):
Kerry O’Brien: But there’s a very clear sense that you’re facing a higher degree of
tension and uncertainty in your operations as journalists than even twenty-four
hours ago.
Paul McGeough [a journalist working in Iraq]: Oh, quite clearly, quite
clearly. In terms of the war, and I imagine—in 1991, when I was here, as the
bombing started, the Iraqis herded us all into one hotel, and the gates were closed,
and we were sort of escorted to press conferences by regime ministers or to the
scene of bombings, etc. We have not been told that that will happen this time, but
I fully expect it to happen.
Kerry O’Brien: But you had the very clear sense that they are still actively and
successfully recruiting others to replace those that have been arrested?
Zachary Abuza [Southeast Asian terrorism analyst]: I think that’s very clear—
that they’re able to continue the recruitment.
While the link between clear sense and knowledge seems obvious, the precise
meaning of this expression may be somewhat obscured by two possible
readings to which this expression lends itself in some contexts: is it a matter
of what is “clear” to the experiencer of a “clear sense” or of what is “clear” to
other people? For example, a clear sense of humor usually implies, in
context, that someone has a sense of humor and that this fact is clear to
those who know this person. This is different from, for example, a keen sense
of humor, in which keen describes the mental attitude of the person in
question.
For this reason, to tease out the cognitive scenario conveyed by the phrase
clear sense as such, it is best to begin by considering some examples in the first
person: it is clear that when one says, for example, “I had a clear sense that Y,”
one is using the word clear to describe the nature of one’s own thoughts rather
than other people’s impressions. Here are some examples:
[Australian Radio National, interview with Alison Richard, vice chancellor of Cambridge
University, 2005]:
Alison Richard: When I was being interviewed for this position . . . I had a clear sense, I think,
of what the challenges are here. And I also got a very, very clear sense that Cambridge is a
place with extraordinary vitality and excellence and ambition and aspirations—it’s one of the
great universities of the world. That was really clear to me.
[feminist writer Naomi Wolf’s interview by the Australian TV program Four Corners,
2005]:
Naomi Wolf: Am I willing to listen when people talk to me or ask me questions about
spirituality? Yes, of course, I am. But until I get a super clear sense that a lot of people really
want to have this conversation in a more direct way . . . I’m going to be super careful about it
because it’s really, really, really problematic.
Such unambiguous first-person examples make it very clear that the cognitive
scenario projected by the speaker includes the component “I know this well
now.” For example, Alison Richard thought (according to her own testimony):
“I know this well now: Cambridge is a place with extraordinary vitality and
excellence and ambition and aspirations.” Naomi Wolf wanted to be able to
294 SENSE
think: “I know well now that a lot of people really want me to have this
conversation [about spirituality].”
Essentially, what applies to the frame a clear sense that also applies to
a clear sense of what. For example, when Alison Richard says, “I had a
clear sense of what the challenges are here,” she is implying that she thinks
like this: “I know well now what the challenges are here.” The word here in
Alison Richard’s sentence is helpful as it underscores the fact that the knowledge
referred to by clear sense is not abstract but is focused on the here and now.
Alison Richard is referring to how she thought when she was being interviewed
at Cambridge.
Thus, it appears that the knowledge implied by clear sense is not only “clear
knowledge” but also “local knowledge.” For example, the prospective vice
chancellor of Cambridge University needs to know some things about the place
(the university) for which she intends to assume responsibility. This suggests the
following cognitive scenario:
I had a clear sense of what the challenges are here.

“it is like this:
I know that I will be here for some time
it will be good if I know well some things about this place at all times during this time
I know well now what these things are”
When one examines a large number of corpus examples, one notices that the
desirable knowledge implied by clear sense that often seems to involve being
with some other people and especially doing something with other people.
Consider, for example, the following extract from a New York Times article
(September 15, 2002):
The assessment on how to build an Afghan army was carried out by a fifteen-
member team led by Maj. Gen. Charles C. Campbell, chief of staff for the United
States Central Command. He said he had come away from talks with Hamid Karzai,
the interim Afghan leader, with a clear sense that he wants a new army “to be a
powerful symbol of national unity, stability, and pride.”
General Campbell’s “clear sense” of Hamid Karzai’s intentions relates to his own
involvement with a place (Afghanistan) and with some people from that place
(notably, Hamid Karzai). General Campbell’s “clear sense” of Hamid Karzai’s
intentions arose at the time when they were together somewhere (where the talks
were taking place), and it was concerned with the prospect of an ongoing
involvement:
he thought like this [about someone] at that time:

“it is like this:
I know that I am with this someone now
I know that I will be doing something with this someone for some time
it will be good if I know well some things about this someone at all times
during this time
I know well one of these things now”
Strictly speaking, when General Campbell came away from his talks, he could no
longer think “I am with someone now”; he could at most think “I was with this
someone now.” But English speakers do say things like that, using “now” with
reference to something that happened a short time before. A year or even a month
later General Campbell would be unlikely to say, “I have a clear sense of what
Hamid Karzai wants”; he would be more likely to say, “I think I know what he
wants.”
Let us test the analysis developed here against two more newspaper examples:
The Poles, who had a perfectly clear sense of what they needed [from NATO] all
along—watertight renunciation of any German territorial claims—supported a
united Germany in NATO from the start (New York Times, July 21 1990).
According to the interpretation developed here, the Poles thought like this:
“it is like this:

we know that we are here [in NATO] now
we know that we will be here for some time
it will be good if we know well something about it [NATO] well at all times
during this time
we know well now what this something is [we know well now what we need
from NATO]”
This seems to be a plausible interpretation of the excerpt as seen in context.

Essentially the same formula appears to apply to the next example, which refers
to a lack of a “clear sense”:
Teachers in most states still don’t have a clear sense of what the tests are supposed to be
testing or what constitutes high achievement. Instead, everyone becomes obsessed with the
scores (New York Times, February 18, 2001).
The teachers (as represented here) appear to be thinking like this:
“it is like this:

we know that we are doing some things here now
we know that we will be doing these things here for some time
it will be good if we know something about it well at all times during this time
we don’t know well now what this something is”
The ambiguity of many third-person sentences with clear sense obscures to some
extent the clues that we could otherwise derive from large-scale statistical
comparisons based on Google searches.13 Nonetheless, some numerical data
296 SENSE
obtainable through such searches are illuminating. In particular, it is striking to

what degree the phrase sense of direction attracts the adjective clear in preference
to its competitors like strong, deep, and keen.
Roughly speaking, the overall figures of clear sense, strong sense, deep
sense, and keen sense are comparable—in each case, around a million occur-
rences (for strong sense, a little more: 1,300,000). When combined with the noun
direction, however, clear beats its competitors hands down. In rounded figures
(see table 6.22):
TABLE 6.22.
strong sense of direction 24,000
deep sense of direction 3,000
keen sense of direction 1,000
clear sense of direction 115,000
Thus, sense of direction strongly attracts clear—there is no comparison in this

case with keen and deep, and even in comparison with strong, which can also
readily co-occur with sense of direction, clear sense of direction emerges as a
clear victor.14 This predilection of sense of direction for the adjective clear is
telling us something about the meaning of clear sense or at least about one
category of uses of this phrase. To see what it is, let us examine some examples
with a clear sense of direction:
Without a clear sense of direction, planning and decision making about programs,
curricula, and instruction can remain uncoordinated.
A clear sense of direction means that investors know where to invest . . . In China they
still enjoy the clear sense of direction of just increasing economic output.
Geoff Gallop [Australian state premier]: We’re giving police a clear sense of direction in
terms of the way that they will approach youngsters in Northbridge.
. . . students were found [in McInnis and James’s 1995 findings] to have a sense of
purpose but often not a clear sense of direction in their studies.
Ronald Reagan . . . not only had a sense of where the American people wanted to go,
that promised land, the City on a Hill, but he had a clear sense of direction. He was the
leader of the wagon train and for the most part knew which turns to take, which paths to
avoid.
What such examples suggest is that some people are going to do something for
some time, that they need to know well what they should be doing (“along
the way”), and that they can know it well. The underlying metaphor is clear: it is
like someone choosing the way to go in order to reach a desired destination.
Interestingly, however, the ability to choose one’s route in a spatial sense is usually
described as a good sense of direction rather than a clear sense of direction: the
latter expression is normally applied to living one’s life or pursuing a course of
activities rather than choosing one’s path in a literal sense. Here are some examples
(the first two are from Australian Web sites, and the third is from the British National
Corpus):
“She walks very regularly, she’s a tough old bird. We can know she hasn’t got a good
sense of direction, but [she’s] a very commonsense sort of a lady,” Ms. Hamer said.
Getting out to some of these remote and isolated places requires a good sense of direction
or a good map and a sturdy four-wheel drive.
Behind us lay the snow-streaked slopes of Mount Shasta, one of the seven sacred mountains
of the world; before us lay the Simon Callaghan Trail, and old Indian trade route (today used
by old Indians, with a very good sense of direction).
In contrast to a clear sense of direction, the expression a good sense of direction

does not imply the presence of a cognitive scenario and can be applied to animals,
as well as people, as the following Internet examples illustrate:
So wolves need a good sense of direction to get around.

Some dogs, cats, horses, and other domestic animals also have a good sense of direction
and find their way home from unfamiliar places.
Examples with clear sense of direction considered here suggest the follow-
ing cognitive scenario:
She had a clear sense of direction.
she thought like this (about something) for some time:

“it is like this:
I know that I will be doing some things because of this for some time
it will be good if I know well at all times during this time what I want to do,
why I want to do it, how I want to do it
The question that we now need to consider is which of the components included
in this scenario can be attributed to clear sense and which are due to the
meaning of the word direction. I assume that when clear sense combines with
volitional nouns like direction, purpose, responsibility, or mission, it means
something somewhat different from what it means in combination with a that-
clause. At the same time, I would expect that whatever the semantic differences
between direction, purpose, responsibility, and mission, clear sense means the
same in combination with all of them. To establish what it is, we need to look
first at a few examples with a clear sense of purpose and a clear sense of
responsibility:
298 SENSE
Ask yourself these questions to help develop a clear sense of purpose. What is your
motivation in this communication process?
Understanding your goals, your reason for what you are working for creates a clear sense
of purpose.
American managers reported a clear sense of responsibility, knowing who is doing what,
and a clearly defined role of team members.
There is a clear chain of command here, a clear sense of responsibility, and no one
shirking from [sic] that responsibility.
The delegation of duties is clearly established, and this helps develop a clear sense of
responsibility and accountability on the part of the board members.
As these examples illustrate, a clear sense of purpose implies knowing well

what one’s purpose is, and a clear sense of responsibility, knowing well what
one’s responsibility is. The shared semantic core of phrases of this kind can
indeed be portrayed as in the formula for a clear sense of direction:

it will be good if I know well at all times during this time what I want to do
I know it well now
What conclusions can we draw from the fact that clear sense combines
readily with words like purpose, responsibility, mission, and commitment but
has a particular predilection for direction? Compare, for example, the figures for
strong sense and clear sense of purpose and direction, respectively (table 6.23):
TABLE 6.23.
strong sense of purpose 70,000 strong sense of direction 24,000
clear sense of purpose 90,000 clear sense of direction 115,000
As table 6.23 shows, the figures for strong sense of purpose and clear sense of
purpose are comparable, whereas the figure for clear sense of direction is much
higher than that for strong sense of direction.
It appears, then, that while both purpose and direction include in their
meaning something that strong sense can hook onto and that the same applies
to clear sense, direction (in its abstract, nonspatial sense) attracts clear sense in a
special way—as if it had some additional components particularly well suited to
its meaning. It is not difficult to figure out what these additional attractions of
direction to clear sense (and vice versa) might be.
Both nouns (purpose and direction) imply that one wants to do something
and that one envisages doing it for some time. They are both compatible,
therefore, with the idea of a complex task that needs some discernment and
some task-related knowledge. Only direction, however, appears to embody some

such components in its meaning. Consider, for example, the sentence “students
were found to have a sense of purpose but often not a clear sense of direction in
their studies,” which I cited earlier. Both sense of purpose and sense of direction
imply here that the students want to do something and that they know what they
want to do (study for a degree). A sense of purpose, however, does not imply that
they also know how to get there, whereas a sense of direction does.
Similarly, in the Ronald Reagan example, a sense of direction is contrasted
with a sense of where to go in terms of the knowledge of how to get there (“which
turns to take, which paths to avoid”), in addition to knowing what the final
destination should be. This is, I suggest, where direction and clear sense join
forces: in the reference to knowing some things about the terrain where one is
going to be for some time. For example, the phrase a sense of purpose refers to
“knowing what one wants to do,” and a clear sense of purpose refers, in addition,
to “knowing some things about it well.” In the case of a clear sense of direction,
too, the word clear raises “knowing” to “knowing well,” but the reference to
“knowing some things along the way” is conveyed not only by clear but also by
direction itself. Without presenting the full explications of these four expressions,
we can compare the four cognitive scenarios in question as follows:
She had a sense of purpose.

“it is like this:
I know that I want something to happen
I know that it will not happen if I don’t do some things for some time
I know what I want to do”
She had a sense of direction.

“it is like this:
I will be doing these things for some time now
I know what I want to do during this time, why I want to do it, how I want to do it”
She had a clear sense of purpose.

“it is like this:
I know it well now”
300 SENSE
She had a clear sense of direction.

“it is like this:
why I want to do it, how I want to do it
What clear appears to be adding to a sense of purpose is the realization that

while pursuing one’s goal, one needs to know well what one wants to do and why
and have the assurance that one knows these things well. Essentially, it adds the
same to a sense of direction. In this case, however, this added material reinforces
a component already present in the sense of direction as such: the component
referring to knowing what one wants to be doing while pursuing one’s goal, as
well as why and how one wants to do it. Thus, there is more in a sense of direction
for clear sense to feed on than there is in a sense of purpose, and this is, I suggest,
the reason why there is such a strong attraction between clear sense and direction
(or between sense of direction and clear).
Finally, clear sense—in contrast, for example, to strong sense and deep
sense—normally does not co-occur with terms of emotion or only marginally
so. For example, at the time of this writing (May 11, 2007), a Google search
yielded the figures in table 6.24 for shame and sadness (the top row is in rounded
figures):
TABLE 6.24.
deep sense of shame 17,000 deep sense of sadness 15,000
clear sense of shame 5 clear sense of sadness 1
Some emotion terms, for example frustration and relief, are more readily
combinable with clear sense, but relatively speaking, here, too, other adjec-
tives are greatly preferred over clear. For example, great and strong are
strongly preferred over clear in the case of relief and frustration (tables 6.25
and 6.26).
TABLE 6.25.
strong sense of relief 14,000
great sense of relief 38,000
clear sense of relief 2,500

TABLE 6.26.
strong sense of frustration 10,500
great sense of frustration 8,100
clear sense of frustration 2,600
The degree of combinability of different emotion terms with various adjectives in

the sense of frame would make a fascinating study. Intuitively, it makes a great deal
of sense that sense of shame is more likely to be described as deep rather than
strong, whereas sense of relief is most likely to be described as great. What matters
in the present context, however, is that on the whole, clear sense collocates poorly
with emotion terms. No doubt this is closely related to the fact that clear sense
rarely co-occurs with the verb feel, as the following (rounded) figures from a
Google search (May 11, 2007) illustrate (table 6.27):
TABLE 6.27.
felt a strong sense 28,000
felt a deep sense 28,000
felt a clear sense 3,000
Intuitively, this, too, makes sense: When the adjectives strong and deep occur in the
phrases strong sense and deep sense, they appear to be describing to some extent
the nature of the feeling, but when clear occurs in the frame clear sense, it seems to
be describing the experiencer’s thoughts rather than feelings.
Having established that clear sense does not readily co-occur with emotion
terms, let us nonetheless examine some examples of such collocations to see
how they compare with the other, more common categories of clear sense
expressions that were discussed earlier. Consider, for example, the following
sentence (from the Web):
War was coming, and as an ex-soldier I felt a clear sense of dread settle over me, as it did
for a lot of veterans I know.
What this sentence appears to imply is that the speaker was trying to understand
his own emotions and that he saw these emotions as ongoing. This would be
consistent with the following formula:
he thought like this for some time:

“it is like this:
302 SENSE
I know that something is happening to me now (I feel something bad)

I know that it will be happening for some time (I will feel like this for some time)
it will be good if I know well at all times during this time what I feel
I know it well now (I feel dread)”
Long-term emotions are also referred to in the following sentences that

combine feel with a clear sense:
Several pensioner readers whose income falls below the new £1,500-a-month threshold
felt a clear sense of betrayal after being with the bank for many years.
In the study referred to, people felt a clear sense of exclusion on the basis of who they were.
The feelings of betrayal and exclusion are likely to remain with the experiencers
for some time, and it seems plausible that they would want to understand well
what is happening to them.
The complex nature of the feelings combined with clear sense is also evident
in the following example:
I took great pleasure in its success and acceptance, but I also felt a clear sense of regret
when the manuscript is [sic] finally turned in to the Viking Press.
Here, the experiencer’s feelings are mixed, so it is understandable why he or she

would feel the need to sort them out, and presumably this sorting out would take
some time. Thus, it appears that the formula proposed for sentences that combine
clear sense with the word feel is applicable here, too, and that this category of
clear sense is parallel to the others.
6.10. An Acute Sense (of Something)
When not combined with sense, the adjective acute can have two different
meanings in English, one describing a feeling, and the other, perception com-
bined with cognition. For example, the phrases acute embarrassment and acute
pain describe certain feelings (roughly, intense, short term, undesirable), whereas
an acute sense of smell refers to someone’s nose capable of detecting smells that
other people’s noses might fail to detect. But a phrase like an acute sense of
timing (see the first of the following examples) appears to combine some ele-
ments of both those meanings: an acute, quasi-bodily feeling and an acute
perception combined with a realization of some kind (in this case, about when
to do something). Here are some examples from COBUILD:
His vision, an acute sense of timing, and the special needs of his constituency propelled
him beyond “skin politics.”
Montini’s acute sense of the difficulties involved in getting some three thousand people to
work together would have made the idea of him convening a council “impossible.”
Amafufunyana is widely feared and often results in death, being an especially powerful
form of self-hypnosis induced by an acute sense of guilt.
Sir William has an acute sense of political, judicial, and now vice regal propriety.
An acute sense of propriety (in the last example) brings to mind a keen
sense of propriety discussed in the section on keen, just as an acute sense of
smell is reminiscent of a keen sense of smell. But if in some contexts an
acute sense seems to be close to, and almost interchangeable with, a keen
sense, in others, the two are clearly far apart. For example, native speakers
usually find an acute sense of embarrassment perfectly natural, but a keen
sense of embarrassment odd. They also accept a keen sense of enjoyment but
reject an acute sense of enjoyment. Google searches for all these colloca-
tions support these intuitions: while the figures for keen sense of smell and
acute sense of smell are comparable, those for acute sense of embarrass-
ment, though small, are nonetheless much higher than those for keen sense
of embarrassment, and those for keen sense of enjoyment (also quite small)
are incomparably higher than those for acute sense of enjoyment (April 3,
2008) (table 6.28):
TABLE 6.28.
acute keen
sense of smell 35,500 75,000
sense of embarrassment 300 5
sense of enjoyment 3 950
Some of the contrasts between keen sense and acute sense can be
explained in terms of the link between keen and wanting: as discussed in
the section on keen sense, a keen sense of smell implies a desire, as well as
an ability, to obtain knowledge through smells; an acute sense of smell, on
the other hand, implies that one is assailed by smells that one cannot help
noticing. Just as there is nothing desirable about an acute pain, there is
nothing desirable about an acute sense of disappointment or an acute sense
of embarrassment. A keen sense of enjoyment implies something desirable
and is acceptable, but an acute sense of enjoyment sounds incoherent and is
not acceptable.
The phrase acute pain mentioned earlier may in fact provide a clue to the
undesirable implications of the collocations with acute sense: acute pain appears
to be the most common English collocation with acute and one that lies at the
heart of the whole phraseological network including this adjective. There is no
such link between keen and pain, as the following (slightly rounded) figures from
a Google search (March 11, 2008) highlight:
304 SENSE
acute pain 9,000,000

keen pain 6,000
It is clear that many collocations with acute are perceived as it were through the
prism of the strong collocational link between acute and pain and thus imply
something undesirable.
This cannot be the whole story, however, because, for example, an acute
sense of timing is both desirable and acceptable. The reason for this discrepancy
appears to be that there are two distinct types of expressions with acute sense, one
that refers to a feeling, and one, to a faculty. For example, a sense of timing is a
faculty rather than an actual feeling: one cannot feel a sense of timing as one can
feel a sense of embarrassment, and while acute sense as a feeling implies
something undesirable, acute sense as a faculty does not.
An acute sense of timing implies that those who have (not feel but have) such
a sense can sometimes feel—for a short time—a quasi-bodily feeling that can
alert them to what they should do in a given situation. An acute sense of guilt,
which is not a faculty but a feeling, is also restricted in time (one can probably
have a sense of guilt off and on for years but not an acute sense of guilt), but at the
same time it implies something undesirable.
My conclusion is that there are indeed two types of expressions with
acute sense and that they both imply a short-term, quasi-bodily feeling that
leads to a clear recognition of something—for example, that this is the right
time to do something, or that it is very difficult to get three thousand people
to work together, or that one is guilty, or that something embarrassing has
happened.
Focusing for the moment on the type related to emotions, we note that acute
sense implies that the feeling is both short-lived and very unpleasant, as an acute
pain is both brief and very unpleasant. Acute sense is different in this respect not
only from keen sense but also from sharp sense, to which it is otherwise closely
related. To illustrate, a Google search (April 8, 2008) for the combinations of
acute sense and sharp sense with selected terms of emotion yields the picture
shown in table 6.29 (the larger figures are slightly rounded).
TABLE 6.29.
sharp sense of acute sense of
joy 3 5
relief 580 4
embarrassment 4 280
guilt 8 680
disappointment 380 560
loss 1,200 2,300

Although the figures involved are small, these results are consistent with
native speakers’ intuitions, which, combined with the figures from Google
searches, allow us to formulate two generalizations.
First, sharp sense can in principle combine with both negative emotion terms
(e.g., disappointment, guilt, and loss) and positive ones (e.g., relief ), whereas
acute sense can combine only with negative ones (e.g., disappointment, embar-
rassment, guilt, loss).15
Second, sharp sense can combine only with emotion terms that imply a
momentary onset (something sudden), as in disappointment, relief, and above all
loss, whereas acute sense can combine more readily with emotion terms that do
not imply a sudden onset. For example, an acute sense of embarrassment can be
linked with an embarrassing situation (short term but not necessarily sudden), and
an acute sense of guilt can be due to thoughts that are dominating one’s con-
sciousness over a period of time—a short period but not necessarily one with a
sudden onset.
In the case of collocations that link sharp sense with emotion terms, I have
accounted for the implications of suddenness with the components “in one
moment” and “I didn’t know before that something like this would happen to
me now.” The contrasts between sharp sense and acute sense illustrated here
suggest that in the case of acute sense the short-term nature of the emotional
response should be portrayed in terms of a short time rather than in one moment,
and also, that the component of unexpectedness (“I didn’t know before . . . ”)
would not be appropriate here. This leads us to the following explication of the
first type of collocations with acute sense:
She felt an acute sense of X (e.g., guilt, embarrassment).

“it is like this:
I know that something bad is happening to me now
I feel something very bad now
c. she could know it because when she thought like this, she felt something very bad for a
short time,
like someone can feel something very bad in some parts of their
body for a short time
because something sharp [M] moves inside these parts of their body at that time
The reference to something sharp moving inside some parts of a person’s

body recognizes the link between acute sense and sharp sense. At the same time,
there are some differences: the component of unexpectedness posited for sharp
sense (“I didn’t know before that something like this would happen to me now”)
306 SENSE
is missing from acute sense; the component “something bad/something good is

happening to me now” posited for sharp sense is reduced in acute sense to
“something bad is happening to me now”; the feeling is overwhelming (“I can’t
not feel like this”) in acute sense but not in sharp sense; and the references to “in
one moment” in sharp sense have been replaced in acute sense with references to
“a short time.” Jointly, these differences account for the different range of use of
sharp sense and acute sense (in combination with emotion terms).
Turning now to acute sense, it has a collocational profile that is similar in
some respects to that of sharp sense but differs from it in others. Thus, there can
be an acute sense of observation and an acute sense of humor, as there can be a
sharp sense of observation and a sharp sense of humor. But for example an
acute sense of justice and an acute sense of responsibility do not have their
(commonly used) counterparts with sharp. While a sharp sense of justice and a
sharp sense of responsibility are not impossible, Google searches (April 3, 2008)
indicate that they are incomparably rarer than their counterparts with acute (the
overall figure for sharp sense is about half that for acute sense) (table 6.30).
TABLE 6.30.
acute sharp
sense of justice 1,600 43
sense of responsibility 1,600 14
Two other collocations that appear to attract acute in contrast to sharp

are sense of the absurd and sense of the ridiculous. Again, although absolute
numbers are quite small, the contrasts are nonetheless suggestive (April 8, 2008)
(table 6.31):
TABLE 6.31.
acute sharp
sense of the absurd 700 340
sense of the ridiculous 430 60
The very low figure for a sharp sense of the ridiculous, in contrast to an acute
sense of the ridiculous, is all the more striking in view of the fact that a sharp
sense of humor is very common and as the section on sharp sense notes, is in fact
by far the largest subgroup of all the sharp sense collocations.
A person with a sharp sense of humor tends to notice, instantly, that
something funny (and not good) is going on. A person with an acute sense
of the absurd unfailingly notices something absurd but does not necessarily
notice it instantly. Furthermore, having become aware of it, this person is
likely to want to do something because of it (above all, to draw other people’s
attention to it). By omitting a reference to “in one moment” from the

cognitive scenario of acute sense and adding to it the component “I want to do
something because of this,” we can account both for the contrast between sharp
sense of humor (common) and sharp sense of the absurd (rare) and for
that between sharp sense of the absurd (rare) and acute sense of the absurd
(well attested).
The contrasts between, on the one hand, acute sense of justice and acute
sense of responsibility (relatively common) and and on the other, sharp
sense of justice and sharp sense of responsibility (rare) could be explained
in the same way. A sharp sense of either justice or responsibility would
imply an instant recognition of something wrong. Since a sense of justice
and a sense of responsibility would normally require some time for reflec-
tion, the reference to “one moment” would not be appropriate in this case,
whereas a reference to a desire to do something, implied (according to the
analysis proposed here) by acute sense, would make perfect sense. Thus, on
both these grounds one would expect an acute sense to go better with justice
and responsibility than sharp sense, and this is exactly what the results of
the Google searches indicate.
To make sense of the intuitively felt differences in meaning between all
these collocations, which are corroborated by the observed numerical contrasts,
I propose the following cognitive scenario for acute sense as a faculty:
She had an acute sense of observation/humor/timing/justice/responsibility.
she often thought like this (about things of one kind):

“it is like this:
I want to do something because of this”
The first two components of this scenario are similar to those of the cognitive
scenario of sharp sense, except that the first line in sharp sense includes two more
extra details: not just “something” but “something bad” and not just “something
is happening here now” but “something (bad) is happening here now because
someone is doing something.” These two extra details would be compatible with
an acute sense of the ridiculous (because of the meaning of the word ridiculous)
but not with an acute sense of responsibility: A person with an acute sense of
responsibility may feel compelled to do something to prevent something bad
from happening rather than to do it in response to something bad that is already
under way.
The last component of the cognitive scenario proposed for acute sense (“I
want to do something because of this”) explains, in particular, why a sense of
timing favors acute over sharp, whereas for a sense of time, the reverse is true. A
sense of timing implies that one wants to do something (at the right time), and this
makes acute (as portrayed here) highly appropriate. A sharp sense of time, on the
other hand, implies a high awareness of exactly what time it is, and it does not
308 SENSE
imply that one wants to do something. Consider for example the following
sentence from COBUILD:
King . . . ran with the exuberance of youth. He is right-handed and left-footed, with an
electric pace off the mark, an eye for an opening, and an acute sense of when to pass.
An “acute sense of when to pass” implies that one wants to do something

and to do it at the right moment. This implies taking stock of the situation,
realizing unfailingly that “something is happening here now” (“I can’t not
know it”), and acting on this realization. A sharp sense would not fit this
context equally well partly because nothing “bad” is happening (and in fact
an opportunity to do something desirable presents itself) and partly because
a sharp sense (as a faculty, not as an emotion) implies an ability to notice
something in one moment (instantly) without subsequently wanting to do
something.
Here is another example (from a job advertisement):
Acute sense of responsibility, integrity, and loyalty, ability to deal with residents under all
conditions. Sincere desire to work with the aging . . .
The reference to the “acute sense” of responsibility, integrity, and loyalty implies
an extreme sensitivity to situations that may call for such qualities and a sincere
desire to respond to them by doing whatever needs to be done. All this fits in very
well with the proposed components of the cognitive scenario: “I know that
something is happening here now, I can’t not know it, I want to do something
because of this.”
Arguably, the association with “acute pain” could also motivate the compo-
nent “I want to do something because of this.” When one feels “acute pain,” one
would normally want to do something to stop it. By contrast, “sharp pain,” which
is momentary, is less compatible with the thought “I want to do something
because of this” (there may simply be no time for such a thought to crystallize
in the experiencer’s mind before the “sharp pain” is over).
Turning now to the bodily image associated with an acute sense, this
collocation evokes a more intense pain, as well as one of longer duration, than
a sharp sense. Certainly, an acute sense is also short term rather than long term,
but it is not momentary. It is not like the sensation caused by the prick of a needle,
because it is both longer and more intense than that. I suggest, therefore, that the
bodily prototype of an acute sense is that of a pain associated with a sharp object
moving inside some parts of a person’s body rather than with a sharp object
suddenly touching one’s skin.
As we have seen in the section on sharp sense, collocations with sharp sense
fall into two types with two distinct bodily images, both involving a sharp object.
Collocations with emotion terms such as a sharp sense of disappointment evoke
the image of a sharp object (like a surgeon’s scalpel) moving inside some parts of
a person’s body, whereas those referring to a permanent faculty, such as a sharp
sense of humor, evoke the image of a sharp object touching a part of the body
(like a needle pricking the skin). In the case of an acute sense, there are also two
types, but both of them appear to share the same bodily image: that of a sharp
object moving inside some parts of someone’s body. This brings us to the
following overall explication:
She had an acute sense of observation (humor, timing, responsibility).
a. she often thought like this (about things of one kind):

“it is like this:
I want to do something because of this now
when they are in this place
c. she could know it because when she thought like this,
she felt something for a short time,
like someone can feel something very bad in some parts of their
body for a short time
because something sharp [M] is moving inside these parts of
their body at that time
In conclusion, then, an acute sense is like an acute pain: one cannot not
notice that something is happening, and one cannot ignore it. If the acute sense
refers to something that one feels (e.g., guilt or embarrassment), it implies an
awareness that one feels something very bad and that one cannot not feel like this.
If it refers to an external situation, it implies that one cannot help being aware of
this situation and that one wants to do something because of this. In both cases,
there is a bodily image of a short-lived but intense pain, like the pain that (one
imagines) might accompany the movement of a sharp object (e.g., a surgeon’s
knife) inside parts of one’s body.
The overall profile of an acute sense is similar in many ways to that of a
sharp sense, and yet it is also different, as the perception in an acute sense is not
necessarily unexpected and momentary, and the pain referred to in the bodily
image is less momentary and more intense.
A coda: a methodological reflection

The figures presented in the tables in this section (6.10) are, relatively speaking,
very small. A numerical contrast between, say, 700 for acute sense of guilt and 9
for sharp sense of guilt is, of course, quite dramatic, but given that even the figure
of 700 is, by the standard of the Google searches in the other sections, quite small,
one could doubt whether this contrast is really significant and would remain
stable over time. What conclusions should we draw from this?
310 SENSE
One possible conclusion would be that contrasts of this kind are not worth
reporting and that the meanings of acute sense and sharp sense should be
compared on a purely intuitive basis. For example, one could say that, “to my
ear,” acute sense of guilt sounds more plausible than sharp sense of guilt. This
could be further strengthened with questionnaires distributed to a number of
native or at least competent speakers of English.
Another way to proceed is to monitor the numerical contrasts reported in this
section over a period of time and to do so in the context of a wider inquiry based on
some qualitative semantic hypotheses. For example, the hypothesis that sharp
sense (of an emotion) suggests a sudden onset whereas acute sense does not, is
consistent with the numerical data presented here, which differentiate between
loss and disappointment on the one hand and guilt and embarrassment on the
other.
For this study I monitored the figures in question over a period of two weeks.
As tables 6.32 and 6.33 illustrate, the results of this monitoring were consistent
with those of the earlier searches: sharp sense combines readily with loss and
disappointment but not with guilt and embarrassment, whereas acute sense
combines readily with the latter two as well. In addition, sharp sense combines
with relief, whereas acute sense does not. (See also chapter 10.)
TABLE 6.32. Sharp sense with emotion terms
April 9 April 10 April 11 April 14 April 15 April 16 April 17 April 18
2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008
sharp sense of 320 320 320 270 280 270 270 270
disappointment
sharp sense of loss 1,300 1,200 1,150 1,200 1,200 1,200 1,200 1,000
sharp sense of guilt 8 7 8 9 9 8 9 8
sharp sense of 4 4 4 4 4 8 4 4
embarrassment
sharp sense of 600 600 600 500 500 500 500 500
relief
TABLE 6.33. Acute sense with emotion terms
April 9 April 10 April 11 April 14 April 15 April 16 April 17 April 18
2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008
acute sense of 500 500 500 450 450 500 450 450
disappointment
acute sense of loss 2,350 2,020 2,300 2,300 2,300 2,300 500 2,300
acute sense of 680 970 670 650 950 680 690 630
guilt
acute sense of 280 280 270 250 250 270 250 240
embarrassment
acute sense of 6 7 7 6 4 4 6 4
relief
7
Moral Sense
7.1. Moral Sense: A Human Universal

or an Artifact of English?
The concept of moral sense plays an important role in books on philosophy,

psychology, and popular science written by authors who write in English and take
the English language for granted. For example, in his atheist tract, The God
Delusion, the evolutionary biologist and public intellectual Richard Dawkins
asks (in a chapter title): “Does our moral sense have a Darwinian origin?”
(Dawkins 2006, 214), and he replies: “Our moral sense, like our sexual desire,
is indeed rooted deep in our Darwinian past”; he also affirms that “we have a
moral sense which is built into our brains, like our sexual instinct or our fear of
heights.” (ibid.)
Dawkins uses the phrase moral sense interchangeably with the phrase a
sense of right and wrong, and he also appears to equate moral sense with
“morality” and “moral universals.” In a critical review of Dawkins, another
biologist, H. Allen Orr, concurs: “I suspect that biological evolution has endowed
us with a rough moral sense” (Orr 2007, 24).1
In another acclaimed book for the general reader, American psychologist
Paul Bloom (2004, xiii) writes about “the growth of the ‘moral circle,’ the
universe of beings encompassed by our developed moral sense,” and he
promises to “present a theory of the emergence of a uniquely human morality,
and discuss how certain forces can enhance, nourish and solidify our evolved
moral sense.”
313
314 SENSE
The key role of the phrase moral sense in the language of popular science is
also reflected in the Web-based “moral sense test” (MST) designed by Harvard
psychologist and evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser, the author of a book titled
Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong
(2006). I will discuss the putatively universal “sense of right and wrong” shortly;
for the moment, however, my focus is on the phrase moral sense.
As Hauser explained in a radio interview (Mitchell 2006), “we built about
three years ago a Web site called the moral sense test . . . which now . . . has
somewhere like 300,000 subjects from around the world. And on that Web site
people log in and tell us where they’re from, their religious background or
educational background, age, and so forth.” Apparently Hauser and his collea-
gues assume that the phrase moral sense is intelligible to “people around the
world” and also that by encouraging “people around the world” to log in and take
the test, they can collect culture-independent data on “moral universals.” Inter-
viewer Natasha Mitchell sums up Hauser’s position and his invitation to “people
around the world” as follows: “Moral fundamentals that Marc Hauser’s research
is revealing are common across all human cultures, and you can test your own
response to some everyday moral dilemmas on his team’s moral sense test on the
Web and add to his data. Pop the words ‘moral sense test’ and ‘Harvard’ into
Google, and you’ll find it.”
Evidently, the moral sense test is meant to be culture-blind in the sense of
being culture neutral, but in fact it is strikingly culture-blind in another sense: its
very title appears to equate universal human concerns about morality (in the sense
of “doing bad things” and “doing good things”) with the Anglo concept of moral
sense. What the designers of the test overlook is that in fact the concept of “moral
sense” is a cultural artifact, part of the Anglo cultural heritage, that it is linked
with modern English, and that it has no exact semantic equivalents in other
languages or even in Shakespeare’s English.
When one looks at the MST Web site, one can find putative versions of “the
same test” in Spanish and Chinese, but even a quick glance at the Spanish version
shows that this presumption of identity is not justified and that not even the title
“moral sense test” can be adequately translated into Spanish. The Spanish phrase
encuesta de juicıó moral introduced at the outset means, in fact, something like
“an inquiry into moral judgment.” But since juicıó, like judgment, implies an
element of reflection, it is incompatible with the nonreflective implications of the
phrase moral sense. It is not surprising, therefore, that the word juicıó is quickly
dropped in favor of a loan from English and that the explanatory note “About the
Moral Sense Test” is rendered in Spanish as “Sobre el Moral Sense Test.”2
Furthermore, the key English words right and wrong used in the explanation
of the test are rendered in the Spanish version as correcta and incorrecta,
‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ (action) because Spanish has no equivalent words. But
the words right and wrong do not mean the same as correct and incorrect, and in
fact they stand for uniquely English concepts (for a detailed discussion see
Wierzbicka 2006, chapter 3).
In the Chinese version of the moral sense test, moral sense has been rendered
as shı̀ fei guan, where shı̀ means something like ‘yes, correct, right’; fēi ‘no,
MORAL SENSE 315
incorrect, wrong’; and guan, ‘point of view, concept’ (cf., e.g., Liang 1973).
While such glosses can be only approximate, there can be no doubt that shı̀ fei
guan does not match the English moral sense any more than the Spanish juicıó
moral does.
Empirical linguistic investigations strongly suggest that the concepts of good
and bad are indeed universal and also that in all languages and cultures people
distinguish between “doing something bad” and “doing something good” (for a
detailed discussion see Wierzbicka 2001, 161–69). The ideas that “people can do
bad things” and “people can do good things” can indeed be regarded as moral
universals, but the same is not true of the notion of moral sense, which is in fact
highly culture specific, just as “right” and “wrong” are.
The introduction to the moral sense test states: “Our aim is to use data from the
MST, as well as other experiments, to characterize the nature of our moral psychol-
ogy, how it evolved, and how it develops in our species.” The word “our” in the
phrase “our moral psychology” is meant to stand for “human,” but if human moral
psychology is seen through the prism of the modern Anglo concept of moral sense,
its portrayal is bound to be distorted to some extent by an Anglo bias.3
Although the expression moral sense is less colloquial and less frequent
in English than its putative semantic equivalent, a sense of right and wrong
(see section 7.4), it is by no means rare. In fact, a Google search yields close to
a million occurrences of moral sense, as compared to less than half a million
of sense of right and wrong. Nor is moral sense restricted to the language
of philosophers, psychologists, and popularizers of science, as the following
examples from COBUILD from the British National Corpus (BNC) and from a
popular novel illustrate:
My moral sense has been dulled by too many years here. (BNC)
Without the guidance of the nuns, Tilda seemed to have lost the last vestige of moral
sense. (BNC)
It was not just that he was unversed in Washington mores, he was also a deeply religious
man with a highly developed moral sense. (COBUILD)
The moral sense seems to be lacking in their makeup. (COBUILD)
“I will be writing,” pronounced Monty, “of my beliefs concerning the state of the
university system in this country. I will be writing employing my knowledge, as well as
my moral sense.” (Zadie Smith 2000)
In popular philosophical and psychological discussions of “moral sense,” the

word sense is often used more or less interchangeably with the word judgment or
with expressions like our intuitive judgment. Hauser (2006) also speaks about a
“universal moral grammar,” which he describes as “a tool-kit for building
possible moral systems,” and about a “moral calculus,” which is “a completely
unconscious intuitive process.” However, as the examples from COBUILD and the
British National Corpus illustrate, moral sense cannot mean exactly the same as
moral judgment: a judgment cannot be part of someone’s makeup, cannot be
unconscious, and does not imply any link or analogy with the senses, with bodily
perception, or with bodily sensations.
316 SENSE
There can be little doubt that speakers of English interpret the expression
moral sense against the background of expressions like a sense of time, a sense of
direction, a sense of obligation, a sense of responsibility, and above all, a sense of
right and wrong. Like all these other sense expressions, moral sense, too, stands
for a complex concept that combines, in a particular way, references to thinking,
feeling, and knowing and implies an analogy with the senses and sensations.
More precisely, the concept of sense in the expression moral sense refers to the
human capacity to think something, to feel something at the same time, and to
know something on the basis of these thoughts and these feelings—as one can
know something on the basis of bodily sensations and perceptions. At the same
time, it is significant that moral sense, in contrast to a sense of right and wrong, a
sense of time, and so on, is usually used in present-day English without the article
a (unless it is accompanied by an adjective, e.g., a rough moral sense; cf. the
quote from Orr given earlier)—a grammatical difference that reflects a special
conceptual status of moral sense as a shared human characteristic (in contrast, for
example, to a sense of time).
So what exactly does the expression moral sense (as it is used in present-day
English) mean?
Building on the analyses of other sense-expressions developed in this book,
I propose the following NSM explication:
Moral sense in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
a. people can think about some things like this:

“it is like this:
I know that if I do this, I will do something good
I know that if I do this, I will do something bad”
b. when people think like this about these things, they can know that it is like this,
like people in a place can know something about this place because they are in this
place
c. they can know it because when they think like this, they can feel something,
d. all people can think like this
The element “I know” in the first block of components situates moral sense closer
to perception than to judgment: my moral sense tells me (causes me to know) that
if I do this, I will do something good (bad); it is not a matter of reflection but of
inner perception.
One could argue that the two basic thoughts associated with moral sense
should be formulated in terms of “someone” rather than “I”: “if someone does
this, this someone will do something bad/good.” However, in contemporary
popular science and other writings of the subject, the notion of moral sense is
strongly linked with motivation, action, and choice, and also with questions
such as “what is the origin of goodness?” and “what is the origin of altruism?”
MORAL SENSE 317
(cf., e.g., Dugatkin 2006). These questions relate more to one’s own prospective
acts (“if I do this, I will be doing something good/bad”) than to one’s assessment
of people’s behavior in general (“if people do this, they will be doing something
good/bad”). Of course, the expression moral sense can be used in relation to such
assessments as well, but arguably this is done by extension from the more basic
first-person model (“I know that if I do this, I will be doing something bad/
good”), which connects better with the view of moral sense as a guide for action.
7.2. A Brief History of the Concept of Moral Sense
Given how important the concept of moral sense is in the Anglo/English world,
and how many influential writers have tried to trace the origins of this “sense” in
“our Darwinian past,” it is interesting to trace the origins of the concept of moral
sense in Anglo/English intellectual history. In fact, the milestones of this history
are not difficult to identify since they can be linked fairly straightforwardly with
the names of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, and Darwin, and from Darwin the
path led straight to contemporary writers like Hauser, Dawkins, Bloom, and Orr.
Tracing the use of the phrase moral sense in the writings of these authors, we can
establish both a clear continuity and a semantic shift.
It is commonly held that the expression moral sense was first used in English in
the writings of the early eighteenth-century moral philosopher Lord Shaftesbury,
alongside a sense of right and wrong (cf. Mautner 1996, 277–78).4 Shaftesbury was
deeply convinced of the universality and, in some sense, innateness, of basic moral
distinctions. In his correspondence, he scornfully rejected Hobbes’s view of human
nature (which without external control would lead to “a war of every man against
every other man”), but he was far more worried about Locke’s influence and what he
saw as the danger inherent in Locke’s view that “virtue . . . has not other measure,
law, or rule, than fashion and custom”:
It was Mr. Locke that struck the home blow: for Mr. Hobbes’s character and base
slavish principles in government took off the poison of his philosophy. ’Twas
Mr. Locke that struck at all fundamentals, threw all order and virtue out of the
world, and made the very ideas of these (which are the same as those of God)
unnatural, and without foundation in our minds. (Shaftesbury 1900, 404)
According to Shaftesbury, the key question is not whether moral ideas are (in
some sense) innate but whether “the constitution of man be such that, being adult
and grown up, at such or such a time, sooner or later (no matter when), the idea
and sense of [moral] order, administration, and a God, will not infallibly, inevi-
tably, necessarily spring up in him” (ibid.). Shaftesbury attributed Locke’s
rejection of moral universals to his excessive credulity:
Then comes the credulous Mr. Locke, with his Indian, barbarian stories of wild
nations, that have no such idea (as travellers! learned authors! and men of truth! and
318 SENSE
great philosophers! have informed him), not considering that is but a negative upon
a hearsay, and so circumstantiated that the faith of the Indian . . . may be as well
questioned as the veracity or judgment of the relater, who cannot be supposed to
know sufficiently the mysteries and secrets of those barbarians; whose language
they but imperfectly know; to whom we good Christians have by our little mercy
given sufficient reason to conceal many secrets from us. (ibid.)
But although Shaftesbury indeed advanced the idea of a moral sense or a

sense of right and wrong and although he on occasion used the phrase moral
sense, this phrase took root in the English language through two seminal works of
moral philosopher Francis Hutcheson, each comprising two semiautonomous
treatises: An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue [1725]
and An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections [1728].
Both these works were extremely influential in eighteenth-century England and
America and had a particularly great impact in Scotland, where they influenced
many well-known Scottish philosophers, including Hume.
Leidhold (2004, xiii), in his introduction to Hutcheson’s Inquiry, notes
Hutcheson’s acknowledged debt to Shaftesbury’s Characteristics of Men, Man-
ners, Opinions, Times (1711) and states that “Shaftesbury had taught that social
affections were the foundations of morals and that a moral sense was the origin of
our moral ideas.” But the phrase moral sense appears in Shaftesbury’s Charac-
teristics only twice, whereas in Hutcheson’s work it occurs very frequently and
becomes a veritable key term. As Raphael (1947, 2) has noted, “the expression
‘moral sense’ was first used by Shaftesbury, but in a loose and vague way; it
became the name of a specific theory in the work of Hutcheson, who drew upon
Locke’s empiricist theory of knowledge in framing it.”
It is true that Shaftesbury’s use of the term moral sense was somewhat vague
and that he did not make a clear distinction between the new term moral sense
and the older term conscience. For example, he wrote that “to want [i.e., lack]
conscience, or natural sense of the odiousness of crime and injustice, is to be most
of all miserable in life” (1999, 209). The word conscience, which Locke defined
as “our own Opinion or Judgment of the Moral Rectitude or Pravity of our own
Actions” (Locke 1975 [1690], Essay 1.3.8, 70), carried implications of reflection
and was felt to have Christian connotations. As nineteenth-century preacher
Frederick William Robertson, quoted in the OED (with the date 1853), put it,
“We come into this world with a moral sense; or to speak more Christianly, with a
conscience.” As an electronic search indicates, there are as many as 969 uses of
the word conscience in the Works (1861) of seventeenth-century writer John
Bunyan. Hutcheson’s moral sense, on the other hand, was free of Christian
connotations and was linked with “the five senses,” not with moral reflection,
and as Partridge (1992, 90) puts it, it was “both prospective and retrospective.”
Drawing on Locke’s theory of knowledge, according to which all knowledge
is ultimately derived from the senses, Hutcheson advanced the view that in
addition to “external senses” like sight and taste, there are also “internal senses”
such as “the sense of beauty” and “a moral sense.” In his Inquiry Hutcheson set
out to prove “that some actions have to men an immediate Goodness; or, that by a
MORAL SENSE 319
superior Sense, which I call a moral one, we approve the Actions of others . . . ; a
like Perception we have in reflecting on such Actions of our own, without any
View of natural advantage from them” (Hutcheson 2004 [1725], 88). There can
be no doubt that for Hutcheson, “moral sense” so defined was analogous to “the
five senses”: “All our Ideas, or the materials of our reasoning or judging, are
received by some immediate Powers of Perception internal or external, which
we may call Senses” (Hutcheson 2002 [1728], 215). Furthermore, as Partridge
(1992, 97) comments, “the most important point for Hutcheson is that the nature
of the moral faculty involves sensation, and not reason.”
Hutcheson’s notion of a “moral sense” put forward in his Inquiry was sharply
criticized by many of his contemporaries. In his Essay (published three years
later), the phrase moral sense was provocatively placed in the title and attracted
even more attention. In this work, in which the phrase moral sense recurs dozens
of times, the author writes: “All Men feel something in their own Hearts recom-
mending Virtue, which yet it is difficult to explain. This Difficulty probably arises
from our previous Notions of a small Number of Senses, so that we are unwilling
to have recourse in our Theories to any more” (Hutcheson 2002 [1728], 7).
One of the most active participants in this debate was Adam Smith, the
famous author of The Wealth of Nations, who in his Theory of Moral Sentiments
(1759) argued against the innateness and universality of “moral sense” in Hutch-
eson’s sense of the term on linguistic grounds:
It is strange that this sentiment, which Providence undoubtedly intended to be the

governing principle of human nature, should hitherto have been so little taken notice
of, as to not have got a name in any language. The word moral sense is of very late
formation, and cannot yet be considered as making part of the English tongue.
(Smith 1982 [1759], 326)
Smith does not reject the idea of moral universals, but he notes the contin-
gent nature of Hutcheson’s concept of “a moral sense.” As Partridge (1992, 250)
puts it, “This in itself . . . undermines, as Smith notes, the credibility of the
philosophical claim that there is such a distinct faculty.”
Eighteenth-century Britain was the scene of a raging debate between propo-
nents and opponents of the “moral sense” and also one about the appropriate use
and interpretation of this phrase. As Hume noted in his Enquiry concerning the
Principles of Morals:
There has been a controversy started of late, much better worth examination,
concerning the general foundation of Morals; whether they be derived from Reason,
or from Sentiment, whether we attain the knowledge of them by a chain of argument
and induction, or by an immediate feeling and finer internal sense; or whether, like
all sound judgment of truth and falsehood, they should be the same to every rational
intelligent being.” (Hume 1969 [1751], 59)
Hume himself was very much on Hutcheson’s side, and he argued strongly
for what he called “a sense of morals.” For example, in the Treatise of Human
320 SENSE
Nature (Hume 1978 [1734], 455), in a section titled “Moral Distinctions

not deriv’d from Reason” (section I, part I, book III), he wrote: “Moral distinc-
tions . . . are not the offspring of reason. Reason is wholly inactive, and can never
be the source of so active a principle as conscience, or a sense of morals.” In
another section, he also wrote that “It requires but very little knowledge of human
affairs to perceive that a sense of morals is a principle inherent in the soul, and
one of the most powerful that enters into the composition” (ibid., 619).
But although Hume used, here and elsewhere, the phrase a sense of morals,
he also adopted Hutcheson’s phrase a moral sense, and in particular, section I
(part I of book III) of the Treatise bears the memorable heading “Moral distinc-
tions deriv’d from a moral sense.” The section starts as follows:
Section I., Part I, Book III Moral distinctions deriv’d from a moral sense. Thus the
course of the argument leads us to conclude that since vice and virtue are not
discoverable merely by reason, or the comparison of ideas, it must be by means of
some impression or sentiment they occasion, that we are able to mark the difference
betwixt them . . . Morality, therefore, is more properly felt than judg’d of; though
this feeling or sentiment is commonly so soft and gentle that we are apt to confound
it with an idea. (ibid., 470)
The keywords in this passage are discoverable, feeling, reason, and idea.
Jointly they suggest that for Hume, a moral sense was a matter of knowing how to
distinguish between “vice” and “virtue” on the basis of what one felt (rather than
merely on the basis of what one thought).
Both Hutcheson and Hume talk about a moral sense rather than moral sense
(although they also use other determiners, such as our, this, and the), and they
both appear to regard a moral sense as one of the senses (“internal senses”),
almost on a par with “external senses” like sight, smell, and touch. As the Scottish
philosopher Thomas Reid, who was an opponent of Hutcheson and Hume, states
in his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), “Many important powers
of mind have, especially of late, been called internal senses from a supposed
resemblance to the external; such as, the sense of beauty, the sense of harmony,
the moral sense” (2002 [1785], 71).
Thus, building on the explication of the senses in chapter 4, I propose the
following explication of that eighteenth-century (Hutcheson/Hume) meaning of
the phrase a moral sense:
(a) moral sense (eighteenth century)

people are like this:
they can know that when they want to do some things, they want to do something good
at the same time, they can know that when they want to do some other things,
they want to do something bad
they can know this because when they think about it, they can feel something,
like they can feel something in some parts of their bodies
when something is happening in these parts of their bodies
MORAL SENSE 321
when they think that someone else did some things, they can know the same
because when they think about it, they can feel the same
The explication of senses (as in the five senses) starts with the component
“people’s bodies are like this,” and the explication of the eighteenth-century
concept of moral sense starts with an analogous component: “people are like
this.” The explication of senses posits a direct link between what is happening at a
particular time in the place where someone is and what can happen in some parts
of this someone’s body; and also, a direct link between what happens in some
parts of this someone’s body and some resulting knowledge. Both these links have
their counterparts in the explication of the eighteenth-century concept of moral
sense proposed here. Furthermore, the temporal anchoring of the “moral sense” in
the first line (“when they want”), parallel to the anchoring of sensory perception
in the here and now, connects with Hutcheson’s and Hume’s view that the
“moral sense” (unlike a mere judgment) can move people to action (cf. Mautner
1996, 278).
Thomas Reid, who was one of the most noteworthy players in the eighteenth-
century debate about “moral sense,” in his Essays on the Active Powers of Man
[1788] argued against Hume’s (and Hutcheson’s) use of this phrase:
When Mr. Hume derives moral distinctions from a moral sense, I agree with him in
words, but we differ about the meaning of the sense. Every power to which the name
of a sense has been given, is a power of judging of the objects of that sense, and has
been accounted such in all ages; the moral sense therefore is the power of judging
in morals. But Mr. Hume will have the moral sense to be only a power of feeling,
without judging: this I take to be an abuse of a word. (Reid [1788], quoted in
Raphael 1947, 153)
But as influential as Reid was in other matters (and in particular, in his

promotion of the notion of common sense, which he helped to become a vital part
of the Anglo/English thought world), on the question of “moral sense” he lost.5
Although the present-day meaning of the phrase moral sense differs in some
respects from that given to it by Hutcheson and Hume, it is much closer to their
meaning than to that advocated by Reid. For example, when Dawkins, Hauser,
Bloom, and Orr talk about “moral sense,” they do not mean “a power of judging,”
as Reid would have it, but rather an ability to react to certain human actions
“instinctively,” “intuitively,” and, yes, by “feeling.”
Finally, it is interesting to note that Darwin, who was undoubtedly an
important link in the conceptual chain leading from Hutcheson and Hume to
present-day writers such as Dawkins and Hauser, seems to have sometimes
spoken interchangeably of the moral sense, a sense of right and wrong, and
some feeling of right and wrong. He also wrote:
It can hardly be disputed that the social feelings are instinctive or innate in the lower
animals; and why should they not be so in man? Mr. Bain [see, for instance, “The
Emotions and the Will,” 1865, 481] and others believe that the moral sense is
322 SENSE
acquired by each individual during his lifetime. On the general theory of evolution
this is at least extremely improbable. (Darwin 1871, 84)
Darwin also quoted, with apparent approval, “our great philosopher, Herbert
Spencer,” who “has recently explained his views on moral sense” and who linked
“moral sense” with emotions:
I believe that the experiences of utility organised and consolidated through all
past generations of the human race, have been producing corresponding
modifications, which, by continued transmission and accumulation, have become in
us certain faculties of moral intuition—certain emotions responding to right and wrong
conduct, which have no apparent basis in the individual experiences of utility.
(ibid., 115)
7.3. Moral Sense in the Eighteenth Century

and Now: A Comparison
Whatever may have changed in the meaning of moral sense between, say,
Hutcheson and Darwin and then Darwin and Dawkins, arguably the link between
knowing and feeling has survived: present-day moral sense, too, links moral
distinctions not with reasoning (as in the Spanish word juicıó or the English
judgment) but with an intuitive, feeling-based response.
One might ask: why should we think that anything at all changed in the
meaning of moral sense between Hutcheson and Dawkins?
There is, indeed, no conclusive evidence on this point; there is, however, a
good deal of circumstantial evidence. To begin with, Hutcheson’s moral sense
was usually accompanied by an indefinite article (a moral sense), and it was
explicitly presented as one of the senses, more precisely, one of the “internal
senses,” alongside a sense of beauty and some others; and these “internal senses”
were quite explicitly presented as parallel to the “external senses.” Thus, in the
eighteenth-century usage (or at least in Hutcheson’s), there was a transparent and
direct semantic link between the phrase a moral sense and the word senses (as in
the five senses).
By contrast, in present-day usage the link between moral sense and the five
senses is less direct and less obvious. For example, when Dawkins says the “we
have a moral sense which is built into our brains” he does not compare this
“sense” with other “senses” but with “our sexual instinct” and “our fear of
heights.”
Furthermore, the whole semantic context in which the expression moral
sense exists in contemporary English is quite different from what it used to be.
With time, moral sense came to be seen as closely related in meaning to a sense of
right and wrong—not in the sense in which Shaftesbury used that phrase (rough-
ly, an innate and universal “natural sense” closely related to “conscience”), but in
a new sense (discussed in the next section). This new meaning of a sense of right
and wrong implies consciousness: thinking in terms of “I.” We can schematically
MORAL SENSE 323
represent the conceptual shift in question, which relates to the first chunk in the
two explications of moral sense, as follows:
Eighteenth century
people can know that when they want to do some things,
they want to do something good/bad
Twentieth and twenty-first centuries

people can think about some things like this:
“it is like this:
I know that if I do this, I will be doing something good
I know that if I do this, I will be doing something bad”
Arguably, this conceptual shift in the meaning of moral sense is closely related
to a broader cultural shift, which has also occurred in the semantic history of
experience (see chapter 2). As Shweder, Mahapatra, and Miller (1990, 142) argue,
“there is an unequal distribution . . . of self-consciousness” across populations, and
“self-consciousness about thinking is probably a useful cross-cultural . . . variable.”
The term cross-cultural can also be applied to different epochs. To say that the
thought world reflected in modern (twentieth- and twenty-first-century) English is
different from that reflected in pre-Enlightenment English is hardly a radically new
claim. But the methods of linguistic semantics and in particular of NSM semantics
can help us to trace such differences more precisely and more systematically than it
was possible before (see, e.g., Bromhead 2009).
The emergence of the first-person perspective in the twentieth- and twenty-
first-century meaning of moral sense brought this meaning closer in some
respects to that of a sense of right and wrong and to the perspective reflected in
the plethora of other more or less recent sense expressions such as a sense of
commitment, a sense of responsibility, and a sense of identity.
At the same time, this alignment between moral sense and those other
present-day sense expressions is no doubt only partial, if only because moral
sense is still seen today, as it was in the eighteenth century, as a shared human
characteristic. Thus, there is no assumption today that everybody has “a sense of
responsibility,” “a sense of humor,” or “a sense of direction,” but those who use
the phrase moral sense assume that (apart from pathologies) all people have
“moral sense.” Accordingly, the explication of moral sense (twentieth- and
twenty-first-century meaning of moral sense), like that of the earlier (eigh-
teenth-century) meaning, has been phrased here in terms of “people” rather
than “someone,” and both include the component “all people can think like this.”
The present-day meaning of moral sense is linked with consciousness and
the possibility of choice: “if I do this, I will be doing something good; if I do that,
I will be doing something bad.” There is no evidence for the presence of such a
link in the eighteenth-century usage, in which moral sense was strongly asso-
ciated with other “senses,” both “internal,” like “a sense of beauty,” and “exter-
nal” (“the five senses”). The five senses do not imply consciousness and are
attributed to so-called lower animals, but not even Frans de Waal, the most
324 SENSE
prominent champion of “a sense of right and wrong” in nonhuman primates

(2006), attributes “a moral sense” to frogs and spiders.6
The two explications of moral sense proposed here, one for the eighteenth-
century usage and one for the present-day meaning, reflect considerations such as
these. While it is not possible to present these considerations here in full detail, one
point needs to be at least briefly addressed: the relationship between moral sense and
a sense of right and wrong in present-day English. I turn to it in the next section.
7.4. A Sense of Right and Wrong in Present-Day

English
Philosophers and scientists who write about “moral sense” often appear to use the
phrase moral sense interchangeably with a sense of right and wrong, apparently
for elegant variation. In ordinary language, however, the two phrases do not mean
the same. Roughly speaking, the phrase a sense of right and wrong implies
something less stable and less permanent than moral sense or to put it differently,
something more variable, more changeable, more situation bound, and more
individual than moral sense. Consider, for example, the following descriptions
of people from the British National Corpus:
A strong-minded colleen with a sense of right and wrong [?moral sense].

He was someone with respect for himself and for his community. He was someone with a
sense of right and wrong [?moral sense].
One could describe someone as a person with a sense of responsibility, a sense of

duty, or a sense of humor but not as someone with moral sense, because moral
sense implies a common human characteristic. Furthermore, a sense of right and
wrong is often presented as something acquired through learning, whereas moral
sense implies something innate (or, in current parlance, hardwired):
This undermines the authority of parents, the ones most responsible for passing on to their
offspring a sense of right and wrong [?moral sense].
People can speak of passing on to one’s offspring, through example and moral
teaching, a sense of right and wrong, but they do not normally speak of passing
on moral sense in this way.
Similarly, one can speak of trying to instill in any children in one’s care a
sense of right and wrong, as in the following example, but hardly of trying to
instill moral sense in them:
As a PE teacher, I spent a lot of time at extracurricular activities, such as football matches

against other schools. But I am becoming frustrated by trying to instill a sense of right and
wrong [?moral sense] into our players, not only toward each other but also toward the
referee.
MORAL SENSE 325
But perhaps the clearest evidence of the difference in meaning between moral
sense and a sense of right and wrong comes from collocations with adjectives.
Generally speaking, moral sense usually occurs without any adjectives, unqualified,
whereas as the following table illustrates, a sense of right and wrong can be readily
described as strong and above all, as clear (see rounded figures in table 7.1, based on
a Google search conducted on April 22, 2008).
TABLE 7.1.
moral sense 530,000 sense of right and wrong 440,000
strong moral sense 12,000 strong sense of right and wrong 31,000
clear moral sense 260 clear sense of right and wrong 14,000
In table 7.1, the figures for moral sense and sense of right and wrong are
more or less comparable, whereas the figure for clear sense of right and wrong is
fifty times higher than that for clear moral sense. This is a spectacular difference,
and it strongly suggests that a sense of right and wrong is perceived as more
conscious and more related to “clear thinking” than moral sense. No doubt this is
related to the semantic implications of the words right and wrong, which presup-
pose, roughly speaking, rational thinking (cf. Wierzbicka 2006, chapter 3)—
implications that are absent in the meaning of moral sense. The fact that moral
sense normally occurs without any adjectival qualification altogether suggests its
‘absolute’ character, as something shared by all (normal) human beings.
A person who has “a clear sense of right and wrong” often assesses people’s
actions as either “right” or “wrong.” By contrast, a person who has “moral sense”
is just like everyone else: in principle, all people can distinguish between doing
something good and doing something bad (especially in relation to their own
actions).
As discussed in detail in my English: Meaning and Culture (Wierzbicka
2006, chapter 3), the concepts right and wrong are, unlike good and bad, complex
and culture specific, and I do not analyze them again here. Leaving these two as
they are, we can explicate the expression a sense of right and wrong as follows
(the asterisks indicate here words that are semantically complex):
She has a sense of right and wrong.
a. she often thinks like this about some things:

“it is like this: I know that if someone does this, it is *right;
if someone does this, it is *wrong”
like people in a place can know something about this place because
they are in this place
c. she can know it because, when she thinks like this about something,
she can feel something,
326 SENSE

As mentioned earlier, the meaning of a sense of right and wrong explicated

here is almost certainly different in some respects from Shaftesbury’s early
eighteenth-century usage, but here I do not pursue this comparison further.
7.5. Conclusion
The phrase moral sense plays a significant role in contemporary philosophy,

science, and popular science, and it is an important tool in the conceptual kit with
which the English language provides its speakers, writers, and thinkers. Anglo-
phone scientists, including evolutionary biologists, often take this phrase for
granted and assume that it corresponds neatly to something “built into our brains”
(Dawkins 2006). Yet this phrase has no exact equivalents in other European
languages, let alone non-European ones.
As this chapter shows, the phrase moral sense is part of the Anglo cultural
heritage going back not only to eighteenth-century British moral philosophers
like Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Hume but even further—to Locke’s influential
tenet that all knowledge ultimately derives from the senses.
While the meaning of the phrase moral sense has changed in the course of the
last three centuries, there is also a continuity here. Scientists and popular science
writers who today write in English about “moral sense” generally do not seem to
be aware that they are part of a particular linguistic and conceptual tradition and
that by equating “human morality” with “moral sense” they are interpreting it
though the prism of that tradition.
When Hume wrote that “moral distinctions are not the offspring of reason”
(1978 [1734], 455) and that “moral distinctions [are] derived from a moral sense”
(ibid., 470) he was making a claim about the source of moral distinctions, and he
was not taking the concept of a moral sense for granted. By contrast, those who
write today (in English) about “moral sense” tend to take the concept of moral
sense for granted and use this phrase as if it were self-explanatory, unproblemat-
ic, and independent of history and culture.
Many present-day speakers of English continue to use the word conscience
alongside moral sense and a sense of right and wrong, and even Darwin, perhaps
to connect with a wider European tradition, used the phrase “moral sense or
conscience” (see, e.g., Darwin 1871, 70). Yet connotations of conscience and
sense are quite different: the former evokes ideas of soul, God, spirit, and
conscious discernment, and the latter, of the body, brain, and the senses. It is
not surprising, therefore, that Anglophone popular science writers like Dawkins
prefer moral sense to than conscience. “Conscience” is not a universal concept,
either,7 and it, too, was shaped by a particular cultural tradition, but so was the
more scientific-sounding “moral sense.”8
MORAL SENSE 327
No doubt for contemporary English writers, including science writers, the

phrase moral sense can be a piece of convenient shorthand for talking about a
whole cloud of unanalyzed ideas, one of which is the distinction that people
everywhere make (or can make) between “doing something good” and “doing
something bad.” But if the use of this shorthand is not accompanied by an
awareness that it carries with it a historically shaped cultural perspective, an
Anglo bias creeps in—and once again, the writers are not only using the English
language but are unwittingly being used by it themselves.
In his tribute to Clifford Geertz, Richard Shweder (2007, 203) writes that
“His goal, in an age of ‘globalization,’ was to help us imagine difference:
different conceptions of the self, of morality, of emotions . . . as made manifest
by groups of people, ways of life.” To “groups of people” and “ways of life” one
could add, of course, languages. Languages manifest and promote different
conceptions of the self, of emotions, and of morality (among other things), and
the modern English phrase moral sense— the cornerstone of a whole discourse of
“moral sense”—is a good case in point. Seeing this phrase and this discourse in a
cross-cultural and historical perspective can help us to stretch our imagination as
to different possible conceptions of morality and to go beyond the culture-bound
vision of what Hauser (2006) calls a “universal sense of right and wrong.”9
8
Common Sense
8.1. The Importance of Common Sense in Anglo

Culture
Common sense is one of the central values of Anglo culture reflected in

the English language. To see the importance of this value for speakers of
English, I examine here two areas of language use: book titles and the language
of the law.
To start with book titles, it is remarkable how many books listed on Amazon.
com include in their title the descriptor common sense, used as a way of
advertising the product. Typical examples include Common-sense Parenting of
Toddlers and Preschoolers; Arthritis and Common Sense; Common-sense Class-
room Management for Special Education Teachers; Understanding and Over-
coming Depression: A Common-sense Approach; Common-sense Organizing:
A Step-by-step Program for Taking Control of Your Home and Your Life;
Common Sense: A Simple Plan for Financial Independence.
Words like plan, program, and approach frequently occur in such titles (as in
some of the examples above). Equally common are guide, manual, handbook,
and kit, used either in the main title or in the subtitle (e.g., Dr. Richter’s Common-
sense Diet: A Complete Guide to the Fruits and Vegetables That Help You;
Common-sense Parenting Learn-at-Home Kit [book and DVD]; Divorce Com-
mon-sense Handbook: 180+ Things to Do and 8+ Things Not to Do before Your
Divorce; Uncommon Common Sense: A Guide for Engaged and Married Cou-
ples; Rugby for Real: The Common-sense Training Manual).
328
COMMON SENSE 329
Subtitles like the following ones appear to be particularly popular: A Step-by-

step, Common-sense Guide, Quick, Common-sense Tips, The Common-sense Train-
ing Manual, Everyone’s Common-sense Guide, and Common-sense Strategies.
From a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective the most striking
feature of such book titles and subtitles is their cultural uniqueness and untrans-
latability. For example, to translate a title like “a common-sense guide to X” into
French, Italian, or German, one would have to say “un guide pratique,” “guida
pratica,” or “praktischer Ratgeber,” that is, ‘a practical guide’. However, common
sense as a modifier does not mean the same as practical. One can say “I am a very
impractical person” (to describe oneself matter-of-factly) but hardly “I have no
common sense.” (Presumably, if one really had no common sense, one would be
unlikely to have enough discernment to recognize this deficiency in oneself.)
To appreciate how different common sense (as a modifier) is from the
adjective practical and its equivalents in other European languages, consider
the following two sentences from COBUILD:
if you take common-sense security measures, your car is less likely to be stolen.
No matter what your skin type, you should always adopt a common-sense approach when
suntanning.
It would make little sense to replace common sense with practical in these
sentences because what matters here is that one should think in a certain way
(and do something as a result), whereas practical refers to a way of doing things
without any reference to thinking.
As I discuss in more detail later, bilingual dictionaries usually match the
English common sense (used as a noun) with phrases like bon sens in French,
buon senso in Italian, senso común in Spanish, and gesunder Menschenverstand
in German, but such phrases cannot be used in book titles in the way common
sense can be used in English. They cannot point to a recognizable kind of
approach, the way the English common sense (used as an adjective) does. They
can refer to a valued personal characteristic but not to a recognizable approach,
attitude, and way of thinking. Above all, they do not stand for a great cultural
value recognized as such in the common perception of language speakers. They
cannot sell books, policies, or anything else. The virtue they refer to could be seen
as marginal in French, Italian, Spanish, or German. “Common sense,” on the
other hand, is widely seen as a core value—incontrovertible, basic, and indis-
pensable.
Commentators on Anglo culture have often noted the centrality of “common
sense” among values widely shared in English-speaking societies (especially in
England) and often contrasted it with theories, ideologies, and logical reasoning.
For example, in The English: A Portrait of a People, Jeremy Paxman (1999)
writes:
The English approach to ideas is not to kill them, but to let them die of neglect. The
characteristic English approach to a problem is not to reach for an ideology but to
330 SENSE
snuffle around it, like a truffle hound, and when they have isolated the core, then to
seek a solution.
It is an approach which is empirical and reconciling and the only ideology
it believes in is Common Sense. The English mind prefers utilitarian things to
ideas. As Emerson put it, “They love the lever, the screw, the pulley, the Flanders
draught-horse, the waterfall, wind-mills, tide-mills; the sea and the wind to bear
their freight ships. You can see why they have produced so many great scientists.”
(Paxman 1999, 192–93)
Social anthropologist Kate Fox, author of the acclaimed book Watching the
English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour, agrees. She describes the
“English” worldview as a cluster of attitudes, the most fundamental of which is
empiricism, which (in her sense) essentially means a preference for common
sense:
Empiricism is another shorthand term into which I am packaging a large collection

of English attitudes. . . . I am using these terms in a much broader, more informal
sense, to include both the anti-theory, anti-abstraction, anti-dogma elements of our
philosophical tradition (particularly our mistrust of obscurantist, airy-fairy “Conti-
nental” theorizing and rhetoric) and our stolid, stubborn preference for the factual,
concrete and common-sense. (Fox 2005, 405; emphasis added)
But it is not just the English who value common sense. The notion may be
appealed to in Britain more often than it is in the United States, but like fairness,
privacy, and evidence, it is entrenched in modern English, and it is part of the
shared conceptual core of British and American English and of Anglo-English in
general.
The high value placed on common sense by speakers of American English is
illustrated by the following quotes from various famous Americans (from the
Internet):
I can never fear that things will go far wrong where common sense has fair play. (Thomas
Jefferson, 1762–1826)
If the obstacles of bigotry and priestcraft can be surmounted, we may hope that common
sense will suffice to do everything else. (Thomas Jefferson, 1762–1826)
Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes. (Ralph Waldo Emerson,
1803–1882)
The three great essentials to achieve anything worthwhile are, first, hard work; second,
stick-to-itiveness; third, common sense. (Thomas Edison, 1847–1931)
Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man’s upper chamber, if he has common
sense on the ground floor. (Oliver Wendell Holmes, physician, poet, Harvard professor,
1809–1894)
It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common
honesty, and common decency. (H. L. Mencken, 1880–1956, American journalist and
author of the authoritative study The American Language, 1919)
It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try again.
But above all, try something. (Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1882–1945)
COMMON SENSE 331
I do not believe that any political campaign justifies the declaration of a moratorium on
ordinary common sense. (Dwight Eisenhower, 1890–1969)
But a list of quotations spanning two centuries can be misleading. When

Thomas Jefferson paid homage to common sense, what did he mean by this
phrase? Did he mean the same as Edison or Roosevelt? A short answer to this
question must be no. The phrase has been part of American discourse from the
time of the Founding Fathers and has always implied “something very good,” but
its exact meaning did not stand still.
As noted, for example, by the editors of Common Sense: The Foundations
for Social Science, “The most famous case of an appeal to common sense was
Thomas Paine’s pamphlet titled Common Sense, in which the Englishman, Paine,
urged the American colonists to declare their independence” (van Holthoon and
Olson 1987, 2). There can be little doubt that Jefferson used the term common
sense in a sense closer to Paine’s than Edison’s, for example. But what exactly
was that sense?
Van Holthoon and Olson offer, in the space of one paragraph, two different
explanations. One is that book titles of this kind “proclaim that the message in the
book is a plain and self-evident truth.” According to the other, the authors of such
books want “to present a particular message in a way which readers would
recognize as practical, down-to-earth and obvious.”(ibid.) But did Paine see
this message to the American colonists as “practical, down-to-earth and obvi-
ous”? “A plain and self-evident truth,” probably. However, describing such a
truth as “practical and down-to-earth” would be, I think, a projection of a much
later meaning onto eighteenth-century English speakers.
There is, of course, a historical continuity between Jefferson’s and Roose-
velt’s rhetoric of common sense. But the value that they appeal to with the phrase
common sense is not the same since the historical and cultural contexts in which
the two presidents were using the phrase were not the same.
Later on I explore the semantic change masked by the continuous use of
common sense and the continuous high profile of this phrase in both Britain and
the United States. Here, let me present several examples of the use of common
sense in contemporary American English from the US Books subcorpus of
COBUILD:
First you explore what you’re thinking and doing in a certain situation. Then you learn to
substitute new thoughts and behaviors that can serve you better. . . . The techniques are
grounded in common sense.
I don’t care how great he is. He doesn’t have an ounce of common sense.
I’ve always admired you for having such good common sense.
You must let your common sense guide you.
The Common-sense Mortgage. Successful Real Estate Negotiation.
He and Shoot were acting on behalf of the laws of nature, defending decency and common
sense.
Their good common sense and decency shone.
332 SENSE
Obviously this is all nonsense. Such contentions are absurd and constitute at once an
outrage upon the sovereignty of Parliament and upon common sense.
In the following pages I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and
common sense.
But Reagan cleansed them of all but a modicum of resentment and bitterness, making an
ideology that had once sounded extreme appear to be the bedrock of common sense and
consensual values.
But a greater number of feminists forged a more sensitive style of political work that
voiced and affirmed the common sense and common experience of housewives and
secretaries, mothers and blue-collar workers in a world controlled by men.
The salience of common sense in American lingua-culture is tellingly

reflected in the experience of immigrants from a non-Anglo background.
Thus, in the novel The Namesake (2003, 276) by Bengali American writer
Jhumpa Lahiri, the heroine, Ashima, sums up her cross-cultural experience as
a Bengali immigrant in the United States by referring to what she perceives as
the [American] “ideal of happiness” and “American common sense.” The
Bengalis of her own generation of immigrants, she reflects, considered it
“their duty to stay married.” Her American-born children, however, “are not
willing to accept, to adjust, to settle for something less than their ideal of
happiness. The pressure has given way, in the case of the subsequent genera-
tion, to American common sense.”
But perhaps the most telling endorsement of common sense as a compass
for navigating in life comes from representatives of the law. For example, legal
scholar Ronald Allen (John Henry Wigmore professor at Northwestern Univer-
sity School of Law) states that “the law . . . is the embodiment of common
sense” (2000/2001, 1426). As Allen puts it, “common sense does not lie in a
collection of propositions. Instead, it lies in certain attitudes of mind, particu-
larly those embodied in folk psychology and naive realism, and permits the
effective navigating of the environment even if inconsistent premises seem to
be held” (ibid., 1418). This statement, implicitly comparing common sense to a
compass, linking it with a way of thinking (“mind”), and contrasting its practi-
cal effectiveness in many situations with a concern for abstract logic, reflects
some of the main themes that recur in both scholarly and popular discussions on
common sense.
Allen cites many endorsements of the value of common sense taken from the
same Internet sources from which I have drawn some of mine. But frequent
references to common sense in legal practice, to which Allen rightly draws
attention, are particularly telling. Describing some research that he and one of
his colleagues have done on citations of various legal authorities appealed to by
judges and in legislative hearings, Allen concludes: “Do you know what is the
single most cited authority for an argument that we have been able to identify? It
is common sense, invoked as an argument” (ibid., 1428). To illustrate this
conclusion, he notes that “the words and phrases ‘common sense,’ ‘commonsen-
sical,’ and ‘sensible’ used as an argument (based on crude sampling) appear
upward of 70,000 times in Westlaw” (ibid., 1429).1
COMMON SENSE 333
Opposing theory-based approaches to law advocated by various “giants of

modern American legal theory” (ibid., 1428), Allen writes: “The high legal
theorists have mismodeled the phenomenon they are supposedly exploring.
They have modeled the law as an integrated formal system or process amenable
to top-down theorizing, and it is not. . . . It is a bottom-up, organic process at the
heart of which is common sense” (ibid., 1430; emphasis added).
In this context Allen refers to John Maguire’s “famous” book Evidence: Common
Sense and Common Law (1947, 1429) and quotes sociologist Siegwert Lindenberg’s
(1987, 208) observation that “the body of law governing evidence may be the strongest
bastion against sudden assaults on common sense.” Allen concludes: “Resisting
sudden assaults on common sense may be one of the most important guarantors of
the continuing progression of civilization” (2000/2001, 1431).
I believe that Allen’s emphasis on the importance of common sense in
common law in English-speaking countries is a good illustration of the pivotal
role that this concept plays in the life of these societies. In the next section
I follow Allen’s lead and examine in some detail how Australian judges appeal
to common sense in practice.
8.2. Common Sense in Law
As the material presented in this section (and taken from an Australian legal
database called AustLII) illustrates,2 Australian judges appear to put their faith in
common sense no less than their American counterparts do. In particular, refer-
ences to common sense often appear in instructions to jurors: common sense is
appealed to as a principle that should guide the jurors in their deliberations and
conclusions. Often the jurors are told to proceed “in a common-sense way” and to
“use their common sense,” as in the following examples (I number the examples
in this section consecutively):
(1) The authorities make it clear that the jury is entitled to examine the nature and quality
of the medical evidence and should do so in a broad and common-sense way.
(2) His Honour told the jury . . . that they must proceed on the basis of the evidence “using
your common sense and your experience of life to assess it.”
There are also frequent references to proceeding “on a common-sense basis,”

“according to common-sense principles,” and “on common-sense lines.”
In many documents included in the database common sense co-occurs with
strong modal verbs such as should (as in example 1) and especially must, which
highlights the normative power of common sense:
(3) Of course, common sense must prevail!
In this example, the use of the phrase of course is just as telling as that of the word
must. Equally telling is the combination of must with the phrase overriding
approach and the verbs determine and follow in the next example:
334 SENSE
(4) The tribunal considers that its overriding approach with respect to legislative
interpretation must be common sense, and the Tribunal notes the High Court
decision in March v Stramare (1991) 171 CLR 506, where the court directed that
causation with respect to the Act was to be determined by a common-sense
approach, and that this approach has been followed by the Tribunal in previous
matters.
And here is one more example that combines must with determine in describing
the common-law tradition in general terms:
(5) The common law tradition is that what was the cause of a particular occurrence is a
question of fact which must be determined by applying common sense to the facts of
each particular case.
In addition to modal verbs like should and especially must, judges often combine
common sense with speech act verbs like tell (as in “common sense tells us”) and
causative verbs like compel or require:
(6) Common sense tells us in this case to look to the facts and the medical evidence.
(7) Common sense compelled the conclusion because the injury could not be registered
as the result of the defect alone but required the active and negligent intervention of
the first respondent for its occurrence.
(8) It could well be the case that “but for” the assault, the applicant would have ended up
on morphine. It could equally be the case that “but for” the assault, the applicant
would not have ended up on morphine. As Mason CJ tells us in March v Stramare,
however, the decision-maker is to return to common sense, and cannot rely on the
“but fors” alone.
(9) Common sense requires the conclusion that a special relationship of
proximity . . . does not arise unless the person providing the information or advice
has some expertise or knowledge.
Particularly interesting are overt statements that emphasize the importance

of common sense in decision-making and the long tradition of favoring reliance
on common sense, especially in common law:
(10) This approach to the issue of causation places rather too much weight on the “but for”
test to the exclusion of the “common-sense” approach which the common law has
always favoured . . . As Dixon C. J., Fullagar and Kitto JJ. remarked in Fitzgerald
v. Penn (p. 277): “it is ultimately a matter of common sense.”
The word ultimately in this last excerpt is also telling. We have already seen that
common sense “must” be the “overriding approach” to legislative interpretation
and that such is “the common-law tradition.” Here, we hear that the common law
“has always favored” the common-sense approach and that common sense is the
“ultimate” court of appeal.
COMMON SENSE 335
Of particular interest are references to a “common-sense concept of causa-

tion” (or similar), implicitly contrasted, in a positive way, with more theoretical
concepts of causation:
(11) The common-law concept of common-sense causation accepts that the chain of
causation between breach and damage is broken for the purpose of attributing legal
responsibility for that damage if there has been an intrusion of “a new cause which
disturbs the sequence of events.”
(12) In this situation, s.82(1) should be understood as taking up the common-law practical
or common-sense concept of causation.
(13) Out of the many conditions that combine to produce loss or damage to a person, the
common law is concerned with determining only whether some breach of a legal
norm was so significant that, as a matter of common sense, it should be regarded as
a cause of damage.
Often “common sense” is contrasted in such legal texts, in a positive

way, with various “theories” (“philosophical,” “scientific,” “abstract,” or “meta-
physical”):
(14) The existence of the relevant causal connection is determined according to common-
sense idea—and not according to philosophical or scientific theories of causation.
(15) Similarly in Alphacell Ltd v. Woodword 117, Lord Salmon observed that causation is
“essentially a practical question of fact which can best be answered by ordinary
common sense rather than by abstract metaphysical theory.”
The normative character of appeals to common sense is clearly visible in

contexts referring to some perceived violations of this principle. Expressions like
“contrary to common sense,” “an affront to common sense,” “flouts business
common sense,” and “offensive to common sense” are common and revealing.
For example, in a medical case a doctor operated on a patient without warning
her of the risk involved. During the procedure her esophagus was perforated
and became infected. The judge in the subsequent lawsuit opined as follows
(examples 16, 17, and 18):
(16) It is contrary to common sense to treat part of the very risk which called the duty
into existence as a supervening event breaking the chain of causation beginning with
the breach of that duty.
(17) From a common-sense point of view, the cause of the perforation and the
consequent mediastinitis was the examination of the esophagus with a rigid
endoscope, an examination which carried with it an internal risk of perforation.
To argue otherwise seems, the judge said, “an affront to common sense,”
elaborating as follows:
(18) Similarly, with great respect to the learned judges in the courts below, it seems
contrary to common sense to conclude that the defendant’s failure to warn caused
336 SENSE
or materially contributed to him perforating the plaintiff’s esophagus on this

occasion.
Here are two other examples:
(19) His Honor stated that the allegations defied common sense and experience.
(20) The liability is personal, not vicarious: First, it might be suggested that it is an offense
to common sense to burden one person with the consequences of the willful criminal
conduct of another.
Many collocations that recur in the legal database combine common sense with
other highly positive words central to modern Anglo cultures, such as fairness and
reasonable (see chapters 4 and 5 in my English: Meaning and Culture [2006]):
(21) A requirement based upon logical or cause proximity between the act of carelessness
and the resulting inquiry is plainly better adapted to reflect notions of fairness and
common sense.
(22) In any case where the person deceived has not himself behaved with reasonable
prudence, reasonable common sense, or can in any true sense be said to have been
the author of this own misfortune . . the damage that he seeks to recover must have
flowed directly from the fraud perpetrated upon him.
Locutions such as “as a matter of common sense and experience” and “as a
matter of logic and common sense” are also very telling, as experience and logic
also imply (in such contexts) something of indisputable value:
(23) That strength lies in the fact that the evidence reveals “striking similarities,” “unusual
features,” “underlying unity,” “system,” or “pattern” such that it raises, as a matter
of common sense and experience, the objective improbability of some event having
occurred other than as alleged by the prosecution.
(24) As a matter of both logic and common sense, it makes no sense to regard the
negligence of the plaintiff or a third party as a superseding cause or novus actus
interveniens when the defendant’s wrongful conduct has generated the very risk of
injury resulting from the negligence of the plaintiff as a third party and that injury
occurs in the ordinary course of things.
It is also interesting to note that common sense occurs in the database in

phrases like commercial common sense and business common sense, which
further upgrade common sense by adding to it a glow of professionalism:
(25) If detailed semantic and syntactical analysis of words in a commercial contract is

going to lead to a conclusion that flouts business common sense, it must be made to
yield to business common sense.
(26) Likewise, there was no dispute as to the need to construe words against the
benchmark of commercial common sense in terms of Airwork case supra.
COMMON SENSE 337
The expression the benchmark of commercial common sense points here to the
wide acceptance of some ways of thinking in a particular professional domain as
a generally agreed-upon reference point and an indisputable standard.
Again and again, appeal is made to “ordinary common sense,” where the
word ordinary functions as a term of positive evaluation:
(27) . . . as a matter of ordinary common sense . . .

(28) . . . as a matter of ordinary common sense and experience . . .
(29) . . . a practical question of fact which can best be answered by ordinary common
sense.
We saw the phrase ordinary common sense earlier (in section 8.1) in a
rhetorical statement made by President Eisenhower, and it is a significant
one (as is also plain common sense). The adjectives ordinary and plain make the
appeal to common sense sound even more emphatic and seemingly compelling
(no one could argue against “ordinary common sense” or “plain common sense”).
Summing up, we have seen that Australian judges (like their American
counterparts) show a great deal of respect for common sense and frequently
appeal to it in their statements and their advice to jurors. This is a linguistic as
well as sociocultural phenomenon of great significance and with far-reaching
consequences. There is no corresponding discourse of “common sense” in conti-
nental Europe, and as we will see in the next section, there is no semantic
equivalent of common sense in other European languages.
8.3. The Uniqueness of English Common Sense

(Common Sense vs. Bon Sens)
Thomas Reid’s monumental work Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man

(2002 [1785], 17) opens with the following statement: “There is no greater
impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the ambiguity of words.”
There are few areas of scholarship to which this statement applies more than that
associated with the phrase common sense.
In ordinary language, the phrase common sense does not have many different
meanings, and fittingly, the common usage provides good guidance here to the
common meaning. In scholarly literature, however, common sense in used in a
variety of ways, leading to anything but clarity and common understanding. The
literature is huge, but this “cloud of testimonies” (to use Reid’s phrase) obscures
rather than clarifies what I see as the basic points:
· The phrase common sense, as it is used in contemporary English, has no

equivalent in other languages and embodies a unique Anglo-English
concept. In particular, the meaning of the English phrase common sense
is not identical with the meanings of its supposed equivalents in other
European languages, such as bon sens (or sens commun) in French, buon
338 SENSE
senso (or senso comune) in Italian, or gesunder Menschenverstand

in German.
· The meaning of the English phrase common sense has changed over the
centuries, and the way this phrase is used now is different from the ways
in which it was used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
· In modern English, common sense is a cultural keyword that is very
frequently used in a wide range of contexts and in various grammatical
frames. It is often appealed to as the ultimate arbiter in many different
situations.
· The fact that the English phrase common sense is particularly common in
the titles of books with practical advice (across a wide range of domains)
highlights its practical orientation and its connection to other uniquely
Anglo-English “guiding words” such as reasonable, sensible, plain,
pragmatic, effective, efficient, economical, and businesslike.
In this section I focus on the first of these four basic points: the uniqueness of the
English concept.
Anglophone scholars who write about common sense are often oblivious to
the fact that the English phrase common sense carries a unique, culture-specific
meaning. As a result, they discuss, for example, topics like “common sense in
Kant (Rousseau, Vico, Popper, etc.)” as if authors writing in German, French, and
Italian were actually talking about common sense in the English sense of the term
or, alternatively, as if there were some language-independent idea of common
sense that could be discussed independently of any particular expression in any
particular language. One also reads in the literature about the endorsement of the
value of common sense given, for example, in some Persian, Arabic, or Chinese
proverbs and other sayings. All this results in confusion, because common sense
is in fact an English concept (or rather a sequence of English concepts associated,
across centuries, with different meanings of the English phrase common sense).
Not surprisingly, the uniqueness of the English common sense, often missed
by Anglophone scholars, is far more noticeable to native speakers of other
languages, in particular those that—like Dutch—have borrowed the English
phrase common sense, together with the Anglo-English concept embedded in it.
For example, Dutch historian Peter van Kessel (1987, 116) writes:
The actual concept of common sense is of Anglo-Saxon origin. The most adequate
way to express this notion is to use the English words. This seems obvious and
tautological, and in fact it is. But I would like to underline in this way that notions
have to be expressed in a language—that notions and language are part of a
particular, not universal, culture, and of a culture, like all cultures, locked up in a
historical process.
Van Kessel refers in this context to his experience of attending international

conferences, whose themes are formulated in one official language (usually En-
glish), such as the theme of common sense. On such occasions, “the representatives
of different countries have fundamentally different concepts and notions about the
COMMON SENSE 339
central theme of the conference,” and as a result, such conferences may “start and
end in great confusion and misunderstanding” (ibid., 117).
In fact, van Kessel applies these observations to the very volume in which his
chapter was published. The volume (which I have already quoted here) is titled
Common Sense: The Foundations for Social Science, and van Kessel’s own
contribution bears the title “Common Sense between Bacon and Vico: Scepticism
in England and Italy.”
As mentioned earlier, the Italian term usually equated with the English
common sense is buon senso (comparable to good sense rather than common
sense) or senso comune. Neither of these quasi-equivalents, however, matches the
meaning of the English phrase common sense. Van Kessel comments:
It is interesting that today the Anglo-Saxon concept prevails almost everywhere,

although different interpretations and accentuations still exist. In Dutch, for in-
stance, one uses the English expression, but there is also a pure Dutch one, gezond
verstand, which means something like farmers’ healthy sense of reasoning. In
German we find the same situation: Gesunder Menschenverstand. . . . It would,
however, be too simple to say that gezond verstand or bon sens or senso comune
would be the exact translation of the English “common sense.” (ibid.)
Such noncorrespondence highlights, as van Kessel (ibid., 118) stresses, the fact
that “language is the expression of a culture” and that “there is no scientific
Esperanto as one is supposed to believe.” (It also highlights, one might add, the
fact that English is not a scientific Esperanto.) This makes titles like Common
Sense: The Foundations for Social Science problematic:
Common sense has to be interpreted as a product of Anglo-Saxon cultural experi-

ence—it cannot be simply translated into other languages without changing some-
thing of the contents of the notion, too. Bon sens and buon senso are not just
translations of common sense; they mean something different. The fact that in the
Dutch language the use of the English expression “common sense” is very common
indicates how the Dutch are used to the influence of other cultures and languages
and understand quite well the difference between their own gezond verstand and the
English “common sense,” even if they have made the English idea part of their
cultural heritage. (ibid.)
This is not the place to engage in detailed semantic analysis of the

various expressions often used as translation equivalents of the English common
sense, but a few brief comments on bon sens and buon senso are in order, given that
these two are particularly often identified in the literature with common sense.
Descartes’ Discours de la methode opens famously with a sentence about
bon sens (good sense):
Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagée: car chacun pense en être si
bien pourvue, que ceux même qui sont les plus difficiles à contenter en toute autre
chose, n’ont point coutume d’en désirer plus qu’ils en ont” (Descartes 1947, 1)
340 SENSE
(“Good sense is mankind’s most equitably divided endowment, for everyone

thinks that he is so abundantly provided with it that even those with the most
insatiable appetite and [who are the] most difficult to please in other ways do not
usually want more than they have of this” [Descartes 1977, 3]).
This ironic first sentence is followed by what amounts to a definition of bon

sens: “cela témoigne que la puissance de bien juger, et distinguer le vrai d’avec le
faux, qui est proprement ce qu’on nomme le bon sens ou la raison, est naturelle-
ment égale en tous les hommes” (Descartes 1947, 2). An English translation
(Descartes 1977, 4) renders this sentence as follows: “This evidence shows that
the ability to judge correctly and to distinguish the true from the false—which is
really what is meant by good sense and reason—is the same by innate nature in all
men” (Descartes 1977, 3–4).
If we compare this definition of bon sens with Thomas Reid’s definition of
good sense (see section 8.5) we will see that the two have a good deal in common.
As Reid puts it, “good sense is good judgment” (2002, 424). Thus, Reid agrees
with Descartes that good sense/bon sens is essentially the ability “to judge well”
(la puissance de bien juger) and that it is given by nature/God to all people.
However, Reid links his “common sense” (which is, as it were, a minimal “good
sense”) with one’s ability to manage one’s own affairs and with one’s “conduct
toward others.” For Descartes, on the other hand, “bon sens” has to do with
distinguishing the true from the false and has no practical or social dimension.
While the meaning of both bon sens and common sense subsequently
changed (cf. Lalande 1947, 14), those key differences between Descartes’ bon
sens and Reid’s common sense are consistent with those between bon sens in
contemporary French usage and common sense in present-day English.
In his commentary on Descartes’ Discours the historian of philosophy
Etienne Gilson (1947, 82) notes that when Descartes himself wanted to speak
of bon sens in Latin, he rendered it as bona mens (roughly, ‘good mind’), thus
highlighting the intellectual nature of his concept of bon sens. Barbara Cassin
(2004, 1152), in her Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des
intraduisibles (‘The European Dictionary of Philosophies: A Dictionary of Un-
translatable Words and Expressions’) contrasts the philosophical tradition behind
the English common sense with that behind the French (Cartesian) bon sens as
follows:
The Anglo-Scottish tradition stemming from Shaftesbury and Reid is grounded in a

“philosophy of common sense,” which developed and highlighted moral and epis-
temological aspects converging in an original analysis of sociability. . . . The phi-
losophy of common sense is linked with a valorization of the “ordinary,” ordinary
language and ordinary life.
According to Lalande’s Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie

(1947, 114), raison and bon sens, virtually identified by Descartes, subsequently
grew apart in meaning:
COMMON SENSE 341
Bon sens a cessé, au contraire, de désigner ce qui est “naturellement égal” dans tous
les esprits, et désigne spécialement la puissance de bien juger, avec sang-froid et
justesse, dans les questions concrètes qui ne comportent pas une évidence logique
simple. Il s’oppose alors, suivant la forme des expressions où il entre: A. à la folie et
aux états analogues, passion, colère: n’être pas dans son bon sens . . . B. au manque
de jugement, au caractère des esprits légers ou des esprits faux: avoir ou ne pas avoir
de bon sens.
(“Bon sens has ceased, on the contrary, to signify what is ‘equal by nature’ in
all minds (esprits), and designates especially the ability to judge well, with sang-
froid and rightness (justesse), in concrete questions that cannot be simply decided
by logic. It is therefore opposed, depending on the form of the expressions of which
it is a part, to A. madness and similar states, such as passion, anger, ‘not to be in
one’s bon sens’; B. to lack judgment . . . ‘to have or not to have bon sens’.”)
These two senses of bon sens can be compared to the English sanity and
sound judgment, but neither sanity nor sound judgment can be equated with
common sense. “Having bon sens” can reasonably be compared with “having
sense” or “having good sense” but not with having common sense. The fact that
bon sens could never be used to translate book titles with common sense drama-
tizes the difference between the two, but a comparison of the use of bon sens in
the French part of COBUILD with that of common sense in the English part brings to
light many other differences.
First of all, it is interesting to note that Descartes’ Discours is still present in
the collective memory of educated speakers of French, with recurring references
to “le bon-sens cartésien.” Second, bon sens collocates readily in French with the
noun raison ‘reason’ and the verb raisonner ‘to reason’, whereas in English
common sense is not similarly paired with reason and reasoning:
la raison, le bon sens cartésien, l’universel, la laı̈cité

‘reason, the Cartesian bon sens, the universal, laicity’
Il faut être attentif à ce raisonnement de bon sens.
‘One must pay heed to this reasoning based on bon sens’
Son discours de raison, sa politique de bon sens
‘His discourse based on reason, his politics based on bon sens’
. . . série de réactions totalement étrangères à la raison, au bon sens, sur lesquels toute vie
sociale doit se bâtir.
‘ . . . a series of reactions totally contrary to reason, to the bon sens on which all social life
must be built.’
. . . toute personne raisonnant avec bon sens a le sentiment que Sofri a été condamné
pour . . .
‘anybody who reasons with bon sens feels that Sofri was sentenced for . . . ’
Dans quelle direction aller? A mon avis, dans celle du bon sens et de la raison . . .
‘In what direction should we go? In my view, in that of bon sens and reason.’
Third, bon sens collocates readily with the word règles ‘rules’, whereas the
English common sense does not similarly collocate with the word rules (there are
342 SENSE
no “rules of common sense,” but clearly there are, many French speakers believe,
some règles de bon sens (presumably, rules of logic and reason):
le respect commun de règles de bon sens

‘general adherence to rules of bon sens’
. . . appliquer en politique ce qui est la règle élémentaire du bon sens . . .
‘ . . . to apply in politics that which is the elementary rule of bon sens . . . ’
Il y a des règles de bon sens que tout gouvernement serait bien inspiré de . . .
‘There are rules of bon sens that every government would do well to . . . ’
Fourth, the English common sense is seen as something absolutely ordinary

and is remarkable by its absence rather than its presence. In English it is natural to
say that someone lacks “elementary common sense” (there are many such
examples in the English COBUILD [see section 8.4]) but not that someone has
“remarkable (or exceptional) common sense.” By contrast, the French bon sens
is not similarly seen as commonplace, and it can be described by means of
superlatives:
. . . que la folie gagne autour de vous, réinsuffler votre bon sens légendaire.
‘ . . . that madness spreads around you, to breathe your legendary bon sens into [the
situation] . . . ’
. . . elle s’offre à lui sans atermoiement, avec un bon sens remarquable.
‘ . . . she offers herself to him without trying to temporize, with remarkable bon sens.’
. . . tranquille et raisonnable, doué apparemment du meilleur bon sens.
‘ . . . calm and clear headed, apparently endowed with the best bon sens . . . ’
Il répond avec un bon sens qui l’honore . . .
‘He responds with a bon sens that does him great credit . . . ’
. . . on le savait plein de bon sens . . .
‘he [Gorbachev] was known to have a lot of bon sens . . . ’
It is also interesting to note the name of a bank: “le Crédit agricole, la banque
du bon sens en action” (Agricultural Credit, the bank of bon sens in action). One
can imagine a bank advertising itself in English as one that represents “good
sense in action” but hardly one that called itself a bank of “common sense in
action”: “common sense” is just too unremarkable and too common to work as an
effective ad in a context like this.
Consider also the following sentence from the French COBUILD (calling for
environmental protection of French Guiana):
Cette banque biologique admirable, dont on tire 40% des medicaments que nous utilisons,
voit son sol très mince tassé par bulldozers, ses arbres tronçonnés en dépit du bon sens et
ses animaux voués à disparaı̂tre.
‘this admirable biological bank, the source of 40% of our medicines, is witnessing its thin
soil being packed down by bulldozers, its trees cut down contrary to bon sens, and its
animals destined to disappear.’
COMMON SENSE 343
The actions described here are presented as contrary to sound environmental

policies but not as contrary to “common sense.”
Finally, the material in COBUILD reflects the fact that bon sens is often used in
French to translate the English common sense. Unlike Dutch, French has not
borrowed the English term common sense on a lexical level, but the concept is
familiar to educated French speakers and is often rendered through the calque bon
sens. At the same time, COBUILD shows that the more Cartesian bon sens is also
very much alive in present-day French speech. This bon sens can be qualified in
many different ways. In particular, it can occur in collocations like bon sens
paysan (‘a farmer’s [healthy] bon sens’), bon sens terrien (‘the bon sens of [a man
of] the soil’), le bon sens commun (‘common bon sens’), and le bon sens
populaire (‘ordinary people’s bon sens’).
In fact, this is how Cassin (2004, 241) glosses the English term common
sense in her dictionary of “untranslatable European concepts”:
Common sense, selon une signification a minima, n’est pas un terme philosophique.
Il désigne une forme de bon sens populaire, lorsque quelqu’un déclare: “just use
your common sense!” il évoque la possibilité d’une sagacité pratique, d’une appré-
hension ordinaire des choses. Ainsi, pour mieux connaı̂tre l’amour, le mariage, les
enfants, etc., il existe The Common-sense Book of Love and Marriage, The
Common-sense Book of Baby and Child Care.
‘Common sense, in its basic meaning (“a minima”), is not a philosophical term.
It designates a kind of “popular [common] good sense” (bon sens populaire). Thus,
when someone says, “Just use your common sense!” they evoke the possibility of a
practical shrewdness, an ordinary apprehension of things. Thus, to better know love,
marriage, children, etc., one can consult The Common-sense Book of Love and
Marriage, The Common-sense Book of Baby and Child Care.’
This is all different from the old bon sens cartésien, which lives on, to some
extent, in the contemporary French bon sens.
What applies to the French bon sens applies also, by and large, to the
Italian buon senso. As for sens commun and senso comune (which are
relatively rare in French and Italian, respectively), they can appear in a
sense comparable to that of common sense in “translationese,” as a result of
conceptual borrowing from English. Other than that, they tend to be used with
reference to something like “general (shared) opinion” rather than anything really
close to the English common sense. Here are some examples from the French
COBUILD:
Contre le sens commun des élites américaines il avait donc établi que l’Amérique n’était
pas puritaine.
‘Against the general view (sens commun) of the American elites he showed that America
was not puritan.’
Les réponses du président américain étaient, pour le sens commun, évasives.
‘The responses of the American president were, in general perception (sens commun),
evasive.’
344 SENSE
Mais le sens commun d’aujourd’hui veut qu’entre ses cent visages [de Voltaire] celui de
des Contes, . . . soit le seul réussi.
‘But the prevailing opinion (sens commun) is that among those dozens of portraits [of
Voltaire], that of des Contes is the only successful one.’
In Italian, too, senso comune is used in ordinary language in relation to the

shared or the prevailing opinion. As noted, for example, in the Italian Dizionario
delle idee (1977, 1068), senso comune can in fact be contrasted with buon senso,
as general opinion could be contrasted in English with someone’s individual
good sense. As Dizionario delle idee (ibid., 110) notes, a locus classicus of such a
contrast is provided by a sentence from Manzoni’s (1827) classic novel I Pro-
messi Sposi (chapter 32). The sentence in question refers to people who, during
the plague, avoided taking certain precautions (dictated by buon senso) for fear of
the widespread prejudices of those around them (i.e., of the senso comune).
Such examples of the use of sens commun and senso comune throw into relief
the uniqueness of “the English idea” (as van Kessel puts it) embedded in the
phrase common sense as it is now used in English.
A special issue of the French journal Langages (2008, issue 170) is titled
Le discours et sens commun (‘discourse and common sense’). The articles in this
issue are devoted to what in English would be described as “common under-
standings” or “folk conceptions.” For example, one article discusses the classifi-
cation of colors and smells reflected in ordinary (nonscientific) French linking it
with the phrase sens commun. This highlights the profound difference between
the French sens commun and the English common sense: the classification of
colors and smells reflected in ordinary English is not a matter of “common
sense.”
In their introduction to Common Sense: The Foundations for Social Science,
the editors write:
Peter van Kessel shows [in his contribution to the volume, ] [that] what is taken as
common sense differs in different centuries. In England in the 16th century, the
emphasis was upon the senses. . . . In Italy, on the other hand, the common sense was
rooted not so much in the evidence—the sense—as in the community, the common:
“One should live in continuous contact with one’s community, let oneself be guided
by its sensus communis,” as Vico put it. (van Holthoon and Olson 1987, 7–8)
As I read van Kessel’s contribution, however, he shows something very

different from what is being attributed to him in this quote: not that “common
sense differs in different cultures” but that “common sense” is an Anglo concept
not found in other cultures. In particular, when Vico was writing about the
“sensus communis” of a society (cf. Isaiah Berlin 1976, 61), he was writing not
about “common sense” but rather about something like a shared outlook often
based on shared cultural heritage (“the judgment without reflection felt in com-
mon by an entire class, an entire people, an entire nation, or the entire human
race” [Vico 1968, 63]). This is really a different idea, not just a different
interpretation of the same idea (“the idea of common sense”).
COMMON SENSE 345
But it is not just the uniqueness of “the English idea” embedded in the
phrase common sense that needs to be acknowledged. Even more important is the
fact that this phrase has acquired in English the status of a cultural keyword and
become an anchor for a widely shared cultural value that Anglophone societies
have come to take for granted. Nothing like that has happened with the ideas of
bon sens, buon senso, sens commun, senso comune, gesunder Menschenverstand,
or gesond verstand—none of these expressions has become what van Kessel calls
“a unifying factor in society” the way common sense has in Anglophone socie-
ties:
Whereas in England one could find a real common sense in fundamental beliefs,
shared by a majority, in Italy there was no such consensus as the deep-rooted
meaning of the concept connected with common sense. At best there existed an
abstract, theoretical idea of common sense, which included both beliefs and values,
traditions and faith, as well as private knowledge. But this was no real common
sense, operating as a unifying factor in society. (van Kessel 1978, 129)
When he speaks, with reference to England, of “fundamental beliefs shared

by a majority,” van Kessel appears to have in mind primarily those beliefs that
spread in Britain as a result of the “scientific revolution”: the belief in science and
technology and in the power of the human mind. But nothing testifies to the
reality of beliefs shared (and, indeed, taken for granted) by a majority better than
new concepts embedded either in new words or new meanings of old words. The
new, the post-Newtonian meaning of the English word science (with its implica-
tions of empirical evidence, verifiability, and exactness) is a good case in point,
and so is the modern Anglo-English concept of common sense.
The differences in meaning between the English science and the French
science, Italian scienza, or German Wissenschaft reveal differences in societal
shared understandings (Wierzbicka, forthcoming), and so do the differences
between common sense, bon sens, buon senso, or gesunder Menschenverstand.
In addition, the high frequency of the phrase common sense in English discourse
across many genres and registers and its prominent role in, for example, the
language of the law and in book titles offering guidance in many areas of life
points to a cultural importance of this phrase incomparably greater than that of its
putative equivalents in other European languages.
The first sentence of Vladimir Nabokov’s book Speak, Memory reads: “The
cradle rocks above abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a
brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness” (1951 [1947], 9). The
sentence is unidiomatic in English because philosophical reflections on human
existence are not a matter for “common sense” in contemporary English. What
Nabokov (who wrote this book in two versions, English and Russian) really
meant is clear from the Russian version of the same passage: “zdravyj smysl
govorit nam. . . . ”
The Russian phrase zdravyj smysl, which literally means something like
‘healthy judgment’, is a well-established calque from the German expression
gesunder Menschenverstand, literally, ‘healthy human reason’. Both the Russian
346 SENSE
phrase zdravyj smysl and the German phrase gesunder Menschenverstand are
compatible with philosophical reflection and do not refer to any need to do
something in a concrete situation. The modern English common sense, however,
is different—and unique.
8.4. The Meaning of Common Sense in

Contemporary English
8.4.1. Conceptual analysis as a necessary first step for

social science
“Men rarely ask what common sense is,” wrote Thomas Reid (2002, 427) more
than two hundred years ago, and one could say the same thing today. Or if they
do, they rarely come up with a clear and cogent answer. For example, van
Holthoon and Olson open their Common Sense: Foundations for Social Science
with the following comment: “Common sense is like sanity. Either we know and
can recognize it without reflection, or else no amount of explanation will make it
clear” (1987, 1). At the same time, the authors acknowledge that “we cannot do
without it” and contend that “it is essential to examine . . . the phenomenon such a
word expresses as well as the social use of such a concept.” They remark that “the
examination is not a straightforward process . . . because common sense . . . ap-
pears to have limited specifiable content.” Nevertheless, they assure the reader
that “as we shall see in the course of this volume, the content may be productively
explicated.”
And yet one searches in vain for a concrete explication of the notion of
common sense in all the chapters of the volume. Instead one finds (to
borrow Thomas Reid’s phrase) “a cloud of testimonies”—intriguing and
thought provoking certainly, though anything but clear and precise in their
conclusions.
In this section I demonstrate that the phrase common sense (as used in
contemporary English) has a specifiable content and that it can be clearly and
precisely explicated by means of NSM. I must stress, however, that I am not
planning to explicate “the phenomenon of common sense” but rather the concept
of common sense, and I do not believe that one can productively examine “the
social uses of such a concept” without first explicating the concept itself.
8.4.2. Various meanings of the word common

I start with some observations about the word common, which has a number of
different though interrelated meanings in contemporary English. The most im-
portant among them and the most relevant to common sense are the following:
1. common as, roughly, ‘shared’; 2. common as, roughly, ‘frequent’.
Common as ‘shared’ is likely to be a historical descendant of the expressions
common good, common weal, and common wealth. It is not purely descriptive but
expresses a positive attitude—toward what is shared but also (and even mainly)
COMMON SENSE 347
the fact that it is shared. For example, common ground is something of value not
because it is ‘ground’ but because it is ‘common’, and the same applies to
common cause, common room, and (our) common inheritance.
Such current uses of the word common have their antecedents in the six-
teenth- and seventeenth-century uses of the word such as the following one:
A common-wealth is called a society . . . of a multitude of free men, collected together,

and united by common accord and covenants among themselves. (1577, Sir T. Smith,
OED)
The fact that there were discussions in the seventeenth century as to the meaning of
the word common-wealth suggests that there was a semantic change in progress at
the time and that a new meaning of common—the one that we see today in
expressions like common cause—was emerging and becoming firmly entrenched.
‘Common-wealth’ was seen, of course, as a good thing, and so were “common
accords” and “common covenants”: in such contexts common implied a unity
among many people, beneficial to them all. Such implications of something that
unifies people and is thus beneficial to everyone are evident in present-day expres-
sions like common ground, common inheritance, common purpose, and even
common room (though the latter is lexicalized to some extent). (These implications
can be shown in the following explication:
a common cause
a. it can be like this:

b. some people in a place want to do some things because they want something to happen
c. other people in that place don’t want the same
d. sometimes it is not like this
e. sometimes when some people in a place want to do something because
they want something to happen
all other people in that place want the same
f. it is good if it is like this
g. when it is like this, many people can be like one thing because of this
a common room (I do not explicate room here)

b. many rooms in a place are like this:
c. some people in this place can do many things in one of these rooms as they want
d. other people in this place can’t do the same
e. one room in this place is not like this
f. all people in this place can do many things in this room as they want
g. it is good if one room in a place is like this
h. when it is like this, many people in a place can be like one thing because of this
Turning now to common2 (i.e., common comparable to ‘frequent’), I will

note that common refers to something like “common experience.” For example,
348 SENSE
the common cold is a kind of cold that not only occurs often but can often be
encountered by people in a place.
Sandstorms may or may not be frequent occurrences on Mars, but even if
they were they would not normally be described as “common.” Common refers to
a “common occurrence in common experience.” We can capture this aspect of
common2 along the following lines: all the people in this place can know that this
often happens in this place. To be more precise, we could propose the following
explication:
It is a common occurrence (in Australia).
a. things like this often happen in this place

b. if someone is in this place for some time
this someone can know this not because someone else said something about it
This sense of common can be seen as another reflection of British empiricism:

things that are frequently encountered (in people’s experience) have a special
epistemological status as compared with those that may be frequent (according
to scientists’ calculations) but are not frequently encountered (by “ordinary
people”).
It is particularly interesting to note that the French word commun, cognate
with the English common and a codescendant of the Latin communis, does not
have a meaning that corresponds to common2. Thus one can use commun to
translate common in combinations like common interest, common consent, com-
mon cause, or common language but not in combinations like a common occur-
rence, common belief, or a common sight (Collins-Robert 1996). The latter
expressions are translated by Collins-Robert as une chose fréquente ou répandue
(‘something frequent or widespread’), une croyance universelle (‘a universal
belief’), and un spectacle familier (‘a familiar sight’).
It should also be noted that while common1 implies a positive evaluation,
common2 does not. Obviously, common ground implies a value, and common
room, common cause, and common goal do too. Even expressions like our
common lot and common concerns imply something like human solidarity seen
as a value. On the other hand, there is nothing valuable about common cold and
common problems, which imply something frequently encountered (common2),
not something shared (common1).
So what links common sense with either of the two meanings of common
considered above? Is common sense a “common good” in any sense? And is it
something that one often encounters?
From a semantic (and synchronic) point of view, the answer to both of these
questions must be negative. To begin with the first one, “common sense” can, of
course, be viewed as a good (a gift) shared by all people. It does not, however,
have the inherently plural (communal, as it were) character of common cause,
common goal, or common ground. One cannot say, “He has a common cause,”
but one can say “he has (a lot of) common sense.” Common1 suggests something
like overcoming the actual or potential separateness of individuals (and thus, it is
COMMON SENSE 349
semantically related to community). There is no such suggestion, however, in the

meaning of common sense.
Nor does common sense refer (by virtue of its meaning) to something that is
frequently encountered in a place. In 1748 the English statesman and letter
writer Lord Chesterfield wrote: “Common sense (which, in truth, is very uncom-
mon) is the best sense I know of” (Chesterfield 1901, vol. 1, 273; see section
8.6). Today, too, one could say that “common sense is not that common,” and
while this statement would sound paradoxical, it would not sound incoherent.
This shows that common in common sense does not mean the same thing as
common in expressions like a common occurrence. Common sense implies a
way of thinking available to everyone (“all people can think like this”), not the
way all (or even most) people actually think (a frequently encountered way
of thinking).
I think, then, that the meaning of common sense can no longer be semanti-
cally analyzed into that of common and that of sense and that (as the permissible
spelling commonsense reflects), the notion of common sense is now semantically
unitary. In the meaning of this expression, certain components correspond to
some of the components of common in various senses of this word and there are
also some components which correspond to certain elements in various meanings
of the word sense (as in Sense and Sensibility, good sense, and even a sense of
rhythm, responsibility, or guilt). It is not possible, however, to analyze common
sense semantically into two parts: “common” and “sense” in any identifiable
meanings of these highly polysemous words.
Shortly, I will propose an explication of common sense based on this initial
assumption. First, however, let us examine the use of this expression in the
material collected in COBUILD.
8.4.3. “Common sense” in COBUILD

When one considers the sentences with common sense in COBUILD, one is struck
by certain recurring collocations, above all, the phrase lack common sense (or
lacking in common sense). There are also other variations on the same theme,
such as “don’t have the common sense,” “doesn’t have an ounce of common
sense,” or “[he found] common sense in short supply.”
Other expressions that stress the ordinariness of “common sense” and at the
same time affirm its incontrovertible value include simple common sense, plain
common sense, and basic common sense (also normal common sense and
straightforward common sense), as in the following examples:
In this life all you need is basic common sense to be able to read write and converse with
the average person.
. . . an utterly normal common sense for people to actually line up on the other side of
them.
Or is that straightforward common sense . . .
He looked for a “simple common-sense way” to achieve it
350 SENSE
This is a simple common sense maneuver which is nearly always successful.

This is simply common sense but nonetheless a useful touchstone for evaluating any
claims made.
In the following pages I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and
common sense.
Yet despite its seemingly ordinary status, common sense is also seen as an
authority that can “tell” people (or even “dictate” or “scream”) what to do or
think:
Common sense told her, however, that if one were smart, one wouldn’t show Lloyd
Murphy one’s backside.
What’s your common sense tell you?
Common sense dictates that a bypass be built.
Common sense told that Shooters wasn’t Hector’s home.
Common sense told him such a theory was probably accurate.
My common sense screamed back, “No!”
You must let your common sense guide you.
Common sense should have told Ted something was wrong.
Common sense is frequently conceptualized as a tool that can be used for a

specific purpose:
. . . have to use a dollop of common sense

There are guidelines, of course, but in the end of the day at the mission we are allowed to
use our common sense in each individual case to decide what’s in the best interests of the
child.
Use your common sense.
. . . youre just assuming that the people in that situation in that job are actually going to use
their common sense.
Put your mind to simple things, taking care that you start to use your common sense
without using your mind to change for the better.
A recurring phrase is talking common sense (analogous to talking sense),

which always implies a positive evaluation of what is being said:
Are we talking common sense here, or is Herr Sheriff leaning on you?

There is my little sky-lark, talking common sense.
The assumed value and effectiveness of “common sense” is also seen in

sentences like the following ones:
. . . like a great balloon pricked by the common sense of citizens . . .

He said he rated common sense above brains.
. . . personal antagonism clouded common sense.
COMMON SENSE 351
Common sense is often the best headache cure.

. . . to be the bedrock of common sense and consensual values . . .
. . . his calmness and common sense are greatly appreciated.
The techniques are grounded in common sense.
Schwarzkopf, always quick to appreciate common sense . . .
Often, common sense is conjoined in the COBUILD data with another word
referring to an indisputable value:
The people in our country applied common sense and logic to the matter of race relations.
We are still living in the echo of that tremendous crash since all such skepticism would, at
least in meaningful community life, be mitigated by social realism and common sense.
Common sense and logic would have made us give in a hundred times.
Though full of good humor and common sense, he was distinctively odd.
Given common sense and unselfishness, there are thousands with any of whom you could
be happy.
He and Snoot were acting on behalf of the laws of nature, defending decency and
common sense.
Their good common sense and inherent decency shone, said McCarthy.
8.4.4. Explicating ‘common sense’

Pulling together different elements from our observations on the use of common
sense (sections 8.1, 8.2, 8.4.1, 8.4.2, and 8.4.3), I would specify the content of this
rich and complex cultural concept as follows:
common sense (approach)

b. someone thinks like this:
c. “something is happening here now
d. I want to do something because of this
e. if I do some things, something bad can happen because of this
f. if I do some other things, something bad will not happen because of this
g. I don’t want something bad to happen
h. because of this, I want to think about it for a short time
i. if I think about it for a short time, I can know what I can do”
j. when this someone thinks like this, after a very short time this
someone can know it
k. (because of this, this someone does something)
l. it is good if someone thinks like this
m. all people can think like this
n. it is good if people do things because they think like this
o. it is bad if someone doesn’t think like this
Emerson wrote in his journals (1866): “common sense, which, one would
say, means the shortest line between two points.” (quoted in Stevenson 1958,
352 SENSE
1795). Presumably what he had in mind is that one needs to think about some-
thing for a short time to arrive at a common-sense solution to a problem. It is not a
matter of sophisticated speculation that some particularly clever or knowledge-
able people may be capable of but one of brief and simple reflection. For
example, a “common-sense solution” is the simplest solution and does not require
a great deal of thinking, special knowledge, or intellectual sophistication. At the
same time, Emerson’s reference to “the shortest line” is consistent with the
hypothesis that common sense does require a little bit of thinking.
When we try to pin down the pattern of thoughts associated with the idea of
common sense, one readily identifiable component is that of practical knowledge:
“I want to know what I can do (now).” Another key component is the ability to
foresee and avoid possible bad consequences of certain actions that one might
otherwise engage in. For example, it is common sense to take an umbrella when
one goes out on a rainy day or a scarf if the day is cold. If I do not take an
umbrella (or a scarf ), something bad can happen because of this. If I do, I can
assume that something bad will not happen because of this. Since I do not want
something bad to happen, it does not require a great deal of thinking to decide that
it is better to take an umbrella or a scarf.
Common sense implies a general folk-philosophical view about people
(“all people can think like this”). At the same time, it involves a categorical
folk-axiological view: “it is good if someone thinks like this”; moreover, “it is
bad if someone doesn’t think like this.” It also shows a practical and situation-
based attitude toward life: what matters most is not how much one knows about
the world in general or how well one can think about abstract matters but
whether one can think on one’s feet and thus be able to deal effectively with a
particular situation and avoid bad situations, at least insofar as they are easily
avoidable.
According to the explication presented here, common sense is, above all, a
pattern of thinking (which is likely to lead to some actions) rather than a way of
doing things (grounded in a way of thinking). This may seem inaccurate given
that common sense is often used with reference to certain actions, as well as to a
certain way of thinking. But many collocations show that common sense can be
used with reference to a possible way of thinking (about what to do) rather than to
actual actions or behavior (e.g., “from a common-sense point of view,” “a
common-sense perspective,” “a common-sense notion,” “as a matter of simple
common sense”). The “practical” character of common sense lies, above all, in
the content of “common-sense thinking,” which refers to actions to be decided
upon in a given situation rather than to any abstract views or beliefs.
It should be added that in addition to the ordinary meaning of common sense
found in English databases such as COBUILD and explicated here, there is also a
specialized usage that appears in philosophical literature. This usage continues
the earlier philosophical tradition going back to the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries and is at variance with ordinary usage.
For example, when G. E. Moore wrote in a celebrated article titled
“A Defence of Common Sense” that “The Common Sense view of the world, is
in certain fundamental features, wholly true” (1925, 44), he was not using this
COMMON SENSE 353
phrase in its ordinary twentieth-century sense. The use of the capitals is often a
signal of this special philosophical sense of the term, but the convention is by no
means always adhered to, and the difference between the ordinary sense of the
phrase and the specialized philosophical usage is seldom acknowledged.
The specialized philosophical use of the term common sense (or Common
Sense) can be recognized in phrases such as common-sense beliefs, common-
sense view of the world, and common-sense propositions. For example, the long
list of “common-sense propositions” provided by Moore at the beginning of
“A Defence of Common Sense” includes the following:
· There exists at present a living human body, which is my body.

· continuouslywasever
This body born at a certain time in the past and has existed
since.
· the surface of the earth.it has been either in contact with or not far from
Ever since it was born,
· II have
have not only perceived things . . . but have observed facts about them.
· as . . . thebeenfactaware of the facts which I was not at the time observing, such
that my body existed yesterday. (ibid., 34–35)
It is striking how far removed Moore’s examples of “common-sense beliefs” are

from ordinary ways of speaking. Outside of philosophy, people do not normally
speak of “bodies being born” any more than they do of “bodies existing continu-
ously” or “the fact that my body existed yesterday.” Clearly, when he was
advocating “common sense,” Moore was not using common sense in the ordi-
nary sense.
Often, however, the difference between two senses is blurred in scholarly
literature. Recall, for example, the opening sentences of Common Sense: The
Foundations for Social Science (van Holthoon and Olson 1987, 1), which
I quoted earlier: “Common sense is like sanity. Either we know and can recognize
it without reflection, or else no amount of explanation will make it clear.” The
authors do not specify which common sense they are referring to here—common
sense as used in ordinary language or common sense as used by philosophers—
and seem to prefer not to make this clear. For example, they state that “The fact
that common sense is generally appealed to rather than defined allows the concept
to play a much broader role in everyday life and in social science discourse than
its more articulated semantic neighbors such as judgment, knowledge, and truth.”
(ibid.).
This sounds as if the fact that common sense was “appealed to rather than
defined” was convenient because it allowed social science to use it very broadly
and without having to explain what exactly was meant by this phrase. But as the
next paragraph illustrates, such equivocation does not lead to conceptual and
historical clarity: “Common sense, while highly regarded in everyday discourse,
has fallen in repute in scholarly thought, a fall that began in the Enlightenment”
(ibid., 1). This statement obscures the fact that the “common sense” which is
“highly regarded in everyday discourse” is not the same common sense which
was held in high repute by eighteenth-century philosophers, and also, that the
354 SENSE
high repute in which common sense was held by those philosophers has, in fact,
led to the rise of common sense in everyday discourse.
As I see it, instead of allowing ourselves to glide over different senses of
common sense, we should specify what these different senses are. At the same
time, we should recognize that common sense is one of the keywords (or key
phrases) of modern Anglo culture without equivalents in other lingua-cultures,
and seek to elucidate its semantic history, including its connection to the philo-
sophical ideas of the Scottish and English thinkers who helped make this phrase
part of “everyday discourse” and part of ordinary English.
8.5. Thomas Reid and the Origin of English

Common Sense
In a letter to his friend Robert Heilman (a noted American educator and writer),
German American political scientist Eric Voegelin (2004[1969]) wrote:
The English 18th century . . . has produced the “common sense” philosophy from
[Thomas] Reid onward. And “common sense” is, for Reid and his successors, a
deliberate toning down of philosophy . . . on the level of the common man who does
not engage in philosophical meditations.
The common sense man of the Scottish philosophers is a man who holds the
same truths with regard to man and his ethical conduct as a philosopher but without
the philosophical apparatus. It is a regression to what one might call a pre-philo-
sophic “wisdom” literature, which, however, has absorbed the results of the philo-
sophers.
Elaborating on these thoughts, Voegelin suggests that there is “an English style of
thinking (which also has entered the American style as a component) yet quite
insufficiently explored.”
I think that these observations are very apt. In particular, the suggestion that
the “common sense” philosophy of Thomas Reid and his followers helped shape
some aspects of the Anglo-English “style of thinking” seems to me spot on. There
can be little doubt that the “philosophy of common sense” had a lasting impact on
Anglo culture and on the English language. While common sense does not mean
exactly the same in modern (twentieth- and twenty-first-century) colloquial
English as it did in the philosophical writings of Thomas Reid, the similarities
between the former and the latter use are striking indeed. The fact that Reid’s
classic work, An inquiry into the Human Mind: On the Principles of Common
Sense, has (since its first appearance in 1764) gone through no fewer than forty
editions, speaks for itself, as does the fact that in the first sixty years of its
existence there were more than twenty editions. Evidently there was a massive
interest in this work, and it is clear that like Locke’s Essay concerning Human
Understanding, it had a great impact on Anglo ways of thinking and speaking.
Above all, Reid’s influence has helped to shape the modern Anglo-English
concept of common sense as it is now entrenched in ordinary English. To trace
COMMON SENSE 355
the trajectory of Reid’s influence in this regard, we need to ask, first of all, what
Reid himself meant by common sense.
According to Reid’s own testimony, he found the phrase common sense in
colloquial language (“common sense is a popular and not a scholastic word”
[Reid 2002, 427]), and he believed he was following the popular usage in his own
writings on the subject. Undoubtedly, the phrase had been used in English for a
long time before Reid. The OED cites the following sixteenth-century example:
“unless he be void of all common sense and natural wit of man” (T. Norton,
Calvin’s Institutes, 1535). According to his own description, the two key ingre-
dients of Reid’s notion of common sense were these: first, some things that
people accept as true are self-evident, and second, these things are, in principle,
available to all people because they are given to people by nature (or by God):
We ascribe to reason two offices, or two degrees. The first is to judge of things self-
evident; the second, to draw conclusions that are not self-evident from those that
are. The first of these is the province, and the sole province, of common sense; and
therefore, it coincides with reason in its whole extent, and is only another name for
one branch or one degree of reason. (Reid 1997, 425)
I quoted earlier in this chapter Reid’s observation that “men rarely ask what
common sense is”—an observation that seems as valid now as it was two
centuries ago. But Reid himself gave this question a great deal of attention and
returned to it repeatedly. In the chapter titled “Of Common Sense” in his Essays
on the Intellectual Powers of Man he wrote: “All that is intended in this chapter,
is to explain the meaning of common sense . . . I have endeavoured to show, that
sense, in its most common, and therefore its most proper meaning, signifies
judgment. . . . From this it is natural to think, that common sense should mean
common judgment, and so it really does” (2002 [1785], 427).
Reid refers at this point to the authority of Dr. Johnson, who in his Dictionary
of the English Language (1755) quoted another scholar, Dr. Bentley, “for what
may be called a definition of common sense”: “God hath endowed mankind with
power and abilities which we call natural light and reason, and common sense”
(Reid 2002, 427).
In his commentary, Reid (ibid.) also quotes Alexander Pope’s poem devoted
partly (as Reid interprets it) to the meaning of the English word sense and to the
value of good sense and by extension, that of common sense:
Good sense, which only is the gift of Heaven;

And though no science, fairly worth the seven;
A light, which in yourself you must perceive,
Jones and Le Nôtre have it not to give.
The names of Jones (a celebrated architect) and Le Nôtre (a famous garden

designer in France) symbolize here, one assumes, the understanding that comes
from other, more knowledgeable, people. Common sense, on the other hand,
comes not from other people but from heaven.
356 SENSE
According to Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1733–1734), “The proper

study of mankind is man,” and it was human nature rather than, for example,
astronomy that was “the most useful object of human reason” (quoted in Him-
melfarb 2005, 25). Despite Pope’s reverence for Newton, it was “of more
consequence to adjust the true nature and measures of right and wrong, than to
settle the distance of the planets and complete the times of their circumvolutions”
(also quoted in ibid.). This emphasis on “right and wrong” chimes with Pope’s
eulogy of “sense” (rather than “reason”)—an emphasis that Reid clearly found
very congenial:
The inward light or sense is given by Heaven to different persons in different

degrees. There is a certain degree of it which is necessary to our being subject of
law and government, capable of managing our own affairs, and answerable for
our conduct towards others: This is called common sense, because it is common to
all men with whom we can transact business, or call to account for their conduct.
(Reid 2002, 426)
Thus, common sense is (for Reid) a common endowment of all people who
are of sound mind and can be held responsible for their actions. This common
sense applies, according to Reid, both to the conduct of one’s life and to our
understanding of self-evident truths: “The same degree of understanding which
makes a man capable of acting with common prudence in the conduct of life,
makes him capable of discovering what is true and what is false in matters that are
self-evident, and which he distinctly apprehends” (ibid.). As we can see, then,
common sense was for Reid largely a matter of intellectually accepting self-
evident truths, and this applied both to knowledge about the world and to matters
of human conduct: “All knowledge, and science, must be built upon principles
that are self-evident; and of such principles, every man who has common sense is
a competent judge, when he conceives them distinctly. Hence it is, that disputes
very often terminate in an appeal to common sense” (ibid.).
It is very interesting to note that according to Reid’s testimony, in his day
disputes often terminated in an appeal to “common sense”—as in fact they often
do today (in English-speaking societies). But we must keep asking: “common
sense” in what sense? In the same sense that this phrase has today? This seems
unlikely, in the light of Reid’s own examples and comments.
To put it briefly, common sense, as this phrase is used now, no longer refers
to self-evident truths—it does refer to how one thinks (Reid’s “judgment”) but
only to the extent to which this has implications for what one may do (how one
may act) in a given situation. Outside technical philosophical language it is no
longer used to refer to what one (generally) thinks about the world. For example,
for Reid, believing in the existence of a material (physical) world was a matter of
common sense, but it would not be in the present-day usage of this phrase. Thus,
neither the sharp contrast between “philosophy” and “common sense” drawn by
Reid nor his rejection of the former in favor of the latter corresponds exactly to
contrasts often drawn today between abstract theories and “common sense.” Yet
COMMON SENSE 357
the rhetorical force of passages like the following one must have contributed, one
assumes, to the ascent of “common sense” as a value in modern Anglo culture:
Des Cartes, Malebranche, and Locke have all employed their genius and skill
to prove the existence of a material world; and with very bad success. Poor
untaught mortals believe undoubtedly that there is a sun, moon, and stars; an
earth, which we inhabit; country, friends, and relations, which we enjoy; land,
houses, and moveables, which we possess. But philosophers, pitying the credulity
of the vulgar, resolve to have no faith but what is founded on reason. They
apply philosophy to furnish them with reasons for the belief of those things
which all mankind has believed without being able to give any reason for it . . .
Admired Philosophy! daughter of light! parent of wisdom and knowledge! . . . if
indeed thou hast not power to dispel those clouds and phantoms which thou
hast discovered or created, withdraw this penurious and malignant ray; I despise
Philosophy, and renounce its guidance; let my soul dwell with Common Sense.
(Reid 1997, 18)
I explore the shift in the meaning of common sense further in section 8.6.
Here, let me take a closer look at the distinction that Reid draws between common
sense and good sense. I think that if the subsequent philosophical literature had
paid more attention to this distinction, the tendency to identify the English
common sense with the Italian buon senso or the French bon sens would not
have established itself so firmly in it, and the uniqueness of the modern English
concept of common sense would have been more clearly recognized. This would
have prevented the confusion and misunderstandings discussed, for example, by
van Kessel, and above all, it would have allowed a clearer recognition of common
sense as an Anglo-English value.
While Reid’s common sense did not mean the same as the twentieth-century
common sense, the distinction he draws between common sense and good sense
parallels, to some extent, the present-day distinction between good sense (or
simply sense) and common sense.
In a nutshell, common sense had for Reid, as for present-day English, a
social dimension, whereas good sense focuses on the individual. Speaking of
“natural judgments” that are “a part of that furniture which nature hath given to
human understanding” and that “make up what is called the common sense of
mankind,” Reid says that “the strength of them is good sense, which is often
found in those who are not acute in reasoning” (ibid., 215). A man can lose his
good sense to the point of “lunacy, as when a man believes that he is made of
glass . . . but when he enters into society, Common Sense recovers her authority”
(ibid.)
Thus, for Reid, “common sense” is consistent with “good sense,” but it is
shared “good sense,” which is both innate (a gift from heaven) and also in some
sense social. This innate and shared “common sense of mankind” has, unlike
abstract reason, practical consequences in ordinary life: “Such original and
natural judgments serve to direct us in the common affairs in life, where our
reasoning faculty would leave us in the dark” (ibid.).
358 SENSE
This capacity of common sense to guide people in practical matters was

not yet (as far as I can see) part of the meaning of the phrase common sense
as used by Reid, but clearly it became part of its meaning later and most likely to a
considerable extent under the influence of Reid’s writings. For Reid, it was
an important fact about “the common sense of mankind” that it could provide
practical guidance in daily life, not yet a part of the meaning of the phrase common
sense. On the other hand, for Reid’s readers (over the next two centuries),
the reference to that practical guidance became a part of the very meaning of
this phrase, together with the appeal to the shared judgment of people (Reid’s
“society”).
In Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Reid 2002, 424), Reid insists
that “in common language, sense always implies judgment” (i.e., thinking):
“A man of sense is a man of judgment. Good sense is good judgment. . . . Com-
mon sense is that degree of judgment that is common to men with whom we can
converse and transact business.” This characterization of good sense is somewhat
simplified for polemical purposes, but the essence of the distinction between the
two concepts—good sense and common sense—is maintained: common sense is
for Reid social and practical. As we have seen, both these aspects of Reid’s
conception of common sense have become entrenched in the modern meaning of
this key English phrase.
Descartes’ bon sens was focused on thinking well so as to know what is true
and what is false. By contrast, Reid’s common sense was focused to a large extent
on knowing what to do (in addition to knowing what is true). For that, too, some
thinking was necessary, but there was not the same emphasis on thinking, which
may involve some time spent on the process of reasoning. For Reid, what was
true was often self-evident (to anyone but a philosopher), and he explicitly
contrasted conclusions drawn from reasoning (which are often unreliable and
may have to be rejected) with the decisions of common sense (which have to be
followed):
The province of common sense is more extensive in refutation than in confirmation.

A conclusion drawn by a train of just reasoning from true principles cannot
possibly contradict any decision of common sense, because truth will always be
consistent with itself. Neither can such a conclusion receive any confirmation from
common sense, because it is not within its jurisdiction.
But it is possible that by setting out from false principles, or by an error in
reasoning, a man may be led to a conclusion that contradicts the decisions of
common sense. In this case, the conclusion is within the jurisdiction of common
sense, though the reasoning on which it was grounded be not; and a man of common
sense may fairly reject the conclusion without being able to shew the error of the
reasoning that led to it. (2002, 433, VI, ii)
After Reid, the ability to think quickly (and to decide quickly what to do and
what not to do) became foregrounded for speakers of English, in contrast to the
ability to “reason well” (about what is true and what is false).3
COMMON SENSE 359
8.6. Common Sense and the British Enlightenment
In eighteenth-century England and Scotland, several interrelated or mutually

germane ideas took root and eventually led to the emergence of several cultural
keywords and widely shared understandings associated with them. In a brief and
simplified form, these ideas can be summarized as follows:
· Human reason has its limitations, and abstract ideas, logic, syllogisms,
and so on are not to be fully trusted. At the same time, the ability to think
and think well (combined with other human resources) can be relied on
in ordinary life. Hence, the fundamental shift from the value of “reason”
as such to that of being “reasonable” (in a pragmatic sense of the word)
(see Wierzbicka 2006, chapter 4).4
· Other human resources that can be relied on include, crucially,
experience, which is based on senses and on doing things (e.g.,
experiments). This led, in time, to the emergence of the Anglo-English
keywords science, empirical, a new sense of the word experience, and
the whole family of expressions and constructions based on the word
sense.
· Both the ability to think and the capacity to derive useful knowledge
from what our senses tell us belong to universal human endowment: they
are common to all people, and all people can rely on them and be guided
by them. The modern keywords and phrases derived from these ideas
include, prominently, moral sense, the sense of right and wrong, and,
above all, common sense.
To elucidate the sources of the present-day concept and value of common

sense it is useful to look at the antecedents of this phrase in earlier usage and in
particular, to compare some aspects of the British and French Enlightenments.
Two particularly salient (and interrelated) differences between these two Enlight-
enments can be linked with different attitudes toward reason and the “common
people.” The emergence of the key Anglo value of common sense was closely
related to both these differences.
The French philosophes made reason (raison) the central principle of
their ideology. As Gertrude Himmelfarb (2005, 151) notes, “that word, repeated
constantly and in the most varied contexts, served almost as a mantra. . . . Long
before [Thomas] Paine declared his age to be the “Age of Reason,” Diderot
had defined the Encyclopédie (launched in 1751 and completed in twenty-eight
volumes) as the instrument of “a reasoning age,” “a philosophical age.”
The Encyclopédie embodied, as Himmelfarb put it, the spirit of the French Enlight-
enment, and its key word was raison. The name of Thomas Paine, on the other hand,
became firmly associated in history not with reason but with common sense (from
the title of his famous book, Common Sense [1776]), as did the name of Thomas
Reid, known as the founder of the “common-sense school of philosophy.”
360 SENSE
The contrast between the reason (raison) of the French philosophes and the
common sense of the two British Thomases epitomizes not only the different
orientation of the two Enlightenments but also much in their respective semantic
heritages in modern French and modern English.
Voltaire, Diderot, and other leading encyclopédistes revered reason and
rather despised the common people, and the two attitudes were related since
the common people were seen as capable of sens commun but not of raison
(‘reason’). Himmelfarb (2005, 154) notes that “Diderot made it clear that the
common people had no part in the ‘philosophical age’,” and she cites the
following quotes to illustrate this:
The general mass of men are not so made that they can either promote or understand
this forward mark of the human spirit. (Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew)
Distrust the judgment of the multitude in matters of reasoning and philosophy;
its voice is that of wickedness, stupidity, inhumanity, unreason and prejudice. . . .
The multitude is ignorant and stupefied. . . . Distrust it in matters of morality . . .
(Diderot, “Multitude,” in Encyclopédie)
All these conclusions are evident to anyone who reasons, and . . . whoever does
not reason, renouncing his nature as a human being, must be treated as an unnatural
being. (Diderot, “Le droit naturel,” in Encyclopédie)
As Himmelfarb further notes, Voltaire, too, “never concealed his disdain for
the people—la canaille (‘the rabble’), as he habitually called them, and she
quotes him as saying to d’Alembert: “Have no concern with it; it will always
remain canaille” (2005, 171). Both the French philosophes’ reverence for reason
and their contempt for the common people were at variance with the attitude of
the leading figures of the British Enlightenment, who attributed to all people a
moral sense and a common sense. For the French philosophes, the lower classes
were divided from the upper ones by an unbridgeable chasm of superstition and
ignorance. By contrast,
for the British philosophers that social chasm was bridged by the moral sense and
common sense that were presumed to be innate in all people, in the lower classes as
well as the upper. The philosophes, allowing to the common people neither a moral
sense nor a common sense that might approximate reason, consigned them, in
effect, to a state of nature—a brutalized Hobbesian, not a benign Rousseauan,
state of nature—where they could be controlled and pacified only by the sanctions
and strictures of religion. (ibid., 156)
Diderot professed a great admiration for the British moralist Shaftesbury and
translated his book, but (Himmelfarb observes) Shaftesbury would never have
said that a man unable or unwilling to reason must be treated as an “unnatural
being” or a “wild beast”: “The moral sense and common sense that the British
attributed to all individuals gave to all people, including the common people, a
common humanity and a common fund of moral and social obligations. The
French idea of reason was not available to the common people and had no such
moral or social component” (ibid., 170).
COMMON SENSE 361
Of course, all such quotes beg the question of what exactly the phrase
common sense (as well as moral sense) meant for the English and Scottish
philosophers. It is easy to interpret their use of it anachronistically and to assume
that it meant then what it means now. At the same time, it is clear that regardless
of its exact meaning at the time, the British philosophers used this phrase in a
positive way; for Voltaire, on the other hand, the term sens commun was
ambivalent, if not downright pejorative.
Voltaire’s entry on sens commun in his Philosophical Dictionary (always
translated into English as common sense) is highly instructive:
Sometimes vulgar [i.e., colloquial, ] expressions are a reflection of what goes on at

the bottom of the hearts of men. To the Romans sensus communis meant not only
common sense [sens commun], but humanity, sensibility. Since we’re not worth as
much as Romans, the word means only half as much to us as it meant to them. It
means nothing but good sense [bon sens], plain reason, elementary reason, the first
notion of ordinary things, a middle condition between stupidity and wit. “That man
has no common sense,” is of course an insult. “That man has common sense,” is an
insult too; it suggests that he isn’t exactly stupid, and that he lacks what is called wit.
(Voltaire 1962, 467)
It seems inconceivable that any of the leading representatives of the British

Enlightenment would call a sentence like “this man has common sense” an insult.
For Thomas Reid (and also for many others), in any contest between “philoso-
phy” and “common sense,” victory would have to belong to the latter.
His reference to philosophers who “pitying the credulity of the vulgar, resolve
to have no faith but what is founded upon reason” and who in the process
create “clouds and phantoms” that they are unable to dispel shows this clearly
enough.
As discussed earlier, common sense does not mean in today’s English what it
meant in Reid’s writings, and it did not mean there what sens commun meant in
Voltaire’s. Yet the difference in the attitudes toward both “reason” and “the
vulgar” (or, as Reid ironically calls them, “poor untaught mortals”) is perfectly
clear, and this difference goes a long way toward explaining why the English
phrase common sense is today very common and is associated with something
that is seen as an incontrovertible value, whereas in French, the phrase sens
commun is not.
One question that needs to be addressed here, however briefly, is the relation
between common sense and moral sense, both of which in Britain were often
favorably contrasted with reason. To quote Himmelfarb once more, “in France,
the essence of the Enlightenment—literally, its raison d’être—was reason”
(2005, 18). This was not, however, the case in Britain or America:
The driving force of the British Enlightenment was not reason but the “social
virtues” or “social affections.” In America, the driving force was political liberty,
the motive for the Revolution and the basis for the republic. Thus, the British
Enlightenment represents “the sociology of virtue,” the French “the ideology of
reason,” the American “the politics of liberty.” (Himmelfarb 2005, 19)
362 SENSE
The belief in a “moral sense” entrenched in human nature was a central motif
in the writings of the British moralists and more generally (as Himmelfarb
stresses), one of the ideas that dominated the British Enlightenment. Further-
more, moral sense and common sense appear to have been closely connected in
the language and thought of British philosophers of the period: moral sense was
seen as a common (universally shared) sense (endowment):
The generation of philosophers that followed Shaftsbury qualified his teachings in

one respect or another, differing among themselves about the precise nature and
function of the moral sense. But they all agreed that it . . . was the natural, necessary,
and universal attribute of man, of rich and poor alike, the educated and the unedu-
cated, the enlightened and unenlightened. They also agreed that it was a corollary of
reason and interest, but prior to and independent of both. (ibid., 33)
Thus, moral sense was inherently common to all humankind and could be
interpreted as common sense par excellence. Himmelfarb, for one, does not
hesitate to link the “common-sense philosopher” Thomas Reid with the moral
sense philosophers of the period:
For the philosopher Thomas Reid, it was “common sense,” not reason, that was the
unique quality of the “plain man.” If man had been endowed only with reason,
the race would soon have been extinct. Fortunately, reason was complemented
by the “benevolent affections,” which were “no less necessary for the preservation
of the human species than the appetites of hunger and thirst.” (ibid.)
The quotes from Reid that Himmelfarb cites in the preceding excerpt come
from Essays on the Active Powers of Man (1788), but in his other works, too,
Reid links what he calls “the province of common sense” with human conduct.
As we saw earlier, in Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Men (1785), he
ascribes to reason “two offices, or two degrees.” The first of these two is “the
province of common sense. . . . In the greatest part of mankind no other degree of
reason can be found. It is the degree that entitles them to the denomination of
reasonable creatures. It is this degree of reason, and this only, that makes a man
capable of managing his own affairs, and answerable for his conduct towards
others” (Reid 2002, 433).5 Presented in this way, common sense is not only
practical and social but also ethical—not in its meaning as such but in its
implications and applications.
In subsequent usage, however, “common sense” and “moral sense” drifted
apart, and in present-day English moral sense would not be seen as a kind of
common sense. Very briefly, the story of this parting can be summarized as
follows.
After Hutcheson and Hume (and presumably under their influence, see
chapter 7, “Moral Sense”), the expression moral sense became associated in
English with other senses, “external” ones such as sight and hearing, and “inter-
nal ones,” such as “a sense of beauty.” (Recall Raphael’s [1947, 2] observation
that “ ‘moral sense’ . . . became the name of a specific theory in Hutcheson, who
drew on Locke’s empiricist theory of knowledge in framing it”). By contrast, the
COMMON SENSE 363
subsequent history of common sense was shaped more by the influence of

Thomas Reid, who opposed Locke’s empiricist emphasis and argued against
Hutcheson’s and Hume’s “sense of morals” based on “sentiments” rather than
reason. As we have seen, according to Reid, common sense was a matter of
“judgment,” not of “sentiments” or “senses.” As a result of these (and no doubt
other) influences, moral sense is aligned in today’s English with other “senses”
(especially, “a sense of right and wrong”) and includes semantic components that
refer to “feeling” and “the body,” whereas common sense (as explicated here) is
not. In fact, in its subsequent semantic history, common sense by and large lost its
association with sense and senses and can no longer be seen from a semantic
point of view as a combination of common and sense (as it was for Reid and
Hume), whereas moral sense is still analyzable into moral and sense.
But while common sense is not seen today as “embodied” (in the way
moral sense is), it still has a link with human conduct, and in fact, this link is
now entrenched in the very meaning of this phrase (together with a positive
evaluation).
The British Enlightenment had, of course, many different strands, but for the
most part they converged as far as the recognition of and respect for common
sense (or something like it) was concerned.
For example, David Hume, whose position was in many respects very
different from that of Thomas Reid, frequently appealed to “common sense” in
relation to morals: “The general opinion of mankind has some authority in all
cases, but in this of morals ’tis perfectly infallible” (Hume 1978, 552). As David
Norton persuasively argues in his book David Hume: Common Sense Moralist,
Sceptical Metaphysician (1982), Hume was a strong supporter of “common
sense” in the area of morals. He appealed to the “authority [of] the universal
consent of mankind” (Hume 1978, 546–47), and he put “general opinion” and
“common sense” in moral matters above any philosophical reasoning:
An appeal to general opinion may justly, in the speculative science of metaphys-

ics, natural philosophy or astronomy, be deemed unfair and inconclusive, yet
in questions with regard to morals . . . there is really no other standard, by which
any controversy can ever be decided. And nothing is a clearer proof, that a theory
of this kind is erroneous, than to find, that it leads to paradoxes repugnant to
the common sentiments of mankind. (Works, vol. 3, 460, quoted in Norton
1982, 138)
According to Hume, there are general principles that are “authorized by

common sense and the practice of all ages” (1978, 588), and such principles
include both people’s duty to submit to legitimate civil government and their
right to resist a tyrannical ruler. On such matters, humankind’s common sense is
far more authoritative than any abstract philosophical arguments and in fact, is to
a large extent “infallible”:
I shall . . . prove, from the universal consent of mankind, that the obligation of
submission to government is not deriv’d from any promise of the subjects. Nor
364 SENSE
need any one wonder, that tho’ I have all along endeavour’d to establish my system
on pure reason, and have scarce ever cited the judgment even of philosophers or
historians on any article, I shou’d now appeal to popular authority, and oppose the
sentiments of the rabble to any philosophical reasoning. For it must be observ’d,
that the opinions of men, in this case, carry with them a peculiar authority, and are,
in a great measure, infallible. (ibid., 552)
A moral theorist who argued that a particular ruler had no right to the throne
because this right cannot be accounted for “by any received system of ethics”
would be “justly thought to maintain a very extravagant paradox, and to shock the
common sense and judgment of mankind” (ibid., 558), but so would a condem-
nation of resistance to supreme power in the case of “enormous tyranny and
oppression” (ibid., 563):
We may observe, that this is both the general practice and principle of mankind, and
that no nation, that cou’d find any remedy, ever yet suffer’d the cruel ravages of a
tyrant, or were blam’d for their resistance. Those who took up arms against
Dionysius or Nero, or Philip the second, have the favour of every reader in the
perusal of their history; and nothing but the most violent perversion of common
sense can ever lead us to condemn them. (ibid., 552)
Norton, who sees Hume as a “common-sense moralist,” notes that “explicit

and implicit appeals to common sense are found [also, ] in Hume’s later writ-
ings,” and he comments that “Section 1 of the Enquiry . . . gives at least an
implicit sanction to a common-sense test of moral theories” (Norton 1982,
130). The phrase “a common-sense test of moral theories” appears to conflate
Norton’s twentieth-century sense of common sense with Hume’s common sense
of mankind, which was closer to the consensus gentium than to the kind of
pragmatic (and “commonsensical”) sense that we find, for example, in contem-
porary English databases like COBUILD. Nonetheless, Hume’s positive use of
common sense may well have contributed to the rise of the phrase and the
value associated with it in modern English and modern Anglo culture.
Locke, who was fundamentally opposed to “innate ideas,” was ipso
facto opposed to the idea of an innate “common sense.” Yet the logic of
his overall position on knowledge—empirical, limited, yet practically useful—
naturally led in the direction of something like “common sense”—not an innate
endowment of humankind but nonetheless something accessible, in principle, to
all people.
As Roy Porter puts it in his magisterial Enlightenment: Britain and the
Creation of the Modern World, “In stark contrast to Descartes . . . Locke’s truth
claims were models of modesty. . . . Man was a limited being, and reason just
sufficient for human purposes” (Porter 2000, 60). Locke’s interest in the anthro-
pological evidence of great diversity in human customs and beliefs underpinned
his “extreme distrust of alleged innate cognitive and ethical truths. . . . Yet full-
blown scepticism was not in order: knowledge was achievable as a construct out
of the interplay of mind and nature” (ibid.).
COMMON SENSE 365
Achievable, that is, to ordinary mortals; probable rather than certain; empiri-
cal (based on experience) rather than theoretical; but useful in the ordinary
business of life:
While inevitably lacking the certitude of revelation or intuition, this formed the
main stock of truth available to mortals. Locke agreed with Sydenham, Boyle,
Newton and their peers in stressing the limits of man’s powers, but that was no
insuperable problem: “our business here is not to know all things, but those which
concern our conduct.” (Locke 1975 [1690], 63, essay 2.11.17)
According to Porter, it was Locke who, with his empiricism, epistemological

modesty, and distrust of pure reason, “replaced rationalism with reasonableness
in a manner which became programmatic for the Enlightenment in Britain. . . .
His philosophy proved a great watershed, and he became the presiding spirit of
the English Enlightenment” (ibid., 66).
It is fascinating to note the convergence between the post-Lockean “reason-
ableness” and the post-Reidean “common sense.” Locke’s legacy, as Porter
notes, “proved controversial,” but “Locke’s empiricism took root” (ibid.), and
so the ground was prepared for the rise of the key modern English concepts of
experience (in the new, consciousness-based sense of the word) and reasonable-
ness (in the new, pragmatic, and epistemologically modest sense of the word
reasonable). Thomas Reid’s conception of common sense also took root and
unleashed a semantic process whose end result is the concept of common sense as
we know it in today’s English.
The present-day discourse of common sense connects with that of both rea-
sonableness and experience—so much so that Kate Fox does not hesitate to call the
basic “English” value of common sense the manifestation of “English empiricism.”
“Reasonableness,” “experience,” and “common sense” frequently meet in contem-
porary English speech. Both their ubiquity and their connectedness in contempo-
rary English discourse reflect the legacy of Locke and Hume, of Shaftesbury and
Reid, and more generally, of the spirit of the British Enlightenment.
As Porter points out in relation to the British Enlightenment as a whole, “big
ideas must be contextualized in terms of broader transformations in casts of mind,
habits of thinking and shades of sensibility” (ibid., 13). They must be seen in
terms of their “diffusion among the reading public” and “their practical conse-
quences.” The British Enlightenment “was not just a matter of pure epistemolog-
ical breakthroughs: it was primarily the expression of new mental and moral
values, new canons of taste, styles of sociability and views of human nature”
(ibid., 14; emphasis added).
The ideas of reason, knowledge, common people, and common sense were
all hotly contested in eighteenth-century England (and Scotland), and they were
often pitted against the views and attitudes of Descartes and other French
philosophers. As Porter puts it,
Thinkers like Locke abhorred l’esprit de système and swept aside the old scholastic
cobwebs . . . the most ingenious way of becoming foolish was to be a system-
366 SENSE
monger, quipped Shaftesbury, who made ridicule the test of truth. England’s
modernizers . . . made their pitch in the metropolitan market place and courted the
public, hoping, with Joseph Addison, who supported Cicero’s praise of Socrates for
bringing philosophy down from the heavens, to make it “dwell in Clubs and
Assemblies, at Tea-Tables and in Coffee Houses.” (ibid., 11)6
The new views of human nature, disseminated among the reading public
through the writings of influential writers like John Locke and Thomas Reid,
included a belief that people could get practical and useful knowledge through
observation and experience and that while the knowledge that was “the harvest
of experience” (ibid., 651) was necessarily limited and uncertain, it could none-
theless provide guidance in the ordinary business of life. They also included a
belief in a human “common sense” shared by people (those compos mentis, that
is) and in the atmosphere of “buoyant pragmatism” (ibid., 14), which was a
salient feature of enlightened England. This belief led to a transformation in the
very concepts of reasonableness and common sense (as they were understood at
the time) and to the birth of the new “mental and moral values” of reasonableness
and common sense (as we know them in twentieth- and twenty-first-century
English).
Let me close this chapter with a coda—a look at the tribute that the
eighteenth-century statesman Lord Chesterfield paid to common sense in his
famous Letters to His Son.7 In one of the letters, the father, whom his contem-
poraries credited with a “perfect knowledge of mankind” (Cookson 1989, 7),
summed up his advice to his “Dear Boy” by appealing to common sense:
“Common sense (which in truth, is very uncommon) is the best sense I know
of: abide by it, it will counsel you best” (September 27, 1748; Chesterfield 1901,
vol. 1, 273).
The endorsement of common sense given here is unequivocal, but the remark
that “common sense is very uncommon” is puzzling, especially in view of
another passage in the same letter that appears to be making a contrary claim:
“Pray let no quibbles of Lawyers, no refinements of Casuists, break into the plain
notions of right and wrong; which every man’s right reason, and plain common
sense, suggest to him” (ibid., 271).
How can the reference to “every man’s plain common sense” be reconciled
with the remark that common sense “in truth, is very uncommon”? In fact, when
read in the context of the letter as a whole the apparent paradox is easily resolved
and moreover, helps us to understand the meaning of common sense in Lord
Chesterfield’s eighteenth-century usage. As Lord Chesterfield sees it, common
sense is available to all people, but many philosophers and others enamored of
casuistry and sophistry have willfully renounced that natural light, and among
those, common sense is very uncommon.
The best example of someone who “quits certain plain truths, obvious in
gross to every understanding, in order to run after the ingenious refinements of
warm imagination and speculative reasonings” is, according to Lord Chesterfield,
“Doctor [George] Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne” (ibid., 272). This “very worthy,
ingenious and learned man has written a book to prove that there is no such thing
COMMON SENSE 367
as Matter, and that nothing exists but in idea, that you and I only fancy ourselves
eating, drinking and sleeping, you at Leipzig, and I in London: that we think we
have flesh and blood, but that we are only spirit” (ibid., 272–73). This passage
about Berkeley is followed in Lord Chesterfield’s letter by the remark that
“common sense (which in truth, is very uncommon) is the best sense I know
of.” The final counsel to the “Dear Boy” reads: “Read and hear, for your
amusement, ingenious systems, nice questions subtilly agitated, with all the
refinements that warm imaginations suggest; but consider them only as exercita-
tions for the mind, and return always to settle with common sense” (ibid., 273).
As these quotes make clear, the meaning that Lord Chesterfield associates
with the phrase common sense has a good deal in common with the present-day
(twenty-first-century) meaning but is by no means identical with it. Today’s
common sense is not concerned with questions such as whether we really eat
and drink or only fancy ourselves doing so or whether we really have flesh and
blood or are only spirit. Nor is it concerned with “the plain notions of right and
wrong,” as it was at the time when “moral sense” could be seen as “common
sense” par excellence. Rather, it is concerned with the question of what to think in
a particular situation so as to know—and know quickly—what to do and what not
to do there and then.
Common sense is no longer seen as an innate faculty (part of an innate human
endowment) but rather as an attitude—a possible way of thinking that can offer
practical and reliable solutions to problems arising in everyday life. (Recall
the collocation common-sense attitude, which recurs in COBUILD, as noted in
section 8.3.) This new concept of common sense and the new value entrenched
with it in today’s English has its roots in the earlier usage, especially in that
of widely read eighteenth-century writers who were champions of “common
sense” in the earlier sense of the phrase, such as Thomas Reid, Thomas Paine,
and (on a more modest scale) the famous author of Letters to His Son.
9
From Having Sense

to Making Sense
9.1. Being Sensible
At first sight, being sensible may seem to be very similar to having common
sense. On closer inspection, however, one discovers certain significant differ-
ences between the two. One of these is that sensible appears to often be used in
speech directed at children, whereas common sense is not (or at least not nearly as
often as sensible). This impression that sensible has more pedagogical potential
than does common sense is confirmed by evidence from children’s books. For
example, in Kenneth Grahame’s children’s classic The Wind in the Willows there
are eleven occurrences of sensible and not a single instance of common sense.
With one exception, in all the sentences with sensible this word is used with
reference to people, as in “Let’s be sensible” or “a sensible Toad.” (In fact,
Toad’s not being sensible is a major theme of the book.) Here are some examples:
We’ll stand no nonsense whatever. We’ll bring him back to reason, by force if need be.
We’ll make him a sensible Toad.
We’ll teach him to be a sensible Toad!
But I tell you, I’d take any trouble on earth for you, if only you’d be a sensible animal.
When are you going to be sensible, and think of your friends, and try and be a credit to
them?
All these examples refer to situations in which Toad is doing something

foolish, which, predictably, leads to disaster. Obviously, Toad, who is not being
368
FROM HAVING SENSE TO MAKING SENSE 369
sensible, fails to think about the bad things that might happen when he does
something that he wants to do, or at least he does not let any such thoughts (should
he have them) stand in the way of his doing what he has set his heart on doing.
In contrast to Toad, his friends Badger, Rat, and Mole are sensible animals
who can foresee very bad consequences likely to result from certain actions.
Thus, when Toad, having ignored their advice, lands in jail and gives in to
despair, he laments like this: “Stupid animal that I was . . . now I must languish
in this dungeon, till people who were proud to say that they know me, have
forgotten the very name of Toad! O wise old Badger! . . . O clever, intelligent Rat
and sensible Mole! What sound judgments, what a knowledge of men and
matters you possess! O unhappy and forsaken Toad!” (Grahame 1908).
But being sensible is not just about foreseeing and avoiding negative con-
sequences of certain possible actions. It is also about foreseeing possible advanta-
geous outcomes and taking a course of action likely to lead to them. For example,
when Toad, dressed as a washerwoman, escapes from prison and hitches a ride
with an unsuspecting gentleman, he pretends to be feeling unwell and proposes to
move to the front seat (allegedly in order to feel better, while in fact plotting to
grab the steering wheel), the credulous gentleman praises the washerwoman as
being “very sensible”: “‘What a very sensible woman!’ said the gentleman. ‘Of
course you shall.’ So they carefully helped Toad into the front seat beside the
driver, and on they went again” (ibid.; emphasis in the original).
Similarly, when Rat, who is preparing a feast to share with Mole, notices that
Mole is well supplied with premium beer, he praises him for being “sensible”:
“The Rat, meanwhile, was busy examining the label on one of the beer-bottles.
‘I perceive this to be Old Burtons,’ he remarked approvingly. ‘SENSIBLE Mole!
The very thing! Now we shall be able to mull some ale! Get the things ready,
Mole, while I draw the corks!’ ”
This is then another difference between common sense and being sensible:
the former implies an ability to foresee bad consequences of some possible
actions (and, consequently, to avoid those actions), whereas the latter implies
an ability to foresee both bad and good consequences and to act accordingly.
Another difference between the two is that “being sensible” implies, above
all, a pattern of behavior (based on a pattern of thinking), whereas common
sense is primarily a pattern of thinking (with behavioral consequences). Thus,
“Be sensible!” implies “Behave in a sensible way!” whereas “Have some com-
mon sense!” implies, rather, an appeal to the addressee to “think straight” (and
perhaps to abandon some foolish ideas and thus steer clear of some easily
avoidable bad outcomes). “Have common sense!” without the word some sounds
odd. “Have intelligence!” is unacceptable, whereas “Be sensible!” sounds per-
fectly natural.
Common sense is, as we have seen, a somewhat minimalist value, remark-
able by its absence rather than its presence. As discussed earlier, it is more
common to say that someone is “lacking common sense” than that someone
“has common sense.” On the other hand, it is perfectly natural to say “she is
sensible” or “it was a sensible thing to do.”
370 SENSE
Thus, “she is sensible” is more likely to be used as praise than “she has
common sense” (unless one adds a magnifier of some sort, for example, “she
has a lot of common sense”). At the same time, “she is sensible” does not sound
like extravagant praise, and when used about an adult (human), it can even sound
patronizing. Everyone can be expected to “have common sense,” and while not
everyone can be expected to “be sensible,” many can.
Concomitantly, to say that someone “doesn’t have common sense” implies
strong censure, whereas to say that someone “is not sensible” implies milder
censure and in fact, suggests a kind of concern that parents may have about a
child rather than a criticism directed at an adult. To put it differently, it is bad
(people think) if someone “doesn’t have common sense,” whereas if someone “is
not sensible,” it can be rather a worry. The exhortation “Be sensible!” appeals to
a person (often a child) to think about the likely consequences of their actions and
to take appropriate precautions; it does not necessarily imply a criticism. By
contrast, “Have some common sense!” does imply a criticism, and as already
mentioned, “Have common sense!” (or even “Show common sense!”) is hardly
acceptable.
Gathering these observations together, we can posit the following explica-
tion for sensible (as in a sensible approach):
sensible (e.g., sensible approach, sensible decision, sensible shoes)

b. someone does something because this someone thinks like this:
f. if I do some other things, something good can happen because of this
j. when this someone thinks like this, after a short time this someone can know it
k. it is good if someone thinks like this
l. often people don’t think like this (many people don’t think like this)
m. it can be bad for someone if this someone doesn’t think like this
I have put some of the components of this explication in bold in order to

facilitate comparison with common sense, the explication of which is repeated
here for the reader’s convenience:
common sense (approach)

f. if I do some other things, something bad will not happen because of this
j. when this someone thinks like this, after a very short time
this someone can know it
k. (because of this, this someone does something)
m. all people can think like this
n. it is good if people do things because they think like this
o. it is bad if someone doesn’t think like this
Like common sense, sensible has no semantic equivalents in other European

languages, including French. The Collins-Robert French-English, English-
French Dictionary translates the adjective sensible in collocations like sensible
clothes as “pratique, commode” (‘practical, comfortable’), whereas in other
contexts (e.g., she is a sensible person) it offers the adjective raisonnable (from
raison ‘reason’). In English, however, the meaning of sensible is the same (or
almost the same) in both cases, and the dictionary recognizes this indirectly by
offering an alternative translation for she is a sensible person: “elle a les deux
pieds sur terre” (‘she has both feet on the ground’).
The common phrase sensible shoes refers to shoes that are not only
practical and comfortable but also the kind of shoes that it is sensible to
wear in a particular situation. More generally, a sensible decision brings a
solution to a practical problem arising in a particular situation (here and
now). It is reached relatively quickly and takes into account the likely
consequences of different options. It does not involve prolonged, deep, or
original thinking. Rather, it is a decision that most people could make in the
same situation if they thought about it in the same way. A sensible person is
a person who, when faced with practical problems can and usually does
make “sensible” decisions.
The Anglo value of “being sensible” is closely related to the Anglo value
of “being reasonable,” which I discuss in detail in my English: Meaning
and Culture (2006). They both focus on knowing what to do in a concrete
situation (unlike, for example, the French word raisonnable, which is a
“false friend” of its English cognate). Reasonable, however, preserves its seman-
tic link with reason through the component “think well.” Sensible includes
no such component. Instead, it implies an ability to quickly assess the likely
consequences of different possible actions and as a result, to know what one
should do in a given situation.
Finally, sensible has dramatically changed its meaning over the last
two centuries or so. The direction to change can be schematically presented
in terms of a shift from A (“feeling”) through B (“thinking” and “knowing”)
and C (“thinking well”) to D (“thinking” and “doing”) (as in sensible thing
to do and sensible shoes). The following examples from the OED illustrate this
shift:
372 SENSE
A. A person of a tender, sensible, and compassionate temper. (1675)

Thus his backwardness wrought so violently on her sensible and tender heart, that she
soon felt for him all those gentle sensations which are consistent with a virtuous and
elevated female mind. (Fielding 1749)
St. Peter certainly was of a warm and sensible nature. (Sterne 1760)
Johnson had, from his early youth, been sensible to the influence of female charms.
(Boswell 1791)
B. I was not sensible to the extent of my danger. (1806)
C. Sir Roger . . . knew several sensible people who believed these Gypsies now and then
foretold very strange things. (1711)
D. Forty, if she’s a day, wears pince-nez and sensible boots and an air of brisk efficiency
that will be the death of me. (Agatha Christie 1924)
As I discuss in the next section, two hundred years ago, “being sensible”
could be seen as the opposite of “having sense.” In present-day English, however,
the two have come to be perceived as very close to one another. More precisely,
sensible has become drawn into the orbit of sense (and common sense) and away
from sensibility—a symbolic victory, one might say, of sense over sensibility in
modern Anglo culture.
William Empson, who discusses the semantic history of sense and sensible in
his book The Structure of Complex Words (1977 [1951]), comments on this shift
thus: “There has been a war between sense and sensibility, a war in which the
English sensible, though not the French, was taken capture by the enemy” (251).
Empson is referring here to the title of Jane Austin’s novel Sense and Sensibility,
to which I turn in the next section.
9.2. Having Sense
One of the best-known novels written in English is Jane Austen’s Sense and
Sensibility. The two values contrasted in the title are represented in the novel by
two sisters, Elinor and Marianne: Elinor has sense and Marianne has sensibility.
The author clearly identifies with Elinor, who epitomizes sense.
In French, the title of Jane Austen’s novel has been rendered as “Raison et
Sentiments”—not out of perversion but out of necessity: there is no word in
French (or most likely in any other language) that would match the English sense
in meaning, as there is none that would match common sense or sensible: All
three stand for quintessentially Anglo concepts and values.
Elinor, the daughter who represents sense, is introduced in the novel in the
context of a family crisis in which her mother, more mindful of her dignity than
of her and her daughters’ destitution, decides nonetheless to follow her daugh-
ter’s advice:
Elinor, this eldest daughter, whose advice was so effectual, possessed a strength
of understanding, and coolness of judgment, which qualified her, though only
nineteen, to be the counsellor of her mother, and enabled her frequently to
counteract, to the advantage of them all, that eagerness of mind in Mrs. Dashwood
which must generally have led to imprudence. She had an excellent heart; her
disposition was affectionate, and her feelings were strong; but she knew how to
govern them: it was a knowledge which her mother had yet to learn, and which one
of her sisters had resolved never to be taught. (Austen 1975, 42)
It is easy to see from this description that what Elinor epitomizes for her creator is
not reason (raison) but something else.
According to the entry on raison (‘reason’) in the Vocabulaire européen de
philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles (Cassin 2004), raison is opposed in
French to folie ‘madness’, understood as deraison ‘unreason’, and it is crucially
linked to logical thinking. But clearly, it is not logical thinking that Elinor
Dashwood excels in. Rather, it is a kind of practical thinking, thinking about
what it can be good and beneficial to do in a concrete situation.
In her discussion of Jane Austin’s Sense and Sensibility, literary critic Ellen
Moody (2003) remarks that “sense and sensibility are highly complex words with
long histories” and also that “sense covers the same territory as sensible” and
“connects with common sense.” But does that mean that sense and sensible mean
the same thing? And what exactly does “connecting with common sense” mean?
Moody refers in this context to a chapter devoted to the words sense and
sensibility (but also touching on common sense and sensible) in Empson’s
Structure of Complex Words (1977). Empson himself notes that the New English
Dictionary assigns thirty different meanings to the word sense and that it defines
the eleventh as “natural understanding, intelligence, especially as bearing on
action or behaviour; practical soundness of judgment” (ibid., 257). This defini-
tion, which Empson appears to be quoting with approval, seems to fit Jane
Austen’s use of both sense and good sense well enough. Nonetheless, the ques-
tions of the exact relationship between sense, common sense, and sensible
remain. In what follows, I will clarify this relationship through NSM explica-
tions. First, however, let us look at some present-day examples of the use of sense
(in a sense close to Jane Austen’s use of this word).
The relatively strong positive implications of sense are clearly visible in the
following example from COBUILD:
Well done, Sheriff James Paterson, for throwing out the beef-on-the-bone case (The Sun,
April 22). If looked at logically, then all meat is attached to a bone of some kind. At last,
the sheriff has proved there is someone around with a bit of sense.
People would be unlikely to congratulate someone with the words “well done!”
for simply showing common sense. A further implication of this example is that
there are not many people around with “a bit of sense” and that “having some
sense” is something more remarkable than simply “having common sense.”
A blog on the Washington Post’s Web site during the 2008 presidential cam-
paign comments: “In politics, there is nothing worse than appearing out of touch.”
Then it elaborates: “It’s all about perception. Bush’s mangling of the English
language HELPED him, not hurt him. Think Fred Thompson. Rented out a red
374 SENSE
pickup and carried chewin’ tobaccy. Bill Clinton had the sense to hide the fact that
he was incredibly smart. Gore and Kerry made the mistake of thinking people want
smart leaders.” Clearly, the author does not mean that Bill Clinton had the common
sense to hide the fact that he was incredibly smart or that Gore and Kerry showed a
lack of common sense. Many dictionaries more or less equate sense with common
sense, but as this example clearly shows, sense is much more than common sense.
It is also more than being sensible. The author could have said that it was
“sensible” of Bill Clinton to hide how smart he was and that Gore and Kerry’s
behavior was not “similarly sensible,” but this, too, would have conveyed a very
different message: roughly speaking, it would have implied that Gore and Kerry
were behaving somewhat foolishly, whereas Bill Clinton was not.
As this example also illustrates, sense is often used in present-day English in
the frame to have the sense to (do something). Used in this way, sense implies
doing something not merely sensible but rather clever—more precisely, respond-
ing in a rather clever way to the situation in which one finds oneself.
In other frames, too, sense implies more than either common sense or sensible.
Consider, for example, the following blog reporting an unlikely hero’s response to
a situation brought about by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans (2005):
The Crack Man had more sense in time of crisis . . . Here is an interesting story that I’ve
never heard about. In a show of cool-headed leadership and courage, a [housing] project
dwelling, dope dealing crack head (allegedly) commandeered a school bus and rescued
many people from Orleans during Storm Katrina.
Nobody could have accused other people—those who did not think of comman-
deering a school bus to rescue people during the hurricane—of lacking common
sense or not being sensible. Clearly, the “Crack Man’s” imaginative, cool-headed,
and courageous action went well beyond common sense or sensible-ness. Yet the
word sense (in the phrase to have more sense) is perfectly appropriate in this context.
Consider also the following example from COBUILD:
When the pressure is on during a crucial match, it’s very difficult to keep your cool, as one
bad decision could cost you your livelihood. Referees should learn to understand this and
show a bit of sense when deciding how to punish a manager. I understand there are so
many rules coming in that soon the only people in football will be choir boys and angels.
Refs must realise managers would have to be as dead as a lump of wood not to react
when . . .
First, this example implies that there are many referees who fail to “show a
bit of sense” and therefore, that “sense” is not something that can be taken for
granted. In addition, the example is instructive insofar as it explicitly contrasts
“sense” with “rules”: there are no “rules of sense” in English, as there are règles
de bon sens in French, and sense implies an ability to improvise in response to a
particular situation. This supports the component “something is happening here
now,” which I have posited for both sense and common sense (and also for
sensible).
To facilitate a comparison, I have highlighted those components of the
explication of sense that are absent from that of common sense:
sense (as in show a bit of sense or Bill Clinton had the sense to hide how incredibly smart
he was)

f. if I do some other things, something good can happen because of this
h. I want something good to happen
i. because of this I want to think about it for a short time
j. if I think about it for a short time, I can know what I can do”
k. when this someone thinks like this, after a very short time this
someone can know it
m. often people don’t think like this (many people don’t think like this)
n. it is not good if people don’t think like this
The clearest difference between common sense and sense lies in the pre-
sumed generality of the former (A) in contrast to the latter (B):
A. all people can think like this

B. many people don’t think like this
This is related to the more condemnatory ring of no common sense (A) as

compared with no sense (B):
A. it is bad if someone doesn’t think like this

B. it is not good if someone doesn’t think like this
The component “it is bad if someone doesn’t think like this” assigned here
to common sense has not been assigned to sense. At best, there is the implica-
tion in sense that since “it is good to think like this,” it is not good not to think like
this.
A third and also related difference lies in the expected good outcome of
sense. Common sense implies that if a person adopts a commonsensical attitude,
that person can easily foresee and avoid bad consequences of some actions. Sense
implies this, too, but in addition it paves the way for foreseeable good outcomes.
Taken together, these three differences account to a large extent for the
minimalist implications of common sense and the more upscale ones of sense.
376 SENSE
The title of Jane Austen’s novel highlights, among other things, some of the
differences between sense and common sense. The book could not have been titled
“Common Sense and Sensibility” (or, for euphony, “Sensibility and Common
Sense”) because the common sense of the younger sister is never in question. Nor
is there any implication that Marianne has less common sense than Elinor.
As I discuss in section 9.1, common sense has somewhat minimalist implica-
tions and is remarkable more by its absence than by its presence. Sense is not
similarly minimalist. Elinor is remarkable because of her sense, but she could
hardly have been remarkable by virtue of her common sense.
The use of sense (in a sense similar to that immortalized in the title of Jane
Austen’s novel) is somewhat narrower in contemporary spoken discourse than it
was in the nineteenth century, and some kind of quantifier (a lot of, some, no,
enough) is now normally required. Often it is used in routinized expressions such
as Have some sense! as in the following example from COBUILD:
“If you shout, Hilton, I’ll just have to shoot you,” Cross told him gravely. “Have some
sense, I’m in danger, and I won’t hesitate to shoot, see?” . . . Cross could almost see the
rapid calculations spinning around in Hilton’s brain. He had backed off to a wall now.
In this example, Hilton is urged by Cross to think like this: “I have to do

something now.” Hilton does not think about it for a long time (“rapid calcula-
tions”), but he evidently does make some calculations of the kind envisaged in the
explication. Clearly, as a result of his rapid calculations Hilton realizes what he
should do in this situation, and so “he backs off to a wall now.” Hilton’s
assessment, based on a quick calculation of the likely consequences, is obviously
a sound one: given the reality of the threat, there can be no doubt that he knows
what he needs to do (rather than merely thinks that he knows). Finally, Hilton’s
assessment leads to immediate action (he backs off to the wall).
The link between “sense” (in the sense under discussion) and “practical”
knowledge is easy to see in the following two examples, which include the
expression enough sense:
At the news of his impending return she had been feasted—the fattening they called it
though she had enough sense to know that he had liked her leanness and would not want to
be confronted by one of these fat grinning moons that smirking mothers like to lead out for
mating.
If she [Amber] didn’t have enough sense to stay with Theo, then she could suffer the
consequences.
In the second example, Amber does not have “enough sense” to calculate the
consequences—and she will suffer as a result. In the first, the heroine does have
“enough sense” to calculate the likely consequences, and so she understands what
to do in the situation in which she finds herself.
There is no reference to “feeling” in these examples. Having enough sense or
a lot of sense implies knowing what one should do in a given situation, and this is
similar to, for example, having an acute sense of when to pass (see chapter 6).
However, the two cases are also different: an acute sense of when to pass implies
knowing something instinctively on the basis of a quasi-bodily feeling, whereas
having enough sense to do something implies knowing something on the basis of
a quick calculation.
This difference between the two types has to do with different collocational
possibilities: a sense of when to pass can be described as acute, but sense in
enough sense or have some sense! cannot. One could say that Jane Austen’s
Elinor had a lot of sense but not that she had keen sense, acute sense, or strong
sense. Thus, Jane Austen’s sense—unlike the sense that can occur with an
indefinite article (as in a sense that)—refers exclusively to “thinking,” “know-
ing,” and “doing”, without any reference to “feeling.” As we have seen, the same
is true of common sense and of being sensible.
In fact, common sense is not quantifiable to the extent to which sense is; it
occurs in emphatic collocations such as no common sense at all and not an ounce
of common sense but only rarely in combination with enough or a lot. This stands
to reason if one accepts that common sense implies only a minimum of sound
judgment, whereas sense has no such in-built limitations and is compatible with a
much wider range of possibilities, from no sense at all through a bit of sense and
enough sense to a lot of sense.
Earlier I quoted The Structure of Complex Words by William Empson. By
“complex words,” Empson means words that are semantically complex, and he
regards sense as a prime example. The basic idea of the book, Empson says
(1977, viii), is that “as the various meanings within one word, and their interac-
tions, are tricky to analyze out, yet the speakers often interpret a use of them with
confidence and speed, there is likely to be an inner grammar of complex words
like the overt grammar of sentences.”
I share Empson’s wonder at the confidence and speed with which speakers
interpret the numerous different uses of a multifaceted word like sense, and I, too,
admire the complex, intricate, and orderly network of crisscrossing semantic
components that define the semantic space of sense in all its different but
interrelated meanings. As I have shown here, NSM is a tool that can help us to
illuminate this network better than it could be done in a language full of words as
complex and culture-bound as those whose meanings we may seek to elucidate.
9.3. Making Sense
Constance Classen’s highly illuminating book Worlds of Sense: Exploring the

Senses in History and across Cultures (1993) opens with the following statement:
“Different cultures present strikingly different ways of ‘making sense’ of the
world.” “Making sense of the world” refers here primarily to perception: “In the
West we are accustomed to thinking of perception as a physical rather than
cultural act” (1). Classen argues that perception is deeply influenced by culture:
“As our habits of eating, dress, language, and so on are determined by our culture,
so are our habits of perception, and as the former express cultural codes, so do the
378 SENSE
latter.” In her own words, her book debunks “the myth of perceptual transparen-
cy” (ibid.) and draws attention to the great extent “to which our own sensory
consciousness is structured by our culture’ (ibid., 49).
Classen’s arguments are persuasive. But it is not only “our sensory con-
sciousness” that is structured by our culture: so are many of our seemingly most
basic and neutral words and notions, such as “making sense.” When she says that
the ways in which various cultures make sense of the world “are strikingly
different,” Classen could be implying that at least the aspiration to “make sense
of the world” is universal. In fact, however, it is not, because the idea of “making
sense” is both language and culture specific: it is another cultural artifact of
modern English. Evidence suggests that all languages and cultures share the
concepts of knowing and thinking but not that of making sense.
Judging by the data in English corpora, one might conclude that making
sense is one of the central preoccupations of English speakers and that the notion
of making sense provides them with an essential guide in any situation. When in
doubt, one can always ask “Does that make sense?”—and treat the answer as a
key to what to think and do.
The importance of this question is so much taken for granted that native
speakers of English are usually astonished to hear that it cannot be formulated in
other languages and that evidently speakers of other languages do not think in
such terms, at least not habitually. Of course, experienced translators can always
suggest various expressions that can approximate the expression make sense in a
particular context. For example, in French one could sometimes press into service
the word sens, which is a dictionary equivalent of the English sense—but not in
all contexts and not without a change in meaning.
For example, one can say in French çela n’a pas de sens (literally, ‘this
doesn’t have any sense’), but one cannot say the opposite: *çela a (beaucoup de)
sens ‘this has (a lot of) sense’. The French COBUILD includes numerous examples
of the negative version but hardly any of the positive except for one or two
translations from English.
In German databases, one can find both the negative and the positive
versions of the expression Sinn machen, lit. ‘to make sense’ (das macht keinen
Sinn, das macht Sinn), but various commentaries on present-day German note
that this expression is a recent Anglicism. In fact, the Anglicism is widely
deplored as a glaring example of German “Selbstkolonisierung” (Stahl 2002,
48; Carstensens and Busse 1994).
The very fact that the expression to make sense spread like wildfire in
Internet German and in “Denglish” (Deutsch English) and then more generally
in German is a good indication of the salience of this expression in present-day
English. I illustrate this, to begin with, with the use of this expression as a
standard conversational routine in English (examples from COBUILD).1
– Does that make sense? —Yes, yes.

– Does that make sense? —Yes, it does.
– Does that make sense? —Yeah, yeah.
– Does that make sense? —Yes.
– Does that make sense? —Yeah, it makes sense.

– Does that make sense to you? —Mm.
– Does that make sense to you? —It does make sense.
One could not translate these sentences into French using the word sens, and
the best one could do would be to use the word comprendre ‘to understand’.
But of course, “does that make sense?” does not mean the same as “do you
understand?”
Importantly, the English phrase to make sense has a slot for the speaker (“to
me”) and the addressee (“to you”):
Ella frowned, puzzled. “It doesn’t make sense to me.” Autumn threw herself back into the
chair. “It makes sense to me.”
Ripping apart this entire mountain, pulverizing it into talcum powder, treating it with
cyanide, turning it into some jewelry for some people to wear. It just doesn’t make sense
to me.
I think that’s a physically inconsistent controversy [that clouds should determine
temperature of every place]. Now, it physically doesn’t make sense to me because the
updraughts in the clouds are only a tenth of a percent of the area, so yes, within the cloud
that may be true, but the ambient has no reason to follow that.
Social learning theorists would argue that little boys prefer to play with trucks because
they have been reinforced for such play, as when parents buy them more toys like this.
Does this make sense to you?
As these examples illustrate, saying “it doesn’t make sense to me” is one of the
ready-made English strategies for expressing one’s opinion while leaving room
for other opinions. It is analogous in this respect to locutions like in my view, as I
see it, and to my mind (cf. Wierzbicka 2006, chapters 2 and 7).
The question “does it make sense to you?” (of which “does it make sense?” is
often an abbreviated version) also serves important pragmatic goals in English.
This question is frequently linked with a proposal for joint action, and the
assumption is that if the proposal makes sense, then the interlocutors will
proceed: cooperation is expected to be based on the agreement that what is
being suggested makes sense. For example:
If it’s not getting over [succeeding] in that method, then we’ve got to review the method
and put other ways forward. Does that make sense? —Yes, yes.
The question “does that make sense?” can also be a conversational tool for
reaching agreement with one’s interlocutors as to how to think about something
(rather than how to act):
I find it remarkable that my lad seems unaffected by the insecurity he’s lived with for most
of his life. It doesn’t make sense, does it?
—I only got just over three quid an hour, and yet my husband . . . gets paid astronomical
amounts for sitting on his arse all day. [laughs]. It just doesn’t make sense, does it? —No.
380 SENSE
Given that something that “makes sense” is regarded as a reliable guide for
action, it is hardly surprising that this phrase is frequently combined with an
infinitive: it makes sense to do something. For example:
It can make sense to soak these overnight before planting.

It does make sense to keep some “rainy day” money there, which you can get hold of on
short notice.
If you plan to use a room with no other heating during the morning, it may make sense to
take advantage of the Economy 7 low-rate period to preheat the room.
Again, one could not translate these sentences into French using the word sens.
The expression it doesn’t make sense is also used to condemn an action as
unreasonable or foolish:
The football team selection doesn’t make sense.

It doesn’t make sense for them to borrow at R one to invest in projects that are lower than
that.
Immediately following the last verdict Lionel [the father], shaken man, muttered, “It just
doesn’t make sense.”
But while the idea of making sense has an essentially practical orientation
(it makes sense to do something), it is also widely used in English discourse for
thinking about “big” abstract subjects such as life and the world, and the question
of how to think (about such matters) appears to be perceived as closely related to
the question of how to act (in a concrete situation):
And her relationship with her own mother, the screenwriter Phoebe Ephson, obviously
influenced “This Is My Life,” when some of the best lines go to the teenage daughter, who
is trying to make sense of her life.
But whether you subscribe to an accepted faith or not, the truth is we all need to make
sense of our lives and feel a sense of direction and purpose.
Life doesn’t make sense anymore; it’s crazy.
Often it doesn’t seem to fit together terribly well; often it doesn’t seem to make sense, and
really part of treatment . . . is about helping people to put the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle
back together into a coherent kind of story to make sense of the experience (“Perils of
Peacekeeping,” Background Briefing, ABC Radio National broadcast, October 29, 2006).
A sentence like “life doesn’t make sense anymore” does not mean the same
as “life has no meaning.” The latter could be rendered, more or less, in other
European languages, but the former could not. In fact, according to Albert
Camus, the question of what he calls “le sens de la vie” is “the most pressing”
of all questions—the only philosophical problem that is really serious. Comment-
ing on Camus’ view, Austrian philosopher Clemens Sedmak (2005) notes that
there are many books with the title “Der Sinn des Lebens.” But although the
words sens and Sinn are usually regarded as semantic equivalents of the English
word sense, in English, people normally speak of “the meaning of life,” not “the
sense of life”—a fact that points to an important difference between sense and its
putative counterparts in other European languages.
Briefly, titles like Le sens de la vie, Der Sinn des Lebens, and The Meaning of
Life refer to the question of what one lives for, and this highlights the semantic
link between sens, Sinn, and the notion of goals (‘what for?’). By contrast, the
English sense has to do with “why,” not with “what for.” Accordingly, “making
sense of one’s life” has to do with trying to figure out “why things have happened
to me the way they have,” not “what I have lived for.” I return to this point later in
the context of specific explications.
In English “translationese,” the expressions a sense of life and the sense of
life are sometimes used—but this is “translationese.” For example, in discussions
of Camus’ ideas, le sens de la vie is sometimes rendered as a sense of life, and
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s book Un sens à la vie (lit. ‘a sense for [one’s] life’)
has been published in English as A Sense of Life. Two other books of literary
criticism (Lewis 1959; Jackson 1967) use the expression the sense of life in
relation to Moravia and Chekhov, respectively.
Facts of this kind highlight the semantic mismatch between the English sense
and its putative counterparts in other European languages and the uniqueness of
the idea of “making sense of one’s life,” which is embedded in modern English
but cannot be accurately rendered in other languages (although it can be ex-
plained through NSM).
One untranslatable aspect of the English sentence is its implicit reference to
different parts (or components) of one’s life, which one wants to somehow put
together and make them fit like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, as in the last
example from COBUILD. Another is the implicit reference to events—to things that
have happened to us. Yet another is the implication for the present: if I know how
all those parts (the things that have happened to me) fit together, I can know what
to do now because of this.
The COBUILD corpus includes many sentences that link the phrases make sense
with the word past, but they are all compatible with some practical lessons for the
present. This is clear, for example, in the following sentences:
She attends therapy in the Landbroke Grove area. This is to help her to come to terms with
her early upbringing and make sense of past experiences.
In fact, what you are watching is . . . a man trying to make sense of, and reclaim, the past.
Judith, aged thirty-two, wanted psychotherapy in order to help her make sense of two
failed marriages. She felt that she was to blame . . . and wished to change aspects of herself
which she perceived as “ugly.”
As these sentences illustrate, people try to “make sense” of their past in order to
“reclaim” it, “come to terms” with it, and learn from its lessons.
The relevance of the here and now is explicit in sentences like the following:
Now Paw [a musical group] are dredging their pasts because they realize sometimes that’s
the only way to make sense of the here and now.
382 SENSE
The two of them would spend hours wandering along the seafront, trying to make sense of
what was happening to them.
The importance of the idea of parts or components is evident in sentences in

which make sense is combined with words like all, whole, or things:
As the year passed and it was witnessed, time after time, it all began to make sense.
But the way that it’s going down on the ground, that’s not really been the case . . . ’cos
some subject areas have been hit at different times to try to make sense of the whole thing.
It was all this streaming down.
How do we make sense of it all?
The story comes around, pushing at our brains, and soon we are trying to travel back to the
beginning, trying to put families into order and make sense of things.
It had blokes on skates dressed as bears, a revolving wooden pole trying to
knock them over, and Capital’s Foxy up in the commentary box trying to make sense
of it all.
As these sentences illustrate, English speakers often consider “making

sense” of things as very important, and the verb try (‘trying to make sense’)
occurs very frequently. Other auxiliary verbs that often co-occur with the phrases
make sense are want, need to, have to, got to, and must:
You’ve got to try and make sense of it.

They, like others, were having to make sense of a changing world.
It was about this sort of crucial Christian belief whether women can really be equal or not,
so we’ve come home, and we’ve got to make sense of this long, complete debate [on the
ordination of women].
Perhaps within this freedom of choice lies the answer to what a successfully resolved
Electra complex might consist of, that is, an understanding that a woman has to make
sense of her relationship with her mother before true intimacy with her father, and thereby
with men, is possible.
From a cross-linguistic perspective, one of the most intriguing aspects of the

expression make sense is the fact that it appears to have two very different
meanings associated with two different syntactic frames: if someone wants to
“make sense” of something, this may be roughly translatable with a word close to
understand, but if something “makes” (or “doesn’t make”) “sense,” this can
seldom be translated with a word comparable to understandable. For example,
the common conversational gambit “does that make sense?” can hardly be
paraphrased in English as “is that understandable?” and a similar paraphrase in
other languages would be equally inappropriate. Yet in English, the two frames
appear to be closely related semantically. What is that relationship? What is the
conceptual bridge between the two?
According to my hypothesis, this bridge is the link between “sense” and
speaking. What other people say to us may or may not “make sense” to us; if it
does not, we may try to “make sense” of what they are saying. Thus, “making
sense” can be seen as a two-way process involving the interlocutors: for the
communication to work, they both need to try to “make sense” to one another and
to “make sense” of what the other is saying:
She gazed at him, her eyes confused, as if trying to make sense of what he had said.
[Verse] 2.17 reads, turn, my beloved, here we have, make haste, my beloved—a translation
which tries to make sense of the Hebrew word heb, which normally means ‘flee’.
For such quotes to make sense . . . we must translate rate-and-point combinations into
simple rates.
Dan Slobin proposes that children are born with a certain “operating principle” that
governs the way they listen to and try to make sense out of the flow of sounds coming
at them.
What it all boils down to is, I suggest, that some combinations of words can
“make sense” to listeners or readers and that people try to “make sense” of the
sequences of words they hear or see (in print or in writing). Thus, I am suggesting
that the idea of “making sense” is linked with the model of human speech as a
two-way process of “making sense” in speaking and listening.
This brings us to the following explications:
This sentence (passage, etc.) makes sense.
[people can see many words in one place here]

if someone thinks about these words well
this someone can think about these words like this because of this:
“I can know what someone wants to say with these words
I can know why this someone says it like this”
this is good
This sentence (passage, etc.) doesn’t make sense.

if someone thinks about these words well
this someone can’t think about these words like this because of this:
this is bad
This sentence (passage, etc.) makes sense to me.

I have thought about these words well
I can think about these words like this because of this:
this is good
384 SENSE
This sentence (passage, etc.) doesn’t make sense to me.

I have thought about these words well
I can’t think about these words like this because of this:
this is bad
Since the word sense is associated with the word word (and words) anyway
(e.g., a word can have several senses), the hypothesis that the phrase to make
sense has its conceptual model in producing and decoding sequences of words
makes, it seems to me, a lot of sense. This conceptual link between “making
sense” of somebody’s words and the fact that the words themselves “make sense”
is strongly supported by historical evidence. Eighteenth- and late seventeenth-
century examples like the following three suggest that a long time before
anybody spoke about “making sense of one’s life,” it was common to speak of
“making sense” of something that somebody had said:
I took the prisoner to the Compter [a prison]; the woman was very much frightened,
nobody could make sense of what she said. (Thomas Harwood 1786, The Proceedings of
the Old Bailey).
But Mr. Congreve was resolved to make his Logick and Drollery of a piece, and I must be
produced in Ferment and Figure, as he calls it. But this Expression I shall leave with the
Reader, and give him some time to make Sense on’t. (Jeremy Collier 1699, A Defence of
the Short View)
For aught I know might have been wrote by him—it was moreover in a Gothic letter, and
that so faded and gone off by damps and length of time, it cost me infinite trouble to make
any thing of it . . . after two or three hours pouring upon it, with almost as deep attention as
ever Gruter or Jacob Spon did upon a nonsensical inscription, I thought I made sense of it.
(Laurence Sterne 1768, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy)
But how did English speakers make the transition from “making sense” of texts
and utterances to “making sense” of their own lives?
An obvious hypothesis is that the expression to make sense also has a
metaphorical sense based on an analogy between words and things, more pre-
cisely, between a sequence of words that someone can hear or see and a sequence
of events that someone can witness, remember, or read about. Accordingly, I
propose the following explications:
I want to make sense of my life.
I have lived for some time

many things happened to me during this time
I want to know why these things happened to me like this
if I think about it for some time, I can know it
it will be good if I know it
if I know it, I can do something because of this

I want to think about all these things
like people can think about many words when they see these words in one place
if they want to know what someone wants to say with these words
I want to make sense of what is going on.
many things are happening in this place now

I want to know why these things are happening like this
if I think about these things for some time, I can know it
it will be good if I know it
if I know it, I can do some things because of this
I want to think about all these things
like people can think about many words when they see these words
in one place
if they want to know what someone wants to say with these words
According to these explications, trying to “make sense” of one’s life or of a

complex situation is like trying to “make sense” of a complex passage. The main
difference is that in the case of a passage, the goal is to know what it says, whereas in
the case of a situation or of one’s past life, the goal is to know why these things are
happening or have happened, with an added implication that if one knows this, one
will be able to do something because of it. A passage “says something,” and events
may “add up” to something like a message, a lesson, or a conclusion, and if they do,
they “make sense,” like a spoken or written passage can “make sense.”
So far so good. But what about sentences like “it makes sense to do this”? Can
they, too, be interpreted along similar lines? Let us consider a concrete example:
It makes sense to stop smoking completely or at least try to cut down during pregnancy.
Here it is not a matter of many things happening to someone but of one thing, and
the question is not why they are happening but what to do and why. Schemati-
cally, this can be represented as follows:
It makes sense to do this (X, e.g., stop smoking) (if one wants something [Y] to happen).
[someone wants to do something because this someone wants something to happen]

if someone thinks about it for some time,
after a short time this someone can think like this because of this:
“people can know that if some people want something (Y) to happen
it will be good if they do this (X)”
In this case, there is no analogy to “many words,” but there are still some parallels
with “making sense” of what is going on. At the same time, there are some
parallels here with “having sense” and “showing sense”: if it makes sense to do
something, then one might say that the person who is doing it is “showing sense.”
This brings us back to routinized conversational phrases like does that make
sense?, it just doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t really make sense. Do they, too,
386 SENSE
embody in their meaning a reference to “words” (as a paradigm of what can

“make sense”)? This seems unlikely, given the routinized character of such
expressions and the fact that they usually refer to a single event rather than a
sequence of events. Consider, for example, the following sentence:
It does not make sense to talk about “black people” or “ethnic minorities” as a single group.
It appears that all that the speaker is saying in a case like this is something along
the following lines:
It doesn’t make sense (if someone does something [X] when this someone wants
something [Y] to happen).
[someone wants to do something because this someone wants something to happen]

“people can know that ,if some people want something (Y) to happen,
it will not be good if they do this (X)”
The negative assessment (“it will not be good”) is unmistakable here (the
speaker takes it for granted that it is bad (or at least not good) if something
“doesn’t make sense”). By the same token, an affirmative sentence (“it makes
sense that something happens”) implies approval:
It makes sense that (critics are detested most by the people they criticize).
[someone says something like this about something: it is like this]

“people can know why it is like this”
this is good
The routinized response “that makes sense” (or “that makes a lot of sense”)
expresses both agreement and approval of what has just been said:
That makes a lot of sense. (It has helped me to see it more clearly.)
[someone says something like this about something: it is like this]

if someone thinks about this for some time
“people can know very well why it is like this”
this is good
A remarkable, highly culture-specific folk philosophy appears to be asso-

ciated with the English array of make sense expressions. One aspect of this folk
philosophy has to do with trust in quick thinking, especially, quick thinking about
the current situation and about what one should do “now.” The implication
appears to be that if people are mentally alert and think “I want to know why
these things are happening (or have happened)” or “I want to know what I should
do,” they can usually figure it out in a short time—and “that’s good.”
This ability to quickly arrive at a realization of what one should do or think in
a concrete situation is not seen as some people’s special talent but as an ability
that is available to everybody. Furthermore, it appears to be assumed that people
are likely to assess other people’s actions and utterances with reference to their
own ability to quickly figure out why those other people should have done or said
what they did.
There are close conceptual links here with “common sense” and with the
perceived value of behaving and speaking in a “reasonable” way. There is an
expectation of a possible consensus as to what does and does not make sense in a
particular situation and a disinclination to devote a lot of time and energy to what
is disparagingly referred to in English as “cogitating,” “ruminating,” “ponder-
ing,” “speculating,” “theorizing,” “chopping logic,” “splitting hairs,” “wran-
gling,” “quibbling,” or “flogging (beating) an argument to death.”
According to the Collins COBUILD dictionary (1991), “if a course of action
makes sense, it seems reasonable and practical,” and “if you say that someone
makes sense or talks sense, you mean that they are saying wise or sensible
things.” The word wise does not seem to be as well chosen in this context as the
words reasonable, practical, and sensible, but even wise hints here at knowing
what to do rather than being knowledgeable about many things or overly intel-
lectual. The hidden message encoded in the English lexicon and phraseology is
that it is good to be “brainy” but not to be “cerebral,” and it is good to be “sharp,”
“quick on the uptake,” or “quick witted” and “to know what’s what” and “to have
a good head on one’s shoulders.”
Collins COBUILD also says that, “if something makes sense, you can under-
stand it,” and up to a point, this is true. It is not true, however, that if you cannot
understand something, this something does not “make sense.” For example, if I
cannot understand the theory of relativity, this does not mean that the theory of
relativity does not make sense. Nor could the sentence “I want to understand the
theory of relativity” be paraphrased as “I want to make sense of the theory of
relativity”: “making sense” refers to events (or utterances), not to theories, and it
implies a practical orientation (“if I know why these things happened, I can do
something because of this”).
Expressions like to make sense of one’s life or to make sense of the world
may seem to be incompatible with the practical orientation attributed to the
phrase make sense both in Collins COBUILD and the present discussion, but in
fact, they, too, appear to make sense in light of the overall folk philosophy linked
with words and expressions like sensible, reasonable, to have sense, common
sense, and to make a lot of sense. In fact, the idea of making sense of one’s life is
as culture specific as those of common sense (see chapter 8 on common sense)
and reasonableness (see Wierzbicka 2006, chapter 4).
It is impossible to translate a sentence like “I want to make sense of my life”
into other European languages, even those in which words like sens (French),
388 SENSE
senso (Italian), or sentido (Spanish) are widely used: in most contexts, these are
all “false friends.”
For example, in Polish, one can speak about sens życia, but this means ‘the
meaning of life’, not ‘the sense of [one’s] life.’ In Polish there is no way to say,
“I want to make sense of my life.” One could perhaps say, “chce˛ zrozumieć moje
życie,” ‘I want to understand my life’, but obviously this is not the same (and in
any case, no one would normally say that in Polish, just as one would be unlikely
to say the literal equivalent in English).
In Russian, where the habitual way of thinking about one’s life invokes the
concept of ‘sud’ba’ (very roughly, ‘fate/verdict’/‘life sentence’/‘God-given indi-
vidual life path’), the idea of making sense of one’s life is even more culturally
and conceptually alien. The idea that everyone can figure out why things happen
in their life the way they do and draw from this some practical conclusions for the
future seems incompatible with the cultural view that the course of a person’s life
is unfathomable, which is embedded in the meaning of the Russian keyword
sud’ba (Wierzbicka 1992; Shmelev 2002; Apresjan 2006). One cannot know why
things happened to one the way they happened; one has to simply accept one’s
sud’ba and find solace in its uniqueness and “God-givenness.” As the great
Russian poet Boris Pasternak put it, one needs to “sebja i svoj žrebij podarkom
bescennym tvoim soznavat’ ” (‘recognize that both I myself and my fate are your
[God’s] priceless gift to me’).
A sentence from COBUILD quoted earlier says that “the truth is we all need to
make sense of our lives and to feel a sense of direction and purpose.” But this is
not a universal truth; it is a cultural truth: it is Anglo culture reflected in the
English language that encourages English speakers to try to make sense of their
lives. Other languages pass on to their speakers similarly compelling truths—for
example, the truth about “sud’ba” in the case of Russian, the value of “esprit” in
the case of French, and the importance of “Heimat” in the case of German.
Similarly, the educational objective that schools should be “like the pre-
school years when the very young infant is seeing, hearing, touching, and
smelling the great uncharted world and trying to make sense of it” (COBUILD) is
an objective with an Anglo slant, reflected in the expression to make sense. From
many other cultural perspectives, young children are trying to “understand” the
world rather than to “make sense” of it (a phrase that cannot be translated into the
languages linked with those other perspectives).
It is also impossible to translate English phrases (common, for example, in
COBUILD) like “to make sense of the data,” “to make sense of the observations,”
“to make sense of [one’s] experiences,” “to make sense out of what would
otherwise have been a baffling and disorganized sea of information,” “to make
sense of our world,” and so on into other European languages. A scientific model
seems to be at work here: the model of an empirical scientist trying to interpret
data by actively constructing a hypothesis (and presumably testing it in practice).
The model of making sense of other people’s utterances converges with that of an
empirical scientist, as the following advice for teachers teaching children to read
illustrates:
Remind students that many words can be figured out by thinking about what would
make sense in a sentence and seeing whether the letters in the word match what one is
thinking of.
There seems to be an assumption here that usually everyone can “make sense” of
sentences, observations, data, events, one’s experiences, one’s world, and one’s
life and also that it is important to try to do so (practically important). Judging by
cross-linguistic semantics, these assumptions, embedded in the English language,
are highly culture specific.
The image of nature as a book to read is, of course, not restricted to the
tradition linked with the English language, but the cultural ideal of “reading
nature” through the prism of “sense” and drawing practical conclusions from
what one “reads” tallies well with the overall picture emerging from the present
study. This ideal is elaborated in an eighteenth-century English poem titled “The
Reading Glass”:
There is a Book, and in that book a page,

Which holds a lesson for each state and age;
That proper lesson every man should read;—
And one good Glass is all the help he’ll need:—
To keep your thoughts no longer in suspense,
Nature’s the Book; the Glass is Common Sense.
In Nature’s horn-book, her mere criss-cross row,
’Tis the first sentence, “Live for Use, not Show.”
Could Scholars read this, thro’ the Glass of Sense,
What loads would vanish of impertinence!
Could Beauties see it, what a change would rise,
From patch and paint—to puddings, and to pies!
Could Poets learn it, what a world of wit,
That never will be read—would not be writ!
Could we all get it, tho’ some toil attend on’t,
’Twould make us none the worse, we may depend on’t.
Let then all those, who would for wisdom look,
Make Sense their Glass, and study Nature’s Book.
(Samuel Bishop 1796, The Reading Glass, Literature Online)
The importance of the notion of “making sense” in Anglo culture is reflected

in the centrality accorded to it by moral philosopher Charles Taylor in his classic
work, Sources of the Self (1989:57):
What better measure of reality do we have in human affairs than those terms which
on critical reflection and after correction of the errors we can detect make the best
sense of our lives? “Making the best sense” here includes not only offering the
best, most realistic orientation about the good but also allowing us best to under-
stand and make sense of the actions and feelings of ourselves and others. For our
language of deliberation is continuous with our language of assessment, and this
with the language in which we explain what people do and feel.
390 SENSE
Arguing against the application of “natural science models” to the “enter-

prise of self-understanding in the sciences of human life” (ibid., 56), Taylor
repeatedly calls on the notion of making sense of ourselves and our lives
(ibid., 57):
This is an important point for my purposes, and so I want to pause to examine it a bit
more closely. What are the requirements of “making sense” of our lives? These
requirements are not yet met if we have some theoretical language which purports to
explain behavior from the observer’s standpoint but is of no use to the agent in
making sense of his own thinking, feeling, and acting.
In developing this theme, Taylor challenges the widespread assumption that

“the terms of everyday life, those in which we go about living our lives, are to be
relegated to the realm of mere appearance.” Taylor’s radical defense of the
crucial existential importance of “the terms of everyday life” as those “in
which we go about living our lives” (ibid.) is extremely impressive, and it is
highly germane to the deepest theme of the present book. The presence of
concepts like dignity, courage, or brutality (Taylor’s examples) in one’s moral
vocabulary may indeed be crucial to how one “makes sense” of one’s own life
and of the lives of others. I would add, however, that the phrase to make sense (of
something), too, stands for one of those concepts in terms of which English
speakers “go about living their lives”—and that, more generally, speakers of
other languages do not live with, and “in ”, the same key everyday terms as
English speakers do.
Taylor rejects as “preposterous” the suggestion “that we ought to disregard
altogether the terms that can figure in the non-explanatory contexts of living for
the purposes of our explanatory theory” (ibid., 58), and I could not agree more.
However, if we want to make sense of how human beings in general (rather than
Anglos) think about life, the world, themselves, and other people, we need at
some point to go beyond the concept of “making sense” and reach for universal
human concepts. I think this is consistent with the following statement by Taylor
(ibid., 58):
What we need to explain is people living their lives; the terms in which they cannot
avoid living them cannot be removed from the explanandum, unless we can propose
other terms in which they could live them more clairvoyantly. We cannot just leap
outside of these terms altogether, on the grounds that their logic doesn’t fit some
model of “science” and that we know a priori that human beings must be explicable
in this “science.”
It may well be true that Anglos cannot avoid living with concepts like
“making sense”, and, of course, there is no reason why they should: a “thick,”
culture-specific moral and intellectual vocabulary is a valuable part of a given
society’s cultural heritage. But to explain human beings in general, it is good to
reach, at some point, beyond the everyday terms of English and to try to anchor
our analysis in universal human concepts. I hope it is not “preposterous” to
suggest that by doing so we may indeed be able to attain “more clairvoyant” and
more culture-independent explanations.
Taylor’s assumption that in human affairs there is no “better measure of
reality” than the terms that “make the best sense of our lives” reflects, I believe, a
deep truth; at the same time, however, this key English phrase simply does not
translate into other languages, not even closely related ones like French. The
minilanguage of universal human concepts (NSM) allows us to explain the Anglo
notion of “making sense”, (whether of one’s life or anything else) in any language
whatsoever, and at the same time it gives us a framework for exploring “moral
space” in ways that are accessible to all human beings, wherever they live and
whatever language they live in.2
PART IV
PHRASEOLOGY, SEMANTICS,
AND CORPUS LINGUISTICS
10
Investigating English Phraseology

with Two Tools: NSM and Google
10.1. An Overview
As the material discussed in this book shows, the semantics of collocations can be
studied by both qualitative and quantitative methods, and the two approaches can
complement one another. For instance, when we try to determine what phrases
like a deep sense of shame or a great sense of urgency mean, we need to study
numerous examples of the usage of the expressions deep sense and great sense in
context (say, through a corpus like COBUILD), but it is also helpful to examine
quantitative collocational profiles of such expressions (e.g., what nouns they tend
to collocate with and how strongly some combinations are “preferred” to others).
For example, native speakers find the collocation deep sense of shame
acceptable but deep sense of urgency strange. The data from COBUILD are consis-
tent with this, as they include some sentences with deep sense of shame but none
with deep sense of urgency. However, the contrasts are not always clear-cut. For
example, native speakers tend to find great sense of guilt less natural than either
deep sense of guilt or great sense of pride, without finding the latter two either
unacceptable or strange.
Such intuitive judgments of what is and what is not “natural” are not always
consistent across speakers, and it is good if they can be corroborated by objective
evidence such as numerical data from English corpora. But databases like
COBUILD or the British National Corpus are usually too small to offer such
evidence. On the other hand, if we can treat the Web as a corpus and explore
the collocational profiles of expressions that interest us with Google, we obtain a
395
396 PHRASEOLOGY , SEMANTICS , AND CORPUS LINGUISTICS
much broader basis for testing and validating semantic hypotheses developed by
investigating semantic intuitions and by analyzing particular examples in con-
text.
Part III of this book has made considerable use of Google searches. To
reiterate the point made throughout this part, the absolute figures yielded by
such searches are subject to change and even volatile. Yet proportions between
various collocations have proved, on the whole, remarkably stable over an
extended period. This suggests that at the very least such proportions have a
considerable heuristic value and can provide corroborating evidence for semantic
hypotheses developed on the basis of qualitative semantic analysis. The fact that
these hypotheses can also be tested with further Google searches and modified
according to the results means that semantics and corpus analysis that treats the
Web as a corpus can work hand in hand. It also means that they can serve as
checks on one another, thus increasing the overall plausibility of the conclusions.
In what follows, I discuss my experience of comparing the conclusions drawn
from the semantic analysis of selected collocations (combining sense with an
adjective) with the results of Google searches that targeted the same collocations.
The discussion is organized as follows. First I discuss contrasts that are both stable
and clear and then those that are both stable and overwhelmingly sharp. I then
address the question of proportions and patterns versus absolute figures. This is
followed by a discussion of the issue of anomalies and the limitations of Google
searches of the kind undertaken here. Next I present the results of monitoring hit
counts over an extended period of time and compare the outcome of searches with
Google and with Yahoo. I conclude with an overall evaluation of the use of Google
as a tool for a large-scale semantic study of phraseology.
The results of the searches are presented in a large number of tables. For the
convenience of those readers who are not interested in examining all the tables
and prefer a general discussion of the findings, I have included in this chapter
only a few of these tables and placed the full set in an appendix.
10.2. Clear and Stable Contrasts
In many cases, numerical contrasts in collocability recorded in 2007 were

virtually repeated in a check carried out a year later. For example, the special
attraction between sense of relief and the adjective great, as well as its preference
for strong over clear, is clearly illustrated by the very similar results of repeated
searches recorded in table 10.1.1
TABLE 10.1. Sense of relief with different adjectives

May 28, 2007 March 11, 2008
strong sense of relief 14,000 15,700
great sense of relief 38,000 36,800
clear sense of relief 2,500 3,300

INVESTIGATING ENGLISH PHRASEOLOGY WITH TWO TOOLS 397
Table 10.2 presents equally clear and remarkably stable differences, which
shows sense of pride’s marked preference for great, as well as the absence of such
a preference in the case of sense of guilt.
TABLE 10.2. Great with sense of pride and sense of guilt

April 10, 2007 March 11, 2008
sense of pride 1,200,000 1,300,000
great sense of pride 70,000 70,000
sense of guilt 500,000 450,000
great sense of guilt 9,000 10,300
A similarly stable (though not so sharp) spread of differences is evident in

the table for sense of frustration (see table 10.3 in the Appendix).
The closeness of the figures for 2007 and 2008 suggests that these results are
not accidental but reflect real differences in frequency between the various
collocations. The qualitative semantic analysis developed in this book offers an
explanation for these differences, and the numerical results presented in the tables
corroborate this analysis. Such quantitative corroboration is not necessary to
validate the qualitative semantic analysis but is nonetheless extremely interesting
and valuable. In any case, the prevailing overall consistency of the numerical
results requires an explanation.
10.3. Stable and Overwhelmingly Sharp Contrasts
In many cases, predictions based on semantic analysis are corroborated by

extremely sharp numerical contrasts that have proved stable over time. For
example, in May 2007 the results for deep sense of shame and deep sense of
sadness were many thousands of times higher than those for clear sense of shame
and clear sense of sadness, and the same proved to be the case when the search
was repeated in March 2008 (table 10.4).
TABLE 10.4. Emotion Terms with deep and clear

May 28, 2007 March 11, 2008
deep sense of shame 17,000 14,000
clear sense of shame 5 5
deep sense of sadness 15,000 10,500
clear sense of sadness 1 4

In fact, such contrasts between one-digit and five-digit figures can be reason-
ably interpreted in categorical terms: in this case, we can conclude that the
collocations clear sense of shame and clear sense of sadness are virtually
nonexistent in English, whereas deep sense of shame and deep sense of sadness
are common.
The same applies to contrasts between deep sense and good sense in
combination with emotion terms, both negative ones such as shame, guilt, and
sadness and positive ones such as gratitude and joy (see table 10.5 in the
Appendix).
What this table shows is that combinations of good sense with words like
shame, guilt, sadness, gratitude, and joy are virtually nonexistent in English,
whereas the combinations of deep sense with such words are either very common
(as in the case of shame, guilt, sadness, and gratitude) or at least reasonably well
attested (as in the case of joy).
10.4. Figures, Proportions, and Patterns
Hit counts as such are not always reliable. As William Fletcher (2007, 37) notes,
“hit counts vary widely due to non-linguistic factors,” and as he points out, the
same search done at different times can give different results. Since the searches
done at various times can result in different hit counts, the proportions between
hit results can vary, too. At the same time, however, the Web evidence presented
in this book shows that broad patterns predicted by qualitative semantic analysis
(of the kind undertaken here) tend to be remarkably stable.
Consider, for example, table 10.6 below, which shows how the occasional
dramatic instability of isolated hit counts can be combined with the stability of
phraseological patterns. As table 10.6 shows, on those particular days the figures
for sense of anger were totally different (the later one more than twenty times
higher than the earlier one), and yet both sets of figures for the collocations
combining sense of anger with the adjectives strong, deep, and keen support the
hypothesis based on qualitative semantic analysis: sense of anger attracts both
strong and deep and is virtually incompatible with keen.
TABLE 10.6. Sense of anger with different adjectives

May 9, 2007 March 11, 2008
Sense of anger 70,000 2,000,000
strong sense of anger 16,000 15,000
deep sense of anger 11,000 13,000
keen sense of anger 5 4

I might add that when sense of anger with different adjectives was monitored
over a longer period (three weeks in April 2008), the absolute figures jumped,
with two exceptions, between two levels: around both 60,000 and 700,000. At the
same time, the figures for deep sense of anger and strong sense of anger were
relatively high (those for deep sense of anger were higher than those for strong
sense of anger; see table 10.30 in the Appendix), and the figures for keen sense of
anger were always negligible (under 5).
For another example, consider the table comparing great sense of community
and great sense of self and based on two searches almost a year apart. As table
10.7 (see Appendix) illustrates, the 2008 hit counts for sense of self are only about
half of those recorded in 2007, and for sense of community, less than half. At the
same time, the figure for great sense of self has hardly changed, and that for great
sense of community has actually doubled. Nonetheless, the prediction based on
qualitative semantic analysis is supported by both sets of figures: they both show
that the figures for great sense of community are, as predicted, much higher than
those for great sense of self (in 2007, ten times higher, and in 2008, thirty times
higher).
As a third example, let us consider the twin collocations sense of justice and
sense of injustice. Here, too, the figures have changed, yet both sets of figures
support the semantic pattern predicted by the qualitative semantic analysis
(table 10.8).
TABLE 10.8. Sense of justice and sense of injustice with different adjectives
May 9, March 4, May 9, March 4,
2007 2008 2007 2008
sense of 1,000,000 580,000 sense of 200,000 487,000

justice injustice
strong sense 64,000 67,200 strong sense of 900 700

of justice injustice
deep sense of 800 800 deep sense of 1,000 6,900

justice injustice
The absolute figure for sense of justice halved, and that for sense of injustice
doubled, the figures for both collocations with strong sense and one with deep
sense remained stable, and in 2008 one collocation with deep sense showed a
result several times higher than in 2007. Yet the overall pattern is supported by
both sets of data: both in 2007 and 2008 the figures for strong sense of justice
were a great deal higher than for strong sense of injustice and much higher than
those for deep sense of justice (as it happens, about sixty times higher in both
cases), whereas sense of injustice shows no preference for strong. Thus, both sets
of data confirm the hypothesis that sense of justice, in contrast to sense of
injustice, attracts the adjective strong.
I am not claiming that any randomly chosen set of collocations with sense
will show stable proportions analogous to those shown here. Rather, what
I am proposing is a combination of qualitative and quantitative (Web-based)
analyses. Regularities such as those evident in the tables presented here are
unlikely to come to light as a result of random surfing. They can, however,
emerge in the process of testing hypotheses developed through qualitative
semantic analysis. In some cases, they can also offer correctives to semantic
hypotheses: what appears as an anomaly in an otherwise meaningful pattern can
sometimes point to an error in the analysis that can be eliminated. Not all
anomalies, however, can be explained and utilized in this way: in some cases,
numerical anomalies may be due to entirely nonlinguistic disruptive factors
and from a linguistic point of view may have to be accepted as freakish. (See
the next section).
10.5. Anomalies: How Significant Are They?
The results of repeated searches for adjectival collocations with sense show a
remarkable degree of stability in many patterns identified on the basis of qualita-
tive semantic analysis. At the same time, they throw a number of apparent
anomalies of various kinds—a phenomenon quite different from normal fluctua-
tions that one expects with an unstable database such as the Web.
Consider, for example, table 10.9 (in the Appendix ), which shows compar-
isons of the figures for deep sense and good sense in combination with the
positive emotion terms gratitude, satisfaction, joy, and with the word peace.
For gratitude, both searches yielded very similar results: a huge number of hits
for deep sense and hardly any for good sense. For joy, too, the results of the two
searches were very similar: around six hundred hits for deep sense, and hardly
any for good sense. For peace, the results of the 2007 search are comparable to
those of gratitude and joy. The 2008 search for peace, however, produces an
apparent anomaly: the number of hits for good sense of peace is almost as high as
that for deep sense of peace!
This high number of hits for good sense of peace is inconsistent with native
speakers’ intuition that this collocation is quite marginal in English. Whatever the
reason for this peculiar numerical result, it is worth noting that on the same day
the number of actual examples of good sense of peace that could be accessed (at
least through a first search) with Google was only 11 ( just as in 2007). At the
same time, the number of examples for deep sense of peace that could be
accessed (through a first search) on the same day was nearly 800. Furthermore,
when the search for good sense of peace was repeated on March 31, 2008, the
number of hits was again 11 (as a year earlier), and the number of available
examples was also 11.
Thus, the strange numerical result of 47,300 hits for good sense of peace (for
March 6, 2008) was inconsistent not only with the 2007 result and with the
speakers’ intuitions but also with internal evidence from Google searches carried
out on the same day. In addition, it was inconsistent with the results of further
monitoring over a period of four weeks in April 2008 (throughout this period, the
figure for good sense of peace was always under 25 [on average, 16]).
Overall, twelve searches comparing deep sense and good sense with emotion
terms were carried out in 2007: six with gratitude, peace, and joy, and six with
shame, guilt, and sadness, and another twelve in 2008 (see tables 10.9 and 10.10
in the Appendix). Of these twenty-four searches, twenty-three yielded results
supporting the hypotheses based on a qualitative semantic analysis. Only one
(good sense of peace, March 6, 2008) produced an anomalous result, which
proved to be irregular in not only the exceedingly high number of hits but also
in the discrepancy between the number of hits and the number of accessible
examples. Furthermore, it proved to be ephemeral.
A similar anomaly was recorded for sense of fear: according to the 2007
search, sense of fear strongly attracts the adjective strong; deep less strongly; and
keen not at all. For strong and deep, similar results were obtained in the 2008
searches. For keen sense of fear, however, one 2008 search yielded the anomalous
result of 8,600. At the same time, for the semantically related collocation sense of
anxiety, the 2008 search mirrored the 2007 one, with strong sense slightly ahead
of deep sense, and keen sense virtually nonexistent (tables 10.11 and 10.12).
Thus, of the sixteen hit counts recorded in tables 10.11 and 10.12 (for sense
of fear and sense of anxiety), fifteen corroborated the results of the qualitative
semantic analysis, whereas one (keen sense of fear, March 11, 2008) did not.
Whatever the explanation for the one anomalous result in the set of sixteen, the
fifteen nonanomalous ones require an explanation even more than the one which
is anomalous. Further monitoring of the collocation keen sense of fear over a
period of four weeks (in April 2008) overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that
the “normal” level of keen sense of fear in English is extremely low and that the
one-off result of 8,600 was an aberration (on all other occasions, the figure for
keen sense of fear was under 21, and the average was 14).
In establishing the credibility of numerical results, it is particularly important
to have a broad spread of comparable sets of data that show a consistent and
stable pattern. If there is a wide spread of data which show a consistent and stable
pattern then an occasional “freakish” result can be more easily isolated as a
meaningless anomaly than in the case of a single, narrow set.
Tables 10.13–10.16 illustrate the importance of this factor by comparing the
hit counts for strong sense, deep sense, and keen sense in combination with four
different emotion terms: anxiety, anger, anticipation, and enjoyment.
According to the semantic analysis developed in this book, anxiety and anger
are virtually incompatible with keen sense, whereas anticipation, anxiety, and
loss are highly compatible with it. Tables 10.13–10.16 support this analysis, and
the stability of the patterns they illustrate offers strong evidence for the meaning-
fulness of the results. A similar table for sense of loss, however, includes one
seemingly “freakish” result: the 2008 figure for strong sense of loss is forty
times higher than that in 2007 (see table 10.17). Given the wide spread of
comparable sets of data presented in these tables, this one anomaly can hardly
outweigh the evidence of the remaining twenty-nine results, which all support the
qualitative semantic analysis. It is hard to see how anyone could reasonably
dismiss the testimony of the twenty-nine results because of the abnormality

of one. At the same time, the observed anomaly warrants further monitoring
(see section 10.6).
Often (though by no means always) numerical anomalies of the kind dis-
cussed here prove to be only ephemeral. Consider, for example, the following two
tables, which cover a similar period (slightly longer in the second case). Table
10.18, which compares strong sense of gratitude with deep sense of gratitude,
shows very consistent results (the figures for deep sense are about three times
higher than those for strong sense). Table 10.19, which compares strong sense of
guilt with deep sense of guilt, also shows, on the whole, consistent results (the
figures for deep sense are more than ten times higher than those for strong sense).
In this case, however, there was also, on a single day, a big jump for strong sense
(and a small jump for deep sense).
Looking at tables 10.18 and 10.19 it is hard not to conclude that both deep
sense of gratitude and deep sense of guilt must be more common in English than
their counterparts with strong and that the anomalously high result for strong
sense of guilt recorded on March 4, 2008 is an aberration. (On a much smaller
scale, the same applies to the two results for deep sense of guilt.)
Indeed, it seems reasonable to accept that even two inexplicable sharp jumps
or slumps in an otherwise consistent pattern over a similar period cannot bring
down a generalization that holds for the great majority of results. Consider, for
example, table 10.20, which compares the results of strong sense of loss with
deep sense of loss. The jumpiness of the results for strong sense of guilt, deep
sense of guilt, deep sense of loss, and strong sense of loss is puzzling, but in all
cases the figures for deep sense are much higher than those for strong sense.
Moreover, sometimes jumps and slumps can occur not only from day to day
but also from hour to hour and sometimes even almost from moment to moment.
For example, on March 18, 2008, the first search for strong sense of loss produced
27,300 hits; a second search ( just a few minutes later) a mere 950; and a third just
a few minutes later a high result similar to the first (28,600). Whatever the
explanation for such occasional slumps and jumps, they cannot outweigh the
overall consistency of patterns extending over a broad spread of comparable
expressions and persisting for extended periods of time.
Thus, despite the volatility of the Web and the vagaries of Google’s procedures,
in searches involving whole networks of semantic relations (like those investigated
in this book), a combined use of various methods usually allows us to distinguish
aberrations from “normal” variation in numerical results. No doubt, in the future the
array of methods for distinguishing the two will be considerably improved.
10.6. Monitoring the Proportions of Strong Sense

to Deep Sense
In view of some unexpected results involving certain collocations with strong

sense that appeared in March 2008, I decided to monitor the proportions of strong
sense to deep sense for two groups of collocations over a period of two weeks.
One group focused on the experiencer’s will (sense of commitment, loyalty,

responsibility, purpose) and the other, on the experiencer’s emotions (sense of
sadness, shame, gratitude, guilt, loss). The results are as follows.
For the sense of commitment, loyalty, and responsibility the results are, on
the whole, astonishingly stable: the figures for strong sense are two to three times
higher than those for deep sense for both commitment and loyalty and three to six
times higher for responsibility. For the last member of the group, purpose, the
figures for strong sense are also consistently much higher than those for deep
sense, but the proportions are not similarly stable, as the figures for deep sense of
purpose proved erratic: for six days they were between 10,000 and 20,000, but on
three occasions they fell to about 1,000. Both the prevailing stability of the results
and the jumps in some of the figures are illustrated in tables 10.21–10.24.
For the group of emotions, the overall results were quite similar. As tables
10.25, 10.26, and 10.27 show, in the case of sadness, shame, and gratitude, the
figures for deep sense are consistently higher than those for strong sense (al-
though the 2008 figures for strong sense of shame are all much higher than the
one for 2007).
In the case of guilt and loss, however, the figures were so erratic that
I decided to monitor them for a more extended period (throughout April 2008).
During this time, the irregularity of the figures continued, but again, those for
deep sense were always much higher than those for strong sense. Since the figures
were not altogether irregular and unpredictable but jumped up and down between
two levels it seems reasonable to assume that the variability was due to technical
rather than linguistic factors.
Finally, the results of monitoring the levels of sharp sense and acute sense
over a three-week period (from April 8 to April 30, 2008) are particularly
interesting. Despite the fact that the figures for these collocations were, relatively
speaking, quite low, the regularities described in the section on “acute sense” in
chapter 6 persisted either without exception or with very few erratic results
(tables 10.28 and 10.29; exceptions indicated in bold).
10.7. Limitations of Google as a Tool for Exploring

English Phraseology
Google can be a very useful tool for investigating some aspects of phraseology
but not for others. One limitation of Google searches that surfaced in the present
investigation concerned the length of the string. While clear semantic patterns
emerged from the investigation of four-word collocations such as clear sense of
purpose or keen sense of anticipation, this was not necessarily the case with
longer phrases (especially, it seems, when they included function words such as
and or a). For example, five-word collocations such as strong (clear, keen, etc.)
sense of right and wrong did not produce very clear and stable results comparable
to those obtained for four-word ones.
Similarly, while the method used for the study of four-word adjectival
collocations with sense (e.g., deep sense, strong sense, sharp sense) has on the
whole led to clear and fairly stable results, it did not prove itself to the same
extent in the study of six-word verbal phrases such as show a (Adj.) sense of
(Noun) and demonstrate a (Adj.) sense of (Noun). In particular, I hypothesized
that the verbal phrases show a sense of (Noun) and demonstrate a sense of (Noun)
would favor strong (strong sense) over deep (deep sense). This hypothesis is
consistent with the semantic analysis developed in this book and with speakers’
intuitions; it was not, however, corroborated by very clear and stable results in
Google searches. Again, the explanation likely lies in the length of the string
(possibly in combination with certain function words).
Another limitation that surfaced in this study concerns three-word strings such
as sense of anger as compared with four-word ones like deep sense of anger. As
mentioned earlier, the proportions of adjectival sense expressions with emotion
words like anger have proved fairly stable in the repeated searches (table 10.30).
By contrast, the phrase sense of anger as such proved unstable, and unstable in a
very curious way. The figures moved up and down between two very different
levels: one around 60,000 and the other, around 700,000. It seems clear that
such shifts are likely to be due not to random fluctuations but to various technical
aspects of how Google works, perhaps comparable to the phenomenon known as
“Googlebombing”:
Occasionally, when a particular website is the subject of public attention, other sites
begin linking to it. This may elevate its importance as gauged by our ranking
software, which assigns a PageRank value based in part on who links to a given
page. Higher ranking in Google results may lead to more awareness, which may
lead to more links, and so on. This is sometimes referred to as a Googlebomb, or
Googlebombing.
One side-effect of not using an editorial viewpoint to determine the ranking
of results is that anomalies occasionally occur. We view such occasions as
opportunities for us to learn more about how the Web works and how to
improve our algorithms for all searches in the future. (Web Search Help Center,
http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=4115
[accessed February 16, 2008])
The phenomenon of “Googlebombing” concerns the ranking of the texts, which

may or may not affect the number of hits. Whatever the technical reasons for the
relative instability of sense of anger (without adjectives), it is evidently an
anomaly that cannot invalidate the evidence provided by clear and stable patterns
that involve sense with adjectives.
10.8. Comparing the Results of Google

and Yahoo Searches
Google is, of course, only one of a number of search engines with which one
could investigate collocations on the Web. It was not feasible to duplicate all of
the Google searches undertaken in this book with other search engines. I have,
however, carried out some sample checking with Yahoo. In particular, I have
tested the collocational profile of sense of anger arrived at by means of repeated

Google searches with parallel Yahoo searches. The results naturally show differ-
ent figures but very similar proportions of collocations with various adjectives.
As discussed in section 10.4, Google searches repeated over a period of three
weeks show that sense of anger strongly attracts the adjectives deep and strong
and repels both the adjective keen and, as further searches show, the adjective
acute. They also indicate that its attraction to deep appears to be stronger than that
to strong. Yahoo searches undertaken over a similar period are fully consistent
with this, as table 10.31 illustrates.
It is particularly interesting to compare Google and Yahoo results for
collocations that show some aberration, such as keen sense of fear and good
sense of peace, as compared with deep sense of fear and deep sense of peace (see
tables 10.32 and 10.33).
Finally, although the results of the Yahoo searches are generally consistent
with those of Google searches, in one case the proportions between two colloca-
tions (deep sense of fear and strong sense of fear) are different (table 10.34). At
the same time, the Yahoo and the Google figures shown in table 10.33 are
mutually consistent as far as the main point is concerned: sense of fear attracts
both strong and deep and “repels” keen.
10.9. Concluding Remarks
As noted by Schmied (2006, 322), “even if we agree that the Web is not a corpus
in the sense that it is stratified according to everyday language use, it is a useful
database. . . . Despite its limitations, the Web is expanding continuously, the
number of pages is increasing, new texts and text-types are being added all the
time. It is also becoming increasingly stable and it is more and more used as a
linguistic tool” (cf. also Hock 2007; Levene 2005). Referring in particular to the
Web-based corpora known as “WebCorp” and “WebPhraseCount,” Schmied
assesses the usefulness of Web tools as follows:
In the end, no Web tools can give us “the truth” about English usage, they only
provide a useful and broad basis for user decisions. The WWW community is not a
speech community, Web English is not World English and WebCorp and Web-
PhraseCount are not human linguists—but they help, in particular the non-native
speaker who [lacks] a certain language-awareness and intuition about options in
language variation. As usual with electronic aids, how useful Web tools like
WebCorp and WebPhraseCount are depends largely on the individual user. This
survey has illustrated that they open new horizons not only for non-native speakers
but also for native speakers of other varieties than their own—if they are aware of
their strengths and weaknesses. (Schmied 2006, 322–23)
The research reported in this book does not use the same Web tools as
Schmied, but its results are consistent with Schmied’s assessment. If we know
what questions to ask, if we repeat the searches over an extended period of time
(as recommended by Fletcher [2007] and others), and if we use “only the most
robust statistical distributions” as evidence (Mair 2007, 444), the World Wide
Web can serve as a corpus and prove to be an invaluable help in the semantic
exploration of phraseology, as well as in other areas of semantics (cf. Goddard,
2009). Google is not a human linguist, and it cannot replace semanticists armed
with a coherent and rigorous semantic methodology, but if properly handled, it
can be their invaluable assistant.
As Mair points out in his chapter in The Changing Face of Corpus Linguistics
(2006), small corpora (such as the British National Corpus or COBUILD) and large
databases such as the Web can complement each other, and many areas of
linguistics can no longer afford to ignore the Web. “In spite of its obvious short-
comings as a corpus, the Web is an indispensable source of data” for the study of
many linguistic phenomena.” There is no need to choose between “(1) a ‘small-
and-tidy’ approach which emphasizes detailed philological analysis of clean
corpora, and (2) a ‘big-and-messy’ one which stresses the advantages to be gained
from the computer-assisted analysis of vast quantities of dirty data” (ibid., 355).
As Mair further points out, “today . . . the supply of digital text—online and
offline—is practically unlimited for English . . . so that restricting the scope of
one’s work to data available in a small number of corpora only would be counter-
productive in the analysis of many linguistic problems” (ibid., 370).
This is clearly the case in the semantic study of collocations such as those
investigated in this book. Corpora such as COBUILD and the British National
Corpus are too small to reveal the meaning-based patterning of collocations
such as deep sense, strong sense, sharp sense, or real sense. But the vast
quantities of “dirty data” offered by the Web reveal regularities that shed a
great deal of light on the semantics of such collocations and more generally, on
the hidden workings of the empiricist worldview operating beneath the surface of
modern English phraseology, grammar, and lexicon.
NOTES
Chapter 1
1. David Graddol (2006, 101) estimates that by 2010 two billion people (i.e., one-
third of the world’s entire population) will be learning English.
2. These corpora are large databases of naturally occurring language use stored on
computers. The first widely used, computer-readable corpora were set up in the 1960s and
1970s. In the mid-1980s computer-assisted searches of large text collections began serving as
a source of evidence of the meanings of words and phrases (see, e.g., Stubbs 2001). Many
examples cited in the present book come from a subcorpus of a corpus called COBUILD (the
acronym for Collins Birmingham University International Language Database). This
subcorpus, which is available online, contains 56 million words and includes excerpts from
books (fiction and nonfiction) and newspapers, as well as samples of spoken English. The
French examples cited in this book are (unless otherwise indicated) drawn from the French
subcorpus of COBUILD, which comprises approximately 100 million words.
3. Gribbin (2002, 117) illustrates Descartes’ profound impact in France: “Descartes’
influence was so great in the decades after his death that in France and some other parts of
Europe acceptance of Newton’s idea about gravity and planetary motions was considerably
delayed because they disagreed with Descartes’. There was an element of chauvinism in this—
the French supported their own champion and rejected the ideas of the perfidious Englishman,
while Newton was, of course, very much a prophet honoured in his own country.”
4. As NSM researchers have argued for some time, however, not all lexical meanings
can be resolved directly or immediately to the level of semantic primes: some are best
explicated in stages by using intermediate-level “semantic molecules” (cf. Wierzbicka
1996, 221, in press; Goddard 1998, 254–55, 2005). For example, the optimal explications
for physical-activity verbs such as eat, hit, and run rely on body-part meanings such as
‘mouth’, ‘hands’, and ‘legs’, in combination with semantic primes. Although semantic
407
408 NOTES TO PAGES 20–45
molecules can themselves be resolved into configurations of semantic primes, they enable
a kind of “chunking” in the semantic structure of complex concepts. However, extensive
analytical practice suggests that semantic molecules belong mainly to concrete
vocabulary. The explications of most abstract concepts, such as those discussed in this
book, can be framed entirely in the minivocabulary of semantic primes.
5. In the late nineties, Biber, Conrad, and Reppen wrote: “Researchers are now learning
how to fully exploit the resources of representative text corpora, and as a result, they are also
becoming aware of the many new research questions that can be investigated through corpus-
based research” (1998, ix). The present book is an example of such new questions which can
be investigated through the corpora and also on the Web (see chapter 10).
6. The principle of holding on to the terra firma of natural language (trimmed to the
bone but still intelligible) gives NSM research a stability that ever-changing technical
formalisms (each one more inventive than the last) are sorely lacking. As Croft (2001, i)
observes, “a continuing kaleidoscope of notation [has] made even five-year-old journal
articles—and many reference grammars—difficult to decipher.”
Chapter 2
1. The phrase a man of experience was used also in seventeenth-century English. For
example, Francis Bacon (2000 [1605]) wrote of “councellors which are . . . men of
experience” and of places “which will help us, if a man of experience were before us,
what questions to ask” (113).
2. Experience1A, as in driving experience or teaching experience, can be difficult to
render in other languages—even in French, where the word expérience may seem to provide
an equivalent of the English experience. For example, the Collins-Robert French-English,
English-French Dictionary glosses the sentence “have you any previous experience (of this
kind of work)?” as ‘avez-vous déjà fait ce genre de travail?’ (lit. ‘have you done this kind of
work before?’) and “I have no experience of driving this type of car” as ‘je n’ai jamais
conduit une voiture de ce type’ (lit. ‘I’ve never driven a car of this type’).
3. Literature Online (http://www.online-literature.com) offers the full text of more
than 350,000 works of English poetry, drama, and prose from the eighth century to the
present day, drawing together in one fully cross-searchable database the complete contents
of fourteen Chadwyck-Healey literature collections.
4. In contemporary philosophical literature the plural form experiences is often used
to refer to entirely banal and emotion-free perceptual events. For instance, Searle (2004,
292) gives as an example of a series of what he calls experiences “the taste of coffee, the
sight of the colour red, the view of the San Francisco Bay from my window, etc.” But this
is a philosopher’s English, not ordinary English.
5. Locke’s Essay is quoted in this chapter as in Yolton’s Locke Dictionary: by book,
chapter, and section. Thus “Essay 4.3.14” means book 4, chapter 3, section 14. The text of
the Essay is quoted from Nidditch’s edition (Locke 1975 [1690]). I have, however,
modified the spelling and removed the capitals on nouns and in most cases the italics.
6. In a note titled “Experience,” the editor of Locke’s Essay, Alexander Fraser
(Locke 1959, vol. 1, 222), writes: “This ambiguity of this term [experience] is a main
source of the controversies which the Essay has occasioned.” Having made this important
point, Fraser discusses Locke’s conception repeatedly using the word experience in his
explanations—sometimes in quotes, sometimes in italics, and sometimes without either
quotes or italics but always in ways that defy understanding. For example:
Locke did not see that innateness (in a different meaning) and experience are not
contradictories but are really two different ways of regarding the possessions of the
NOTES TO PAGES 53–99 409
understanding. . . . He [Locke] thus makes our adult understanding of things the

issue of the exercise of the faculties in “experience”; but he does not get insight of
Kant’s question or try to disengage the elements of reason through which a scientific
or intelligible experience is itself possible—the problem of the next great critique of
a human understanding of the universe. (emphasis in the original)
Fraser does not explain (in simple and clear terms) what he means by experience,
“experience,” “scientific experience,” or “intelligible experience”—and so he compounds
the muddle.
7. In the entry on “experience” in his Locke’s Dictionary, Yolton (1993, 73) states
that “Habits of perception result from repeated experiences, e.g., leading us to judge space,
figure and motion of objects by the use of light and colours (2.9.8).” In fact, however, there
is no mention of “repeated experiences” in Locke’s Essay (whether in 2.9.8 or elsewhere),
so it appears that, while Yolton is right in referring to repetition, in using the plural form
experiences he is projecting onto Locke a later use of the word.
A search indicates that in the electronic version of the Essay there are only two
mentions of the form experiences, and at least one of them (in 4.16.8) was apparently
introduced by the editor, since in later editions of the book it was replaced by the singular.
Locke himself used experience almost exclusively in the singular—as a mass noun.
8. Searle’s examples of experiences are primarily those of bodily feeling and
seeing. This is consistent with Locke’s definition of experience as based on seeing and
feeling and with the prototypes given in the explications in this chapter.
9. One recent abstract in the Philosopher’s Index (AN 1774299) focuses on how
important it is “to understand what is universal in human experience.” The same work
“considers cross-cultural perspectives, resources, and approaches, including intercultural
philosophical dialogue between Descartes and Chinese philosopher Mencius on the concepts
of self and nature.” I can imagine a dialogue between Descartes and Mencius on many
subjects, including human lives, human feelings, human thinking, and human knowledge,
but not on “self,” “nature,” or “what is universal in human experience.” Unlike the concepts
of people, live, feel, think, and know, the concepts of self, nature, and experience are
ethnophilosophical constructs of the English language and cannot set the terms of any
meaningful dialogue between French and Chinese interlocutors. Unfortunately, much
current writing in the humanities and social sciences treats English cultural keywords as
self-evidently suitable tools for intercultural communication and understanding.
10. In the German original, Gadamer (1975, 415) speaks of “Sprache als
Welterfahrung,” ‘language as experience (Erfahrung) of the world’.
11. Some German consultants say that “it has to be Erlebnis because it cannot be
Erfahrung.” But this does not mean that Erlebnis sounds natural in this context, and it
does not explain why the examples found in the German corpora are, on the whole, so
different from those of experiences. Of course, it is possible for a native speaker of
German—especially one who is bilingual and lives in an English-speaking country—to
construe a massage as an “Erlebnis.” However, it is a different construal from that linked
with the word experience—less cognitive, less sensory, and more emotional and life
enhancing.
Chapter 3
1. What matters here is Hacking’s observations on the concept of evidence, not
his claims about probability and induction, which are disputed in Franklin (2001, 373,
200–203, 206–209, 222–24). For further discussion see section 3.4.
2. However, one example of evident by appears in Milton: “It is evident by the first
and second verses of this chapter that the apostle here speaks of that spiritual power by
which Christ governs his Church” (1932 [1659], 23).
3. This is not to say that findings are never questioned by anyone. They can be, as the
following examples from COBUILD show: “They plan to challenge the reliability of the
evidence in front of the jury, arguing that the findings cannot be trusted because of sloppy
police work in gathering and testing blood samples”; “The findings were based on
incorrect data.” To question some findings, however, means to question their status as
“findings” and to reduce them to “alleged findings” or “putative findings.”
4. I am grateful to Anna Gladkova for drawing my attention to the significance of
examples such as this and also to the high frequency of the phrase ne trebuet dokazatel’stv
‘doesn’t need any proofs’.
5. Similarly, when Shapin (1994, 198) says that “Hacking documents the shift in the
seventeenth-century usage from the ‘probable’ as opinion warranted by authoritative and
respected sources (as in ‘probity’) to the ‘probable’ as a quality of uncertain knowledge
apportioned to the evidence available,” his use of the phrase “evidence available” (echoing
Hacking’s) can be misleading.
6. The fact that Lyell used, alongside evidence, the plural form evidences (as in the
title of his book) suggests that he was probably using this word in a sense somewhat
different from the modern one, which does not allow a plural. But we can disregard this
point for the purposes of the broad historical outline sketched here.
7. In contemporary writings about Darwin the word evidence is prominent and builds on
Darwin’s own use of it. For example, Niles Eldridge, an evolutionary biologist and
paleontologist, one of two hundred scientists at the American Museum of Natural History in
New York and the author of a book about Darwin written to accompany an important Darwin
exhibition (2005), states that “[Darwin’s work] was unprecedented because it came up with a
mechanism that was convincing. It’s still the core of our understanding of how the evolutionary
process works, by natural selection. And he wrote a book that was so detailed, so insidious and
careful with its presentation of the evidence, that no thinking person would possibly refute its
thesis” (quoted in Cosic 2008, 16). Arguably, Darwin’s unprecedented reliance on and appeal
to evidence contributed to the rise of evidence as a keyword in modern English discourse.
8. The phrase evidence for is particularly characteristic of the most recent meaning
described here as Stage V: typically, it is used with reference to a claim, a hypothesis, or a
theory. The phrase evidence for evolution, which recurs many times in Coyne’s 2005
article in the New Republic (quoted at the beginning of this chapter) is a good example of
this use since it is an abbreviated way of referring to the theory of evolution.
Chapter 4
1. See http://www.quotegarden.com/humor.html.
2. Unless otherwise indicated, all the examples in this chapter are from COBUILD.
3. See http://gos.sbc.edu/r/robinson2.html.
Chapter 5
1. The Internet sources for these ads are as follows: British personal ads with GSOH
(http://www.jewishtelegraph.com/love_3.html [accessed Dec. 1, 2006]); Australian
personal ads with GSOH (http://www.australiancatholics.com.au/m_notices.html
[accessed Dec. 1, 2006]).
2. For the first of these quotations, see http://myweb.ecomplanet.com/LEPO6596/

mycustompage0125.htm, and for the other three see http://www.quotationspage.com.
3. I am grateful to Brigid Maher for drawing my attention to the fact that the English
phrase a sense of humor is frequently used as a standard analytical tool in academic
publications on human psychology, such as this special issue of the journal Humor.
4. “Looking at” is not an NSM prime, so this phrase is used here as a shorthand for “doing
something with one’s eyes for some time like people do when they want to see something for
some time.” The symbol [M] stands for a semantic molecule. (See note 4 in chapter 1.)
5. A Google search on September 10, 2008, yielded eight examples of a sense of
biology and around three hundred thousand of a sense of history.
6. A Google search on September 10, 2008, yielded two examples of a sense of
rocks, ten of a sense of animals, and six of a sense of plants. For a sense of place and a
sense of time, the figures are 1,540,000 and 9,000,000, respectively.
7. Unless stated otherwise, the examples in this chapter are from COBUILD.
Chapter 6
1. All the searches reported in section 6.1 were carried out on May 9, 2007. When
figures for sense of are cited, they do not include the article (i.e., a sense of ). Whenever
appropriate, the figures are rounded off. The same searches were carried out over an
extended period in March and April 2008 and showed, on the whole, similar results,
except that the figures for strong sense of guilt and strong sense of loss were quite erratic
during this period (see the chapter on Google searches). Despite this inconsistency,
however, the figures for deep sense of guilt and deep sense of loss were always much
higher than those for strong sense of guilt and strong sense of loss.
2. Unless otherwise specified, all the searches reported in section 6.2 were carried out
on May 15, 2007. When figures for sense of are cited, they do not include the article (i.e., a
sense of). Whenever appropriate, the figures are rounded off. When the searches were
repeated on March 4, 2008, the results were in most cases quite similar. One exception was
a much higher figure for deep sense of injustice, resulting in an even greater difference
between sense of justice and sense of injustice than in the first round of searches, which is
consistent with the hypothesis.
3. Searching the Internet, one can sometimes find examples such as the following one
from a book review:
Whenever I finish a book by Hilary Mantel, I always close it with a deep sense of enjoyment. Her latest
novel, Beyond Black, is no exception. (Small Spiral Notebook 4(4) (Spring 2006)
Many native speakers, however, usually find such sentences somewhat odd”
4. All the searches reported in section 6.3 were carried out on January 2, 2007. When
figures for sense of are cited, they do not include the article (i.e., a sense of ). Whenever
appropriate, the figures are rounded off. The same searches carried out approximately a
year later (March 5, 2008) yielded very similar results.
5. Unattributed examples cited in section 6.4 were taken from the Internet.
6. As chapter 10 discusses in more detail, during one of the searches carried out in
March 2008, the figure for good sense of peace jumped, implausibly and counterintuitively,
to 47,000. When rechecked later in the month (March 28, 2008), the figure for this
collocation was once again very small (16).
7. Unless otherwise indicated, all the figures for the Google searches cited in section
6.5 were collected on April 10, 2007.
8. The public character of great sense is also consistent with the greater tendency of
this phrase to co-occur with the verbal phrase there is (there was): if there is a great sense
of pride, joy, relief, and so on in a place, this suggests that many people in that place share
the feeling in question. The phrase deep sense, on the other hand, tends to refer to feelings
that are private and hidden from view, and this is consistent with the fact that deep sense
collocates less readily with there is than great sense does. In this case, the numerical
contrast is not as dramatic as in some of the other comparisons cited here, but it is also
significant: while great sense and deep sense are roughly comparable in numbers, there is
a great sense is much more common than there is a deep sense (the April 2007 figures are
three times higher, and the March 2008 ones, five times higher for the former than for the
latter).
9. Moreover, wonderful sense (in particular, wonderful sense of humor) is often
used in obituaries and tributes. This does not mean, however, that wonderful sense, too,
inherently refers to “many people.” Consider, for example, the following sentence:
A typical child has a wonderful sense of adventure—the inspiring need to explore.
It would be difficult to replace wonderful with great in this sentence, I suggest,

precisely because of the absence of a public dimension. A “typical child” is not observed
by “many people.” Wonderful suggests the speaker’s delight at the thought of a child’s
sense of adventure, not “many people’s’ enjoyment and benefit.
10. The huge respect for “reality” in modern Anglo culture is reflected in many
features of English discourse. Let me mention here, by way of example, two facts.
First, real life is a very common collocation in English and is unparalleled in other
European languages. For example, while vie réelle is well attested in the French
COBUILD corpus, its frequency is twelve times lower than that of real life in the
COBUILD Bank of English. Second, common English phrases like “made with real
eggs,” which occur in food advertising, have no counterparts in other European
languages. For example, one could not possibly use the phrase “avec des oeufs réels”
in French food descriptions.
The overall frequency of the word real in the English COBUILD is 260 per million
running words, whereas in the French COBUILD the frequency of the word réel (in all its
inflectional forms) is only 100 per million words. This is a significant difference.
11. A year later (April 2, 2008), the results of a Google search were as follows (the
figures are rounded off ):
sense of security 2,000,000

false sense of security 900,000
sense of danger 200,000
false sense of danger 700
This means that the proportion of false sense of security to sense of security was again
incomparably greater than that of false sense of danger to sense of danger.
12. Unless specified otherwise, all the Google searches reported in section 6.8 were
carried out on May 9, 2007. When they were repeated nearly a year later, on March 11,
2008, the results were, in most cases, very similar. One exception was a sudden jump for
keen sense of fear on the latter date. However, when checked again two weeks later, this
figure had returned to the May 2007 level. Furthermore, even on the day of the jump, the
figure for keen sense of fear was still, as predicted, much lower than those for strong sense
of fear and deep sense of fear.
The difference between keen sense of self (very low) and strong sense of self (very
high) was far less dramatic on March 11, 2008 than in May 2007, but it was still very
substantial. Two weeks later (March 28, 2008) it was again as dramatic as in May 2007.
13. All the searches reported in section 6.9 were carried out on May 28, 2007. When
figures for sense of are cited, they do not include the article (i.e., a sense of). Whenever
appropriate, the figures are rounded off. The searches were repeated with, on the whole,
similar results, on March 11, 2008.
14. When these searches were repeated on March 11, 2008, the figures for clear
sense of direction were not as high as in May 2007, but they were still much higher than
those for the corresponding collocations with strong, deep, and keen.
15. Acute sense, in contrast to sharp sense, can also collocate readily with the noun
anticipation. However, a close examination of sentences with acute sense of anticipation
found through a Google search shows that this phrase usually refers to a mental faculty, not
an emotion, as in the following example:
I soon realized that successful game photography required the ability to concentrate fully on the
action . . . while possessing an acute sense of anticipation, timing, and reaction.
Chapter 7
1. The graphic conventions used in this chapter may strike some readers as
complicated and confusing. Why not write, one might ask, simply about moral sense
rather than, variably, moral sense, moral sense, and “moral sense”? For the purposes of this
chapter, however, it is important to distinguish between the English phrase moral sense,
the modern English concept moral sense, and the quotation “moral sense”, when speaking,
for example, of what Dawkins (2006) calls “moral sense,” that is, to distinguish
graphically between words and phrases (italics), concepts (roman type), and quotations
(double quotes). In accordance with a common convention, I am also using double quotes
as a distancing device, for example, when I put “human nature” or “human morality” in
double quotes. The whole point of the chapter is to problematize the use of English
expressions and English concepts. For this, elaborate graphic distinctions are sometimes
essential.
2. French has the expression sens moral, which might seem to be an exact semantic
equivalent of the English moral sense, but this is an illusion. In fact, sens moral (unlike
moral sense) is closely related to rational discernment and frequently occurs in
collocations like le sens moral, social, et politique and le sens moral et civique (see,
e.g., the French COBUILD). The English moral sense does not occur in similar collocations.
For example, one does not speak of moral and political sense because a moral sense and a
political sense are not conceptually on a par in English as le sens moral and le sens
politique are in French (cf. the entry for sens in Rey et al. [1995] and for moral sense in
Cassin [2004]).
It is also interesting to note that, while Piaget (1969 [1932]) carried out his well-
known studies on “le jugement moral chez l’enfant” (‘moral judgment in children’),
Anglophone developmental psychologists often study instead children’s “moral sense.”
For example, Sharon Lamb (1991), in a work titled “First Moral Sense: Aspects of and
Contributors to a Beginning Morality in the Second Year of Life,” equates the emergence
of morality with that of a child’s moral sense.
More helpfully, Lamb reports that, according to her research, eighteen-month-olds
show remarkable concern for knowing about doing—and not doing—“good” (1991, 187),
but she puts an Anglo spin on her results when she writes, with reference to previous
research, “I also discovered the moral sense of the 1- to 2-year-old” (186).
3. For earlier publications in an NSM framework bearing directly on evolutionary
biology, see Wierzbicka (1999, 2004).
4. Before Shaftesbury, a group called “the Cambridge Platonists” sometimes used
the terms a sense of good and a sense of good and evil (cf., e.g., Partridge 1992, 30).
However, they appear to have been using the word sense in an earlier sense unrelated to
senses and closer to judgment and discernment: “For them, ‘the sense of good’ was a
matter of ‘right reason’ ” (ibid., 31–32). (On the polysemy of the Latin sensus and its
descendants in various European languages, see Cassin 2004).
5. Reid (1895 [1788], 589) stated that “The name of the moral sense, though more
frequently given to conscience since Lord Shaftesbury and Dr Hutcheson wrote, is not new.
The sensus recti et honesti is a phrase not unfrequent among the ancients.” But the Latin
word sensus did not mean the same as the post-Lockean English word sense (cf. Cassin
2004).
6. In a blurb on the cover of de Waal’s (2006) book, Robert Sapolsky, the author of A
Primate’s Memoir, attributes to nonhuman primates not only “the rudiments of morality”
but even “a sense of fairness.”
7. For example, in Chinese, the closest semantic and cultural counterpart of
conscience is liáng xı¯n, roughly, ‘good heart,’ where liáng stands for ‘good’ (in a sense
normally used only in relation to people), and xı¯n, something like ‘heart/mind’) (cf., e.g.,
Liang 1973; Cowie and Edison 1995).
8. In present-day English, conscience is often understood as an imaginary voice
judging one’s own actions, and this understanding appears to go back several centuries.
For example, Swift, quoted in Dr. Johnson’s dictionary (1812 [1755]), wrote: “Conscience
signifies that knowledge which a man hath of his own thoughts and actions; and because, if
a man judgeth fairly of his actions by comparing them with the law of God, his mind will
approve or condemn him, this knowledge or conscience may be both an accuser and a
judge.” This definition links conscience with judgment, knowledge, and God, and it is
retrospective rather than prospective: It presents conscience as an accuser and a judge of
past actions rather than a guide for action.
9. When an earlier version of this chapter was submitted for publication in the
Journal of Social and Evolutionary Psychology, an anonymous reviewer wanted to
know “the explicit position of the author about the universality (or not) of the
phenomena discussed.” My personal view on the phenomena discussed is quite close to
that of Saint Paul (as discussed and elaborated in John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis
Splendor [1993]), which is that a moral law is “written on people’s hearts.” However,
both Paul and the encyclical use language that is metaphorical and culture-specific. To
make my own position clear, I formulate it in simple and universal human concepts as
follows (see Wierzbicka 2001):
(a) all people can know some things

(b) they can know that someone can do bad things
(c) they can know that someone can do good things
(d) they can know that it is bad if someone wants to do bad things to other
people
(e) they can know that it is good if someone wants to do good things for other
people
(f) they can know these things not because other people say these things
Chapter 8
1. Westlaw is (as Wikipedia puts it) “one of the primary online legal research
services for lawyers and legal professionals in the United States.”
2. The material discussed in this section is based on a report on “common sense in
law” prepared for me by my research associate, Dr. Ian Langford. His input is gratefully
acknowledged. The abbreviation AustLII stands for “Australasian Legal Information
Institute.” A joint facility of the University of Technology, Sydney, and the University of
New South Wales Faculties of Law, it includes cases and legislation from all Australasian
jurisdictions.
3. In Robert Bolt’s well-known play A Man for All Seasons, the corrupt and cynical
Cardinal Wolsey urges Sir Thomas More to support King Henry VIII’s wish for divorce
and remarriage with an appeal to “common sense”: “You’re a constant regret to me,
Thomas. If you could just see facts flat on, without that moral squint; with just a little
common sense, you could have been a statesman” (Bolt 1963, 10). Such a use of the phrase
common sense is a projection of a modern English concept and value onto the sixteenth-
century English thought world.
4. For example, when Hume speaks in his Treatise of Human Nature of establishing a
conclusion “on reasonable principles” (Hume 1978, 550), he is using the word reasonable
in the older sense, which was closely linked with reason and did not have the pragmatic
slant of its present-day meaning. In today’s English, only requests, proposals, solutions,
compromises, and the like can be described as reasonable, not anything as unpragmatic as
principles.
5. When Reid speaks here of human beings as “reasonable creatures,” he is using the
word reasonable in the older, pre-Enlightenment sense of the word (see note 5).
6. The quote that Porter cites here is from Joseph Addison and Richard Steele (1711),
quoted in Donald Bond, ed., The Spectator, (1965).
7. The letters were first published as a book in 1774, a year after the author’s death;
an instant popular success, they went through five editions before the end of the year.
Chapter 9
1. Unless otherwise indicated, the examples in this chapter are from COBUILD.
2. In his groundbreaking book on autobiography, The Self in Moral Space, in which
he builds on Taylor’s work, literary scholar David Parker includes among “the central
givens” of human life the fact “that we all make sense of ourselves against horizons of
value” (2007, 6) and the reality of “the structures of value by which we . . . make moral
sense of our lives” (ibid., 10). References to “making sense” of one’s life return like a
refrain in the opening chapter, one of which is titled “Making the Best Sense of Lives.”
Chapter 10
1. The figures in all the tables in this chapter have been rounded off as appropriate
(very large numbers more than smaller ones, and very small numbers not at all).
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APPENDIX
TABLE 10.3. Sense of frustration with different adjectives

May 28, 2007 March 11, 2008
strong sense of frustration 10,500 12,000
great sense of frustration 8,000 9,300
clear sense of frustration 3,000 2,700
TABLE 10.5. Deep sense and good sense with emotion terms
2007 2008 2007 2008
deep sense of 16,000 13,000 good sense of 6 5

shame shame

guilt guilt

sadness sadness

gratitude gratitude
deep sense of 600 700 good sense of 4 2

joy joy
432 APPENDIX
TABLE 10.7. Sense of community and sense of self with great

April 10, 2007 March 11, 2008
sense of community 1,500,000 664,000
great sense of community 114,000 315,000
sense of self 1,500,000 763,000
great sense of self 11,400 11,900
TABLE 10.9. Deep sense and good sense with positive emotion terms
2007 2008 2007 2008

gratitude gratitude
deep sense of 30,000 52,500 good sense of 11 47,300

peace peace
deep sense of 600 670 good sense of 4 2

joy joy
TABLE 10.10. Deep sense and good sense with negative emotion terms
2007 2007 2007 2008

shame shame

guilt guilt

sadness sadness
TABLE 10.11. Sense of fear with different adjectives (see also table 10.29)
May 9, 2007 March 11, 2008
sense of fear 300,000 382,000
strong sense of fear 40,000 48,000
deep sense of fear 20,000 24,000
keen sense of fear 8 8,600

APPENDIX 433
TABLE 10.12. Sense of anxiety with different adjectives

May 9, 2007 March 11, 2008
sense of anxiety 100,000 96,000
strong sense of anxiety 10,000 16,000
deep sense of anxiety 7,000 8,400
keen sense of anxiety 3 2
TABLE 10.13. Sense of anxiety with different adjectives (partial repeat of table 10.12)
May 9, 2007 March 11, 2008
strong sense of anxiety 10,000 16,000
deep sense of anxiety 7,000 8,400
keen sense of anxiety 3 2

May 9, 2007 March 11, 2008
strong sense of anger 16,000 15,000
TABLE 10.15. Sense of anticipation with different adjectives

May 9, 2007 March 11, 2008
strong sense of anticipation 4,000 4,500
deep sense of anticipation 1,500 1,500
keen sense of anticipation 2,500 2,300
TABLE 10.16. Sense of enjoyment with different adjectives

May 9, 2007 March 11, 2008
strong sense of enjoyment 5,000 5,700
deep sense of enjoyment 2,000 2,300
keen sense of enjoyment 1,500 2,400

434 APPENDIX
TABLE 10.17. Sense of loss with different adjectives

May 9, 2007 March 11, 2008
strong sense of loss 700 27,100
deep sense of loss 45,000 36,900
keen sense of loss 4,000 5,800
TABLE 10.18. Sense of gratitude with different adjectives

March March March March March March March
7, 11, 12, 17, 18, 19, 20,
2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008
strong sense 12,000 12,000 12,000 18,000 12,000 12,000 12,000

of gratitude
deep sense of 39,000 39,000 39,000 39,000 41,000 41,000 41,000

gratitude
TABLE 10.19. Sense of guilt with different adjectives

March March March March March March March March March
4, 6, 7, 11, 12, 17, 18, 19, 20,
2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008
strong 23,000 950 960 950 980 1,000 970 970 980
sense of
guilt
deep 22,000 11,000 20,000 11,000 11,500 11,000 13,000 11,500 11,500
sense of
guilt
TABLE 10.20. Sense of loss with different adjectives

March March March March March March March March March
4, 6, 7, 11, 12, 17, 18, 19, 20,
2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008
strong 25,000 26,000 25,000 27,000 27,000 670 29,900 700 29,000
sense
of loss
deep 37,000 38,000 37,000 38,000 41,000 39,000 41,000 41,000 37,000
sense
of loss
APPENDIX 435
TABLE 10.21. Sense of commitment with different adjectives

May March March March March March March March March
9, 4, 7, 11, 12, 13, 18, 19, 20,
2007 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008
strong 40,000 32,000 31,000 32,000 33,000 34,000 33,000 33,000 36,500
sense of
commitment
deep sense 15,000 12,000 12,000 12,000 12,500 13,000 13,000 13,000 12,000
of
commitment
TABLE 10.22. Sense of loyalty with different adjectives

9, 4, 7, 11, 12, 13, 18, 19, 20,
2007 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008
strong sense 34,000 25,000 25,000 26,000 26,000 26,000 32,000 26,000 31,000
of loyalty
deep sense 13,000 14,000 10,000 10,500 13,000 11,000 10,500 13,000 13,000
of loyalty
TABLE 10.23. Sense of responsibility with different adjectives

9, 4, 7, 11, 12, 13, 18, 19, 20,
2007 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008
strong sense 115,000 174,000 96,000 98,000 101,000 184,000 104,000 104,000 187,000
of
responsibility
deep sense of 35,000 27,000 32,000 28,000 33,000 32,000 31,000 29,000 32,000
responsibility
TABLE 10.24. Sense of purpose with different adjectives

9, 4, 7, 11, 12, 13, 18, 19, 20,
2007 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008
strong 70,000 51,000 50,000 52,000 68,000 54,000 54,000 75,000 75,500
sense of
purpose
deep 12,000 1,000 1,000 1,000 19,000 10,000 19,000 10,000 19,000
sense of
purpose
436 APPENDIX
TABLE 10.25. Sense of sadness with different adjectives

9, 4, 7, 11, 12, 17, 18, 19, 20,
2007 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008
strong 8,000 6,350 6,470 6,530 6,540 6,660 6,310 6,620 6,620
sense
of
sadness
deep 12,000 10,700 9,900 10,500 10,600 10,400 10,400 10,600 10,800
sense
of
sadness
TABLE 10.26. Sense of shame with different adjectives

9, 4, 7, 11, 12, 17, 18, 19, 20,
2007 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008
strong 1,000 9,970 9,790 9,590 10,100 9,940 9,760 9,940 9,940
sense
of
shame
deep 16,000 13,500 13,300 13,800 13,600 13,700 14,100 13,100 12,700
sense
of
shame
TABLE 10.27. Sense of gratitude with different adjectives

9, 4, 7, 11, 12, 17, 18, 19, 20,
2007 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008
strong 12,000 12,300 12,200 12,300 11,800 12,100 11,700 12,200 12,100
sense of
gratitude
deep 45,000 38,100 39,300 38,800 39,300 38,800 40,500 40,600 40,700
sense of
gratitude
TABLE 10.28. Sharp sense with emotion terms (extended search)
April April April April April April April April April April April April April April
8, 9, 10, 11, 14 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 22, 28, 29, 30,
2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008
sharp sense of joy 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 8 3 3
sharp sense of 580 582 575 570 486 484 512 497 506 496 498 410 395 399
relief
sharp sense of 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4
embarrassment
sharp sense of guilt 8 8 7 8 9 9 8 9 8 9 9 225 218 214

TABLE 10.29. Acute sense with emotion terms (extended search)
April April April April April April April April April April April April April April
8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 22, 28, 29, 30,
2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008
acute sense of 5 5 4 4 4 4 4 5 4 5 5 4 5 5
joy
acute sense of 4 6 7 7 6 4 4 6 4 4 6 64 4 4
relief
acute sense of 280 277 278 272 251 249 265 248 242 246 246 353 304 306
embarrassment
acute sense of 680 679 970 668 653 949 676 643 629 1,030 1,000 834 979 993
guilt
April April April April April April April April April April April
4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18,
2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008
deep sense of 1,900 1,900 1,900 1,900 1,800 1,800 1,500 1,500 400 1,800 1,800
anger
strong sense of 150 800 800 800 800 800 800 800 150 700 700
anger
keen sense of 4 3 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4
anger
acute sense of 3 4 4 4 3 4 3 3 3 3 4
anger
440 APPENDIX
TABLE 10.31. Sense of anger with different adjectives (April 17, 2008)
Google Yahoo
strong sense of anger 700 1,100
acute sense of anger 3 18
TABLE 10.32. Sense of fear with keen and deep in Google and Yahoo
April April April April April April
18, 21, 22, 28, 29, 30,
2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008
Google keen sense of fear 13 12 17 14 10 9
deep sense of fear 1,110 1,140 1,160 2,080 1,960 1,960
Yahoo keen sense of fear 60 59 59 57 56 56
deep sense of fear 2,810 2,680 2,660 3,080 3,010 2,990
TABLE 10.33. Sense of peace with good and deep in Google and Yahoo
May 5, May 6, May 7, May 8, May 9,
2008 2008 2008 2008 2008
Google good sense 19 17 17 18 19

of peace
deep sense of 36,800 40,600 36,600 40,600 36,600

peace
Yahoo good sense 86 87 86 71 71

of peace
deep sense of 70,800 70,100 70,600 70,700 71,300

peace
TABLE 10.34. Sense of fear with different adjectives (April 18, 2008)
Google Yahoo
strong sense of fear 460 4,200
deep sense of fear 1,100 2,800
keen sense of fear 13 60
acute sense of fear 185 250

INDEX
In addition to subjects and proper names, this index lists (in italics) words from several
languages that are discussed in this book. Non-English words are followed by a rough
gloss for ease of reference, but this must not be taken as equivalent in meaning to the word
discussed in the text. Abbreviations used include Ch (Chinese), Du (Dutch), Fr (French),
Ge (German), It (Italian), Ja (Japanese), La (Latin), Po (Polish), Ru (Russian), Sp (Span-
ish). Other abbreviations are: adj (adjective), n (noun), vb (verb).
ability, 268–269, 280–282 ads, personal, 185–187

action, 201–203, 236, 315–316, 321 advertising, language of, 58
intended, 281–282, 284–285 agent, 224
acute sense of, 302–312 Alexis, Wilibald, 27
associated bodily image, 308–309 Allen, Ronald, 332–333
guilt, 310 America, 318, 361
humor, 306–308 American-born children, 332
justice, 307–308 American English, 5, 14, 144, 146, 155,
observation, 306–308 280, 330, contemporary, 331
responsibility, 308 American Protestants, 73
smell, 303 Americans, 186
with emotion terms, 312 Amis, Martin, 31, 91
adjective(s), 36, 40–41, 86, 100–102, analogy, 243, 244, 384
106–107, 110–111, 119, 152, Anderson, Jon Lee 32, 79
154–155, 162, 182–183, 192–193, Anscombe, Elizabeth, 26, 28
196, 203, 205, 213–312, 231, 239, Anglo American Christian
241, 243, 316, 325, 329, 337, 371, apologetics, 138
396, 398–401, 406 Anglo anthropologists, 3–4
evaluative, 154–155 Anglo assumptions, 6
441
442 INDEX
Anglo bias, 315, 327 Ascham, Roger, 37

Anglo concept, 69, 97, 189, 315 Ashcraft, Richard, ed., 102, 146
Anglo cultural tradition, 89, 326 Atkinson, Dwight, 110, 136
Anglo culture, 5, 10, 15, 19, 30–31, attitude, volitional and emotional, 238,
33–34, 64, 97, 115, 119, 185–186, 241
191, 314, 329, 354–358, 364, 388 Augustine, 64
artifacts of, 26, 314 Austen, Jane, 153, 372–373, 376–377
concept of, 135, 171, 189, 391 Austin, John, 153
empiricist bent of, 159 Australia, 5
history of, 99 Australian English, 5
modern, 34, 44, 5271, 90, 115, 118, Australian soldiers/war veterans, 77
133, 136, 155 Australians, 187
Anglo discourse, 95, 146 autobiographical writings, 37, 68–70
Anglo English, 3, 4, 5, 155, 330
Anglo linguists, 3 Baars, Bernard J., 30
Anglo mind, 30, 53 Bacon, Francis, 9, 15–16, 20, 45, 65
Anglo point of view, 130–131, 155 bad, adj, 315–317, 325, 327, 386
Anglo public discussions, 125–126 Bailey, Nathan, 109
Anglo scientists, 127 Bain, Alexander, 321
Anglo theme, 34 Baker, John H. 140–141
Anglo thinking, history of, 31 Baker, Thomas, 153
Anglo thought, 89, 321 Bard, Morton, and Dawn Sangrey, 235
Anglo tradition, post-Lockean, 74 Barrette, Cyrille, 130–131
Anglo value, 359, 371 Bauman, Richard, and Charles L. Briggs,
Anglo viewpoint, 74 102
Anglo ways of thinking, 31 BECAUSE, 156
Anglo worldview, 71, 77 belief, grounds for, 102–103, 111–115
Anglo-American context, 66 Bennett, M. R., and P. M. S. Hacker, 42
Anglo-English, 317 Benson, Arthur C., 226
concept(s) 91, 338 Bentham, Jeremy, 94–95, 131, 148
conceptual home, 73 Bentley, Edmund, 355
discourse, 7, 69, 96, 138, 139, 154 Berkeley, 6–7, 59
folk ethics, 152 Berlin, Isaiah, 344
folk philosophy, 152–153 Biber, Douglas, 408
intellectual landscape/history, 133, 317 Bible, 102–103
readers, 63 biblical accounts, 137
Anglocentric, 34, 72, assertion, 72 biographical literature, 27
Anglophone biology, 132–139
countries, 5, 30, 32, 187–188 biologists, 132–139, 313–314, 326
popular science writers, 326–327 Black, J. William, 65
scholars, 338 Bloom, Paul, 313, 317
societies, 345 Blume, Mary, 19
Anglosphere, 9, 34 bodily analogue, 224–226
anthropologists, 3, 4 bodily effort, intentional, 230
anthropology, 4 body, 156, 201, 204, 224
anti-Cartesian, 15 experiencer’s, 210–211
Apresjan, Valentina, 388 the, 233–234
Arabic proverbs, 338 bon sens (or sens commun, roughly, ‘com-
arguments, philosophical, 62 mon sense’, Fr), 329, 337, 339–343,
art exhibitions, 74–77 345, 357
INDEX 443
bona mens (roughly, ‘good mind’, Chomsky, Noam, 20–21, 146–147

La), 340 Christ, 138, 143, 154
Bond, Donald, 415 Christian(s), 65, 71, 154, 318
book titles, 328–329, 345 Christian religion, 142–143
Boot, Boetius de, 52 Christianity, 65, 72, 136, 138, 143
Boyle, Robert, 15, 20, 49–50, 87, 136 Classen, Constance, 38, 377
brain, human, 25–26, 30 clear sense of, 293–302
Britain, 5, 15, 319, 331, 345, 361 direction, 296–300
British, 186 right and wrong, 325
British empiricism, 6–11, 14–15, 19, 88, what, 294
139, 152, 155, 277, 348 Clinton, Hilary, 116
heritage of, 14 cognition, 17
opponent of, 146 cognitive awareness, 250–252
rise of, 15 cognitive scenario(s), 215, 216,
the great forerunner of, 9 223–224, 236, 237, 239, 242,
the last great representative of, 9 248, 269, 282, 291, 294, 297,
seventeenth- and eighteenth- 307–309
century, 97 cognitive science, 28, 30
British empiricists, 20, 90, 97, 147 Collins-Robert, 348
British English, 5, 14, 144, 146, 155, collocates, 184
279–280, 330 collocation, 96, 185, 198–200, 215
British Enlightenment, 146, 359–367 collocational profiles, 306, 405
Bromhead, Helen, 112, 145, 323 qualitative, 395–406
Brookes, David, 14 quantitative, 395–406 See also
Bryson, Bill, 187 semantic analysis
Buechner, Frederick, 154 collocations, 83–84, 95, 101, 109,
buen senso (or senso comune, roughly, 115, 154, 215–216, 218, 220–221,
‘common sense’, It), 329, 337, 226, 377
339–345, 357 adjectival, 119, 155, 206, 212–312, 250,
Bunyan, John, 37, 67, 71, 318 325
and function words, 403–404
calque, 189 common, 213, 232, 266
Camus, Albert, 380–381 of evidence, 119
Canberra, 77, 88 length of string, 403–404
Carbaugh, Donald, 115 negative, 120
Cartesian account, 59 semantics of, 242, 395–406
Cartesian formulation, 63–64 a clear sense of, 229–302 (see also clear
Cartesian(s), 10, 52, 153, 343 sense of)
French, 6 a deep sense of, 234–235, 239 (see also
Cassin, Barbara, ed., 343, 373 deep sense of)
Catholic, 65 a false sense of, 277–279 (see also false
causal link, 78 sense of)
causation, 60 a good sense of, 250–262 (see also good
certainty to doubt, from, 145–146 sense of)
Chalmers, David, 28–29, 42, 63 a great sense of, 262–269 (see also great
chemists, 133–134 sense of)
Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, a keen sense of, 279–292 (see also keen
Earl of, 349, 366–367 sense of)
Chinese, 314–315, 338, 409, 414 a real sense of, 269–276 (see also real
choice, 323 sense of)
444 INDEX
collocations, (continued) common sense, 321, 328–367, 387

a sharp sense of, 242–249 (see also and eighteenth century philosophers,
sharp sense of ) 353
an acute sense of, 302–312 as an Anglo-English value, 337–346
collocations, a strong sense, 212–230, concept of, 346
239–240 discourse of, 337, 365
and intentional bodily effort, 230 impact on Anglo culture and English
and persistent bodily feelings, 230 language, 354–358
awareness (knowledge)-based, in American lingua-culture, 332
228–229, 230 post-Reidian, 365
emotion-related, 222–226, 230 common sense concept of causation, 335
identity-related, 218–222, 230 communication, 6, 17, 19
opinion-related, 226–228, 230 English-based, 240
wide range of, 230 intercultural, 409
will- and goal-related, 212–217, 230 complement (s), 54, 58, 192
See also strong sense of, strong noun(s), 161, 226, 228, 244, 262
sense that noun phrase, 159, 161
collocations, that imply high agentivity, that-clause, 161–162
233 complement of the phrase a sense of what,
collocations, that refer to permanent 166
quality, 245 concept(s), 30
Colomer, Advocate General language- and culture-specific, 98
Ruiz-Jarabo, 12 conceptual category, 28
Coltheart, Max, 194 conceptual world, 3
common (adj.), 346–349 Condillac, Etienne, 10, 90–91
as ‘shared’, 346–347 Conrad, Susan, 408
as ‘common occurrence in common conscience, 318, 326–327, 414
experience’, 348 conscious states, 62
common law, 139–140 consciousness, 28–29
common sense, 15, 328–367, 368–371, consciousness, 59, 61, 323
376 concept of, 62
primarily a pattern of thinking, 352, linguistic, 152
369 consensus (in semantic analysis), 92
and causative verbs, 334 contexts, 83–84, 101
and experience, 336 historical and cultural, 331
and modal verbs, 333–334 conversational routine(s), 5, 178
and practical knowledge, 352 conversion, 67
and speech act verbs, 334 Cookson, Catherine, 366
as a tool, 350 core, 17
as used by philosophers, 353 coreligionists, twentieth century, 65
fairness and, 336 corpora
in ordinary language, 353 contemporary linguistic, 20
in the twentieth century, 357 English, 88, 93, 146, 171, 175,
lack of, 349 186–187, 205, 237, 378, 395
ordinary, 337, ordinariness of, 349 German, 86, 409
practical guide, 358 modern, 14, 20
present-day usage of, 356 Russian, 129
reasonable, 336 corpus linguistics, 7, 14, 16, 20–21,
unique Anglo-English concept, 337–346 30, 92–93, 405–406, 395–406,
value of, 349–351, 357, 364 407–408
INDEX 445
Court of Justice of the European Dawkins, Richard, 313, 317, 321–322,

Communities, 12 326
Cowie, Anthony P., 414 de Waal, Frans, 323
Coyne, Jerry, 119 deep sense of
Croft, William, 408 betrayal, 232, 236, 239
cross-cultural training, 6 commitment/responsibility, 213, 237,
cross-linguistic approach, 147 238–239
Crystal, David, 4, 5 gratitude, 213, 235–236, 239
cultural artifact, 314, 378 guilt, 213, 232, 234, 236, 239
cultural assumptions, 5, 17 injustice, 231–232, 240
cultural attitudes, 14 loss, 213, 234, 236, 239
cultural baggage, 6 mission, 239–242
cultural concepts, 178 sadness, 213, 234
cultural developments, 30 satisfaction, 235–236, 239
cultural heritage, 5, 314, 326, 344, 391 shame, 232–234, 236–237, 239
cultural knowledge, 5 See also collocations
cultural literacy teaching, 6 Defoe, Daniel, 39–40
cultural norms, 17 deictic anchoring, 174–175
cultural notation, 17 demonstrations, 134
cultural outsiders, 63, 175 Denglish (Deutsch English), 378
cultural perspective(s), 327, 388 depth, 234
cultural semantics, 4 Descartes, René, 6, 7, 15, 58–59, 63–64,
cultural shift, 323 65, 71, 141–142, 153, 339–341,
cultural sphere, 16 365–366, 407–408
cultural underpinnings, 16 description
cultural universe, 3 linguistic, 17
cultural traditions, 5 semantic, 21
cultural training, 5 desire, 308. See also want
cultural uniqueness, 329 detective stories, 97
cultural values, 5, 17 diagnostic test, 259
cultural ways of speaking, 17 dictionaries, bilingual 96
cultural worlds, 3, 4 Diderot, 360
culture-bound thinking, 3 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 27
culture-independent explanations, 391 discourse, 90, 95, 327
culture-specific assumptions, 389 American, 331
culture-specific concepts, 325, 387, Anglo-English, 154, 191, 201
390–391 community of, 100
culture-specific constructs, 30 concept of evidence in, 135
culture-specific limitations, 65 contemporary, 119, 376
English, 152, 163, 345, 380, 412
Dalai Lama, 73 modern Anglo-English, 138, 139
Dalton, John, 8–9, 133 modern English, 151, 192
Darnton, Robert, 3, 4 of bureaucracies, government
Darwin, Charles, 119, 132–136, 138–139, institutions, universities, 30
142, 317, 321–322 of evidence, 122–131
Darwin, Erasmus, 133, 138 of experience, 49, 51
Darwin, Francis, 136 polemical, 128
data, empirical, 20–21 seventeenth century, 47, 71
databases, 92 discourse patterns, 5
Davies, Martin, 194 discourse practices, 17, 101
446 INDEX
discourse strategies, 11 empirical philosophy, 15

discourses of evidence, new 145 empirical reality, 96–97
discursive formation, 10–11 empirical results, 30
discussion and debates, contemporary, empirical science, 16
115 empirical study(s), 4, 30
Dix, Otto, 75 empirical tradition, 61, 146
dokazatel’stvo, (roughly, ‘proof’, Ru), 127 empirical worldview, 49
doer, 31, 37 empiricism, 9, 14
doświadczenie (roughly, ‘accumulated empiricism, 6–12, 90, 112, 147, 330
experience’, ‘a retrospective empiricist(s), 6–7, 9
perspective’), 74, 77 empirique (roughly, ‘empirical’, Fr), 7–8,
doświadczenia wojenne (roughly, 11–12, 14–16, 19
‘experience of war’, Ru), 77 Empson, William, 372–373, 377
Dutch, 338, 343 England, 49, 56, 90, 186, 188, 318, 345,
365–366
eagerness, 280 eighteenth century, 7, 359
Easthope, Antony, 10 seventeenth century, 44–50, 56, 65, 87
Edison, Thomas, 331 common law in, 140
educational and professional English, 4, 5, 7, 8, 13, 15, 17–21, 29,
advertising, 33 30–31, 82, 90–93, 129, 148, 192, 217,
Edwards, Jonathon, 67 272, 326, 330, 342, 344–345, 363,
eighteenth century, 15, 40, 43, 47, 54, 61, 371–372, 374, 400
66, 102–115, 119, 121, 133, 139, 145, became lexicalized in, 61
147–148, 155, 188, 317–324, 326, contemporary, 10, 11, 38, 59, 90, 96,
331, 337, 354, 359–367 116, 118, 327, 337, 345–346, 360
early, 153, 317, 326 conversational routine, 378
end of, 57–58 cultural (and historical) baggage of, 6,
philosophical discussions, 90 19, 22
sentence, 57 dictionaries, 30
Eldridge, Niles, 410 ethnophilosophical construct in, 64
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 330, 351 folk philosophy embedded in, 153
emotion(s), 40, 45, 55, 58, 85–86, 209, global, 14, 34
222, 230, 242, 249, 272–273, 302, hidden cultural legacy of, 6, 19
304, 322, 327 history of, 102–119
events seen as source of, 242 international, 14
negative, 224 literature, 53
positive, 224 long-established varieties of, 14
emotion terms, 223, 234, 257, 300, 401 modern, 13–15, 32, 36, 58, 71, 85, 97,
negative, 224, 234, 257, 305, 398 107, 314, 337, 364, 378
positive, 398 native speaker of, 127, 175, 388
emotional effect, enduring, 236 nonnative speakers of, 60, 73
emotional state, 223 ordinary, 61
empirical, adj, 7–12, 14–16, 19–21, 30, perspective of, 32
359 philosophical, 62
empirical corroboration, 8 pre-Enlightenment, 323
empirical data, 21 present-day, 33, 36, 54, 61, 98, 101, 115,
empirical evidence, 16 119, 120–122, 128, 178, 316, 324,
empiciral generalizations, 8 326, 367, 374
empirical knowledge, 113 seventeenth and eighteenth century, 7,
empirical methods, 8 97, 107
INDEX 447
Shakespeare’s, 314 later generations of, 53

speakers of, 29, 152 ways of thinking, 31
worldview, 330 English speaking countries, 333
English as a cultural universe, 3 English speaking world, 15
English as a vehicle of culture, 5 English thought, 97
English concept(s), 20, 83, 88, 95, seventeenth century, 52
314, 338 English word, 21, 30, 32, 34, 159
ethnophilosophical, 60 modern, 59, 87
English culture, 186 English-language writings, 155
English cultural keyword, 25, 92 English-speaking countries, 127, 187
English dictionaries, 7, 30 English-speaking cultures, 265
English discourse, 13, 133, 138, 152, 171, English-speaking societies, 356
191, 276–277 English-speaking world, 15, 127
contemporary, 13 English-specific words, 63
modern, 14, 136 entertainment industry, 33
English discourse patterns, modern, 155 enthusiasm, 266–267
English expressions, culture-specific, 185 epistemological discourse, 47
English folk categories, 62 epistemology, Lockean, 53
English language, 3, 4, 5, 9–11, 14, 30, Erfahrung, (roughly, ‘experience,
40, 44, 61, 64, 72, 88, 90–93, 136, impressions’, Ge), 77, 83–89
147–148, 151, 186, 191, 326, Erfahrungen, (plural of Erfahrung, Ge),
354–358, 388 77, 83–89
artifacts of, 26 Erlebnis (roughly, ‘experience’, Ge),
conceptual creations of the, 189 26–27, 77, 83–89
contemporary, 152 Erlebnisse, (plural of Erlebnis, Ge), 26,
cultural baggage inherent in, 148 31–32, 75, 83–89
development of the, 119 Esperanto, 339
embedded in the, 56, 389 esprit (Fr), 189
ethnophilosopical constructs of, 409 ethnophilosophical constructs, 59
habit of the mind entrenched in the, 77 European countries, 140
handed down through the, 148 European intellectual heritage, 159
history of the, 66, 99 European languages, 31–32, 38, 42,
modern, 7, 14, 142, 381 60, 72, 82–83, 92, 96, 142,
peculiar to, 143 159, 160, 326, 337, 371, 380–381,
prism of the, 29 388
psychological verbs in, 58 European philosophy, history of, 14.
world of thought associated with, 99 See also philosophy
cultural underpinnings of the European Union documents, English
present-day, 92 version, 12
English lexicon, modern, 155 European variations on the theme of
English literature, 53 experience, 34
English phraseology, modern, 155 euthanasia, 116
English phrases, 189, 327 evangelicalism, late eighteenth and
English religious language, 65–74 nineteenth century, 66, 70
English sense, 39 events, 58, 69
English sentences, 43 current, 175
English speakers, 154, 31, 390 evidence, 3, 10–11, 14, 19, 94–148
collective consciousness of, seventeenth clear, 121–122
century, 44 discourse of, 122–131
eighteenth century, 331 enough, 119
448 INDEX
evidence (continued) personal, 179, 270–271

hard, 121–122 physical (shared), 264
no, 119–120, 123, 125–126, 136 religious, 65–74
of reason, 113 retrospective, 67
some, 119, 125 semantic history of, 323
what’s the, 122–126 experience, v, 40, 54–58, 359
where’s the, 124–125, 127 experience meetings, 71
in a historical and cultural perspective, experiencer, 175, 192–193, 223, 226–227,
144 230, 232, 236
semantic history of, 146 experiencer-observer, 79–80
unique Anglo concept of, 144 experiencer-undergoer, 79–80
evidence, 9, 94–148, 155 experiencer’s emotions, 403
corroborative, 240 experiencer’s will, 403
linguistic, 191 experiential model, 217
new concepts of 145 experiment, v, 50
new discourse of, 144–145 experiment, 14–15, 46, 50
empirical, 113, 127, 131 experiments, 49, 134
history of, 112 experimental method, 20
sources of, 115 experimental science, 15, 49
what is your, 148 exponents, lexical, 17
évidence (roughly, ‘quality that is clear, eyewitnesses, 137
obvious’, Fr), 103, 141–142
evidentia (roughly, ‘evidence’, an ocular fact(s), 97, 136, 138
proof, La), 104, 105 Baconian, 139
Evison, A., 414 faith in, 117
evolution, 135 matters of, 115, 140
existential link with place, 175 facts, 113
experience, 25–93, 113, 408 faculty, a, 212, 247, 280, 283, 289, 304
direct, 79–81 fair, 5, 19
from, 78 false sense of, 277–279
past, 80–81 confidence (superiority, complacency),
personal, 79–83 279
present day usage of, 40 safety, trust, 279
teaching, 84 security, 277–279
Shakespeare’s 77, 84, 86 feel, a, n, 181
shared, 76–77 (see also shared feel, vb, 160, 162, 198
experience) feeling, 39, 40, 41, 43, 57, 61, 87, 157, 168,
experience(s), 23–93, 97, 154–155 170–171, 194, 200, 262–266, 316
American variations on the theme of, 34 a, 182, 191, 226, 234, 304
culture-specific character, 34 associated with a sharp sense, 244
current, 275 bodily (sensations), 45, 53, 157, 180,
individual, 152 227, 264
introspective, 68 human, 409
long-lasting and hidden, 237, 242 long-lasting, 236, 242
of God, 72–73 prolonged and hidden, 223
of the war, 75–76 quasi-bodily, 159, 170–171, 206,
painful (and long-lasting), 232, 233, 211, 216, 220–221, 229, 241, 248,
235, 237 303–304, 377
people’s, 97 quasi-sensory, 164, 204, 210, 277, 280
perfectionist, 67 very bad feeling, 224
INDEX 449
feelings, 61, 69 French Enlightenment, 359, 361

bad, 243 French language, 90
based on thoughts (emotions), 45 French literature, 188
bodily, 205, 211, 230, 274 French philosophers, 10
current, 230 French translation, 31, 43
deep, 234 French version (of European Union
good, 243 documents), 12
individual, 53 French word, 9, 12, 103, 153
positive, 225 Frossard, André, 72
quasi-bodily, 171, 211 function words, 403–404. See also
shared good, 268 collocations
that motivate people’s actions, 212–213 Furetière, Antoine, 35, 103
Fernández-Armesto, Felipe, 10, 97
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 28 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 5, 27–28, 33, 64
fifteenth century, 47, 102–106, 141 Gammage, Bill, 77
findings, 117 Gassendi, 6–7
findings, 117 Geertz, Clifford, 3, 4, 327
Finley, Kathy, 219 Geldard, Frank, 10
first century, 178 gemeinsame (roughly, ‘common’, Ge), 77
Flannery, Tim, 126 geological changes, 135
Fletcher, William H., 405 geology, 132–138
folk concept, language-specific, 60 geologists, 132–138
folk epistemology, 43 geometry, 141
folk philosophy, Anglo, 88–89, 155 German, 26, 31–33, 72, 82–90, 92, 96, 148,
formalisms, 17, 21, 408 171, 329, 337–338, 378
formulae internet, 378
artificial, 21 prism of, 29
natural semantic metalanguage, 17 German concept, 85
semantic, 17 German culture, 64
fourteenth century, 47, 102–106, 141 German keywords, 64
Fox, George, 37, 67, 71 German language, 64
Fox, Kate, 185–191, 330 German nationalistic myths, 77
Fox, Robert, 32 German phrase, 77
France, 188, 361 German warriors, 77
Franklin, James, 111, 142–143 German word(s), 75, 77, 83
French, 7, 13, 15, 17–21, 31–32, 35, 72, gesunder Menschenverstand (roughly,
82, 88–90, 92, 96, 117, 127, 129–131, ‘common sense’, Ge), 329, 337, 345
148, 154–155, 171, 188–189, 191, Gilson, Etienne, 340
329, 337–338, 342–345, 348, Glanvill, Joseph, 50, 99, 131–132
371–374, 378–381, 388, 391, 409 goal-oriented bodily effort, 242
Cartesian, 340 global English, 14, 34
contemporary, 11, 90, 340, 360 global language, 4, 147
seventeenth century dictionary of, 35 global world, 91
sphere of, 10 Globish, 19
French arguments, debates, discussions, Goddard, Cliff, 5, 17, 29, 187, 406
129–131 Goethe, Johan Wolfgang von, 27, 64
French concept, 20 good, adj, 315–317, 325, 327
French corpus, 13 good sense of
French cultural thought world, 9 balance, 250–252, 256–257
French dictionaries, 7 direction, 253–254
450 INDEX
good sense of (continued) Hale, Matthew, 137–138

orientation, 253–255 Halley, Edmund, 16, 20
pride, 258 Halliday, M. A. K., 133
rhythm, time (timing), 250–252 hand and eye, 141
time, 253, 255–256 Harriot, Thomas, 48
good sense of humor/humour, 257, Harvey, William, 50
259–261 Hauser, Marc D, 314, 317, 327
producer’s, 259, 261 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 27–28
receptor’s, 259, 261–262 here, 169
Google searches, 120–122, 184, 213–214, heuristic, 213, 240, 396
218, 231–232, 234–235, 240, 242, Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 359–362
246–248, 257, 263, 278–279, 285, historical culture, 145
287, 289–290, 296, 300–301, historical, event, 169
303–304, 306–307, 310, 314–315, historical investigation, 145
325, 396, 400, 403–405 historical processes, 145
limitations of, 403–404 historical underpinnings, 16
Googlebombing, 404 history of ideas, culture and society, 148
Gower, John, 102 history, stages of, 147
Graddol, David, 4 hit counts, 398, 400–406
Grahame, Kenneth, 368–369 Hobbes, Thomas, 131, 317
grammar Hock, Randolph, 405
and empiricist worldview, 406 Honderich, Ted, ed., 30, 62, 97
rudimentary universal, 17 Hooke, Robert, 15–16, 20, 45, 50, 87,
grammatical contexts, 216 141–142
grammatical difference, 316 Hryniewicz, Wacław, 73
grammatical frames, 182 human characteristic, shared, 316, 323
graphic conventions, 413 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 4
great sense of, 262–269 Hume, David, 6–7, 59–60, 64, 97, 104,
collective character of, 264–265, 268 112–113, 119, 317–321, 326,
community, 263 362–364, 415
feel a, 262–266 humor
adventure, fun, style, timing, 268–269 a sense of, 184–192
have a, 266–269 concept of, 188–189
humor, 262, 268–269 humour anglais, (English humor, Fr), 188
pride (satisfaction, relief, failure, loss), Hutcheson, Francis, 317–322, 326,
262–264 362–363
private character of, 263 Huxley, Thomas, Henry, 115, 138
public character of, 263–264, 267–269 hypotheses, semantic, 92, 242, 310
urgency/responsibility/purpose, 266 hypothesis, 156, 160, 168, 200, 251,
Greece, ancient, 10, 34 382, 384
Gribbin, John, 15–16, 134–135
Gross, Alan, Joseph Harmon, and Michael ideas, 59,
Reidy, 134, 147 empiricist, 97
Gullen and Mulholland, 74 immigrants, Bengali, 332
Gutzkow, Karl, 27 impressions, 59–60, 63
sensory, 87
habits of the heart, 11 India, 34
habits of the mind, 11, 171 individual, Calvinist emphasis on the, 65
Hacking, Ian, 99, 131, 133–134 induction, 131
Hagège, Claude, 21 infinitive, 380
INDEX 451
intentionality, 59 key cultural theme, 25

interpretation of reality, language and keyword, 101, 318
culture-specific, 28 cultural, 152, 345
introspection, 61 keywords, 3, 14, 19, 63, 320,
introspection in semantic analysis, 91–92 key phrases, 354
Iraq, 32 cultural, 64, 94, 145, 338, 359, 409
Italian, 72, 96, 329, 337–339, 343–344, culture-specific, 4
388 English, 30
Kierkegaard, Sren, 64
Jackendoff, Ray, 16, 20–21 KNOW, 156, 162, 254
Jackson, Robert Louis, ed., 381 knowing, 316, 378
James, William, 65, 67–68, 70–72, knowledge, 69–70, 78–83, 84–85, 87, 89,
91, 153 103–119, 159, 179, 181, 194, 200,
Japan, 34 207, 221, 228, 230, 281, 293–302,
Jay, Martin, 33–34 308, 365
Jefferson, Thomas, 330–331 about a place, 182, 183, 254
John Paul II, 414 about one’s self, 210–211
Johnson, Samuel, 36, 44, 50, 355 about what happens in the world, 32
journalism, 97 accumulated, 31, 34–37, 40, 80, 82, 91
judgment, 314 acquisition of, 38
judges clear and certain, 106–109
American, 333, 337 empirical, 51, 113, 117–118
Australian, 333, 337 experience-based, 90
juicıó (roughly,‘judgment’, Sp), 314–315 experiential, 41, 43, 54, 57, 169, 170–172,
Jünger, Ernst, 77 174, 179–180, 182–183, 204
jurors, 139–140, 333, 337 foundation of, 15, 41, 53
jury, 140 from a sense or perception, 45, 51, 73,
75, 89–90, 113
Kachru, Braj, 5 from feeling and thoughts, 241
Kant, Immanuel, 7, 59, 337 from practice, 44
keen sense, 279–292, 303 human, 113, 409
and ability, 280, 282 introspective, 49
and desire (want to do), 280, 282–284, lived, 75
303 Locke’s theory of, 318
and eagerness, 280 medical, 15
and perceptiveness, 280 potential (source of), 160, 171, 200, 220
as a faculty, 280–285 qualitative, 87, 182, 206
as a permanent attitude, 285–287 quasi-bodily, 171, 205
as an emotion, 287–292 quasi-sensory, experiential, 155, 205
of anticipation/loss/enjoyment, 287–292 real, 270
nonsensory use, 280 reliable, 31
of observation, 280–285 sensory model of, 163, 166, 191
sensory use, 279–280 source of, 49, 107, 157
of smell, 280 specialization of, 36
of timing/audience/drama/humor, 282 Kövecses, Zoltán, 5
of justice, responsibility, propriety, Kriegserlebnis, 77
285–286
Kempson, Ruth, 21 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 10
Kerouac, Jack, 55 Lalande, André, 340
Kersey, John, 103 Latin, 104–105, 131, 188, 340, 348
452 INDEX
Lamb, Sharon, 413 Locke, John, 6, 7, 10, 15, 20, 25, 44–53,
Langenscheidts Grosswörterbuch Deutsch 59–60, 63, 87, 90–93, 97, 99,
als Fremdsprache: Das einsprachige 104–113, 119, 138–139, 141, 143,
Wörterbuch für alle, die Deutsch 146, 153, 317–318
lernen wollen, 32 on experience, 408
language, 64, 17 on knowledge and the senses, 326
irreducible core of, 17 empiricist theory of knowledge,
ordinary, 127, 324 362–366
philosopher’s, 127 influence on Wesley, 66
religious, 66 Lockean assumption that words matter,
language of advertising, 55 99–100
language of religion, (English), 67 Lockean methodology, 91–93
language of the law, 328, 333–337, Locke’s century, 64
345 Locke’s essay, 72, 408–409
languages, 327 logic, 151
non-European, 326 logic, 53, 96–97, 141
language-specific phenomenon, 21, 131 abstract, 332
language teaching, 6 naı̈ve, 158
Latin, 104, 105 logical argument, 113
laughter, human capacity for, 189, 192 Luther, Martin, 64
law, 97, 102, 136–138, 141 Lyell, Charles, 132–138
continental, 140
English common, 139 McEwan, Ian, 25–26
French, 141 Maguire, John, 333
leben (roughly, ‘to live’), 86 make sense, 377–391
legal practice, 332 and culture-specific folk philosophy,
legal texts, 335 386–387
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 6, 17, of words, 383–389
92–93 of events, life, 384–389, 415
Leibnizian methodology, 92–93 with auxiliary verbs, 382
Leidhold, Wolfgang, 318 try to, 382
les conclusions (conclusions, Fr), 117 Mair, Christian, 406
Levene, Mark, 405 Malebranche, 6–7, 45
Lewis, R. W. B., 381 Malouf, David, 5, 148
lexicographers, 16 Manak Chia, 73
lexicon, 16, 19, 387 manner, quasi-bodily, 163
and empiricist worldview, 406 Manzoni, Alessandro, 344
universal, 17 mathematical certainty, 108
Liang, Shiqiu, 315 mathematics, 96–97, 141
Libet, Benjamin, 29 Mautner, Thomas, 127, 317, 321
Lindenberg, Siegwert, 333 meaning, unique culture-specific,
linguistic description, 17 338
linguistic reconstruction, 108 media, 30, 122–131, 240
linguistic semantics, 3 memoir, 31–32
linguistics, 4 German, 31
linguists, 3 memory, 28, 30
literature, 155 Mencius, 409
Littré, Emile, 103 Merton, Thomas, 169–170
Livingstone, David, 114 metalanguage. See natural semantic
Locke dictionary, 90 metalanguage
INDEX 453
metaphor, 99, 117, 223, 233–234, 247, methodology, 240, 323, 407–408
249, 250, 297, 384, 414 semanticists, 98, 407
bodily, 224 naturalists, English, 102, 139
of sharpness, 246 Nerrière, Jean-Paul, 19
of sensory detector, 250 New Testament, 114, 137
verbal, 58 Newton, Isaac, 15–16, 20, 47–48, 97–98,
Methodism, 66–67, 71 111, 119, 133, 135–136, 356, 407
eighteenth and nineteenth century, 66 Nicholls, Sophie, 225
language of, 58 Niermeyer, J., 105
Methodists, 70 nineteenth century, 9, 38, 40, 43, 47, 56,
Mill, John Stuart, 9, 112–113 58, 66, 102–103, 105, 109, 112–115,
Mills, Frederick B., 64 119–121, 131–139, 142, 145–146,
Milton, John, 44, 102, 118 155, 318, 376
mind, the, 59 non-English speaking background, 63,
experiencer’s, 226, 274 127
human, 46, 202 non-European languages, 326
model of, 59 Norton, David Fate, 363–364
modern Anglo habit of the, 61 noun, abstract, 151
minimizers, 181 count, 82, 83–84
mission, 241 mass, 27, 53, 60, 62, 63, 74, 77, 82,
Mitchell, Natasha, 314 83–86
modal verbs, 14, 333–334 nouns, 233
modernity, Anglos, 91 noun phrase, 214
modifer, a, 329 now, 169
modifiers, descriptive, 115 Nuallain, Sean, 156
Mother Theresa, 73 numerical evidence, 395–406. See also
Moody, Ellen, 373 semantic analysis, quantitative
Moody, Judy, and Bette Bridges, 9
Moore, G. E., 353 Oakeshott, Michael, 33
moral certainty, 108 Obama, Barack, 155
moral law, 414 observation, 50–51, 113, 242–243,
moral reflection, 318 245–249
moral sense, 313–327, 359, 361–362, observation(s), 14–15, 43–44, 46–48, 53,
414 60–61, 80, 97, 102–104, 109–111,
eighteenth century, 322 114, 117, 134, 152, 280–285
present-day, 322 geological, 135
moral universal, 313–314, 319 knowledge dependent on, 142
morality, 327, 363–365 personal, 50
Mosse, George L., 77 observer, 31, 38
movement, quasi-bodily 191 očevidnost’ (roughly, ‘obviousness’,
Murray, Les A., 187 Ru), 127
ocular proof, 102, 112, 146
Nabokov, Vladimir, 345 opinion, 230
native language, 147 matters of, 115
native speaker(s)’ intuitions, 92, 257, 303– opyt (roughly, ‘accumulated life
304, 400 experience’, Ru), 26, 29
natural semantic metalanguage (NSM), ordinary people, 102
16–22, 98, 144–145, 241, 346, orientation, 253
377, 381, 391, 395–406, 411 culture-specific folk, 159
explications, 17, 19, 407 origin of species, 135
454 INDEX
Orr, H. Allen, 313, 317 experimental, 87

oščuščenija (roughly, ‘sensations’), 29 “eye and hand”, 87, 89
outcome, desired, 230 eyewitness, 32
outcomes, potentially achievable and first-hand, 71
strongly desired, 220 first-person, 50–52, 61–62, 74–77, 82,
outlook 86–87, 247, 323
culture-specific folk, 159 historical, 92
Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 63 historical-comparative, 30
holistic, 62
Paine, Thomas, 331, 359–360 individual, 76, 152
Paley, William, 136 introspective, 38–44, 77
Parker, David, 5, 148 John Searle’s, 58–65
PART, 156 language and culture-specific, 32
participle, 203 not yet introspective, 71
Partridge, Dawn Elizabeth, 319 participant, 32
Pascal, Blaise, 142–143 past, 81
past event(s), 172, 237 personal, 51
Pasternak, Boris, 388 retrospective, 34–45, 67, 77, 86
patient, a, 232–233 seventeenth century, 52
Pavlenko, Aneta, 4 subjective and qualitative, 74
Peeters, Bert, 17 third-person, 247
perception, 152, 202, 276, 303, 309, 316, undergoer’s, 67
377 William James’s, 65–74
bodily, 163, 176, 182, 194, 197, 315, perspective of the English version, 32
316 perspective on life, 31–32
current bodily, 166 philosopher, 27, 317–318
bodily model of, 164 philosophers, 15, 42, 52, 62, 104,
immediate sense of, 137 317–322, 324, 361
model of sensory, 167–168 American, 147
sensory, 97, 191, 204–206, 321 Anglo, 63
perceptions, 31, 59–60, 63, 180 British, 15, 147, 318, 354
perceptiveness, 280 British moral, 326
perceptual realism, 60 Chinese, 409
pereživanija, (roughly, ‘prolonged strong Continental, 15
emotions due to living through a empiricist, 50
difficult time’, Ru), 29 French, 10, 147, 365
Persian, 338 language of, 315
personal identity, 59 seventeenth century, 91
perspective philosophical discourse, seventeenth
Anglo, 64 century, 45
atomistic, 62 philosophical discussions, seventeenth and
collective, 76 eighteenth century, 90
contemporaneous, 44–53, 77, 81 philosophical vocabulary, 33
cross-cultural and historical philosophy, 15, 45, 90, 136, 138, 140–141,
perspective, 327 155, 361
cross-linguistic and cross-cultural, 329, Anglo, 58, 63
382 Anglo-American, 62
cultural, 388 Anglo folk, 202
culturally-shaped, 65 Anglophone academic, 202
empirical, 87 books on, 313
INDEX 455
British, 97, 99 procedures, scientific, 118–119

British empirical, 139, 141 processes, 58
contemporary, 326 (involuntary) bodily, 227, 230
culture-specific folk, 159 seeing and hearing, 157
European, 14 proof, 96, 128–131
experimental, 46 proof(s), 106, 113, 127–131, 141, 148
French historians of, 91 ocular, 102–106, 146
history of, 98 Protestants, English, 136–139
language of, 30 prototype(s), 35, 38, 45–47, 87, 103,
popular, 30 158–159, 176, 201, 209, 251, 291
phraseology, 395–406 bodily, 165–166, 168, 204, 216, 227,
and empiricist worldview, 406 237–239, 242, 264, 269
phraseological network, 304 personal knowledge, 271
physical ability, 250–252 sensory, 190
physical certainty, 108 przez_ ycia (roughly, ‘life-changing
physicians, ancient school of, 8 emotions’, Ru), 74
physicists, 134 przez_ ycie (lit. ‘living through’, Ru), 76
PLACE, 156 przez_ ycia wojenne (roughly, ‘war
poczucie, (roughly, ‘a feeling/sense of experience’, Ru), 76
humor’, Po), 191 psychologists, 314–315
point of view psychology, 28, 30
first-person, 61 human, 192
scientific, 158 language of, 313
speaker’s, 197 popular, 193
pokazanie (testimony), 127 Puritans, 67
Polish, 31–32, 72, 73–74, 76–77, 89, Puritan preacher, 65
96, 190
native speaker of, 61 Quakers, 67
Polish words, 74 qualitative vs. quantative semantic analysis
polysemic cluster, 92 clear and stable contrasts, 396–397
polysemy, 63, 92, 98, 101, 127, 162 stable and overwhelmingly sharp
Pope, Alexander, 44, 355–356 contrasts, 396, 397–398
Popper, Karl, 338 figures vs. proportions and patterns,
Porter, Roy, Rack, Henry D., 146, 365 396, 398–400
post-eighteenth century, 39 significance of anomalies, 400–402
post-Lockean perspective, 82 strong sense vs. deep sense, 402–403
practical, 387 limitations of Google, 403–404
pre-Lockean sense, 82 Google vs. Yahoo searches, 404–406
present perfect, 172 question, routinized, 183
present relevance, 173, 176–178
present time, 172, 174, 178 Rack, Henry, 67
preuve (proof, Fr), 129–131 raison (reason, Fr), 153, 340–341,
preuves (proofs, Fr), 142–143 372–373
Priestley, Joseph, 102, 133 Raphael, David Daiches, 318
primary language, 5 rationalism, 7
primates, non-human, 324 Continental, 6
prime, (semantic), 156, 216 rationalist, adj, 136, 139
primes, indefinable conceptual, 17 rationalists, 6–7, 9
primes, (universal) semantic, 18, 61, continental, 147
92–93, 98, 407–408 rationnel (rational, Fr), 7
456 INDEX
Ray, John, 50 Russian dictionary, 26

reality, 14, 97, 118, 200, 269, 412 Russian translation, 29
real sense of, 269–275, 279 Russians, 30
an experiencer’s knowledge, 270
an external situation, 270 Sarkozy, Nicholas, 130
and exacting standards, 276 scenario, 227
how, 275 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich
what it would be/was like, 271–272, von, 27
273 Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel
wonder, terror, happiness, 272 Ernst, 28
real sense that, 270 Schmied, Josef, 405
reason (raison in Fr), 10, 14, 359–361, Scotland, 44, 90, 317, 359, 365
365 science, 90, 345, 359
knowledge attained by, 142 science (roughly, ‘science’, Fr), 345
reasonable, 5, 359, 365, 371, 387, 415 science, 28, 30, 90, 97, 110, 118, 125,
reconstruction 133–139, 142, 148, 155–156,
hypothetical, 98 326–327, 345
linguistic, 108 British, 97
reflection, 46 concept of, 148
Reich-Ranicki, Marcel, 31 contemporary, English-dominated,
Reid, Thomas, 14–15, 320–321, 337, 340, 192
346, 354–358, 359, 359–363 empirical, 89, 388–389
religion, 90, 136, 155 experimental, 15, 49
experience in, 65–74 history of, 98
philosopher of, 72 language of, 30
religions, 72 modern, 119
religious conversion, French book physical, 133
of, 72 popular, 30, 125–127, 156, 313–316,
religious experience, 65–74 326
Reppen, Randi, 408 sciences, 133–149
request, routinized, 182 natural, 139
research, 97 scientific, adj, 12, 113
cross-linguistic, cross-cultural and scientific discourse, 110, 127, 147
cross-temporal, 144 scientific knowledge, 137
Restoration Science, 136 scientific method, 16
Rigaud, Stephen Peter, 48 scientific writings, 133–135
right, 5, 19, 21 scientists, 87, 118, 136, 324, 326
Robertson, Frederick William, 318 Anglophone, 27, 326
Robinson, Jonathan, ed., 72 empirical, 388–389
Roman Catholics, 136 experimental, 50
Romantic era, 53 seventeenth century, 91
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 330–331 scienza, (roughly, ‘science’, It), 345
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 27, 338 Scottish thought, 97
Royal Society, 15–16, 45–46, 87, 102, search engines, 404. See also Google
108, 110, 136, 141–142 searches; Yahoo searches
publicists, 50 Searle, John, 58–65. See also perspective
Russell, Bertrand, 6–8 Sedmak, Clemens, 380
Russian, 20, 26, 28–29, 31, 32, 72, 82, self, the, 59, 327
88–89, 127, 216, 345 self-experience, 49–50
prism of, 29 self-observation(s), 48–49, 52, 57, 61, 82
INDEX 457
semantic analysis, 89, 395–406 sens (roughly, ‘sense’, Fr), 154–155, 191,
diachronic (historical), 98 378–381, 388
of cultural keywords, 131 sens de l’humour, (roughly, ‘sense of
qualitative, 121, 395–406 humor’, Fr) 188
quantitative, 395–406 sens z_ ycia (meaning of life, Po), 388
shift, 43–44, 54–58, 317 sense, 149–391, 151–152, 154, 191, 269,
synchronic, 98 326, 359, 372–391, 376, 377
semantic change, 101–102, 331 a, 154
semantic developments, acute, 302–312, 377, 413
post-Enlightenment, 54 and quantifiers, 376
semantic distinctions, 109, 188, 381 clear, 293–302, 325
semantic explications, 17, 19, 21 countable, 155, 160
semantic formula, 180 deep, 231–242, 412
semantic formulae, 17, 272 discourse of, 151–183
semantic history, 131, 138, 354, 372 enough, 376–377
of evidence, 144 false, 277–279
of words, 145 good, 184–185, 212, 340
semantic hypotheses, 92, 242, 310, 396, 400 great, 262–269, 412
testing and validating, 396–406 have a, 169–176
investigating semantic intuitions, have, 372–377, 385
396–406 keen, 279–292, 413
analysing examples in context, 396–406 making, 377–391
semantic implications, 231 moral, 313–367
semantic intuitions, 20, 395–396 real, 269–277
semantic link, 160 sharp, 242–250
semantic methodology, 16, 144–145 show, 385
semantic mismatch, 381 strong, 212–230, 325, 413,vs. deep
semantic molecules, 407–408 sense, 402–403
semantic patterns, 403 there is a, 176–178
semantic relations, network of, 92, 230, wonderful, 412
402 sense, vb, 159–162
semantic shift, 54–57, 317, 323, 372 sense, n, 3, 10, 11, 14, 19, 149–391, 152
semantic theory, 20 a, 155, 234
semantically unitary, 349 common, 152
semanticists, 16 countable, 160
formal, 21 experiential, 58
semantics modern, 42
conceptual, 20 plain, 154
contemporary, 21 Shakespearean, 61, 74
cross-linguistic, 389 sharp, 242–250
cultural, 4 the concept of, 151
historical, 98, 101, 131 sense of
lexical and cultural, 92 bodily (quasi-sensory) implications
linguistic, 3, 323 of, 234
sensation, 46, 55, 57 duty, 202–204
unexpected and momentary, 244 family, 220–222
sensations, 45, 47, 57, 180, 191, 221, 316 happiness, 210–211
bodily, 181–182, 183, 315, 316 history, 204–209
internal bodily, 163 humor, 184–192, 242–
quasi-bodily, 221 identity, 193–194, 220–222
458 INDEX
sense of (continued) perspective, 52

joy, 209–211 philosophical discourse, 45
obligation, 202–204 philosophical discussions, 90
place, 204–209 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 9,
purpose, 212–217 317–318, 326, 360
reality, 204–209 Shakespeare, William, 8, 34–38, 44,
responsibility, 203 102, 112
right and wrong, 313–316, 324–326, 359 and his contemporaries, 42
self, 192–198, 218–220 Shakespearean experience, 77, 84, 86
time, 204–209, 242 Shakespeare’s ocular proof, 102, 112
urgency, 202–204 Shapin, Steven, 45, 50, 110
what, 162 Shapiro, Barbara, 111, 136–137, 139
when, 377 shared experience, 76–77. See also
senses, 155 experience
five, 321 sharp sense of, 242–250
the, 152–153, 156, 320–322 desolation, dislocation, relief, joy,
senses, 10, 14–15, 31, 45–46, 108, 243–244
182, 191 disappointment, loss, 242, 243–244
emphasis on, 20 humor/humour, 242, 247–249
external, 318–319 observation, 242, 246–250
five, 152, 157–158, 176, 191, 318–319, smell, 245–247
321, 323 the ridiculous, propriety, right and
internal, 318–319 wrong, 247–249
the, 152, 191, 316 with emotion terms, 311
sensible, 368–372, 387 shı` f ei gu
an (roughly, ‘moral sense’,
pedagogical potential, 368 Ch), 314–315
primarily a pattern of behaviour, 369 Shmelev, A., 388
sensibility, 372–373, 376 Shweder, Richard A., 4, 327
senso (roughly, ‘sense, meaning’, It), 388 Shweder, Mahaptra and Miller, 323
senso común, (roughly, ‘common Sibbes, Richard, 65, 67, 70
sense’, Sp), 329 sight, 45, 47, 51, 108, 157
sensory (bodily) channels, 160 Simmons, Alison. 2003, 63
sentence(s) Singapore English, 5
first-person, 79 Sinn (roughly, ‘sense’, Ge), 380–381
third-person, 79, 170 situations, 58, 230
sixteenth or seventeenth century, 98 sixteenth century, 31, 36–38, 43, 47, 56,
sentido (roughly, ‘sense, meaning’, 98, 102–106, 140, 355
Sp), 388 slučaj (case or event, Ru), 26
seventeenth century, 15–16, 36, 43–44, Smith, Adam, 319
47–49, 50, 52, 56, 61, 65, 101–102, Smith, Sir Thomas, 141
105–111, 114, 118, 121, 131–132, social advancement, 5
136–148, 155, 318, 338 social life, 90
collective consciousness, 44 social science, 346, 353
dictionary of French, 35 social space, shared, 5
discourse of experience, 44 soldiers, 77
epistemological discourse, 47 Solomon, Robert C., and Kathleen
English empiricist individualism, 50 Higgins, 64
experimental science, 45, 49 Sophists, 10
literature, 37 sources, 113
shift (in meaning), 56 Spanish, 314–315, 329, 388
INDEX 459
spatial relation, 157 thought processes, 47

speech and making sense, 383 thought world, 30
speech community, 99 Tieck, Johann Ludwig, 27
Spencer, Herbert, 322 tool(s), 30
sports, 201 analytical, 59, 98, 131, 202, 377, 403
Stillingfleet, 137 conceptual, 147
strong sense of culture-independent, 191
commitment, purpose, responsibility, for thought and communication, 22, 99,
213, 215, 216, 217, 224, 230, 233 326
family, 219–221, 230 Google, 395–406
guilt, humiliation, 223, 225, 230 linguistic, 405
identity, 218–221, 230 NSM, 395–406 (see also natural
justice, 213, 215, 216, 217, 224, semantic metalanguage)
230–231 Web, 405
loyalty, 213, 215, 216, 217, 224, 230 tourism, 32–33
relief, 224–225, 230 tradition
right and wrong, 213–214, 230, 325 cultural, 72, 89, 327
self, 218–222, 230 empiricist, 10, 11
shame, 222–226, 230 generativist, 20–21
the sadness of the occasion, 228–229, linguistic and conceptual, 326
230 ethnophilosophical, 65
the sufferings of Christ, 228–229, 230 See also Anglo tradition
See also collocations translation, 31
strong sense that, 226–228, 230 Traugott, Elizabeth Closs, and Richard B.
Stubbs, Michael, 407 Dasher, 101
subject, conscious, 47 truth, 97
sud’ba (roughly, ‘fate’, Ru), 388 and empirical facts, 145–146
support, 103, 115–119 cultural, 388
S´wiadectwa (roughly, ‘testimony’, Ru), 74 search for, 10
universal, 388
Taves, Ann, 65, 70 truths, 145
Taylor, Charles, 389–391 twentieth century, 36, 38, 58–59,
Terri Schiavo case, 116–118 102–103, 114–119, 120–121, 139,
testimony, personal 70–71, 102, 106 145–149, 155, 316, 323, 353–354,
that-clause, 172, 226, 229 365
Theobald, Douglas, 138 twenty-first century, 38, 59, 102–103,
theory, 7, 12–16 114–119, 155, 316, 323, 354, 365,
in theory, 13 367
in theory and modal verbs, 14
thinking, 117, 316, 378, 409. See also undergoer, 31, 37, 42
Anglo thinking United Kingdom, 186
thirteenth century, 141 United States, 5, 186, 188, 331
thought, 17, 43 universal, 189, 192, 313–315, 327
a, 57, 220, 226 universal human concepts, 16, 27,
the, 223, 237 390–391, 414
See also Anglo thought
thoughts, 48, 61, 69 value(s), 185
conscious, 87 and attitudes, 258–259
experiencer’s, 227, 301 core, 329
pattern of, 216, 241 cultural, 187, 191, 329, 345
460 INDEX
value(s), (continued) Wierzbicka, Anna, 4, 5, 17, 20–21, 29, 102,

of Anglo culture, 328 115, 117, 147, 276, 314, 325, 371,
self-defining, 196 379, 387, 388
See also Anglo values Wilkins, David, 50
Van Caenegem, R. C., 140 Wilkins, John, 101, 108
Van Fraassen, Bas C., 7–9 will- and goal-related collocations, 217,
Van Holthoon and Olson, 331, 344, 224
346, 353 will- and goal-related nouns, 215
Van Kessel, Peter, 144, 338–339, will- and goal-related uses, 221
344–345, 357 Willesby, 50
Van Leeuwen, Henry, 111, 131 Willey, Keith, 188
verbal cues, 3 Williams, Raymond, 43
verbal and conceptual history, 5 Williamson, Geordie, 152
verbs, 193, 243, 262 wisdom, 40
auxiliary, 273 Wissenschaft (roughly, ‘science’, Ge), 90,
causative, 334 345
modal, 333, 334 wit, 189
physical-activity, 407 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 26–27, 87
speech act, 334 Wood, Ellen Meiksins, 7
Vico, Giambattista, 338, 344 Woolhouse, Roger, 6–7, 10
Vier, Peter C, 105 word meanings, 22
Voegelin, Eric, 354 word order, 17
Voltaire, 6, 360–361 words
Von Humboldt, Wilhelm, 4 English-specific, 63
vosprijatija (roughly, ‘perceptions’, evaluative, 195
Ru), 29 invisible, 5
vpečatlenija (roughly, ‘impressions’, worldview, 4, 71, 77, 89, 330
Ru) 29 empiricist, 406
See also Anglo worldview
want, 237–238, 280–285, 308 writers, sixteenth, seventeenth, or
wanting, 226 eighteenth century, 98
war experience, 74–77 Wycliff, John, 102–103
ways of speaking, English, 152
way(s) of thinking, 16, 44, 55–52, 59, 98, Yahoo searches, 404–405
101, 227, 332 Yolton, John W, 50, 90–91
English, 152
English speakers’, 31 zdravyj smysl, (roughly, ‘healthy
Wesley, John, 58, 65–68, 70–71 judgment’, Ru), 345

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Experience, Evidence,

Oxford New York

Copyright # 2010 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

1. Making the Familiar Look Foreign, 3

Part II. Experience and Evidence

2. Experience: An English Keyword and a Key Cultural Theme, 25

The Verb to Experience: Evidence for the Semantic Shift, 54

3. Evidence: Words, Ideas, and Cultural Practices, 94

Part III. Sense

4. The Discourse of Sense and the Legacy of “British Empiricism,” 151

5. A Sense of Humor, a Sense of Self, and Similar Expressions, 184

6. A Strong Sense, a Deep Sense, and Similar Expressions, 212

3. A Sharp Sense (of Something), 242

7. Moral Sense, 313

8. Common Sense, 328

9. From Having Sense to Making Sense, 368

Part IV. Phraseology, Semantics, and Corpus Linguistics

Making the Familiar Look Foreign

1.1. Mere Words or Keys to a Cultural World?

as an anthropologist rather than a linguist, he understandably did not see the

1.2. The Cultural and Historical Baggage of English

1.3. The Legacy of “British Empiricism”

English is saturated with “British empiricism”. The phrase “British empiricism”

Commenting on this passage, British philosopher Roger Woolhouse under-

But linguistic evidence is, in an important sense, on Russell’s side. Whatever

The Chymistry of the Galenical Tribe is a ridiculous . . . and . . . dangerous Empericism

Gradually, however, ﬁrst a neutral and then a positive meaning of empirical

The triumph of the new meaning of empiricism is reﬂected in Huxley’s statement,

All true science begins with empiricism. (1881)

The prescriptions of the vulgar-wise, like those of the Empiricists. (1698–1712)

Englishness and National Culture aims to demonstrate a profound and hardly

1.4. The English Word Empirical and the French

The differences between contemporary English empirical (always positive) and

A. L’astrologie est un rapport naı̈f et empirique au cosmos (Astrology is a naı̈ve

The cultural image of empiricism that emerges from COBUILD’s Bank of

1.5. ‘Theory’, ‘Common Sense’, and the Reliability

All well and good in theory, but . . .

Another feature that is characteristic of modern English discourse is the use

In theory, we could decide . . . In practice . . .

Thomas Reid was an enormously popular writer in the English-speaking

Individual scientists . . . had already realized the importance of the experimental

1.6. Natural Semantic Metalanguage as an Effective

The lexicon of a language is a treasury of meanings. If these meanings can be

TABLE 1.1. Table of Semantic Primes: English and French Versions

English Version French Version

I, YOU, SOMEONE, SOMETHING/ MOI, TOI, QUELQU’UN, substantives

KIND, PART TYPE DE, PARTIE relational substantives

THIS, THE SAME, OTHER/ELSE CE, LE MÊME, AUTRE determiners

GOOD, BAD BON/BIEN, MAUVAIS/MAL evaluators

BIG, SMALL GRAND, PETIT descriptors

THINK, KNOW, WANT, FEEL, PENSER, SAVOIR, VOULOUR, mental predicates

SAY, WORDS, TRUE DIRE, MOTS, VRAI speech

TO BE (SOMEWHERE), THERE IS/ ÊTRE (QUELQUE PART), IL Y A, location, existence,

LIVE, DIE VIVRE, MOURIR life and death

WHEN/TIME, NOW, BEFORE, QUAND, MAINTENANT, AVANT, time

WHERE/PLACE, HERE, ABOVE, OÙ, ICI, AU-DESSUS, AU- space

NOT, MAYBE, CAN, BECAUSE, IF NE . . . PAS, PEUT-ÊTRE, logical concepts

VERY, MORE TRÈS, PLUS intensiﬁer, augmentor

LIKE COMME similarity

empirique (e.g., approach)

empirical (e.g., approach)