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Knowledge of modern discoveries relating to logic would dispel a good deal of the prevailing confusion (which shows itself from time to time in controversies that disfigure the pages of Nature) concerning …
The complaint is as old as the story of the Tower of Babel, and so is the wish that the problem might be solved, if in no other way, by divine intervention (as in the ‘Acts of the Apostles’, II, v) or by simultaneous translation (as at international congresses), or by a discipline of rigorous mathematical logic (as is proposed in the article from which I have taken my quotation).
Psychoanalysis does not allow one to suppose that the mechanics of communication operating through a universal language – whether that language is a universally known natural language, or an artificially produced language such as Esperanto, or the formulations of mathematicians, or the notation of musicians, or even the ‘universal linguistic’ of art itself, the content rather than the vehicle of the content – will be likely to rid us of disfiguring controversy in our attempts to co-operate in scientific achievement. But psychoanalytic experience shows that even the attempt to deal with individual tensions has not been, and is not likely to be, successful in abolishing this controversy.
If the major problem were only the ‘disfiguring’ nature of controversy, the matter would be painful and worth investigation, but in fact far more serious issues are involved than the emergence of phenomena that disfigure the image that men wish to have of those of their number set apart as leaders of scientific and intellectual ability
and integrity. So many controversies are wasteful and manifestly, from the outset, unlikely to issue in any clarification of the matters in dispute; the feature of almost all scientific controversy is the impotence of the disputants