Читать книгу Bentham - Michael Quinn - Страница 12

In Bentham’s central field of interest, law and government, he believed that the question-begging, investigation-frustrating consequences of reliance on misleading or meaningless fictitious entities had been disastrous, and that thorough revision of language and thought was necessary. That revision had a practical, happiness-increasing purpose – remember the pragmatic rationale for accepting the reality of the wall – but he claimed for it the capacity to substitute sense for nonsense in communication by capturing the elements of reality that impacted on welfare. The revision consisted in interpreting the meaningless fictitious entities in which legal and governmental discourse abounded in terms of real entities, and specifically the entities of pleasure and pain. Thus revised and anchored in sensory experience, language became capable of producing truth-bearing propositions,⁸ and discussions of law and policy could engage with what mattered, the experience of pleasure and pain by sensitive agents.