follows a grammar which is to a large degree inescapable if statements are to
make sense. I do not invent my own language; my thinking depends on forms
which have come to me ready-made, from beyond the present moment of
consciousness. The constraints of language use, along with its capability for
conveying meaning, imply the existence of communicative beings beyond my
self. To deny that other people exist—in this specific sense—is to deny the
communicability and objectivity, indeed the meaningfulness, of one’s own
sentences.
The reality of other people also may be derived from another aspect of the
language in which we think. Words are to a large extent universals. Concepts
(except for indexicals) transcend particulars; they enable one to refer to an
object or a quality as appearing over again in time and in different contexts;
in short, they are generalized. Apply the test of doubt: “Universals do not exist”
is a statement making use of universals. But a general concept implies a
generalized viewpoint. A merely fragmentary, temporal sliver of consciousness
cannot refer to an experience as “a tree,” or even as “that tree again”; it must
be a consciousness which involves both continuity and generality. How can
my particular fleeting experience give rise to the idea of universals? It must
come to me from outside.
The existence of universals implies the existence of society. A concept car-
ries with it a social stance: not merely of some one other person, but an open
and universalizing viewpoint of a plurality of other persons. Just how many
people this implies is not given. It is more than two; in fact it must be explicitly
unspecified how many it comprises, since concepts imply meaningfulness for
any and every personal stance at all. The concepts which go through one’s
mind are more than fleeting, having significance over and above my particular
moment of thinking. Generality of perspective is at the core of our capacity to
think; and this generality implies a collective, omnipresent social viewpoint.
Third, space exists. Although space is not one of the items primordially
given through the sociological cogito, it may be quickly derived. If there are
other people, not identical with one another in their particularity, they must
exist outside one another. This existing outside cannot be merely in time, since
time is a single dimension which does not itself provide room for simultaneous
plurality. There must be some other dimension in which the multiplicity of
selves exists; and we can call this dimension space.^2
We now have the existence of the time-space world as a firm reality. This
is the material world of obdurate objects in ordinary experience, externally
resistant to one another. One of these objects, the most certain of all, is one’s
own body. A plurality of selves exists, outside one another in space. There are
divisions between me and them; this barrier, as experienced from the inside, is
Epilogue: Sociological Realism^ •^859