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.If he is an explorer at all, then, though he may be surprised to hear it, healready has something of an explorer s conscience, that is, some contemptfor shoddy work and some self-recrimination for mistakes and omissions.Even without the prospects of fame or remuneration he has at least a slightinclination to do the job properly.Indeed, other things being equal, henow likes exploring for its own sake.At least a corner of his heart is in it.Exploring is, in some measure, an autonomous occupation.It can be asufficient answer to the question What is he engaged in at the moment?to say He is exploring such and such a bit of country , as it would nothave been a sufficient answer to the question about the lost wanderer What is he engaged in at the moment? to say He is roving around andscanning such and such a bit of the country.I hope it is obvious where I want to go from this half-way house.Thought in the near-professional or near-academic sense of the wordstands to thinking in the general sense of the word as exploring andsurveying stand to procedureless searching for the way home.Theoreticalthinking is, in some degree, self-motivated, and it is subject to its owncanons of correct versus incorrect , economical versus uneconomical ,i.e.it has a discipline.The theorist as such has some special equipment andsome special standards, a special conscience, special tastes and a specialhobby.In a word, we can now credit him with that famous Faculty, anIntellect.It does not matter in the least, for my purposes, whether our specimenthinker s intellectual pursuit is that of an historian, a mathematician, aphilosopher, a literary critic, a philatelist, a grammarian or a bird-watcher;and it does not matter in the least, for my purposes, whether he isproficient, moderate or poor at it; whether he is whole-hearted or half-hearted in it; whether he is a professional or an amateur; or whether he isan adult or an adolescent.If he can do intellectual work at all, he knowswhat it is to get something wrong, and he knows what it is to be in amuddle; and knowing this, he also cares, however slightly, about gettingthings right and getting things sorted out.He would prefer to be out of 444 COLLECTED PAPERS: VOLUME 2the muddle, and he apologizes for the mistake.He may sulk under adversecriticism, but he can still distinguish just from unjust criticism.Part of what I am saying is that, in its specialist sense, thought, i.e.intellectual work, has a discipline or rather a battery of disciplines ofits own.But this assertion is liable to be misconstrued in two quitedifferent ways.(1) First, it is, I think, sometimes assumed that there is just one type ofintellectual fault against which the thinker must have been trained andmust now be wary, namely breach of the rules of Logic.Doubtlessfallaciousness in reasoning is, in some important way, the most radicalthing that can be wrong with a person s theoretical thinking.But in onescientist s criticism of the theory of another scientist, or in one historian scriticism of the work of another historian, accusations of formal fallacy arepretty rare.The faults that are actually found there belong to a wide rangeof different types, with most of which the formal logician has no officialconcern.A first-rate mathematician and a first-rate literary critic mightshare the one intellectual virtue of arguing impeccably, while their otherintellectual virtues could be so disparate that neither could cope evenpuerilely with the problems of the other.Each thinks scrupulously insidehis own field, but most of their scruples are of entirely different kinds.Though equally vigilant against fallacy, they also take quite different sortsof precautions against quite different sorts of mistakes, muddles andomissions.Perhaps our inherited tendency to equate rationality with thecapacity to prove theorems or to deduce conclusions from premisses isconnected with this assumption that fallaciousness, because, maybe themost radical, is in the last resort the only, fault that a theorist can be guiltyof, an assumption as far-fetched as the idea that head-on collisions are thesole penalties of bad driving on the highway.(2) There is a second way in which it would be quite natural tomisconstrue my military metaphor of the disciplines of intellectualwork.It might be taken to imply or suggest that the thinking of the reallyhigh-grade theorist moves distressingly unlike our own thinking assoldiers move on the barrack-square.One evolution is smartly succeededby another evolution, one controlled pace forward is smoothly succeededby one controlled step to the right, and so on.There is indeed somethinking which does go like this, namely what we do when adding,subtracting, multiplying and dividing.Here we can make controlled stepafter controlled step without hesitancy or loss of direction
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