nies of various kinds, and so on. Presumably an adequate theory of meaning should apply to all these uses of language, since they are all meaningful uses of language in any ordinary sense of the term; but it is hard to see how the Verification Theory could be extended to cover them. Reply The positivists acknowledged that they were addressing meaning only in a restricted sense; they called it "cognitive" meaning. To be "cognitively" meaningful is roughly to be a statement of fact. Questions, commands, and lines of poetry are not fact-stating or descriptive in that sense, even though they have important linguistic functions and are "meaningful" in the ordi- nary sense as opposed to gibberish. The restriction to "cognitive" meaning was fine for the positivists' larger metaphysical and anti-metaphysical purposes, but from our point of view, the elucidation of linguistic meaning generally, it is damaging. A theory of
III The scarcity principle is most likely to hold true under two optimizing condi- tions. First, scarce items are heightened in value when they are newly scarce. That is, we value those things that have become recently restricted more than those that were restricted all along. Second, we are most attracted to scarce re- sources when we compete with others for them. III It is difficult to steel ourselves cognitively against scarcity pressures because they have an emotion-arousing quality that makes thinking difficult. In de- fense, we might try to be alert to a rush of arousal in situations involving scarcity. Once alerted, we can take steps to calm the arousal and assess the merits of the opportunity in terms of why we want it. Study Questions Content Mastery 1
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