Dear Steve, Andy, Eric, Martin and Wolff-Michael:
Steve, I hope you are not too put off by being told to go read stuff (by Ana, by Andy, I will refrain!). That used to really annoy me; particularly because it was often stuff I'd read donkey's ears ago. But Andy (who I'm guessing has NOT actually read Langer) did turn me on, in his brusque way, to a lot of stuff that was worth reading (e.g. Colpietro on Peirce) and more than a few things that are worth re-reading.
I think the way you do it is better, though; you put in exactly the quotes you want discussed. It's not only a good way to focus the discussion; it means that a lot of folks who for one reason or another can't get to the horse's mouth are still invited to the party.
Martin-exactly! LSV makes the point (not in so many words) that the term "holophrase" is anachronistic, teleogical, "intentionalist": the child does not know what a phrase is. But the fact that the child can INTEND to use a phrase as a verbal gesture and have it SOUND like a whole phrase is what allows development, and it's also what ensures that development takes place from the outside-in, from pragmatics to semantics, from discourse to grammar, and from sound to meaning.
eric--I'm afraid that's really all I meant. I meant that children use words as complexes, and adults understand them as concepts. When a child says "day" it often means "from the time I get up till the time I go to bed" rather than "twenty-four hours". When a child says "morning" it often means "from breakfast until lunch" rather than from 12:00 am to 12:00 pm. But the circumstance that adults and children use the same words and mean different things and even in different ways does not preclude communication; it merely enables development.
Michael, I am afraid I am thoroughly intentionalist; I think of it as just being practical, though. It's all about understanding classroom discourse. But let me return to the stuff Steve helpfully laid before us.
I think Langer, like many people of that time was very interested in the essential dfference between animals and humans. This was something of an obsession in linguistics for a good century following Darwin, and it seems to me that it’s what the distinction between signals and symbols is all about.
Pavlov likes to think of all symbols as just being second order signals. If a symbol is just a cortical signal touched off by a sensori-motor signal, or a subcortical signal touched off by a cortical one, then the difference between animals and humans can be shown to be essentially non-essential.
Formalists (e.g. Saussure, Jakobson, Liberman and Chomsky) like to think of symbols as sui generis. If symbols are entirely arbitrary in their relationship to external meanings, then their structure reflects nothing more and nothing less than the uniquely human structure of the human mind.
As usual, I think the answer lies not somewhere in the middle but far beyond both positions simultaneously. On the one hand, I am perfectly comfortable with Volosinov’s assertion that in Moscow snowfall in May 'stands for' or 'means' six more weeks of winter, and that it has meant that since long before there was Moscow and even before there was man.
On the other, I am happy to accept that the structure of Chinese reflects something not only uniquely human but even something uniquely Chinese. When a Korean teacher in my data constructs sentences that put participants before processes they are saying something that is recognizeably Korean to me, just as English speakers reflect something quite Anglocentric in their insistance on beginning so many of their sentences with 'I' (this is why McCain sounded sounded more petulant, but also more American, than Obama the other night, when he kept saying 'I know how to do it, my friends'). What is reflected is not the structure of the individual mind but rather the social one.
It seems to me that since just about everything we know in the world can be said to 'stand for' something else, the way in which we classify signs is really very much a function of what we want to do with what we know.
The questions I work with are more concerned with muddling up the categories of 'signal' and 'symbol' than with clearly separating them out. I want to know how:
a) how cultures develop signs that are natural (signals) into those that are social (symbols),
b) how infants reverse engineer this without the centuries of historical time that appear to be required by the original cultural process
c) how school children learning a foreign language can reverse engineer (reverse-reverse engineer?) this without the thickly organized cultural context that appears to be required by the ontogenetic process.
Obviously, it’s in my interest to exaggerate the LINKEDNESS rather than the DISTINCTNESS of these processes, including the first one. But let me start with the last one. Here's some data I've got on hand, roughly translated from the Korean (Andy will recognize it.)
T: Now, open your textbook 'Now We’re First Graders' to page 24. See, there are a bunch of pictures. They have little circles on them, don’t they?
Ss: Yes.
This utterance, and in fact a LOT of teacher utterances, and virtually ALL lessons, can be divided into three different functions, according to Jay Lemke:
a) Getting attention. 'Hi!' 'Look!' 'Open your books!'
b) Giving information: 'I’m Mr. K.' 'This is a test tube.' 'See, there are a bunch of pictures.'
c) Checking comprehension: 'And you?' 'What’s in it?' 'They have little circles on them, don’t they?'
And these functions correspond to grammatical forms, that is, symbolic strings. The typical symbolic string for realizing a) is a greeting or a command; the usual way in which b) is realized is using a declarative or a statement; the canonical realization of c) is by some kind of question.
I think they also correspond to three intonation contours, that is, indexical strings. The typical indexical string for realizing a) is DOWN intonation, the usual way in which b) is realized is a kind of FLAT intonation (though it's actually a gradual downward slope due to the natural decline of air pressure in the lungs when we speak) and the canonical realization of c) is some sort of UP intonation.
We can make some generalizations about the 'iconic' strings too by just looking at how long the strings of noise between the change of speakers is (that is, the turns, or utterances). Statistically speaking, commands tend to be shorter, statements much longer, and questions somewhere in between.
But how do we account for the endless permutations that allow us to develop one kind of thing out of another? Well, of course, we can do all these things non-canonically. You can get attention by saying 'I want you all to look up here' or even 'May I have your attention PLEASE!' But when you do this, the grammatical form may be that of a statement or a question but the intonation is clearly commanding.
The same thing is true when we give information by asking questions (as teachers often do) or giving commands ('Let me tell you that…', or my own compulsive verbal tic, which is 'I want to argue that...') or when we check understanding by using commands ('Tell me about...') or making statements ('This is a…?'). Your intonation gives you away.
There are other intervening variables that complicate the picture, to be sure: for example, we use UP intonation to refer back to old or known information ('Right?') but we use DOWN intonation to move forward into the next activity ('Right!'), and so there are endless permutations. Yes/no questions have rather different intonational patterns (much more uniformly canonical) than wh-questions (which can be DOWN, as in 'Where were you born?' and also UP as in 'Where did you say you were born?'). But within these permutations there appear to be underlying regularities. And these regularities are cross-linguistic to some extent.
So the permutations between DOWN, FLAT, and UP are virtually infinite, and so are the variations we can produce by coloring a command like a question, a statement like a command, and a question like a statement. Every time I open my mug, the great printer driver in my head mentally selects 'millions of colors'. I can do this even though the semiotic resources available in my 'printer' CAN be reduced, in theory, to three primary colors, plus black and white (iconic, indexical, and symbolic, plus volume and pitch).
One of the things that made the whole nineteenth century impressionist movement in oil painting possible was the invention of lead and tin tubes filled with ready mixed oil paint. Prior to that you had to grind your own colors and mix them with linseed oil yourself.
Since the colors came ready-mixed, you might think that this innovation meant rather less mixing of colors, and of course that's probably true for some painters. I had a friend in Paris who used to base his color schemes on whatever was easiest to shop-lift. But in the long run the invention of metal tubes meant MORE chromaticism in painting and not less.
Children and foreign students seem to me to choose their intonational patterns (and to some extent also their grammatical patterns) in much the same light-fingered way. Once people master grammar and intonation it is no more difficult to use them noncanonically than it is to make commands long and statements short. I think THAT’S the reason for the descriptive richness, the abundant chromaticism, we find in Peirce, that so appalled Langer
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
PS: Remarks on Langer's remarks below IN CAPS. Not because I'm in a bad mood, but just because it's the only way to put EMPHASIS when you're doing text-only.
"Symbols are not proxy for their objects, but are **vehicles for the conception of objects**. To conceive a thing or a situation is not the same thing as to "react toward it" overtly, or to be aware of its presence. In talking **about** things we have conceptions of them, not the things themselves; and **it is the conceptions, not the things, that symbols directly "mean." Behavior toward conceptions is what words normally evoke; this is the typical process of thinking. [continuing ...]
I'M AFRAID I FIND THIS A LOT LESS IMPRESSIVE THAN YOU DO. FIRST OF ALL, THERE IS THE SUGGESTION THAT ALL SYMBOLS ARE NOUNS, BECAUSE THEY ARE ALL VEHICLES FOR THE CONCEPTION OF OBJECTS. MOST SYMBOLS ARE NOT NOUNS.
TAKE A LOOK AT THE FIFTY MOST COMMON WORDS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. RIGHT HERE:
1 THE
2 OF
3 AND
4 TO
5 A
6 IN
7 THAT
8 IS
9 IT
10 FOR
11 WAS
12 I
13 ON
14 WITH
15 AS
16 BE
17 HE
18 YOU
19 AT
20 BY
21 ARE
22 THIS
23 HAVE
24 BUT
25 NOT
26 FROM
27 HAD
28 HIS
29 THEY
30 OR
31 WHICH
32 AN
33 SHE
34 WERE
35 HER
36 WE
37 ONE
38 THERE
39 ALL
40 BEEN
41 THEIR
42 IF
43 HAS
44 WILL
45 SO
46 WOULD
47 NO
48 WHAT
49 CAN
50 WHEN
NOT TOO MANY VEHICLES FOR THE CONCEPTION OF OBJECTS THERE, I'D SAY.
BY THE WAY SIGNALS ARE NOT PROXIES FOR OBJECTS EITHER. SIGNALS ARE ALSO VEHICLES FOR THE CONCEPTION OF STUFF. IN FACT, GESTURES ARE GENERALLY A LOT BETTER AT CONCEIVING OBJECTS THAN SYMBOLS ARE.
THIS REMINDS ME OF SWIFT SAYING THAT PEOPLE USE WORDS BECAUSE IT'S TOO DAMN HEAVY TO CARRY AROUND THE THINGS THEMSELVES. SOMEWHERE IN THIS IS A THE OLD EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IDEA OF WORDS AS COINS, NO?.
"Of course a word can be used as a sign [signal], but that is not its primary role. Its signific character has to be indicated by some special modification - by a tone of voice, a gesture (such as pointing or staring), or the location of a placard bearing the word. In it itself it is a symbol, associated with the conception* [see her footnote below], not directly with a public object or event.
THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I WAS CRITICIZING, I'M AFRAID: THE IDEA THAT WE CAN SOMEHOW TALK ABOUT THE CONCEPTUAL CONTENT OF WORDS INDEPENDENTLY OF THEIR PHYSICALITY.
IT'S THE OLD IDEA OF PURE MEANING WITHOUT THE FILTH OF PRONUNCIATION, HOLY SPIRITUAL LANGUAGE ESSENCES UNSULLIED BY ACTUAL VOCABULARY AND PRONUNCIATION.
(MY PROBLEM IS THAT I LOVE FILTH. I REVEL IN PRONUNCIATION. SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE WORDS. BUT I THINK EVEN LANGER HAS TROUBLE THINKING OF UTTERANCE UTTERLY SHORN OF ANY PUBLIC EVENTS; YOU NOTICE SHE'S A BIT SHORT ON EXAMPLES HERE!)
The fundamental difference between signs and symbols is this difference of association, and consequently of their **use** by the third party to the meaning function, the subject; signs **announce** their objects to him, whereas symbols **lead him to conceive** their objects. The fact that the same item - say, the little mouthy noise we can a "word" - may serve in either capacity, does not obliterate the cardinal distinction between the two functions it may assume."
NO, THAT'S RIGHT. WHAT OBLITERATES THE CARDINAL DISTINCTION IS THAT ONE OF THEM DEVELOPS INTO THE OTHER.
*[footnote]: "Note that I have called the terms of our thinking conceptions, not concepts. Concepts are abstract forms embodied in conceptions; their bare presentation may be approximated by so-called "abstract thought," but in ordinary mental life they no more figure as naked factors than skeletons that are seen walking the street. Concepts, like decent living skeletons, are always embodied - sometimes rather too much. I shall return to the topic of pure concepts later on, in discussing communication." (pg 49)
OF COURSE, A NUMBER IS "DISEMBODIED" WITH RESPECT TO AN ACTUAL GROUP OF OBJECTS, AND A GROUP OF OBJECTS IS "DISEMBODIED" WITH RESPECT TO THE SENSUOUS PHYSICAL ACTIVITY OF COUNTING THEM.
BUT THERE IS NO REASON TO ASSUME A LIMIT TO THE PROCESS OF DISEMBODIMENT: FOR EXAMPLE, ALGEBRAIC RELATIONSHIPS ARE DISEMBODIED WITH RESPECT TO NUMBERS.
I THINK THAT THE RELATIONSHIP OF "CONCEPTS" TO "CONCEPTUALIZATIONS" CAN BE CONCEIVED OF IN THE SAME WAY. THE POINT IS NOT THAT THEY ARE DISTINCT; IT'S THAT THEY ARE ALWAYS LINKED.
Here is a another example of her delightful writing - our friend Hegel among others could have used more of this in his - and her answer to my question about animals and signals, and things like traffic lights that are lit red.
"Now, just as in nature certain events are correlated, so that the less important may be taken as signs of the more important [her explanation for a correlation of two things in nature becoming a signal is that one is more interesting than the other, but the other more available, causing a subject to look at the latter for information about the former], so we may also **produce** arbitrary events purposely correlated with important ones that are to be their meaning. A whistle means that the train is about to start. A gunshot means that the sun is just setting. A crepe on the door means someone has just died. These are artificial signs [as opposed to natural signs, **symptoms** of states of affairs - sg], for they are not part of a condition of which they naturally signify the remainder, or something in the remainder. Their logical relation to their objects, however, is the same as that of natural signs--a one-to-one correspondence of sign and
object, by virtue of which the interpretant, who is interested in the latter and perceives the former, may apprehend the existence of the term that interests him. [continuing ...]
I DON'T AGREE THAT THE LOGICAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN A GUNSHOT AND THE SUNSET IS THE SAME AS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN A GUNSHOT AND THE SIGHT OF BLOOD. I THINK THIS REFLECTS A PURELY FORMAL AND FUNDAMENTALLY UNINTERESTING VIEW OF LOGIC.
Discussing pictures of things: "... **the picture is essentially a symbol, not a duplicate, of which it represents." (pg 55).
THERE ARE PICTURES AND PICTURES.
Referring to pictures and words and all symbols: "**That which all adequate conceptions of an object must have in common, is the concept of the object**." (pg 58).
NO, THIS MEANS THAT THE ARCHETYPICAL MEANING IS A NOUN. THAT'S NOT TRUE. THE ARCHETYPICAL MEANING, STATISTICALLY SPEAKING, IS "THE" OR "THIS" OR "THAT" OR "THERE" OR "AND" OR "OF". IF WE WANT TO SPEAK MORE ONTEGENETICALLY, IT'S CRYING, LAUGHING, OR BABBLING. IF WE WANT TO SPEAK PHYLOGENETICALLY, IT MIGHT BE 'WELL" OR "WOW" OR "OH". IT IS NOT AT ALL HELPFUL TO THINK OF ANY OF THESE MEANINGS AS OBJECTS.
THE NEXT QUOTE IS A VERY GOOD EXAMPLE OF THE MONETARY CONCEPTION OF WORDS THAT MOST WESTERN LINGUISTS HAVE HAD SINCE THE DAYS OF SWIFT AND CONDILLAC.
"Another recommendation for words is that they have no value except as symbols (or signs); in themselves they are completely trivial. This is a greater advantage than philosophers of language generally realize. A symbol which interests us **also** as an object is distracting. It does not convey its meaning without obstruction. For instance, if the word "plenty" were replaced by a succulent, ripe, real peach, few people would attend entirely to the mere concept **quite enough** when confronted with such a symbol. The more barren and indifferent the symbol, the greater is its semantic power. Peaches are too good to act as words; we are too much interested in peaches themselves. But little noises are ideal conveyors of concepts, for they give us nothing but their meaning. That is the source of the "transparency" of language, on which several scholars have remarked. Vocables in themselves are so worthless that we cease to be aware of their
physical presence at all, and become aware only of their connotations, denotations, or other meanings. Our conceptual activity seems to flow **through** them, rather than merely to accompany them, as it accompanies other experiences that we endow with significance. They fail to impress us as "experiences" in their own right, unless we have difficult in using them as words, as we do with a foreign language or a technical jargon until we have mastered it." (pg 62)
"Charles Peirce, who was probably the first person to concern himself seriously with semantics, began by making an inventory of all "symbol-situations," in the hope that when all possible meanings of "meaning" were herded together, they would show empirical differentiae whereby one could divide the sheep from the goats. But the obstreperous flock, instead of falling neatly into a few classes, each according to its kind, divided into the most terrifying order of icons, qualisigns, legisigns, semes, phemes, and delomes, and there is but cold comfort in his assurance that his original 59,049 types can really be boiled down to a mere sixty-six." (pg 43).
IT LOOKS LIKE SHE'S READ ABOUT PEIRCE INSTEAD OF ACTUALLY READING HIM. A LOT OF PEOPLE MAKE THAT MISTAKE.
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Received on Thu Oct 9 18:58 PDT 2008
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