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On Philosophy in a New Key (1942), ch. 1-5, plus as background most of us looked at Langer’s main influence Ernst Cassirer via his An Essay on Man (1944), ch. 1-5. Featuring Mark, Wes, Dylan, and Seth.
What is human nature, and why does natural science have such trouble studying it? Cassirer’s massive, three-volume Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923-1929) provides the blueprint and starting point for these more popular works that we’ll be reading over our next three episodes. In this episode we lay out the arguments for man as “homo symbolicus,” the symbol-making creature. This is an epistemological view about how we know the world (Cassirer was a neo-Kantian), and also a theory contra Darwinists that argued that all action must have originated for instrumental reasons: to help us survive. We focus on Langer’s views about speech and non-verbal symbolism like pictures.
In ep. 291, we’ll go on to discuss Cassirer and Langer’s views of ritual and myth-making, and in ep. 292 we’ll deal with Langer’s philosophy of art, which was really our reason for choosing this topic: to add another perspective to our recent treatments of aesthetics. But the way Langer’s book built up its case gradually made us unwilling to simply jump to the later chapters on art, and given the debt that Langer acknowledges to Cassirer, and the fact that Cassirer wrote his own popularization at around the same time (as one of his final works; he died in 1945), made us want to look to Cassirer’s parallel account. The two books read very similarly, with lots of references to then-contemporary science surrounding language acquisition, studies of symbolic abilities in animals and impaired people, etc. They each begin with a polemic chapter explaining how the scientific world-view that has been so successful in producing results in the physical sciences has hit a dead-end with regard to humanistic problems. Cassirer stresses the philosophical problem of man’s knowledge of himself, while Langer talks similarly to Lakatos or Kuhn in positing that the generative ideas behind historical philosophy (i.e. the mind-body distinction and consequent use of “fact” as the goal of physical science) have run dry, and that a “new key” is needed to open a new phase in philosophy: the symbol.
Langer explicitly considers Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and how that work laid out the principle of logical positivism: If you can’t put something in language, which is reducible to statements about states of affairs of the world, then you should just be silent. For Langer, explicitly denotative language where every word has a precise, defined meaning is just one kind of symbolism, and so many of our meanings can’t be conveyed in language: Thus the need for art, and ritual, and spontaneous, expressive utterances, which are in fact what are required for us to have systemic language.
Langer (and Cassirer; there’s a comparable point in his text for most of the points made here about Langer) distinguishes between signs and symbols. Signs are indicators, and can even be symptoms, as in smoke is a sign of fire. But signs proper are intentional communications for a purpose, like an animal making a noise to announce the presence of predators. Importantly, signs always indicate that the hearer is supposed to look for and expect something (or actually do that thing), whereas symbols can refer to things not present, and can be used in situations where the only point is to bring the symbol’s referent to mind, not such that anything in particular should be done with regard to that referent.
Langer points to a human baby’s use of nonsense talk as key to understanding how we can use symbols but animals (who don’t babble in this way) cannot. For animals, sounds (and gestures, etc.) are always for a purpose, and so there’s no semantic indeterminacy, no room for ambiguity or artistic expression. Whereas people just like making sounds, and really like when they hit on naming, and so want to then name everything. Langer discusses the education of Hellen Keller and another blind and deaf person: how when their teachers tried to get them to use word-signs when they wanted something, it didn’t work, but in both cases the breakthrough was when they were just identifying things: with Keller, it was famously water.
So Langer’s argument is against linguistic pragmatists that argue that language comes out of the need to communicate, whereas Langer sees symbolism as an absolutely basic human activity. We do not perceive the world directly, but instead use symbols to break it up into thinkable objects and situations. Langer claims this happens even pre-linguistically and at the level of processing by the individual senses: That the eye does not store a literal light-copy of the world but processes it according to symbols. Every time we see some new situation and think that it’s “the same” as a previous situation (of course it can’t be exactly the same), we’re grouping the situations together metaphorically, and this is how language developed in the first place. For example (and Langer admits this is speculation), if primitive people engaged in some group ritual, like after a hunt, then the cries they’d use during that ritual could get fixed by tradition over time. Then someone could use that utterance to refer to the ritual even when it isn’t happening right then. Even then, the reference would be pretty vague, because it’s picking out a whole recurrent situation. So then inflections might be used to help distinguish whether the speaker is referring to the ritual that was last week, or the one coming up, or picking out some aspect, like maybe it could be used metaphorically to refer to some other joyous group occasion, because there was no separate word for that yet, and eventually we’d have the general concept “celebration.”
An example in the language we’re familiar with is the expression that “a river runs.” This was probably originally metaphorical, in that it moves as a human runs. But now it’s just how we describe moving water, and also we say “a fence runs along the side of a house” or “the property line runs…” which are even further removed from what was presumably the original sense of running (people), so now the term just means “spans.” The point is that it’s not as Wittgenstein implied, that we have literal, descriptive language as the primary and proper use of language, and then poets come along and use it in crazy ways, but that poetic, metaphorical thought is at the heart of language’s development over time.
Cassirer mentions Henri Bergson several times in his account, and the story is similar: Bergson was claiming that our initial ways of cognizing the world (like our perception of time) are not atomistic and quantifiable a la natural science, but that those atomistic ways of thinking are later, rigid developments of a more natural attitude.
Buy Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key, or try this online version. Buy Cassirer’s An Essay on Man or try this online version. For some general background on Cassirer as neo-Kantian, listen to this episode of the New Books in Philosophy podcast featuring Samantha Matherne.
The “theory of mind” episode that Wes is referring to is #172 with Dr. Drew.
Image by Genevieve Arnold. Audio editing by Tyler Hislop; check out his new Pixel Box Media podcast.
Transcript
0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by Some guys were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 290 is something like what is the relationship between human nature and symbolism? Read chapters one through five of Susanne Langer's Philosophy in a New Key from 1942. Plus some of us looked at Ernst Cassirer's An Essay on Man from 1944. For more information, please visit@ partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, My Own Generative idea
0:36 Seth: In Madison, Wisconsin, this is Seth Paskin perceiving and wishing that he was not symbolizing time. In Austin, Texas, this is Wes Alwan
0:47 Wes: symbolizing, not signifying. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, this is Dylan Casey
0:53 Dylan: announcing my presence as a sign of my attendance in Madison, Wisconsin.
0:59 Mark: Well, hey hey ho. This was supposed to be an extension over aesthetics stuff, but we're not going to talk about aesthetics today. The first half of this book is all preliminary, so maybe we'll get to aesthetics next time. Seth, you had suggested this rather because you physically possessed it. Do you want to get us started with your impressions here?
1:20 Seth: I think that I originally picked up this book maybe in grad school, maybe before grad school, but I had in my mind that it was somehow associated with Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung and these kind of archetypes. It was something I always was interested in looking at, and because it resonates with something around music, just the way the name seems to suggest, I thought, oh, this would be something that would be really interesting to read at some point. And then as you know, I studied other things and the arc we've been on, I just sort of filed it away in that maybe one day I'll get around to it category.
But I had always wanted to look at it. And it's just the book that I version I have, the Harvard book, has a very distinct blue and white cover that has stared at me from the bookshelf for decades. So I was just because like you said, we thought it was related to aesthetics. I thought, oh well, this might be something we could finally get. You know, I'd have an excuse to actually read it in conjunction with Pel, since I don't have time to do any other reading outside of Pel. And much to my surprise, it was not at all the book that I thought it was going to be, particularly not the first two chapters, which I thought was going to take me to a place I did not want to go, which is back into logical positivism And Wittgenstein and Carnap and all those guys.
But I was delighted with her turn, what she called the new key. And I think she does a phenomenal job of articulating this concept of human beings as symbol, making creatures and weaving that into that context around language, the philosophy of language, and then creating a distinction in a very clear and interesting way. And I found myself delighted. I absolutely love, love the book. And it didn't hurt that my prep was done predominantly on a 45 foot sailing catamaran in St. Martin, Virgin Islands, as opposed to trying to squeeze in 20 minutes when I'm not being accosted by children and dogs in my hovel here in Austin.
But yes, I thought, I always thought it was somehow an aesthetics text, and it's not really that. And it kind of took us in a different direction, but I really like it.
3:35 Mark: Yeah, it takes a while to get going, maybe. Academic texts from the 1940s have a particular style. There are lots of quotes from other authors. Reads like a research paper, a lot of it. So because she was referring so heavily to Cassirer in the first part of it, that made me look up. So his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms came out in the 20s in three giant volumes. But he wrote actually after this book came out, toward the end of his life, an essay on man, which reads very similarly to this book. And so I had suggested maybe we should do that instead or an additional.
And I read about 100 pages of it, and it says about the same thing that she does in her first couple chapters here. But then she diverges from that and they have their own distinct things that they want to do with this insight that man is a symbolic animal. But I think, you know, as we're just describing what the concepts are, we don't really necessarily have to source them unless you have a particular quotes you want to pull out.
4:31 Wes: Is she honestly quoting Cassirer that much?
4:34 Mark: She's referring to him. It's the epistemological point that Cassirer was actually a Neo Kantian.
4:40 Wes: I understand that there's some. But she hardly actually mentions his name throughout the book. I read the Cassirer as well and saw some of the crossover, but to me, it actually didn't read like an academic paper. I saw it more as an attempt to communicate and a successful one to reach a public audience with a philosophical. You know, she is quoting people left and right, but she has a very conversational style and a very good. You know, and it's very well written, in my opinion. Very readable. Right. It's a very different experience than reading Malebranche.
Right. The density and just sitting there trying to decipher every little thing. You know, this is a readable book with a lot of really interesting ideas and some of them, you know, she obviously owes a lot to other people in the development of her ideas. So when we get to the point where she's going to talk about what a denotation means and what discursive symbolization means, she's going to be highly indebted to the philosophy of language of a certain time, including Wittgenstein, for instance, and Russell. So, you know, I'm curious about what's happened since then and what philosophers today would think of those treatments because they are very insightful, but I'm sure a lot has has happened since.
And similarly with her talk about, for instance, about the origins of language and the hints of language that we might see in non human primates and her description of what the essence of language is. There's a lot of work that's been done since then and I know a tiny bit about it. So her chapter on language, for instance, made me think of that. Then I have a hunch, I have some sense that quite a bit has happened since she was writing about it. But yeah, she's borrowing a lot or she's responding a lot or quoting a lot from various things she's read and stuff that's popular in her time.
So I don't want to call it dated in that sense, but it's, I think it is, in a way, of its time, despite the fact that it's also, you know, it's very insightful and I wouldn't know how to critique it. Right. I wouldn't be able to come at this and say, oh, that's not the way language works. That simply don't have that point.
6:50 Mark: Dylan, initial impressions.
6:52 Dylan: I agree that it's super readable. You know, I found the first couple chapters, again, one of these cases where that kind of summary that she presents was fine for me and us sort of set the stage for the rest of the chapters. Once I got to particularly 4 and 5, the question of why we would be reading it for an aesthetics episode felt like it became a lot more clear. And in an interesting way, maybe it's the most interesting part is the idea that our aesthetic sense, well, I guess you start trying to derive aesthetic sense and make an account for why based upon the way human beings are looking at the way we are in that analysis of members of primates and distinct from other animals, that we would have this and articulate what it would mean to talk about an aesthetic sense that informs how we even structure language.
I haven't read the rest of the book, I don't know if where that goes, but to me, whether she does it or not, she's toeing up to two things. One is that aesthetic sense in human beings is the foundation of our language and our linguistic ability. And also that it is our tendency towards the creation of language and the use of symbols, even in a pre linguistic context, is both the origin of language and the origin of our notion of aesthetic judgment.
8:26 Wes: So she's going to be arguing for symbolism as being broader than discursive thinking, right? Yes, exactly, all that.
8:34 Dylan: And that's pre discursive thinking. And I think she's at least implying that that aesthetic sense is pre discursive in that way. She would underline that it's a sense as opposed even if it's related to rationality. Like it helps generate language, helps generate thinking.
8:52 Wes: So yeah, there's a kind of symbolism that's involved in using language. And then there's what she calls, this is really in the fourth chapter, but so there's discursive symbolism in language and then there's presentational forms. So the idea is that symbolism is sort of baked into things at a very low level. She talks about it happening even at the level of senses, before we get to the brain. I'm not sure if that's meant to be taken literally, but she's doing something very interesting there, which is she's rejecting all the stuff we've heard from Malebranche and others and Kant about, you know, that whole tradition where formal structure can't come in through the senses, right?
It has to be supplied by the cognitive faculties. And so that sort of symbolism is generated by the mind. And philosophers have even thought, you know, by language. Here it comes in at a much more basic level. So it's like a variation on the idea that our experience of the world is theory laden, except the theory perhaps comes in through the senses or it gets added at a very primitive level. So what Kant calls intuition, right? The forms of intuition, spatiality, temporality, and all the structural stuff that is there in the presentational form.
And that is something that is essentially symbolic itself and is part of the
10:16 Dylan: functioning of our biology. I mean there's a way in which you could subtitle the book. Screw you, Descartes. You're wrong, right? I mean in terms of a fundamental mind body distinction, that rationality, for her it's Baked in. Right. Rationality comes out of that. Baked in the ability for us to render symbols through sensory experience. Yeah.
10:41 Seth: I don't know if I heard the two of you correctly. I don't know that I would put it quite that starkly. It's much more clear in the way that Cassirer approaches the problem about. They're trying to come up with this, what they call it, anthropomorphic philosophy or anthropological philosophy, something that takes into account the function of the senses, like how the senses actually contribute something to the experience of sensation. So it's almost like the traditional dichotomy is mind and, you know, sensation and thought or mind and body. And I think what they're doing is they're saying what that does is it puts you in a place where you get into this.
What would have been the skeptical dichotomy. And in the context of when she was writing the philosophy of language, this. If it can't be expressed propositionally, it's somehow not meaningful. Right. It gets at this meaning dichotomy. And what she's saying is, I can go with Kant, that there's this manifold, or we can talk about the flux and the flow of sensation, but it's not that the mind is the only way that. That gets structured. What she's saying is. No. In fact, the way our eyes have evolved, the way our ears have evolved, the way that they process the information, that applies a certain kind of structure already before the mind acts on it.
And then if we ignore that fact by saying it's all mind or it's all propositional statements. Right. And everything else is meaningless, we're missing out on a huge part of what constitutes human culture. And so they're trying to kind of dive back down into some form of. I wanted to say language, but that's not the right term. I mean, maybe it is, but just basically a form of representation that's not linguistic.
12:32 Wes: Well, it's symbolic, though.
12:33 Dylan: Yeah.
12:33 Wes: Right. It's not linguistic, but it's still symbolic. That's her big. Her big thing. Right, so.
12:39 Seth: Well, it is. Yeah. I was trying not to say that either, because we haven't really defined exactly that. But the point is, human culture involves a lot of activity that can be explicitly captured in these linguistic forms. That the propositional philosophy of language, the Wittgensteinian, if you can't. What is it? Whatever we can't talk about. We should remain silent. Right.
12:58 Wes: Shoot ourselves in the head.
13:00 Seth: Yeah.
13:01 Wes: She'll say that the ear and the eye make their own abstractions, like that's how radical it gets. It reminded me of Aristotle a little bit in De Anima. Like, it's the question of whether. Right. We get in little bits of data, and I say bits, I mean, like computer bits or whatever the smallest, like, digital unit of digital information is. And it, you know, we put that into the processor in the brain, and then the computer does all of its constructive activity and applies the intuitions and the categories of the understanding and all that. And then we get structure.
But here it's as if we are sensitive to structure from the very beginning. If the eye and the ear can do their own abstractions, and these are what she calls, quote, unquote, genuine symbolic materials. Right. There's symbolism in there from the ground up, presentational symbolism, then that's a much different conception of how we're related to the world. And Seth, as you pointed out, this is going to become a basis for thinking about art and religion and ritual and those sorts of things which are symbolic, but they're not going to turn out to be meaningless on her account because they are going to be symbolic.
It's just they're not going to be discursive and rational. They're going to be a different kind of symbolism which is more akin to this presentational symbolism in chapter four that we've been discussing. Yeah.
14:18 Mark: You might think that the basic way that we interact with the world is propositionally that through simple declarative statements. Right. I see her as at the birth of ordinary language philosophy. So she refers to Wittgenstein, but she's referring to Wittgenstein's Tractatus, not his investigations and the other people that were influenced by this. And so this is, I feel, like a concurrent effort to what Wittgenstein himself was figuring out was that it's not that there's this basic kind of speech which is all just making statements about states of affairs, and that everything that's sort of artistic or creative or stating myth or something is sort of some more complex, specifically human thing that is built off of that.
Instead, she wants to say that actually what seems more complex, but are actually sort of more vague in certain ways. But these ways of relating to the world symbolically, those in fact provide the foundation for explicit discursive language. And so we can't think that there's something pure and scientific about statements and that everything else is something that we can't make sense of, something that is extra. No, we have to understand. So, for instance, one of the things that I know Cassirer in his political Philosophy is going to make out of this is like ritual, mythological thinking, scientific thinking.
These are all kind of on a spectrum. And what happened, you know, he has an analysis. This is all like, as World War II is just happening, is when people do what the Nazis did, for instance, they're regressing to like ritual magical thinking. And so to see them not merely as different types that can't be related to each other, but that they are part of a single system in its various strata.
16:03 Dylan: I think it's worth pointing out that I'll call it the simplified computational model that Wes just presented. I think that you make a modification to that to understand the kind of things she's talking about with ears and eyes, you know, generating symbols in their datum. And that's not that your higher order brain functions are processing these bits of raw sense datum, but rather that. And the model that I would have is, that is actually closer to the way most computing systems work, is that there are various levels of processing going on. And so the idea that, you know, part of your brain function, you know, your eyes are extensions of your brain cells sticking out into the world and that you're pre processing with your eyes and identifying objects and the notion of symbols, that there's different levels of processing activity and the notion that your senses would be directly related to this kind of early processing that happens, that has that fundamental symbolic character that's pre discursive and such that discursive activity happens on top of that, I think is very much in line with a computational model of the mind.
I think it's a more refined understanding of how that processing symbolism is working.
17:30 Wes: We have these nice analog instruments. Right, sticking out of our brain.
17:35 Dylan: Yeah.
17:37 Wes: The difficulty is it would be great if the brain were like a big piece of wax and what passed through the eyes just ended up as a kind of impression on that. Instead, confusingly, it gets transformed into electrical pulses along wires, which is very confusing if we're going to say that abstraction happens at the level of the senses. It seems to me that we're just talking about a kind of analog receptivity, right. The image that's cast on the retina or however we want to put it. And you know, ultimately I think it kind of pushes us towards a kind of Hegelian idea that symbolism is and structure are just out there in the world and we are structured beings.
And so we are in a way directly in touch with that. We get rid of all this thing in itself and primary secondary quality, all that stuff, we just do away with all that. And there's the world, and it really is structured and we really are, for various reasons, capable of being in touch with that structure. However, we ultimately want to talk about the mind, but the important thing is that there's something symbolic about visual forms.
18:57 Dylan: Would you make a difference distinction between abstract and symbolic in this context?
19:01 Wes: She connects them and I mean, we can get to the details later on, but she will say, abstractions by the eye and ear are genuine symbolic materials. They're the media of the understanding. This will ultimately form the basis for discursive reasoning. Like visual forms are not themselves discursive, but they have the necessary ingredients in them to form the basis of discursive.
19:23 Dylan: The potentiality for discursive reasoning.
19:25 Wes: Yeah. Discursive symbolism.
19:27 Mark: Yeah. Yeah. She sounded very much like a constructionist at some place when she's talking about. Right. Page 74. There's no such thing as the form of the real world. So there are multiple patterns that one can lay on. And I think this was all straight out of Wittgenstein's Tractatus that he talked about sort of a sieve that you could put the various atomic facts through. And even though I don't think she believes in atomic facts, it's definitely that model of. Brings up James Blooming BUZZING confusion What is the world in itself? It's blooming buzzing confusion and the act of symbolism is the act of picking out a thing, distinguishing of this from that. And that is just what is the first step in communication in any form of symbolization whatsoever. That actually is the whole process of symbolization. That it's this sort of ontological act.
20:18 Seth: Yeah. And that section, I didn't relate it back to Wittgenstein, but she talks about mathematics or physics or something and says, you know, it's a pattern, but it's not the only pattern. And the problem is fetishizing it to say that anything that doesn't fall under the rubric of physics somehow isn't a meaningful reflection of the world. So. And that made me think, when you're talking about patterns, I don't know. Do you guys remember when we did Lacan or we read. The guy sure talked about Lacan. Somewhere in that text, I think, there was talking about creating patterns, the symbolic
20:53 Mark: order on top of the wheel. That kind.
20:55 Seth: Yeah. And that there's kind of like an infinite variety of ways that you could do that. That resonated with me, that section.
21:03 Dylan: I like that you point out, Seth is emphasizing meaning as opposed to something like truth or whatever in here, because I Think that that's also what she's getting at. That by talking about this pre discursive mode, the turning point is meaning, not something like truth or correspondence or anything like that.
21:25 Mark: And I really liked her distinction between something being significant. If you ask, how did language come about? People needed it, right? We needed to tell each other where the buffalo is so we could coordinate. But she actually makes this. And she's quoting a lot of, you know, the science of her day, anthropology of her day, that. Okay, yeah. So this is the beginning of chapter five where she's stresses that, no, actually what makes humans different from apes who can use tools, who could signal to each other that, you know, there's food over there or whatever.
They could do a lot of sort of communication. But none of that amounts to actually having a word really represent an object. Right. It can only sort of help to point out an object. And it's the fact that humans babble as babies. It's play that we play with words. And you think about your kid just loves to just point at stuff and name it and then to maybe use those words later to bring the thing to mind. And this is a, you know, just something that animals do not do because whenever they are using a sign, you know, it always has a specific use in that moment.
And it's only because we have this sort of different sense of play that she says that's when things can actually gain significance.
22:45 Wes: There's a denotative aspect to the symbol which is not there in the sign. Right. It can be used to talk about. About things that are not there. So for dog, right? A bell can be a symbol that dinner is about to arrive.
22:59 Dylan: A sign, sorry,
23:03 Wes: say that for dog, a bell can be a sign that dinner is about to arrive. And the sign, in a way, is. It's an association. It's something like behavioral conditioning where some one thing seems to be causally related to another or correlated in some way so that I can use it predictively. And the same thing goes. For instance, if a dog can learn to associate a name with a person and you say James, and the dog gets excited because the dog knows that's its master. And James means master must be near or something like that. That's a much different thing than being able to use a name like that to denote something that's absent and have a conversation about that absent thing. So signs simply do not have that referential quality that symbols do.
24:05 Seth: One way to think about this is that signs operate in the sphere of action. So there's sign Response, something's going to happen. A sign operates in the present because one of the key things about symbolism for Langer and Cassirer is there's really no way to conceive of the past and the future and to not be present without some form of symbolism. And what I mean by that is a symbol represents something that's not present, and it's something that you can hold without actually doing anything with it, so to speak. Something operating as a sign would impel you to some kind of action. But the same thing operating as a symbol wouldn't necessarily do that. It allows you to take a step back from presence and reality to some extent.
24:55 Mark: The one additional term on that which is symptom, symptom versus sign versus symbol. Because these are sort of a chain. A natural sign could just be like, there are clouds in the sky. It looks like rain. In other words, clouds are a sign of rain. What that really is is a symptom of rain. Because a sign, she, you know, Langer goes on to distinguish, is something that somebody intentionally does, like pointing at the sky as if to say, there is rain there, or something like that. Whereas a symptom is involuntary. The fact that you have a disease, it might show right there on your face. But that's not a sign. That's merely a symptom. And so then the sign is one degree more complex and intentional than that. And a symbol is one degree complex and more intentional than that because it's the thing that animals can't even do.
25:42 Wes: So her criticism, you know, she has a lot of criticisms of what she calls the genetic psychologists, and we brought up one of them earlier, which is this idea that language evolves out of the need to facilitate cooperation or fulfilling our other basic animal needs. Whereas for her, it's actually going to be a more, you know, the symbolization is itself going to be its own fundamental need for human beings. But here she says that genetic psychologists see sign interpretation as a kind of archetype of knowledge and signs as the original bearers of meaning.
So, missing the point that symbols, as we said, do something much more complicated. They don't evoke action, right? They make us think of the things. They're not really proxies for their objects, but they're quote, unquote, vehicles for the conception of objects. So where signs kind of mean the thing, the imminent presence of the thing, for instance, symbols mean their conceptions. And she'll say, like, if you want to say that symbols evoke a certain kind of behavior or related to a certain kind of behavior. The behavior is thinking. Right. So signs announce objects, symbols lead to conceptions, and the behavior towards conceptions, the process of thinking is what words normally evoke.
So it's a really interesting critique of what sounds more of like a behaviorist approach to this.
27:12 Mark: Yeah, I was going to say that everything can be put in terms of conditioning. That the difference between those natural signs that I experience dark clouds and I experience rain. And so therefore, when I see the dark clouds, then I will have the expectation it will bring to mind that rain is coming around. And you can kind of see how this is moving forward towards symbolism.
27:33 Dylan: Yeah, maybe. I guess. It's a complicated story. When she's articulating the difference between human capacities and animal capacities in that long section about analyzing are primates who use vocalizations, are they using language? And to the extent they maybe are using sign language, for example, are they using those things as genuine language, or are they using them as sophisticated interactions with signs? And part of that also gets into the discussion about how children grow up and this question of babbling, the characteristic of doing that. And what came through so strongly in there is the fundamental importance of human interactions in developing that language as a fully discursive enterprise and the full use of those symbols that is tuned by our social interactions.
28:35 Wes: Yeah. One thing that's actually left out here, I kind of alluded to this earlier because we've discussed it in other episodes in our theory of mind episode, for instance, or the mentalization episode. I think Dr. Drew was on both of those. But there's an important connection to the concept of joint attention. And. Right. Pointing, in a way, is actually the very first symbol. And a lot of animals don't get pointing, including apes. They don't really get it. They don't have a theory of mind. They can't pass that theory of mind test where, you know, you hide an object under a container and then you move it when a third party is absent.
And then what does the ape expect? What does the ape think about what's going on in the head of the other person? They have trouble distinguishing that from what's going on in their own head. In other words, they have trouble attributing false belief, which is the key to a theory of mind. All that stuff, the capacity for joint attention, pointing. Theory of mind is intimately related to symbol use. Some of it's kind of implied in what she's talking about, but she doesn't explicitly talk about all of that. You know, joint attention is more than just, you know, you and I are Both looking at the same object.
We're looking at the same object. And I know you're looking at it. I know you're interested in and I know that you know that I know you're looking at it. All that back and forth, you know,
29:52 Dylan: you can see how that dovetails with just the idea of it becoming a symbol. You're interacting as if it's a symbol in its fundamental character.
30:01 Wes: Well, the symbol is the pointing or the eye. I mean it's even done with eye glancing. Like we actually point with our eyes. It's one of the interesting thing about all this and that's a very basic human capacity to be able to follow gazes. I would say that's fundamental. I'm bringing it up only because it helps me understand some of this. Even though it wasn't in there.
30:21 Mark: No, I like that connection to theory of mind. But what was distinguished as a symbol is the fact that you can say it when the object is not present. So the convention of pointing necessarily involves things that are present. Right. You're pointing at it. So how is that a symbol? I can see it's a convention of some sort and animals don't get it. So it's got to be related somehow. But I'm not quite fitting the pieces together.
30:42 Wes: Well, you can point at something that's not there because you can point at the conception essentially like it is a pointing. It is still in a way a pointing. And it. She points out that language use is often heavily dependent on context. Right. When we're in a room together cooperating on something in a room, we rely so much on context that there's not necessarily a lot of descriptive content in what we say. It gets more and more like pointing. Right. It's just if we're absent from the situation, we have to create context through language. So we have to create all the contextual stuff on which joint attention and pointing usually rely through language.
31:22 Mark: When she concludes chapter five with this story about how language could originate in the first place, which seems. Is very much relevant to what you were just saying about context there. That as if it starts with these one word sentences, she imagines that we have a ritual something that we're doing together and that we just like the first words are not denotative, they're interjections. Hooray. So we all get together, we're eating the. The kill that the hunters have just come back with and we all booyah. And so like booyah then becomes refers to that situation where we're all hanging around eating the Kill.
And then we can later refer to booyah, but maybe other people won't. Which booyah are you referring to? Like, are you just referring in general to buyah? So then, you know, we have to introduce more contextual things like pointing, that pointing actually becomes part of the setting of the context. Oh, the buyah yesterday, you know, the last one, I'm making a little reverse arrow pointing. I'm not exactly sure how this would work, but somehow this is supposed to, you know, get us to then having to say whole sentences that you can't just say booyah.
You have to say booyah yesterday. Booyah. You know, Phil's booyah. Because it was Phil who brought in that. That yak or something like that. And somehow we get out of that the full context of language. Did I tell that reasonably well, or you want to ask some?
32:50 Seth: No, I think actually you did a pretty good job there. But the term she used is predication and then exposition. So language as it is fully developed now, like we use it, it's fully expository. And names have a different function in a fully developed language, so to speak, than they do in her little primitive language. The idea is you start by naming, denoting, and then everything comes up around that. And then at a certain point when it's evolved enough, you forget that you started with the names. And so you think, oh, the purpose of language is communication. But in reality, the original use of the language was not to communicate with others, but to commune with others, so to speak.
33:40 Wes: Yeah, she talks about this is on page 94. But genuine symbol can most readily originate where some object, sound, or act is provided, which has no practical meaning. It tends to elicit an emotional response and thus hold one's undivided attention. Is that related to what you're saying? Or maybe that's not.
34:01 Mark: That's an important component.
34:03 Wes: Well, I was thinking more about ritual, but this seems to be more about vocalizing.
34:07 Seth: Well, that's. Yeah, I'm in chapter five. More and more vocables are needed to modify the original expression to accompany and emphasize gestures and attitudes. So the grammatical structure evolves by emendation of an ambiguous expression and naturally follows quite closely to the relational pattern a little further down. At first, modifiers and identifiers follow the crucial word that express the required predication. But when the speaker is fully aware of the context and the need of stating it, then speech is full fledged. And she says, as Wegener puts it, only the development of speech as an art and as a science finally impresses upon us the duty of rendering the exposition before the novel predication.
So this is in reference to earlier in the book. She says that trying to uncover how language evolved has proved so difficult that people have just stopped even trying. And we operate from the assumption that we developed speech for the purposes of communication, and this is intended to be an inversion of that, and then could give a. A theory of the development of language that makes sense.
35:13 Wes: Along those lines, she's giving us an idea of how word order and inflection might arise as the attempt to supply this context. Right. Because again, when we're in a situation together, to think of kind of a Wittgensteinian example, if I, you know, I could look at the wrench, and that could mean, please give me the wrench, I need the wrench.
35:34 Dylan: Or.
35:34 Wes: Or I could point to it and have that mean the same thing, or could just. I could just say wrench, and it means, you know, hand me the wrench. If I'm outside of that context, of course, I can no longer rely on context to do all that work, and I have to start adding in other words and grammar. So she says, you know, we supplement the lone verb or noun with demonstratives, little words like da.
36:00 Mark: His.
36:02 Wes: This is what Mark was explaining before. But so from such syllables, added as supplements to the one word sentence, arise inflections which indicate more specifically what the word sentence asserts about the expressed concept. So inflections like we can change the number on verbs, we can do dative or genitive for our nouns, all that grammatical stuff, which gives us more information about how the words are being used and then how they're being connected together.
36:32 Dylan: This is in the context of articulating and linking up this guy Wegener and this process of modification. She points to his principle emendation, which begets the syntactical forms of speech. This is just in the previous paragraph. So this going from one word to multiple words with qualifications, even in context, that process of amending what you're saying and adding more functions or inflections to it, that's the origin of syntax. And then there's this separate activity of establishing metaphors which lead to generality, which you can see obviously is going to lead to abstraction, full discursive language, full discursive sentences.
37:18 Wes: This derivation of generality from metaphor, actually I thought was pretty brilliant, and I hadn't thought of that, which she attributes
37:25 Mark: to Wegener, but who cares?
37:28 Wes: What is the example she gives of flaring? So this is on page 113, where precise word is Lacking. To designate the novelty which the speaker would point out, he resorts to the powers of logical analogy and uses a word denoting something else that is a presentational symbol for the thing he means. The context makes it clear that he cannot mean the thing literally denoted and must mean something else symbolically. So if flares up is typically applicable to a fire, and you say that about the king's anger, someone might immediately make the connection that you're not just misapplying something that belongs to fire to the king's anger.
You're using that metaphorically. And so you expand and you generalize what it means to flare up. So she says the expression to flare up has acquired a wider meaning than its original use to describe the behavior of a flame. It can be used metaphorically to describe whatever its meaning can symbolize. Whether it be taken in a literal or a metaphorical sense has to be determined by the context. And then in a genuine metaphor, an image of the literal meaning is our symbol for the figurative meaning, the thing that has no name of its own. And then we get to the point where the metaphor is, of course, fades.
And a lot of language we use, you know, we think that we're using the word. We forget that original originally was a metaphor. Right. Because it sounds literal. Now I want to say, you know, there's literally a river running through my backyard, even though running is originally a metaphor. Right. Rivers don't run. People run. It's faded enough that we don't think of that as metaphorical use. And we don't even think of the original. It doesn't even make us think of people running. We don't even make that connection. It's transformed the meaning.
39:08 Mark: Yes. Now it just means describing a course. There is a pattern in which the river is.
39:14 Wes: And a lot of language. You know, you could make the argument that everything, every concept is metaphorical, that there is nothing literal. Nietzsche actually makes a variation on this argument on truth and lie. I don't know if you guys remember that, but everything we have is essentially false because it's metaphorical.
39:32 Mark: So I think that's right. Even in that initial story of I was giving that in a Celebration, if somebody says, we all say booyah. If then we say booyah later, then we're kind of saying, well, this is another situation that's kind of like that other one. It's like we're using it metaphorically. We're sort of suggesting that this could apply here too. And I think that's how she's saying all general terms Evolve is that they all start as individual terms. And she emphasizes that presentational, not presentational representation, what is the pictorial, the way of symbolizing that is not representative, but.
So pictures represent. But she says they represent individually. They're always like a picture of a specific thing. It's only if you add a key or something like that that it actually refers to something beyond itself. So even if a triangle, she says, is supposed to, like, you're in geometry, and so you're using this picture of a triangle to refer to all triangles because you're using it to help you with a proof or something, literally, it only is representing itself, right? It's only picturing this particular triangle.
40:34 Dylan: That seems kind of weird because it seems like in the case of the triangle, it's always a symbol.
40:42 Seth: There's a lot that she says about the characteristics of discursive language and grammar and syntax and how that allows us to do propositional representation. But you can use language in the dimension of time. And one of the things that a picture does, or some sort of pictorial representation is it presents you with all the information simultaneously. You don't have to hold it in memory where you're reading a paragraph and you're thinking back. Take any philosopher that we've read in German practically, except for Wittgenstein. You start reading one of those sentences that goes on for like a half a page with six semicolons and all that.
And you have to be able to hold something in your mind where you got started. And a lot of times we have to figure out what even it is referring to later in the sentence. Right. When you get lost in the grammar. But with a picture, everything is presented at once. You can attend to certain details of the picture, but those details are not like component parts, like words in the sentence or, you know, adjectives. You can't abstract a paint stroke out of a picture and think of that like a word that you took out of a sentence. It has no function outside of its presentation in that context.
And that's one of the differences.
42:06 Wes: Yeah. Discursive just means to speaking of a course or running. We have to follow a course, right? One word at a time. So we can take in the landscape all at once, in a way. But if we wanted to describe it, we have to go word by word, bit by bit. And then, Seth, as you said, be able to store it and do all those things that processors do, come back to it, combine it.
42:28 Mark: One interesting thing that Cassirer adds on top of what we've been saying here is that to talk about possibility, you need symbols, right? It's not just like if something is absent, absent, you need symbols. But to talk about something potentially being here. So, like, if you don't have. He talks about if people have had. The part of your brain that affects language has been, you know, you have aphasia, it's been damaged, then you can't understand counterfactuals anymore that things could have been otherwise. You can't understand lying that. That lying itself requires a counterfactual.
I don't know what you think about that in terms of the sign versus symbol thing, because it seems like an ape could lie, but it requires what. Wes, what you were talking about is the theory of mind, right? If I'm going to represent something as it is not, I have to understand that I'm trying to fool you. But it seems like animals do try to, like, hide things or.
43:20 Dylan: Yeah, they feint. But it's not clear that a feint or a dodge. Well, feinting and dodging would be somewhat different. But that a feint or as you said, a hiding something is lying. It seems to be more like following the signs. Right. And so you're trying to. In like the case of hiding, you know, you want to hide your eggs so that the birds don't come and get them. Right. You're trying to avoid making the signs as opposed to.
43:51 Mark: I'm projecting a world in which I am not hiding the eggs in which there are no eggs.
43:57 Dylan: I'm drifting very quickly into a way of thinking that would be at odds with her analysis, in which it would be imagining trying to engineer a situation that is a lie for the other animals. But I think the way she would analyze it, that would preserve its lack of symbolism is that it's a progression of different kinds of signs. That what the animal is doing is doing something to create an environment that is of signs that work. I don't know what exactly to do with the general sort of awareness of the possibility, because animals clearly are aware of the possibility of danger.
Right. And not only being reactive. Right. They're at the water hole and they're drinking their water, and then they look up around and they don't necessarily see any lions in the area. And then when they see them, they clearly are reacting. You know, if the lion gets close enough that they need to run away. I don't know exactly how to analyze that in a sophisticated enough way of processing signs that doesn't run into it being symbols. It seems like it's probably not discursive.
45:09 Wes: We're talking about deception and theory of mind.
45:12 Dylan: I guess effectively we are.
45:13 Wes: Theory of mind requires us to know that other people have been deceived. So it's not about whether we can deceive or.
45:21 Dylan: I guess I would say no, we weren't exactly talking about theory of mind, except to try to understand why raw deception, like feinting on the part of an animal, isn't a demonstration of a theory of mind.
45:33 Wes: Well, I mean, it depends, right. If it's just instinctual, you know, when opossum does it, is it purely instinctual? And there are different gradations of theory of mind. Right. So there's knowing this theory of mind in the technical sense, right. Which requires that you'd be able to know when someone else has been deceived. You're able to know that the other mind has different intentions and thoughts than yours. Right. You know that the pebble has been moved, but they don't. So they're not going to look for the pebble in the right place. But then there's more general theory of mind in which you can be aware that others have their own intentions and thoughts and feelings.
And I think most scientists would say, yes, apes have some of that. Right. It's just that there's a sophisticated sense of theory of mind that they lack that requires really understanding this divergence between what's in my mind and what's in your mind.
46:23 Mark: This is making me think. In Cassirer, he actually has a critique of instinct, as we don't want to think of instinct as a causal power. Right. Instinct is just like a pattern of behavior that we notice. But to say it's caused by instinct is kind of like saying a scientific law, you know, the law of gravity causes things to fall. No, it's just the way we picked out things. It probably is just worth mentioning what Langer's overall point is. She says near the end of chapter four, her agenda is to figure out how symbols work logically and psychologically, the various types of symbols and how to study them.
And I know Cassirer's overall point is that he's going to use these two, like as a way of doing anthropology in a philosophically sophisticated way. Both of them think that symbolism is the new key for unlocking human behavior, for actually doing work in the humanities, because the overall drift of history has been scientism has been trying to use the methods of physics. And, you know, we're going to do experiments, we're going to gain facts and use those in the social sciences. They each have a story like our Cassir about why this has not worked out well, why this is not given a sophisticated, scientifically respectable account of anthropology or anything else you would want to say about the human condition.
Certainly not about philosophy. And so I guess this is a question that we have not read enough of either book to answer well enough. But we can make some guesses at this in Part two. PEL supporters can get that as the next thing in your feed if you support us through Apple. You might have to wait till next week to see that. Thanks.
[…] For more information about this whole signs vs. symbols thing, listen to The Partially Examined Life #290. […]