babies and chairs which at least one party cannot see, it becomes necessary to add such words as the, is, in, his, etc.
If one must speak of a universal grammar, it is surely impossible to avoid the basic phenomenon of the sentence as a coupling and the basic division of couplings into two sorts, whether the language be English or Algonquin: (1) an object beheld by both speaker and hearer and pointed at and understood as one of a class of like objects and named by a sound which is understood as a class of like sounds — thus the pointing at and the utterance of the single-word sentence by father to son: balloon. (2) the coupling of symbol and symbol, e.g., baby#chair to signify vvhatever world relation or event is beheld in common by speaker and hearer.
* According to Veatch, mathematical logicians habitually confuse logical relations with “real” relations — here we would say sentence relations with world relations. Veatch calls the sentence coupling “an intentional relation of identity.” Thus the relation of John to Bill asserted in the sentence John is larger than Bill is a world relation which can be expressed by the isomorphic form xRy. Mathematical logicians persist in setting forth the sentence in the form xRy, whereas in truth the sentence relation is of the form S is P.
Lord Russell and the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus believed that the sentence must be in some sense isomorphic with the fact asserted by the sentence. The later Wittgenstein changed his mind and came to believe that sentences were plays in a language game and could mean whatever they were used to mean.
* Transactions between analyst and patient are especially open to sudden shifts of context, missing referring words, uncued worlds, since the rules of this language game require the patient to say “what comes to mind.”
† Here again, the uncritical use of analogical terms has impeded inquiry into distinctively human modes of meaning. Thus, when instrumentalists like Dewey describe scientific research as socially useful activity like farming and marketing, they state a not very interesting similarity at the expense of a much more interesting difference. What concerns us here is how the farmer sees himself vis-à-vis the world, and how the scientist sees himself. The two are not necessarily the same.
More interesting still is how the layman sees himself vis-à-vis the world of science. Is it possible, for example, for a layman to benefit in one sense from the goods and
services of scientific technology while in another sense falling prey to them, e.g., coming to see himself as a consumer of these same goods and services as a passive beneficiary of a more or less esoteric, not to say magic, enterprise? “They will soon come up with a cure for cancer,” one hears. The question is, Who is “they,” and how does the speaker see himself in relation to “them”?
* Here I am making the case that sentence utterances are triadic events about dyadic events. My utterance Sodium reacts with water is a triadic event about a dyadic event.
It is also true, of course, that a sentence utterance, a triadic event, can be about another sentence utterance, also a triadic event.
Thus, a coupling can be about another coupling. A therapist makes an analysis of a patient’s dream, to which the patient replies, “That’s a lie!” The patient is making a coupling about the therapist’s coupling. Note that the patient’s sentence addresses itself to a normative dimension of the analyst’s sentence. Sentences about other sentences tend characteristically to be judgments about the norms of the latter. E.g.: “That’s a lousy painting,” “Nixon’s speech last night was not his best,” “Kennedy wowed them in Berlin,” “Stalin lied,” “That’s a bad metaphor,” “So that’s a sparrow. So what?”
The only point is that a sentence coupling, being what it is, can be about anything whatever. Since the coupling China is larger than Japan is wholly unlike the relationship of China and Japan, it can assert that relationship. Note that a map cannot. A map is isomorphic but it asserts nothing, unless some assertory claim is appended, e.g., the signature of the cartographer.
Note that those mathematical logicians who believe that propositions are isomorphic with the reality they refer to have found it necessary to invent another mark which shows that the propositional relation is asserted, e.g., Frege’s assertion mark.
But it is of the very nature of a sentence coupling that it not only signifies a relation which is unlike itself but also asserts it.
* For the spirit if not the letter of this conversation I am indebted to Gottschalk.
* The classical world-mistake involving a lay-science interface was the Roman soldier’s mistaking Archimedes’ complaint when the former spoiled Archimedes’ geometric figures in the sand:
Archimedes (concerned about the mathematical world represented by his figure in the sand): “Don’t step on my right-angle triangle!”
Soldier (receiving the remark as a calculated insult to the Roman empire): “Take this!” (And runs him through with his sword.)
9. THE SYMBOLIC STRUCTURE OF INTERPERSONAL PROCESS
NOWADAYS ONE FREQUENTLY hears the relation between psychiatrist and patient described as a field of interaction in which the psychiatrist plays the dual role of participant and observer. The concept of the prime role of social interaction in the genesis of the psyche, largely the contribution of Mead in social psychology and Sullivan in psychiatry, is a valid and fruitful notion and marks an important advance over older psychologies of the individual psyche. Yet it presently conceals a deep ambiguity, and, as ordinarily understood, tends to perpetuate a divorce between theory and practice which cannot fail to impede the progress of psychiatry as an empirical science. It is the thesis of this essay that this ambiguity in both psychiatry and social psychology can be traced to an equivocation of behavioral terms such as sign, stimulus, interaction, and so forth, in which they are applied to two generically different communication events. It is further proposed (1) to call into question the behavioristic or sign theory of interpersonal process, (2) to outline the generic structure of symbolic behavior, and (3) to examine briefly its relevance for the therapist-patient relation.
The ambiguity is found in the way such behavioral terms as interpersonal reflexes, social interaction, and response are applied to what seem to be two different kinds of interpersonal events. This usage leads to confusion because it is not made clear whether the writers mean that the events are different and the terms are used broadly, or that the events are really alike and the terms are used strictly. On the one hand, the phrase interpersonal relation is often used with the clear assumption that what is designated is an interaction between organisms describable in the terms of a behavioristic social psychology.* On the other hand, the same term is extended to activities which are even recognized by the writers as being in some sense different from the directly observable behavior of organisms. The ambiguity appears in the description of the behavior of both psychiatrist and patient. Thus those studying the patient find it natural to speak of the objective study of his behavior and also of an “interpretive content analysis” of what he says.† And the behavior of the psychiatrist is described as “participant observation.” The psychiatrist not only enters into a conversation as other people do; he also preserves a posture of objectivity from which he takes note of the patient’s behavior, and his own, according to the principles of his science. One is free, of course, to designate all these activities by some such term as behavior or interaction. But if it is meant that these activities are really alike, it is not clear in what ways they are alike. Or if it is allowed that they are different, it is not clear wherein they differ or under what larger canon they may be brought into some kind of conceptual order.