The Structure of Symbolic Behavior
It would not, perhaps, be inaccurate to say that American psychology, as well as other behavioral sciences, has settled on an eclectic behaviorism in which the cruder features of Watsonian psychology have been refined by the work of Tolman, Skinner, Hull, Mowrer, Dollard and Miller, Sears, and Angyall. In this view, also put forward at the pragmatic level of semiotic, the organism, whether human or subhuman, is regarded as an open system living in an environment and adapting to that environment through its response to elements which are called signs. A sign is defined as an element in the environment which, through congenital or acquired patterns of behavior, directs the organism to something else, this something else being understood either as some other element or simply as biologically relevant behavior. Thus, the scent of deer directs the tiger to the deer; the scent of the tiger directs the deer to flight. A good representation of this relation is the semiotic triangle, shown in Figure 5.*
The relations between signs and interpreters and between interpreters and objects are of the nature of space-time transactions between an organism and its environment and can be studied by a natural science. The relation between sign and object, shown in Figure 5 as dotted, has been called an imputed, as opposed to a real, relation. But this imputed relation is ambiguous. Does it mean that naming is folly and not the fit subject of a natural science, or does it mean that it is a formal relation and open to study only by a formal science? But naming does happen. People give names to things as surely as rats find their way through mazes.
The problem, it would seem, is how to give an account of symbolic behavior considered not in its formal aspects — as it would be considered by grammar, logic, and mathematics — but as a happening and, as such, open to a natural science.
Although the semiotic triangle is a useful model of stimulus-response arcs and of learning behavior, the fact is that symbolic behavior is irreducibly tetradic in structure, as shown in Figure 6.*
The second person is required as an element not merely in the genetic event of learning language but as the indispensable and enduring condition of all symbolic behavior. The very act of symbolic formulation, whether it be language, logic, art, or even thinking, is of its very nature a formulation for a someone else. Even Robinson Crusoe, writing in his journal after twenty years on the island, is nevertheless performing a through-and-through social and intersubjective act.†
The new ensemble of elements and relations which comes into being does not replace but rather overlays the organismic interaction. People still interact with each other behavioristically as much as do dogs and bees, but they also enter into intersubjective relations and cointend objects through the vehicle of symbols. It is possible, and indeed preferable, to describe symbolic behavior in an operational language which omits reference to mental contents or even to “meanings.” “Ideas” are difficult to define operationally and even more difficult to bring into coherent relation with the observables of behavioral science. As for “meanings,” the word is itself so ambiguous that there is more to be lost than gained from its use. It seems least objectionable to say that in the particular communication event under consideration, an organism intends such and such a designatum by means of such and such a symbol.
This approach still deals with elements and relations, just as does that of the neobehaviorist. A list of the elements and relations of the symbolic meaning-structure, and an example of their clinical application, follows.
The intersubjective community. Whenever behavioral scientists are confronted with a concrete language event, appropriate questions are: What is the community? What is the status of the intersubjective bond? Who is included and who is excluded? Is the community I-you-you or I-you-not you (as it is sometimes when one goes to a very high-toned lecture: we are listening and understanding, and we are quite aware that those out in the street are not)? The community may vary from a face-to-face confrontation of two people and the various colorations of the I-you bond, to the scattered and numerically unlimited community of mass communication in which one person communicates with others through various media. In the latter case, still other questions become pertinent. What is the effect of the interposition of the medium between speaker and hearer? When the President says on television, “I am counting on you right there in your living room to make a sacrifice,” is the sentence received in the same way as it would be in a face-to-face encounter, or is it apt to constitute itself for the viewer as merely another item of “what one hears” on radio and television?
It should be emphasized that this empirical approach does not require the settling or even the raising of the question of the ontological status of the intersubjective relation. The latter is introduced as a postulate which is valid to the extent that it unites random observations and opens productive avenues of inquiry.
The object and the world. The notion of world here is not an epistemological construct, as it is in much of European phenomenology. I am not saying that the world is constituted by the Dasein or the transcendental ego. Nor do I say that a tree is exactly as it appears. I say only that if one makes an empirical study of sign-using animals and symbol-using animals, one can only conclude that the latter have a world and the former do not. Nor does such a notion require the entity “mind” in one and eliminate it in the other. It has only to do with the observable difference between sign behavior and symbolic behavior. A sign-using organism takes account only of those elements of its environment which are relevant biologically. A chick has been observed to take account of the shadow of a hen and the shadow of a hawk but not, I believe, of the shadow of a swallow. A two-year-old child, however, will not only ask for milk, as a good sign-using animal; he will also point to the swallow and ask what it is.
A sign-using organism can be said to take account of those segments of its environment toward which, through the rewards and punishments of the learning process, it has acquired the appropriate responses. It cannot be meaningfully described as “knowing” anything else. But a symbol-using organism has a world. Once it knows the name of trees — what trees “are”—it must know the name of houses. The world is simply the totality of that which is formulated through symbols. It is both spatial and temporal. Once a native knows there is an earth, he must know what is under the earth. Once he knows what happened yesterday, he must know what happened in the beginning. Hence his cosmological and etio-logical myths.* Chickens have no myths.
Nor does the symbol refer to its object in the same mode as the sign does. True, one can use the word mean analogically and say that thunder means rain to the chicken and that the symbol water means water to Helen Keller. But the symbol does something the sign fails to do: It sets the object at a distance and in a public zone, where it is beheld intersubjectively by the community of symbol users. As Langer put it, say James to a dog, and as a good sign-using animal he will go look for James. Say James to you, and if you know a James, you will ask, “What about him?”