* It is irrelevant that in the case of thunder announcing rain, the thunder happens to have a real connection with the rain process. The same relation of signification could be made to take place in a deaf organism by using a blue light to announce rain. Thus, to use Saint Augustine’s nomenclature, whether the sign is natural or conventional, the mode of response is the same.
* If we hoped that Mrs. Langer would follow up the epistemological consequences of this most important insight into the noncausal character of symbolic meaning, we shall be disappointed. She drops it quickly, restates her allegiance to positivism, and goes on to the aesthetic symbol as the form of feeling.
* For example, she had understood the word water (spelled into her hand) but only as a sign to which she must respond by fetching the mug, drinking the water, and so on. The significance of her discovery that this is water may be judged from the fact that having discovered what water was, she then wanted to know what everything else was. (Cf. also the experiences of Marie Huertin, Lywine Lachance, and the well-authenticated account of Victor, the wild boy of Aveyron, who discovered the symbol despite every attempt of his positivist teacher to present it as a sign of a want.)
† “These considerations cast some doubt on the adequacy of Freud’s theory of the origin and nature of thought…According to Freud thought has only one ancestor, the attempt at hallucinatory need-satisfaction…I believe that thought has two ancestors instead of one — namely, motivating needs, and a distinctively human capacity, the relatively autonomous capacity for object interest.”
* It is also true of a human responding to the shout “Firel” in a crowded theater (Mead’s example in Mind, Self and Society). Here, characteristically, the semioticist confuses symbol and sign by citing human significatory responses as illustrative of human meaning in general. One may indeed respond to a word and in this respect our understanding is similar to Helen’s understanding of signs prior to her discovery of the symbol and, in fact, generically the same as a dog’s response to a spoken command. But it is an altogether different situation when a father tells his child that this is fire, and the child awakes to the fact that by this odd little sound of fire his father means this leaping flame.
† It does not matter for the present purpose that some intelligent responses are acquired by conditioning and that others are congenital dispositions of the organism. The learned response of the dog to the buzzer and the innate response of the chick to the sight of grain are both explicable in physico-causal terms as an event in an electrocolloidal system.
* If there is a natural wisdom in etymologies, perhaps this is a case of it — for conceive, one suddenly realizes, means “to take with.”
† George Mead, the great social behaviorist, clearly perceived that language and mind are essentially social phenomena. We owe a great deal to his prescience that the interpersonal milieu is of cardinal importance in the genesis of mind, even though he felt compelled to render this relation exclusively in behavioristic terms for fear of “metaphysical” consequences (it is clear that by “metaphysical” he meant anything airy and elusive). It is typical of his integrity, however, that even with his commitment to behaviorism, he did not shrink from mental phenomena and consciousness, and in fact attempted to derive consciousness from social interaction.
Having realized that language is an interpersonal phenomenon, however, he set himself the impossible task of deriving the symbol from a stimulus-response sequence. For since it was an article of faith with him that the explanatory science of behavioristics is the only hope of approaching mind, he could not do otherwise than render symbolization as a response. As a consequence, he is obliged to define a symbol as the kind of sign which “calls out” the same response from the speaker as from the hearer. This definition drives him into the absurdity of saying that a word can only mean the same thing for you and me if it provokes the same response from you and me. Thus, if I ask you to get up and fetch the visitor a chair, it must follow that I also arouse in myself the same tendency to get up and fetch the chair. Clearly, as Mrs. Langer noticed, something is wrong here.
Is it possible, we wonder, that Mead was right in his emphasis of the social bond but mistaken in construing it behavioristically?
* Hocking writes of intersubjectivity as a direct unmediated bond from which mind and language arise: “…without the direct experiential knowledge of ‘We are,’ the very ideas of ‘sign,’ ‘language,’ ‘other mind,’ itself could not arise.”
Yet one might wonder whether it is not the other way around — whether the relation “We are” does not arise through a mutual intending of the object through its symbol, the word which you give me and I can say too. It would perhaps be more characteristic of angelic intelligences to experience such an immediate intuitive knowledge rather than a knowledge mediated by sensible signs and objects.
* Cf. her comment on presymbolic thought: “…if a wordless sensation may be called a thought.”
† In regard to primitive identification, Oliver Leroy writes: “The logic of a Hui-chol (who mystically identifies stag with wheat) would be deficient only on the day when he would prepare a wheat porridge while he thought he was making a stag stew.” Yet in some sense, the symbol is identified with the thing, a sense, moreover, which is open to superstitious abuse.
* John of St. Thomas: Quid est illud in signato conjunctum signo, et praesens in signo praeter ipsum signum et entitatem ejus? Respondetur esse ipsummet signatum in alio esse. “What may be that element of the signified which is joined to the sign and present in it as distinct from the sign itself? I answer: No other element than the very signified itself in another mode of existence.”
* “The natural sound element has been taken up into and practically disappears from our consciousness in its significant symbolic connotation. In other words the natural sounds have been completely transmuted into conventional sound symbols.”
One can establish this transformation to his own satisfaction by a simple experiment. Repeat the word “glass” many times; all at once it will lose its symbolic guise, its “glassiness,” and become the poor drab vocable that it really is. Yet it is from its original poverty that its high symbolic potentiality derives. It is for this reason, as Mrs. Langer says, that a vocable is very good symbolic material, and a peach very poor.
* Marcel observes that when I ask what is this strange flower, I am more satisfied to be given a nondescriptive name than a scientific classification. “But now we find the real paradox — the first unscientific answer (it is a lupin, it is an orchid) which consisted in giving the name of the flower, although it had practically no rational basis, yet satisfied the demand in me which the interpretation by reduction tends…to frustrate.”
12. SYMBOL, CONSCIOUSNESS, AND INTERSUBJECTIVITY
THERE ARE TWO INTERESTING things about current approaches to consciousness as a subject of inquiry. One is that the two major approaches, the explanatory-psychological and the phenomenological, go their separate ways, contributing nothing to each other. They do not tend to converge upon or supplement each other as do, say, atomic theory and electromagnetic theory. One can either look upon consciousness as a public thing or event in the world like any other public thing or event and as such open to explanatory inquiry; or one can regard it as an absolutely privileged realm, that by which I know anything at all — including explanatory psychology. As exemplars of these two approaches, I shall refer in the sequel to the work of George H. Mead and Edmund Husserl. The other interesting thing is that both approaches encounter the same perennial difficulty, albeit each encounters it in its own characteristic way. This difficulty is the taking account of intersubjectivity, that meeting of minds by which two selves take each other’s meaning with reference to the same object beheld in common. As Schutz has pointed out, intersubjectivity is simply presupposed as the unclarified foundation of the explanatory-empirical sciences. A social behaviorist writes hundreds of papers setting forth the thesis that mind and consciousness are an affair of responses to signs or responses to responses; yet he unquestionably expects his colleagues to do more than respond to his paper; he also expects them to understand it, to take his meaning. As regards phenomenology, on the other hand, philosophers as different as James Collins and Jean-Paul Sartre have noticed that the chief difficulty which Husserl (not to mention Hegel and Heidegger) encounters is the allowing for the existence of other selves.