Thus, when the father in Peirce’s example points out an object and utters the sound balloon and the son looks and nods, an event of the order of that shown in Figure 12 must occur somewhere inside both father and son.
Later, when the son is older and utters some such sentence as That balloon is loose, a coupling of another sort occurs, as in Figure 13, also a triadic event.
Let us say nothing about the physiological or ontological status of the “coupler.” Suffice it for the present to say that if two elements of a sentence are coupled, we may speak of a coupler. Indeed, the behavioral equivalent of Descartes’s cogito ergo sum may be: If the two elements of a sentence are coupled, there must be a coupler. The latter dictum would seem to be more useful to the behavioral scientist, including transformational linguists, than Descartes’s, because Descartes’s thinking is not observable but his speech is.
Accordingly, I had supposed that what the neurophysiologist and anatomist should look for in the brain is not a neuron circuitry transmitting S-R arcs with little s’s and r’s interposed (what Peirce would call a series of dyads) of the following order:
but rather a structural-functional entity with the following minimal specifications: (1) It must be, considering the unique and highly developed language trait in man, something which is present and recently evolved in the human brain and either absent or rudimentary in the brains of even the highest nonhuman primates. (2) It should be structurally and functionally triadic in character, with the “base” of the triad comprising what must surely be massive interconnections between the auditory and visual cortexes. What else indeed is the child up to for months at a time when it goes around naming everything in sight — or asking its name — than establishing these functional intercortical connections?
It was with no little interest, therefore, that I came across the work of Norman Geschwind, who believes he has identified just such a recently evolved structure, “the human inferior parietal lobule, which includes the angular and supramarginal gyri, to a rough approximation areas 39 and 40 of Brodmann. In keeping with the views of many anatomists, Crosby et al. comment that these areas have not been recognized in the macaque. Critchley, in his review of the anatomy of this region, says that even in the higher apes these areas are present in only rudimentary form” (Geschwind). And further:
In man, with the introduction of the angular gyrus region, intermodal associations become powerful. In a sense the parietal association area frees man to some extent from the limbic system…
The development of language is probably heavily dependent on the emergence of the parietal association areas since at least in what is perhaps its simplest aspect (object naming) language depends on associations between other modalities and audition. Early language experience, at least, most likely depends heavily on the forming of somesthetic-auditory and visual-auditory associations, as well as auditory-auditory associations. (Geschwind)
Such findings are adduced here as a matter of interest only and to show that at least the model here adumbrated gives a hint what to look for. Being fully aware of the strong feelings of many psychologists and psycholinguists against such localization of cognitive functions (e.g., Lenneberg and Premack), and being myself altogether incompetent to evaluate Geschwind’s findings, I suggest only that if a triadic theory of language acquisition is correct, one might expect to find some such structure. If Geschwind is right, what he has uncovered is the cortical “base” of the triadic structure of the typical semological-phonological naming sentence (Figure 14).
The apex of the triangle, the coupler, is a complete mystery. What it is, an “I,” a “self,” or some neurophysiological correlate thereof, I could not begin to say.
A Biography of Walker Percy By Judy Khan
When Walker Percy was diagnosed with tuberculosis at twenty-six, what might have seemed a serious setback for a recent medical school graduate turned into a life-altering career change. During the years Percy spent recovering at Trudeau Sanatorium in upstate New York, reading literature and religion, falling under the spell of European existential philosophers such as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Søren Kierkegaard, he turned his focus from healing bodies to healing souls. Returning to his native South, he married Mary Bernice Townsend, converted to Catholicism, and settled into the life of a writer/philosopher. Like the Europeans he admired, he expressed his fascination with philosophy in fictional form, publishing six novels before his death at home in Covington, Louisiana, in 1990.
With the publication of his first novel, The Moviegoer (1961), which won the National Book Award, Percy was immediately recognized as a leading Southern writer. His handling of major existential themes such as alienation, loss of faith, and search for meaning, expressed through the characters of Binx Bolling and Kate Cutrer, left no doubt that he was a writer of great philosophical depth.
Walker Percy was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1916. Undoubtedly his thematic concerns reflected his own childhood tragedies of losing his grandfather and father to suicide and, soon after, his mother to a car accident. Walker and his two brothers were adopted by a cousin, William Alexander Percy (“Uncle Will”), a lawyer, writer, and Southern traditionalist living in Greenville, Mississippi, whose values shaped the Moviegoer character Aunt Emily.
But it’s Binx, a Korean War veteran and New Orleans stockbroker, who most clearly embodies Percy’s own brand of Christian existentialism. Though Binx’s daily activities of making money in the stock market, sexually pursuing a series of secretaries, and moviegoing might seem shallow and avoidant, his inner life is anything but. Internally, he observes and interprets life according to “the search,” a complex philosophical stance of how to live in a world where the traditional values of religious faith and Southern stoicism are crumbling. His female counterpart, Kate, is also adrift after the death of her mother when Kate was still a young girl. Filled with anxiety, at times suicidal, Kate seeks refuge in familial rebellion, pills, and the one person who understands her — Binx. For Kate, Binx’s search is an antic preoccupation; for Binx it is an existential quest of the highest order.
As readers, we might not see the overlapping consciousness that develops between these two isolated southerners, nor do we necessarily see Binx’s movement toward conversion. Yet the novel’s conclusion suggests that salvation can be achieved, that freedom from despair is possible, and that an authentic life can be lived.
Percy outside his family’s home on Arlington Avenue in Birmingham, Alabama. Percy traced his earliest memories, such as watching a Krazy Kat cartoon at a local movie theater, back to his childhood in this neighborhood.
Percy (standing at right) with his father, LeRoy Percy Sr., and his younger brother, LeRoy Percy Jr. Percy’s father, a successful lawyer and Princeton alumnus, suffered frequent bouts of anxiety and depression. In 1929, like his own father a few years earlier, the elder LeRoy committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. Shortly thereafter, Walker lost his mother in a car crash that was deemed an accident. These events haunted Percy throughout his life and shaped some of the thematic concerns of his fiction.