Property:AnnotationComment
A
Eventually this perspective led him to the conclusion that the function of intelligence was not, as traditional epistemology held, to provide cognitive organisms with ‘true’ representations of an objective environment. Rather, he began to see cognition as generator of intelligent tools that enable organisms to construct a relative fit with the world as they experience it. +
the adaptedness of living organisms can be credited only to accidental variations. +
This addition was legitimate because, although reflexive action patterns are ‘wired in’ and remain fixed for a certain time, they can eventually be modified or even dismantled by the organism’s experience. Adults, for instance, no longer manifest some of the reflexes that helped them to find the mother’s nipple when they were infants. +
The urge to know thus becomes the urge to fit, on the sensorimotor level as well as in the conceptual domain, and learning and adaptation are seen as complementary phenomena. +
Understanding language, therefore, requires continuous checking and evaluation of the re-presentations the other’s words call forth. +
The crucial difference, for me, is this: Whatever is called forth by the piece of language, the items it refers to, are items that have been abstracted from experience. They may, but need not, have any immediate link with sensory-motor experience that is going on, nor any link with present or future manifest behavior. Yet, what is said or heard is not without effect. But the effect is on the language users’ acts of representation. +
To interpret an utterance or a written piece of language (be it a message or a text) requires something more than the construction of its conventional linguistic meaning. In fact, to interpret an utterance requires the insertion of whatever we consider its conventional meaning into a specific experiential context. +
The viability of an interpretation, after all, can be assessed only from the interpreter’s point of view. +
If I am told that a mermaid is a creature with a woman’s head and torso and the tail of a fish, I need not have met such a creature in actual experience to understand the word, but I must be somewhat familiar with what is called “woman” and what is called “fish” to construct a meaning for the novel word. And if I am not told that the fish’s tail replaces the woman’s legs, I may construct a notion that is more like a fish-tailed biped than like the intended traditional mermaid. My deviant notion could then be corrected only by further interaction, i.e., by getting into situations where my conception of a creature with legs as well as a fish’s tail comes into explicit conflict with a picture or with what speakers of the language say about mermaids. +
Any prediction based on the interpretation of an experiential item that is taken as a sign pointing to a not yet experienced item, will be judged according to whether it is or is not confirmed by actual subsequent experience. +
a linguistic message, under any circumstances, can be interpreted only in terms of the receiver’s experience. +
I submit that whatever one might choose as the measure of justification, plausibility, or correctness when one is concerned with literary interpretation lies beyond the realm of linguistic competence (which is taken for granted as prerequisite) and involves relations one establishes between the conceptual structures called forth by the text and the conceptual network that constitutes one’s own experiential world. These relations, by definition, are subjective, in the sense that they cannot connect anything but the reader’s own conceptual structures with the reader’s own experiential world. +
and again, any such adaptation and abstraction must be based on the individual construction of patterns of concepts and actions which turn out to be compatible with actions and reactions of other users of the language. +
It is important to realize that the compatibility of two items does not entail their identity. +
At the beginning of the 18th century, Giambattista Vico formulated a constructivist epistemology by saying that humans can know only what humans can construct. +
“Shut the door!,” for instance, must be responded to with a sequence of motor acts which has to be learned in a succession of experiential situations, a succession which provides occasion for the acquisition of simple but nevertheless specific skills and, above all, occasion to experience what has to be avoided. Most of us have been scolded at one time or another for slamming a door when the instruction was to shut it. +
Compatibility is a matter of avoiding clash, passing between obstacles, fitting into space that is not encumbered by the conditions that have to be complied with. +
The constraints within which it attempts to achieve viability are set by the text alone and not by any external area of experience. Hence, the quest for the interpretation of a text turns out to be a futile undertaking. +
Insofar as we remember these structures, we can recall them—and then they are Re-Presentations. I write this with a hyphen, to indicate that they are pieces of experience we have had and are now reviewing. They are not pieces of an external reality. +
In other words, reality leaves sufficient room for them to work in our experiential world. +
