Property:AnnotationComment
A
Communication, therefore, works when two people send each other a telegram
and they have previously established a code outside that communication system. +
Let us assume that your attention is caught by the color red. As such the redness is not confined, has not yet a specific shape in your visual field, and is not a discrete thing. But as you focus on it, you are able to fit the color into the pattern you have learned to call “house”. If you were asked to describe what you see, you would most likely say: “there is a red house”. You choose the adjectival connection because the color and the thing were produced in a continuous application of attention. If, on the other hand, you recognize in your visual field a pattern that fits your concept of “house” and only then, scanning it more closely, you focus attention on its color, you would most likely say: “the house is red”. This syntactic structure clearly expresses that the concept of “house” was brought forth independently of the color that was subsequently attributed to it. +
We all develop a repertoire of conceptual items and connections, and learn to fit them to the syntactic structures that have become customary among the users of a given language. +
As Tomasello and a few before him noticed, Children do not produce their utterances with the help of grammatical rules. Even adults rarely rely on abstract syntactic rules to guide their speech. They know how they have segmented their experience and the praxis of living has shown them useful ways of linking the segments. +
From the constructivist point of view, it is important to stress that it does not matter if the thing I perceive when I follow the direction in which the other is looking is not quite the same as the thing he or she perceives. What DOES matter, in order to link a word to a percept, is that, whenever he or she utters a specific word, I see something that I can consider the repetition of what I saw on similar previous occasions. The crucial feature is the coordination of attention. +
Annotationen:The Control of Perception and the Construction of Reality: Epistemological Aspects of the Feedback-Control System/K0ahsljmye +
The key point is that we may be able to analyze the structure of our experience without making the unwarranted assumption that to perceive must be a process of passive reception rather than a process of construction +
Annotationen:The Control of Perception and the Construction of Reality: Epistemological Aspects of the Feedback-Control System/Mgmrugxl8t +
With a rat in a Skinner box, for instance, it will no longer be sufficient to ask why the rat’s bar-presses become more or less frequent; we also have to ask how the rat succeeds in pressing the bar when it may have to start toward it from different places in the box. In other words, how is it that the rat – or ourselves, for that matter – ever manage to hit a target or attain a goal? +
Annotationen:The Control of Perception and the Construction of Reality: Epistemological Aspects of the Feedback-Control System/Pkmy35hasn +
There is no good reason to believe that our senses somehow provide a one-to- one correspondence with something which we do not perceive. +
Annotationen:The Control of Perception and the Construction of Reality: Epistemological Aspects of the Feedback-Control System/S72d8v4u89 +
And, if we apply the model to ourselves as organisms, we too cannot have access to our own environment because our experience, whatever it may be, lies on this side of the dashed line and can be composed only of the signals within our neural network. +
Annotationen:The Control of Perception and the Construction of Reality: Epistemological Aspects of the Feedback-Control System/Ubbllti36g +
there can be a “response” (i.e. activity) without a stimulus. Activity is triggered by an error signal, and an error signal is generated not only when there is a change in the sensory signal but also when there is a change in the reference value. +
Annotationen:The Control of Perception and the Construction of Reality: Epistemological Aspects of the Feedback-Control System/Uf9f16stpl +
Human knowledge in general, and science in particular, is not engaged in uncovering certainty, truth, or reality, or any of the bugbears of dogmatic science. +
Annotationen:The Control of Perception and the Construction of Reality: Epistemological Aspects of the Feedback-Control System/Y1fflsoldg +
This part of the loop, however, is not accessible to the organism itself, because, as Powers has said, the organism can perceive nothing but its own sensory signals +
In other words, what the observer calls an “object”, is for the organism an inseparable component of an activity cluster. Nevertheless, at this point the stage is set for a momentous step that opens the way to a new kind of operation. No doubt, this step, like every other in the process of evolution, is fostered by the selective pressure of the environment; but for the functioning of the organism, it constitutes a discrete novelty like the opening of a new pathway in its processor. +
According to the view I am proposing, communicatory behavior is a mode of action, its function is to link concerted activity, and it is indispensable because without these links there could be no unified social action. Thus it is an instrument which is to say, a tool. +
For induction, whether it is conscious in the form of a conclusion we draw, or unconscious in the form of a behavior that becomes established because of its success, springs always from the same root: a more or less regular recurrence in past experience. +
It is in this sense that communication must be considered “instrumental”, “goal-directed”, and therefore “purposive”. +
In order to become a reference item, the object has to be cut loose from its original context where it was a more or less relevant sensory adjunct to an activity cluster, and it must become something very like a “representation”. +
To sum up this discussion of linguistic communication, I would suggest three criteria to distinguish ‘‘language’’, all of which are necessary but individually insufficient:
There must be a set (lexicon) of communicatory signs, i.e., perceptual items whose meaningfulness (SEMANTICITY) is constituted by a conventional tie (semantic nexus) and not by an inferential one.
These signs must be symbols, i.e., linked to representations (SYMBOLICITY) therefore they can be sent without reference to perceptual instances of the items they designate, and received without “triggering” a behavioral response in the receiver. As symbols they merely activate the connected representation.
There must be a set of rules (GRAMMAR) governing the combination of signs into strings such that certain combinations produce a new semantic content in addition to the individual content of the component signs. +
To begin, we may say that there could hardly have been an evolution of speech, or language, if there had not been an origin. +
An activity, thus, will be called “purposive” if it serves to reduce or eliminate the discrepancy (negative feedback) between the value of a sensory signal and the reference value in such a “teleological” unit. +
