Annotationen:Of Knowing, Telling, and Showing
However, you can also raise your sweetest voice and call: “Darling, would you come into the garden!” That, too, is interaction, but doesn’t always work. If it is successful, this may be due to one of three things:
1) a history of calls and reinforcements that has conditioned Sue to go to daddy at the stimulus “Darling”, much as a well-trained spaniel comes when called; 2) a history of interactions that has led Sue to parse the sequence “come into the garden!” as one of many possible combinations of signals which, in particular contexts, require a specific motor action; 3) a history of interactions that has led Sue to interpret the utterance as an expression of something that’s in daddy’s head; something that must itself be interpreted through re-presentation of past experiences with daddy’s expression of wishes, with his tendency to say “garden” when he intends “vegetable garden”, with the path to it, etc., etc.) and must be evaluated in relation to other possibilities, and which, in this instance, leads to the decision to do as requested. The way I see it (because that’s the way I have made it), this illustrates four types of interaction. Only the last one has the components I require to use the word “language” in the sense I want. Pushing or pulling others, dragging or carrying them, are no doubt social interactions. As such, they may be modified by all sorts of conventions; but, even if they are, I would not call them “language”. The conditioned response springs from a link the experiencer has established, a link between a sensory experience and a motor action. Even if the stimulus is a “word”, because the stimulator (and others) consider it thus, I would not call the interaction “language”. The complex utterance that requires parsing in a context, is “linguistic” in just that respect. Yet, because the outcome of the parsing is still no more than a fixed connection to a sensory-motor pattern, a trigger for a specific way of acting, I would still not call it “language” in the full sense of the term. Only in the last instance, where the utterance calls forth re-presentations, the replay of past experiences in the receiver’s mind, only in that case is the interaction truly different from all other forms of social interaction, and the difference is an exclusive characteristic of “language”.
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.Another illustration. Assume I say: “There’s a picture in the Louvre in Paris, a picture of a woman who is famous for her smile.” You have immediate access to a past experience of yours, or several maybe, and you can visualize the Mona Lisa (even if, for the moment, you cannot recall her name).
My utterance (written, in this case) is not connected to a specific chain of action of mine nor with some manifest behavior I might expect of you. I used the sentence as an example to show the effect of language on the flow of your re-presentations. The real power of language is this power to call forth re-presentations of past experience or what the language users have abstracted from it; and what one abstracts from one’s experience is “knowledge”. This way of seeing “language” does several things. It makes clear that “to understand” is to be able to fit (more or less satisfactorily) re-presented abstracts of one’s own experience to another’s words that one hears or reads. If the composition one ends up with seems contradictory, one feels one has not understood, or that the other is in some way out of order.
Understanding language, therefore, requires continuous checking and evaluation of the re-presentations the other’s words call forth.
