Property:StationText
This is a property of type Text.
I
What, however, if Susan had found a novel? Literary writings usually do not indicate their purpose. They may, of course, have some didactic effect, but that effect is, as a rule, considered beside the point in a discussion of literary interpretation. If the novel Susan finds, for instance, describes at some point someone walking in Paris, and Susan gathers from that description how one gets from the Pont Saint Michel to the Place Vendôme, that kind of learning would surely be deemed irrelevant to the interpretation, let alone evaluation, of the novel as a piece of literature. Yet, it is far less clear whether the fact that a novel suggests to the reader a way of dealing with a fiercely jealous spouse is to be deemed altogether irrelevant from a literary point of view. Is it the author’s didactic intention that matters? One can hardly doubt that Ibsen wrote Ghosts to teach the public a lesson. And while there may be little, if anything, to warrant the assumption that Goethe published The Sorrows of Young Werther in order to warn young men against falling in love with married women, it would be difficult to maintain that, when writing Faust, he did not intend to impart some kind of wisdom. However, if we accept any such supposition—and it might seem quite reasonable to do so—it immediately raises a serious question: How on earth can a reader be sure that the wise conclusions he or she draws from the text do, in fact, constitute the wisdom the author intended to impart? That question, needless to say, must be raised not only with regard to wisdom but with regard to any deeper meaning or content that is presumed to lie beyond the conventional linguistic meaning of words and phrases. Any proficient speaker of the language in which a literary text is composed can be expected to understand the words and phrases the text contains.[7] But that kind of understanding (which, in principle, is equivalent to what Susan could bring to the found message) is not the kind literary scholars have in mind when they discuss whether or not a certain interpretation of a text is justifiable, plausible, or correct.
The viability of an interpretation, after all, can be assessed only from the interpreter’s point of view. +
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. In the case of a prosaic message, this is relatively easy to see. If a subject, S, let us say Susan, leaves her office, walks out on the parking lot and picks up a sheet of paper on which someone has written, “Thursday, November 11th, 3 p.m.,” she will have no difficulty in understanding the words or symbols, but she will probably be quite unable to interpret them. They clearly specify a particular hour on a particular day, but since she has no clue as to why that point in time is being specified, she has no way of relating that conventional meaning to the framework of her own experiential world. Had she found the sheet fixed to her car in a way that she would consider deliberate, she would search her mind for a possible sender and a plausible interpretation in terms of an experiential event or situation to which the message might refer. But the sheet of paper came to Susan from nowhere and without a pragmatic context. Hence, though she knows what it says, she cannot tell what it is intended to mean. +
In literary studies, the realization that meanings are not materially inherent in words or texts but have to be supplied by readers from their individual stores of experiential abstractions has drawn attention to the fact that interpretations are necessarily subjective and that the source of interpersonal agreement concerning an author’s intentions must be found in the construction of a consensual domain. (Schmidt 1983) +
Just as the interpretation of a piece of language is always guided by the individual interpreter’s experience and expectations, so the interpretation of what one observes is always governed by some theory one has in mind and a goal one has chosen. +
S
You cannot help realizing that the world a native speaker of, say, German experiences and talks about is noticeably different from the world of a native speaker of Italian; both their worlds are different again from those of a Frenchmen or a Briton – let alone a native speaker of American English. Even the everyday things a young man like myself might have been interested in – things supposed to be common to all languages, like cars, mountains, girls, and food – are not quite the same in the experiential worlds of speakers of different languages. Having noticed this, you also begin to suspect that the +
Given that Maturana, at various places in his writings, makes it very clear that he considers unacceptable the concept that is usually linked with the word “representation”, it may surprise one at first that, in the passage quoted here, he bases a discrimination of conversations on “expectations”. In my analysis, to have an expectation means to represent to oneself something that one has not yet isolated by means of distinctions in the present flow of actual experience. The apparent contradiction disappears, however, if one considers that the English word “representation” is used to designate several different concepts, two among which are designated in German by the two words Darstellung and Vorstellung.[9] The first comes to the mind of English-speakers whenever there is no explicit indication that another is intended. This concept is close to the notion of “picture” and as such involves the replication, in a physical or formal way, of something else that is categorized as “original”. The second concept is close to the notion of “conceptual construct”, and the German word for it, Vorstellung, is central in the philosophies of Kant and Schopenhauer. Maturana’s aversion against the word “representation” springs from the fact that, like Kant and Schopenhauer, he excludes conceptual pictures or replications of an objective, ontic reality in the cognitive domain of organisms. In contrast, re- presentations in Piaget’s sense are repetitions or reconstructions of items that were distinguished in previous experience. As Maturana explained in the course of the discussions at the ASC Conference in October 1988, such representations are possible also in the autopoietic model. Maturana spoke there of re-living an experience, and from my perspective this coincides with the concept of representation as Vorstellung, without which there could be no reflection. From that angle, then, it becomes clear that, in the autopoietic organism also, “expectations” are nothing but re-presentations of experiences that are now projected into the direction of the not-yet-experienced.
So kann zum Beispiel eine Frau ihrer Freundin entrüstet von einer Party berichten: „Stell Dir vor, die Irmgard kam in demselben Kleid wie ich!“; und der Sohn kann der Familie auf einer Ferienfahrt erklären: „Das ist das gleiche Auto, das uns schon vor dem Mittagessen vorgefahren ist.“ - Im ersten Fall sind es zwei Kleider, die sich in Bezug auf die Eigenschaften, die da maßgebend sind, nicht unterscheiden; im zweiten Fall hingegen handelt es sich um ein und dasselbe Auto. Anders ausgedrückt: Im ersten Fall wird auf Grund eines Vergleichs die Zugehörigkeit zweier Gegenstände zu einer bestimmten Klasse behauptet, im zweiten wird dem Gegenstand zweier zeitlich getrennter Erlebnisse individuelle Identität zugeschrieben. +
SHANNON’s mathematical theory (1948) confirmed that only directives of choice and combination could travel between communicators, but not the meanings that have to be selected and combined to interpret a message. Language users, therefore, build up their meanings on the basis of their individual experience, and the meanings remain subjective, no matter how much they become modified and homogenized through the subject’s interactions with other language users. From the constructivist point of view, meanings are conceptual structures and, as such, to a large extent influence the individual’s construction and organization of his or her experiential reality. +
Given that Maturana, at various places in his writings, makes it very clear that he considers unacceptable the concept that is usually linked with the word “representation”, it may surprise one at first that, in the passage quoted here, he bases a discrimination of conversations on “expectations”. In my analysis, to have an expectation means to represent to oneself something that one has not yet isolated by means of distinctions in the present flow of actual experience. The apparent contradiction disappears, however, if one considers that the English word “representation” is used to designate several different concepts, two among which are designated in German by the two words Darstellung and Vorstellung.[9] The first comes to the mind of English-speakers whenever there is no explicit indication that another is intended. This concept is close to the notion of “picture” and as such involves the replication, in a physical or formal way, of something else that is categorized as “original”. The second concept is close to the notion of “conceptual construct”, and the German word for it, Vorstellung, is central in the philosophies of Kant and Schopenhauer. Maturana’s aversion against the word “representation” springs from the fact that, like Kant and Schopenhauer, he excludes conceptual pictures or replications of an objective, ontic reality in the cognitive domain of organisms. In contrast, re- presentations in Piaget’s sense are repetitions or reconstructions of items that were distinguished in previous experience. As Maturana explained in the course of the discussions at the ASC Conference in October 1988, such representations are possible also in the autopoietic model. Maturana spoke there of re-living an experience, and from my perspective this coincides with the concept of representation as Vorstellung, without which there could be no reflection. From that angle, then, it becomes clear that, in the autopoietic organism also, “expectations” are nothing but re-presentations of experiences that are now projected into the direction of the not-yet-experienced.
SHANNON’s mathematical theory (1948) confirmed that only directives of choice and combination could travel between communicators, but not the meanings that have to be selected and combined to interpret a message. Language users, therefore, build up their meanings on the basis of their individual experience, and the meanings remain subjective, no matter how much they become modified and homogenized through the subject’s interactions with other language users. From the constructivist point of view, meanings are conceptual structures and, as such, to a large extent influence the individual’s construction and organization of his or her experiential reality. +
You cannot help realizing that the world a native speaker of, say, German experiences and talks about is noticeably different from the world of a native speaker of Italian; both their worlds are different again from those of a Frenchmen or a Briton – let alone a native speaker of American English. Even the everyday things a young man like myself might have been interested in – things supposed to be common to all languages, like cars, mountains, girls, and food – are not quite the same in the experiential worlds of speakers of different languages. Having noticed this, you also begin to suspect that the concepts associated with words are not the same from person to person in one and the same language. +
So kann zum Beispiel eine Frau ihrer Freundin entrüstet von einer Party berichten: „Stell Dir vor, die Irmgard kam in demselben Kleid wie ich!“; und der Sohn kann der Familie auf einer Ferienfahrt erklären: „Das ist das gleiche Auto, das uns schon vor dem Mittagessen vorgefahren ist.“ - Im ersten Fall sind es zwei Kleider, die sich in Bezug auf die Eigenschaften, die da maßgebend sind, nicht unterscheiden; im zweiten Fall hingegen handelt es sich um ein und dasselbe Auto. Anders ausgedrückt: Im ersten Fall wird auf Grund eines Vergleichs die Zugehörigkeit zweier Gegenstände zu einer bestimmten Klasse behauptet, im zweiten wird dem Gegenstand zweier zeitlich getrennter Erlebnisse individuelle Identität zugeschrieben. +
Given that Maturana, at various places in his writings, makes it very clear that he considers unacceptable the concept that is usually linked with the word “representation”, it may surprise one at first that, in the passage quoted here, he bases a discrimination of conversations on “expectations”. In my analysis, to have an expectation means to represent to oneself something that one has not yet isolated by means of distinctions in the present flow of actual experience. The apparent contradiction disappears, however, if one considers that the English word “representation” is used to designate several different concepts, two among which are designated in German by the two words Darstellung and Vorstellung.[9] The first comes to the mind of English-speakers whenever there is no explicit indication that another is intended. This concept is close to the notion of “picture” and as such involves the replication, in a physical or formal way, of something else that is categorized as “original”. The second concept is close to the notion of “conceptual construct”, and the German word for it, Vorstellung, is central in the philosophies of Kant and Schopenhauer. Maturana’s aversion against the word “representation” springs from the fact that, like Kant and Schopenhauer, he excludes conceptual pictures or replications of an objective, ontic reality in the cognitive domain of organisms. In contrast, re- presentations in Piaget’s sense are repetitions or reconstructions of items that were distinguished in previous experience. As Maturana explained in the course of the discussions at the ASC Conference in October 1988, such representations are possible also in the autopoietic model. Maturana spoke there of re-living an experience, and from my perspective this coincides with the concept of representation as Vorstellung, without which there could be no reflection. From that angle, then, it becomes clear that, in the autopoietic organism also, “expectations” are nothing but re-presentations of experiences that are now projected into the direction of the not-yet-experienced.
Be this as it may, my main interest is in devising theoretical principles that might show at least one way that could lead to these important competencies. De Saussure’s model makes very clear that the semantic connection in the first place links an individual’s generalized experience of words with the individual’s generalized experience of other items. For entities that have been generalized German provides the word “Vorstellung”, a word that is central in Kant’s analysis of reason. In English, it has traditionally been rendered by “representation”, and this was thoroughly misleading. In the English-speaker the word “representation” inevitably implies that somewhere there is an original which is now being represented. This interpretation makes it practically impossible to understand Kant’s theory of knowledge; and when it is applied to language it leads to the notion of “reference”, i.e. that words refer to objects in a world thought to be independent of the speakers. If you think about this, you sooner or later stumble over the question how you could possibly have established a semantic connection between a word and an object, if both are supposed to be independent of your experience. The answer becomes obvious in Saussure’s diagram: The semantic connection – one cannot repeat this often enough – can be made only between entities in someone’s head. Just as, for instance, the Morse code links short and long experiences of beeps to re-presentations of letters of the alphabet, so in language, sound images are linked to concepts, that is, to re-presentations of experiential units. The problem of meaning thus comes down to the problem of how we generate units in our experience such that we can associate them with words, and how we relate these units to form larger conceptual structures. +
SHANNON’s mathematical theory (1948) confirmed that only directives of choice and combination could travel between communicators, but not the meanings that have to be selected and combined to interpret a message. Language users, therefore, build up their meanings on the basis of their individual experience, and the meanings remain subjective, no matter how much they become modified and homogenized through the subject’s interactions with other language users. From the constructivist point of view, meanings are conceptual structures and, as such, to a large extent influence the individual’s construction and organization of his or her experiential reality. +
So kann zum Beispiel eine Frau ihrer Freundin entrüstet von einer Party berichten: „Stell Dir vor, die Irmgard kam in demselben Kleid wie ich!“; und der Sohn kann der Familie auf einer Ferienfahrt erklären: „Das ist das gleiche Auto, das uns schon vor dem Mittagessen vorgefahren ist.“ - Im ersten Fall sind es zwei Kleider, die sich in Bezug auf die Eigenschaften, die da maßgebend sind, nicht unterscheiden; im zweiten Fall hingegen handelt es sich um ein und dasselbe Auto. Anders ausgedrückt: Im ersten Fall wird auf Grund eines Vergleichs die Zugehörigkeit zweier Gegenstände zu einer bestimmten Klasse behauptet, im zweiten wird dem Gegenstand zweier zeitlich getrennter Erlebnisse individuelle Identität zugeschrieben. +
You cannot help realizing that the world a native speaker of, say, German experiences and talks about is noticeably different from the world of a native speaker of Italian; both their worlds are different again from those of a Frenchmen or a Briton – let alone a native speaker of American English. Even the everyday things a young man like myself might have been interested in – things supposed to be common to all languages, like cars, mountains, girls, and food – are not quite the same in the experiential worlds of speakers of different languages. Having noticed this, you also begin to suspect that the concepts associated with words are not the same from person to person in one and the same language. +
One misapprehension stems from the general notion of “representation.” As that term is used in psychology and cognitive development, it is ambiguous in more than one way. First, like many words ending in “-ion,” “representation” can indicate either an activity or its result. This ambiguity rarely creates difficulties. Far more serious is the epistemological ambiguity to which the word gives rise. It creates an unwholesome conceptual confusion. The distinction I want to make clear concerns two concepts which, for instance in German, are expressed by two words, Darstellung and Vorstellung; both are usually rendered in English by “representation.” The first designates an item that corresponds in an iconic sense to another item, an “original” to which it refers. The second designates a conceptual construct that has no explicit reference to something else of which it could be considered a replica or picture. (In fact, Vorstellung would be better translated into English as “idea” or “conception.”) Thus, if one uses the word in the second sense, it would help to spell it “re- presentation.” The hyphenated “re” could be taken to indicate repetition of something one has experienced before. This would lessen the illusion that mental re- presentations are replicas or images of objects in some “real” world. It would help to focus attention on the fact that what one re-presents to oneself is never an independent external entity but rather the re-play of a conceptual item one has derived from experience by means of some sort of abstraction.[3] +
This in no way denies the fact that the continuous social and linguistic interactions among the members of a group or society lead to a progressive mutual adaptation of the individuals’ semantic connections. These interactions inevitably bring about the fact that the members of a language group tend to construct the meanings of words in ways that prove compatible with the usage of the community. This is to say, they develop a more or less common way of “seeing the world”. But what they see is nevertheless their subjective construction. That this is a viable assumption becomes clear the moment one considers more than one language. I can illustrate this by a simple example. English text books of linguistics frequently give “the boy hit the ball” as example of a simple sentence that contains a subject, a verb, and an object. In the British Isles this sentence usually calls forth the re-presentation of a boy armed with a tennis racket or a golf club. In the United States he will be imagined to hold a baseball bat. This is a very minor difference. However, if the sentence has to be translated into German, it turns out to be far more complicated. The translator has to know more about the situational context, because the “simple” sentence turns out to be ambiguous. It would be appropriate in several situations, each of which requires different words in German. Here are the four most likely ones: Fig.6: “The boy hits the ball” If the boy hits the ball with a racket, a club, or a bat, the German verb has to be schlagen; if he hits it with an arrow or a bullet, it would be treffen; if he hits it with his bicycle, it would be stossen plus the preposition auf; and if he hits the ball when falling from the balcony, it would be fallen … auf or schlagen … auf. None of these verbs could be used in any of the other three situations. The conceptual structures called up by the German verbs are more complex than the one called up by “to hit”. They all contain the meaning of the English verb, i.e. the construct of an object’s sudden impact with something else; but they also contain specifications of the event that are not part of the English meaning. As a result, English-speakers who want to express themselves in German must learn not only different words but also a different way of seeing the details of the relevant experiences. Between any two languages you might choose, there are innumerable differences of conceptualization. If they lie in the area of perceptual or sensorimotor construction, they sooner or later become noticeable and corrigible in practical situations of interaction. If, however, they are a matter of abstract conceptual construction, such as the meaning of the German word Vorstellung and that of the English word “representation”, they may cause lasting misinterpretation because their incompatibility rarely becomes apparent on the surface. I have chosen examples of the differential construction of meaning in different languages because they manifest themselves in the daily experience of anyone who lives in more than one language. But the meanings individual users of one and the same language construct are no more homogeneous. Although individuals necessarily adapt the meanings they associate with words to what they perceive to be the usage of the community, the stuff those meanings consist of is always part of their own subjective experience. Consequently it is misleading to speak of “shared” meanings. The four terms I mentioned in the abstract involve meaning in one way or another and tend to reinforce the notion that its structure is a well-known fixed entity. This, in my view, inevitably leads to trouble. What speakers of a language have constructed as the meanings of the words they use, is at best compatible in the linguistic interactions with other speakers; but such compatibility remains forever relative to the limited number of actual interactions the individual has had in his or her past. What speakers have learned to mean always remains their own construction.
V
Compatibility does not imply identity, it merely implies viability in the given circumstances. That is why, after having used a word in a particular way for fifty or more years, we may discover that it is not quite the way others are using it – it is just that the circumstances in which we have so far used the word happened to be such that they did not bring out any differences. +
What I suggest now, is that the relationship between our knowledge and “reality” is similar to the relationship between organisms and their environment.[4] In other words, we construct ideas, hypotheses, theories, and models, and as long they survive, which is to say, as long as our experience can be successfully fitted into them, they are viable. (In Piagetian terms we might say that our constructs are viable as long as our experience can be assimilated to them.) This, of course, immediately raises the question as to what “survival” and “viability” mean in the cognitive domain. Briefly stated, concepts, theories, and cognitive structures in general, are viable and survive as long hey serve the purposes to which they are put, as long as they more or less reliably get us what we want. “Getting us what we want,” however, means different things in different realms of experience. In the realm of everyday experience, for instance, Newton’s physics serves our purposes well and is perfectly viable. Most of us simply do not enter the realms of experience where the methods and predictions based on Newton’s concepts break down. This is not so for the ideal scientist (e.g., as portrayed by Popper, 1934/1965 and 1962/1968) who is perennially searching for concepts and theories that “get by” the constraints encountered in all realms of experience and who is, therefore, more concerned with the possible “falsification” of his concepts and hypotheses than with their practical success as means in the pursuit of certain limited ends. This leads to the somewhat peculiar situation that Newton’s ideas are quite “true” for the man in the street, the mechanic, and the working engineer, whereas hey are “false” for a relatively small group of specialized scientists. What must be stressed, however, is that none of this can change the epistemological status of the ideas, concepts, theories, or models that we consider as constituting our “knowledge.” +
It was, indeed, radical to break away from the traditional way of thinking according to which all human knowledge ought or can approach a more or less “true” representation of an independently existing, or ontological reality. In place of this notion of representation, radical constructivism introduces a new, more tangible relationship between knowledge and reality, which I have called a relationship of “viability.” Simply put, the notion of viability means that an action, operation, conceptual structure, or even a theory, is considered “viable” as long as it is useful in accomplishing a task or in achieving a goal that one has set for oneself. Thus, instead of claiming that knowledge is capable of representing a world outside of our experience, we would say, as did the pragmatists, that knowledge is a tool within the realm of experience. +
This viability is, in principle, the same notion as in the case of the lock and the key. +
If we accept this concept of viability, it becomes clear that it would be absurd to maintain that our knowledge is in any sense a replica or picture of reality. +
In the biological theory of evolution we speak of variability and selection, of environmental constraints and of survival. If an organism survives individually or as a species it means that, so far at least, it has been viable in the environment in which it happens to live. To survive, however, does not mean that the organism must in any sense reflect the character or the qualities of his environment. Gregory Bateson (1967) was the first who noticed that this theory of evolution, Darwin’s theory, is really a cybernetic theory because it is based on the concept of constraint rather than on the concept of causation. Somehow we always tend to think that the character of surviving organisms is determined by its environment. We speak of “adaptation”, and the idea of causation seems to become associated with that concept so that we end up believing that environmental constraints can cause certain biological structures or certain behaviors in organisms. This is a serious conceptual error. In order to remain among the survivors, an organism has to "get by" the constraints which the environment poses. +
Let me cite one example that is particularly well-documented and well-known: the Japanese macaque Imo on Koshima Islet that started washing her sweet potatoes (Kawai, 1965). Within 10 years the entire population, with the exception of a few old males who were too conservative, practiced potato washing. There was no time for a mutation or some other genetic accident to increase or decrease anyone’s viability. Nor, indeed, is there any evidence that potato washing has increased anyone’s genetic fitness. But as the new activity quickly created exceptional familiarity with water, it led to yet another novel behavior: swimming. Since all this has taken place in a country where earthquakes and tectonic disasters are not at all impossible, it might be tempting to conjecture that if Koshima Islet should one day sink into the sea, the swimming skill might yet become the crucial feature that allows these macaques to reach a safe shore while the macaques in other sinking regions perish. Subsequent generations of sociobiologists could then use the swimming macaques as a textbook example for “evolutionary explanation.” But such a scenario in which swimming might become an important asset toward the survival of macaques or macaque genes has not yet happened. Yet the washing of food and swimming have become part of the behavioral repertoire of a macaque population without the benefit of an evolutionary explanation. +
