(Note: This post is the seventh in a series of posts exploring the contents of Jean-Louis Dessalles' book, Why We Talk. For a summary of what came before see Why We Talk: Summary.)
I want to go over more of yesterday’s post because I think Dessalles has pointed the way to having a surer grasp of just what meaning is.
It is strange that meaning should be so mysterious. We can tell whether speech is meaningful or not, but it is painfully difficult to say just what meaning is. Now, however, I think Dessalles has brought us much closer to recognizing what’s present or absent when sentences are meaningful or meaningless. We are much closer to understanding just what it is that we do with speech that baffles every other existing form of life on the planet.
The American Heritage Dictionary offers as a definition of meaning, “Something that one wishes to convey, especially by language,” and offers as a sample sentence The writer's meaning was obscured by his convoluted prose. Which is as good as one might expect, but plainly unhelpful if you want to understand just what is going on. Convey is a metaphor and an obscure one at that. It offers no hint of what can be transported or how we pack it up for conveyance.
One thing this blog and Dessalles are agreed on is that convey is the wrong metaphor. Language pilots attention. If I want to “convey” the idea of an orange to you, I use the word orange and you direct your attention to your thought of an orange. What is that thought? Presumably it varies from person to person. One listener might see a naval orange, another might smell a ripe orange, while a third might taste a bit of orange juice. I suppose another person might hear the phrase Citrus sinensis and have no further sensation. It’s a strange conveyance that starts out as one thing and arrives in such different forms.
Meaning: Something to which one wishes to draw attention, especially by language. That’s a better definition. At least it clears up the puzzles of the conveyance metaphor, but it still doesn’t tell us how it draws attention or what the role of syntax is. Especially, it does not tell us the difference between protolanguage and true speech. In protolanguage one says orange; in true language, I brought back an orange from Florida. Is speech just more long-winded than protospeech.
I hate to say how long I’ve wrestled with questions like this (off and on mind you, it’s not quite a paralyzing obsession), so I’m relieved to find that Dessalles has suggested a solution. First, he connects syntax with perception, which makes sense. Attention is a function of perception and it’s the way animals think. Our thoughts are so tangled with language that even if we saw a herd of elephants running toward us, we might think, or even yell, elephants as we started to run. Chimpanzees would start to run too, without the language part. Perception is the ability to understand your sensations. Even if that understanding is reflexive, it still requires perception. You have to see it coming before you can flinch.
The best understanding of how human perception functions comes from the gestalt psychologists. They have established that we distinguish objects from the flow of sensory data. Gestalt psychologists call these objects figures, and spotting one sounds straightforward. There’s a tree out there, so we see a tree, but the challenges become clear when you try to program a computer to find the tree. If you work with Photoshop, you can see the problem. The figures pop out at you but when you try to define the edges they seem to disappear. The colors overlap, or if it is a black and white the tones flow into one another. Finding the the edge on the basis of your understanding as well as eyesight. Perception is not just a passive computation of the figures out there. The perceiver creates part of the perception, famously turning a series of still pictures into motion. We can even perceive things that physics says is not really there. If we can recognize a melody even when the tempo and pitch changes, just what are we recognizing? Is the melody really out there or is it a figure invented by the mind?
Protolanguage can handle this level of perception. The speaker can perceive an object and speak its name. Orange. The listener hears the name and looks, noticing the orange the speaker identifies, or if there is no orange present the listener can imagine an orange, perceiving it with “the mind’s eye.”
But there is more to perception than recognizing figures. Figures appear against a background, what gestalt psychologists call simply a ground. The ground frames a figure and can change our reaction to what we perceive, by individualizing it. A chimpanzee with a forest background evokes one emotion; a zoo cage background can produce a different response. To see the difference compare the two Madonnas below, one medieval and without a background and the other a renaissance work with a background.
We can identify the Madonna in both of them, but only in the later work can we recognize an individual. Doubters might point out that the renaissance work is by Leonardo da Vinci and he was the greater painter, able to put individuality there. But look how he does it: by having the figures interact with the ground. The infant is supporting himself on the rocks. Without that ground the infant would be forced into a more formal, iconic pose and even this Madonna would shed much of her individuality.
Recognizing both identity and individuality are critical to a full understanding. Not surprisingly then, evolution frequently uses gestalt techniques to confuse. The use of colors to blend into the ground is a famous technique, and when that won’t work, as in the case of herding animals on the open plain, zebra stripes and wildebeest beards make it difficult to distinguish one from another. Their identity is plain enough, but their individuality is obscure.
Perceiving individuality and identity at the same time requires seeing things within things. If you look at the medieval painting, the whole thing is the identity. There’s the Mother of God. Da Vinci’s painting shows us the Mother of God and a human being. Seeing both of these things together requires some kind of recursive process stuffing two things into one perception. So it is not surprising that communicating the whole of a perception requires a recursive system.
Yesterday’s post summarized Dessalles’ analysis of semantics. He segments a sentence into two parts, the theme (the figure that changes) and the reference frame (the still ground that locates the theme). This analysis provides a gestalt understanding of semantics as a way of using words to create a perception, complete with figure and ground.
If we take a sentence like My trust in you has been shattered forever by your unfaithfulness, we can see that it gets its power from the way it takes something as whispy as the feeling of trust and makes it a real figure standing against a ground of unfaithfulness. This is how meaning works. In protolanguage it pilots attention to a figure. In true speech it pilots attention to both figure and ground.
The question naturally arises, what could have happened to move our ancestors across that line of communication? Did they acquire a new way of perceiving or did something else happen?
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