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<body id="MyBody" onload="MyBegin()"> <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="VBScript"> </SCRIPT> <script language="VBScript" src="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Scripts/mysounds.js">  </script> <script language="VBScript" src="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Scripts/mycolors.js">  </script> <p align="center"><font size="6">Cognitive Development & Symbolic Differentiation</font></p> <p align="center"><font size="4">A Theory & a Methodology</font></p> <p align="center"> </p> <p align="center"> </p> <p align="center"><font size="3">by Hugh M. Lewis</font></p> <p align="center"><font size="3">1995</font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">  <hr> <font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Copyright, 2001, Hugh M. Lewis</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Copies of this text may be printed for research and classroom use only</p> <hr> <font FACE="Futura Md BT"> <p ALIGN="center"><font size="5">CONTENTS</font></p> <p ALIGN="center"> </p> <p ALIGN="center"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/CognitionFrames.htm#one">INTRODUCTION</a></p> <p ALIGN="center"> </p> <p ALIGN="center"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/Cognition1.htm">CHAPTER 1</a></font><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/CognitionFrames.htm#two">: <font FACE="Futura Md BT">SCIENCE AND COGNITION: THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL</font> <font FACE="Futura Md BT">CONSTRUCTION OF SYMBOLIC REALITY</font></a></p> <font FACE="Futura Md BT"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="center"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/Cognition2.htm">CHAPTER 2</a></font><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/CognitionFrames.htm#three">: <font FACE="Futura Md BT">EMBLEMATIC COGNITION: THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL GROUND</font> <font FACE="Futura Md BT">OF MEANING</font></a></p> <font FACE="Futura Md BT"> <p ALIGN="center"> </p> <p ALIGN="center"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/Cognition3.htm">CHAPTER 3</a></font><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/CognitionFrames.htm#four">: <font FACE="Futura Md BT">CULTURAL CATEGORIES AND THE CULTURAL IMPERATIVE</font></a></p> <font FACE="Futura Md BT"> <p ALIGN="center"> </p> <p ALIGN="center"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/Cognition4.htm">CHAPTER 4</a></font><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/CognitionFrames.htm#five">: <font FACE="Futura Md BT">THE PROPOSITIONAL ORGANIZATION OF WORLDVIEW</font></a></p> <font FACE="Futura Md BT"> <p ALIGN="center"> </p> <p ALIGN="center"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/Cognition5.htm">CHAPTER 5</a></font><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/CognitionFrames.htm#six">: <font FACE="Futura Md BT">CONVENTIONAL KNOWLEDGE AND THE CULTURAL CONTEXT</font></a></p> <font FACE="Futura Md BT"> <p ALIGN="center"> </p> <p ALIGN="center"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/Cognition6.htm">CHAPTER 6</a></font><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/CognitionFrames.htm#seven">: <font FACE="Futura Md BT">THE WORLDVIEW PROBLEM--AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL</font> <font FACE="Futura Md BT">CONSTRUCTION</font></a></p> <font FACE="Futura Md BT"> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font face="Book Antiqua" size="5"><b><a name="one">INTRODUCTION</a></b></font></p> <font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Recent advances in research in non-human forms of intelligence have served to puncture the bubble of our intellectual superiority or uniqueness in the world, perhaps to dethrone humankind as the only intelligent species on earth. But the question of the possible uniqueness of a distinctively human form of intelligence remains to be answered. We can compare up to a point the intelligence of a chimpanzee and a three-year-old child. But a chimp who has only learned a vocabulary of a few hundred rudimentary terms over years of instruction is difficult to compare to a small child who acquires gradual control a few thousand terms over a few months or years. There is a sense that the basic form of cognition of the small infant is fundamentally distinct and humanlike in quality, almost from the very beginning of human awareness. To compare this to the mental functioning of a primate or a dolphin would indeed be like mixing apples and oranges and bananas.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">There are several facets which serve to mark out basic human intelligence as unique. First is the central importance of linguistic acquisition to organization of human awareness, especially of the basic word-symbol that eventually becomes something more than the immediate referent of the sign. Secondly, are the cognitive-affective evocations to stimuli which are also basically symbolic in reference and gestalt in organization. Third, is the very early modeling capability of the child, to learn naturally by imitation and presence of models. Fourth is the very early evidence of the child to evince goal-directed behavior that can lead to solving ever more complex problems in the obtaining of ever less immediate goals. Fifth, is the natural curiosity towards symbolic stimuli, a symbolic playfulness (toys, dolls, clothing, etc.) and an intrinsic interest in human made symbols (letters, words, signs, pictures) which the human shows toward learning and acquisition of knowledge. The child actively explores and thus enlarges the effective environment, and in this regard cannot long be frustrated.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">It is my argument that these distinctions of innate human intelligence cannot be understood just as a matter of degree of neural development or sophistication, but as a qualitative difference of a basic kind which points to an entire different kind of neural organization of the brain. Finally, this development appears to be situated within and tied to an "effective" environment that is culturally defined--the prolonged latency and dependency period of the much slower growth and development of the human child is in stark contrast to the parallel development periods of any other species--including gorillas and chimpanzees. This suggests that whatever is happening to the human brain, it normally requires a prolonged and sequential series of stages to occur before maturation is reached and adulthood is reached. That this process is tied to evolutionary development and is a pan-human, species wide phenomena is evident in the prolonged infancy and delayed sexual maturation of the humans compared to any other species. The growing size of the brain phylogenetically and the delayed period of childhood required for its development suggests that brains and culture that provides the context of human mental development have coexisted evolutionarily for a long time. Both necessitated and made possible more elaborate and extensive cultural developments, which in turn promoted bigger brains. Once humankind happened upon the discovery of brains-and-culture combination, its advantages for the small group in terms of beating the odds in natural selection became immediately apparent.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">The small human grouping was distinctive. It was not a school of fish or a flock of geese or scavenging fowl, neither was it an instinctually driven and organized wolf pack. It probably resembled more a primate troop that exhibited some form of sexual-age based hierarchy and stratification. What marked it out as different was that symbolic forms as controlling and mediational information devices came to increasingly supplant and take the place of instincts, those impulse based drives which gradually became repressed, sublimated, creative and constitutive of a more sophisticated form of response. Such sublimation of instinctual constraints resulted in an increasing world openness of the human species which enabled its groups to begin the process of the cultural construction and development of a new human-made reality--reality of Gods, spirits, weapons, and fire. The rise to consciousness of a genuinely symbolic form allowed the gradual displacement and subordination of those basic biological and instinctual drives, and the creative implementation and manipulation of the symbolic control which such mediation made increasingly possible.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">This form of mediation of basic libidinal drives and their channeling or molding into other forms of response is referred to as symbolic displacement and represents a basic process underlying human evolutionary development.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">It is evident that selection favored the survival of individuals who had larger brains and who were slower to develop, hence more dependent upon the small group. How these individual's gained a survival advantage is in the enlarged scope of planning and social coordination which symbolic displacement enabled. It allowed these people to learn in a more sophisticated manner the patterns presented to them in the natural world, to increasingly carry over the lessons from one behavioral setting to apply them to another. Deliberate tool use, and especially the generalization of tool function, represents this level of pre-cultural development. The tool, consciously manipulated, became the mediational agent of deferred gratification.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">What was evolutionarily more intelligent was whatever it was that traded off brains for brawn--the cunning of wisdom, experience and planning, which eventually won the day over brute force and physical strength.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">An evolutionary aegis favoring larger brains and prolongation of development also entailed the need for the group to find for itself a natural habitus or domestic arrangement that protected them from the adversities of the natural world and provided a safe haven for the nurturance of the child. This included the defensive participation of males and their contribution to the common pool. Demands and responsibilities for nurturance of the child favored those mothers and fathers who could shoulder such responsibility and who showed an empathetic capacity for the peculiar needs of the child. It also favored those individuals who could cooperate enough with one another to make a small group setting worthwhile. Ethnographic evidence also suggests that it may have favored promotion of a particular leaderships style that combined effectively the elements of force and persuasion in gaining, manipulating and sustaining, the cooperation of the group. Though domination may have been achieved through the domination of an alpha-male, at least in the earliest phases, it is evident that this form of leadership must have at some point given way to more indirect, and indirectly more effective forms. The apparent egalitarianism of contemporary small bands of hunter-gatherers suggest that male dominance may not have necessarily been a part of the original picture. Evidence of the social patterning of the pygmy Chimpanzees shows how women can gain and manipulate control of groups through the use of a well developed sexuality. Humans are unique for their year-round sexual receptivity and their well developed sexual characteristics. A great many transitions of the onset of a more adult-like form of symbolic awareness and cognitive sophistication appear to be correlated with and contemporaneous with the onset of sexual maturation during adolescences. It is at this time that the group begins sorting itself out socially.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">The development and use of sexuality as a form of group management may be tied to the reproductive female's capacity to attract and keep male mates over the long term, who would be active contributors to the protection, production and reproduction of the small group. The growing exchange of sons between such groups would foster the foundation of a local, inter-group solidarity and identity. Males might alternately splinter off to form their own male-solidarity groups.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">We can imagine any number of evolutionary scenarios, but at this point, with a lack of solid evidence, can prove none of them. It is likely that in the long course of human evolution, many different kinds of social patterns occurred--some more successful than others. But whatever patterns it was that did occur, it was those which favored bigger brains, marked sexuality, group solidarity and prolonged infant dependency which in the long run won out over alternative courses of development.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">The purpose of these essays are not the evolutionary reconstruction of human phylogenetic or cultural development, but rather the elaboration of a fairly specific theory address the central worldview problem more specifically the connections between culture, cognition and language, which I hold to be more precisely symbolic in form and function. These are questions which have been given a renewed importance in light of recent advances in cognitive sciences (that have so far excluded any real anthropological dialogue or contribution) and the understanding of human cognition. It appears that in light of recent biological and computer achievements, the question and relevance of culture in an analytical or scientific sense has been eclipsed and laid to rest--forgotten in the dust of rapid scientific progress in other fields. And yet the realities and problems of culture remain even more glaringly apparent and relevant to our modern world as they had been during any previous period. Thus, we cannot afford to continue to ignore the question of cultural realities and their consequences upon our world, or the contributions which such a science might make toward our understanding and organization of the world.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">This work advances a relatively general theory about worldview that is rooted in an understanding of the patterning of human symbolic representation as basic to the processes of human cognition, comprehension and construction of the world, its development in both the individual and society, and its theoretical representation. It is claimed that human cognition is basically symbolic, and in its rudimentary form this is emblematic in organization. From the emblematic organization at a basic level of perception, linguistically index cognitive categories are created and organized into a system of reference and inference. This categorical conceptualization of the world is propositionally organized, and the propositional organization of human worldview accounts for the capacity to make inferences and judgments about the ontological status human reality. These processes are critically conditioned within a cultural context, and this context works symbolically in relatively specific ways to constrain and shape human thought and worldview. The result is a culturally situated system of informational patterning which occurs analytically at several discrete levels, which can be empirically evaluated at these levels via means of certain kinds of symbolic framing tasks, and that lends itself to a computer representation of a cultural system that is rule-based and organized upon the basis of the theory.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">That human culture is basic to our sense of reality in the world, and was somehow important to the evolutionary, phylogenetic development of humankind, should go without question in our understanding of our world. That it continues to be of consequence to our development needs to be reemphasized and examined more thoroughly.</font></p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font face="Book Antiqua"><b><a name="two">CHAPTER ONE</a></b></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font face="Book Antiqua" size="5"><b>SCIENCE AND COGNITION</b></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font face="Book Antiqua" size="4"><b>The Anthropological Construction of Symbolic Reality</b></font></p> <font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Science has come to a cross-roads, and is upon the verge of a new era in which the computer will be the center of our scientific procedures and models of the world. The noetic revolution that the advent of the computer has meant is only just beginning to impact upon the world. We can now speak not only about a tertiary orality, but of a secondary electronic literacy that is the product of widespread computer programming and networking.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">We cannot know now fully what consequences this new form of cyber-noetic consciousness will have for our way of viewing and relating to the world. But we can rest assured that it will open up new, hitherto unknown, possibilities which will lead our science to important new, previously undreamt of, discoveries, insights, inventions and innovations.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Even now we are coming to understand new possibilities in the understanding and modeling of hitherto unmanageable complexities in our life. We are finding new forms in chaos and new order in apparent disorder. These offer us new possibilities for coming to grips with many dimensions of our world which we could never before hope to fully comprehend or manage. These possibilities promise that we may further extend the power of our sciences to better predict and control the cosmographical events of the universe--erosion, weather, geological events, evolution, social events, wars, floods, famines, etc.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">We can speak of a new form of space in our lives which does not live exclusively in our minds, nor is completely separate in the world from our minds. Conventional terms designating this would be cyberspace or hyperspace, and it is the stuff of electronic information that is conducted through both the electro-magnetic mediums of our microchips, and through the biochemical mediums of our brains. We speak of a new form of reality--a virtual reality that is constituted by this space.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">A new form of information lives and evolves within the environments of cyberspace. It is a form of information that is vast, fast-paced, complex, virtual and potentially infinite. In cyberspace, the computer screen can become the mirror for our minds--reflecting not only the content of our thoughts, but their possible structure, order, and even phenomenal nature. At the same time, our minds develop to mirror the information of the computer screen. The intrinsic quality of this information of cyberspace is symbolic, in structure and function, in design and device, and therefore inextricably human.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">This work represents the intersection of several disciplines of interest, some of which are already interdisciplinary in practice and theory. It involves the conjunction of theory, methods and knowledge in the fields of ethno-science, cognitive anthropology and the anthropology of knowledge, with the related interdisciplinary field of "cognitive science" spanning the fields of cognitive and social psychology, philosophy, neurology, and computer science.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Within this intersection we can define a set of interrelated problems: 1. the nature, organization and function of implicit knowledge and shared information or understandings in cultural context; 2.the manner in which this knowledge becomes psychologically internalized, contextualizes our understandings and world view, and partially determines of our minds; 3. the internal organization and function and biological foundations of this internalized but implicit knowledge and the psychological constitution of the mind of the ego; 4. the projection of this internalized knowledge onto the environment and its influence in the prestructuring, shaping and modification of the cultural context.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">We can also refer to the systematic means of analyzing knowledge on each of these processural levels, as well as to a means of integrating analysis upon these different levels of processing. These forms of analysis leads to models of representation and to:</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">1. An empirical theory of culture as an informational context </font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">2. A psychological theory of worldview as embodied context</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">3. A symbolic theory of human cognition and worldview</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">4. A symbolic constructivist theory of language as a mediator and medium of this symbolic process</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">5. An anthropological theory of the symbolic construction of reality</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">6. A theory of information in cyberspace and a substantive theory of natural information systems.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">In this regard, we can speak of two sources of informational ambiguity or noise--as both internal and external, or independently variable, endogenous and exogenous information. These two sources of information are interrelated such that they provide dynamic feedback that becomes structured through the channels of internalization and externalization in the world. The principal medium of these channels of internalization and externalization is language, whether nonverbal, oral or textual in form. The process mediating and constituting this interrelation of the two worlds can be described as being symbolic in both form and function.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">It is a central hypothesis that the symbolic function of human cognition is biologically tied to the human linguistic apparatus and organization of the brain for speech production and recognition. The evolutionary acquisition of language was rooted in, and in turn provided, the symbolic foundation for the cultural construction of human reality.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">We say these processes are inherently symbolic because: 1. Humans are biologically hardwired and evolutionarily programmed for symbolic processing of information, 2. Human symbolism has a partially open, non-linear, semi-deterministic, and productive structural design which allows for extreme flexibility as well as precision in the system. Symbolisms have what can be referred to as a plausible or weak inference structure which is variable in its restriction and directionality, guided by relative contextuality and relative non-contradiction. 3. Symbolisms are constituted by the process of symbolization which mediates the two worlds, 4. All symbolisms, and the entire process of symbolization, entails an intrinsic amount of organic cost, psychic investment and affective attachment which confers "meaning" upon the nexus of interrelations between external and internal worlds, 5. Symbolisms cohere and become embedded within other symbolisms, both in the external and internal worlds, to form semi-hierarchical systems which can be said to take the form of a semi-determined symbolic network of meaning, 6. Internal and external worlds thus become tied together in complex ways at multiple levels of meaning and signification and this tethering of the internal and external realities comes to take on the dynamics of a critical system within which interference patterns lead to a certain amount of unpredictable and destructive consequences; 7. Language structure influences and is influenced by this symbolic stratification of meaning and comes to reflect this embedding/embodying process of symbolization, and the organization of both the internal and external patterning of symbolisms, and is the principal mechanism of the symbolic articulation of reality that leads to this stratification of meaning in both our worlds.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">The two sources of information can be said to form a dual-processing system in which both are interdependent variables--partially independent and partially dependent. Their function in relation to one another provides the dual feedback mechanisms of both first-order resonance dampening and second-order resonance amplification, as well as what can be spoken of as a third-order resonance modulation. In a sense, the two worlds created within this system are parallel transformations of one another. The internal world is a cognitive mapping of the external world, while the external world becomes the projective construction of the internal worldview.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">In actuality, the external world is constituted by multiple sources of information (as is probably the internal world as well)--a great deal of which consists of the endogenous projections and externalized constructions of other people. Thus information becomes embedded in the external world in reference and reinforcement by others. It is a special inter-subjective process of symbolic communication occurs in which projective constructions, perceived as if externally real sources of information, become internalized.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Because multiple sources of ambiguity are potentially chaotic and destructive within such a system, regulatory, principled structures emerge that are embedded within and definitive of the context of symbolic communication and that constitutes the foundation of culture. Such a regulatory system is partially, implicitly rule-based, as it defines a central paradigm for all events of symbolic communication by which all manifestations and processes, all speech, action and behavior within the social order becomes tacitly evaluated or measured.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">This symbolic cultural paradigm is mostly latent within the background, and defines the cultural context of social interrelations and the basis of social order. We can say that it finds expression via the embodiment and internalization of its sense of order in the individual, and it comes to have a preferred, tasteful quality within the individual that is a function of its habitualization within the life of the Individual, and by extension, the group culture. We refer to this process as enculturation, and to its consequences as the ethnocentric orientation of the ego.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">A special form of this process of cultural contextualization regulates and orders human interrelationships and defines the framework for social relationships and organization in the world. Internalization of the culturally constructed world takes a special form when it involves interrelationship and communication between humans which have an inherent reflexive or apperceptive quality. This is referred to as status-role identification within a social system, and its process is referred to as socialization of the ego and the characteriological formation of the status-personality configuration.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Without this cultural context operating in the background, social relationships would become marked by irrelation and social identity and the development of the ego as a social entity would not take place. The consequences are monstrous, and that is why we say that humans are, biologically speaking, social animals.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">The career and biographical trajectory of the individual's development is marked by the processes of enculturation and socialization at the primary and secondary levels. Primary socialization occurs mostly in childhood and has as the foundation modeling of behavior from primary reference others--most usually the parents, but also alternate care takers and siblings, peers, etc. We can speak of the symbolic mediation of the effective environment of the child's life-world with process of positive and negative reinforcement by which cultural and social patterns are internalized. Primary forms of socialization and enculturation are marked by what can be referred to as the primary acquisition of learned behavior, and results in the embodiment of the cultural symbolic paradigm in a manner that it remains mostly internalized, transparent, taken for granted, and indirect in its constraint upon our lives.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Furthermore, it must not be seen as just a form of negative sanctioning but as a source of positive valuation for the self, as a source of meaningful relationship with the world. As such it provides models which allow us to integrate our realities, find unity of purpose and practice, and motivate us in our goals and actions.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Secondary socialization may actually begin quite early, and gradually comes to take over the place played by primary socialization. Secondary socialization and enculturation occurs mostly in later childhood and adult-life, and involve to a great extent the external sanctioning and constraint, both direct and indirect, of behavior. Secondary socialization may differ in intrinsic quality of the processes involved in secondary acquisition compared to primary acquisition, involving the elaboration and sanctioning of more explicit and direct symbolic codifications of reality.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">It is regarded by some that the possible conflict, contradiction and interference between patterns established by primary acquisition and subsequent secondary acquisition, especially in the formation of the ego, may lead to basic forms of discrepancy that express themselves as neuro-psychotic and personality or behavioral disorders in the individual. These forms of discrepancy might become patterned in certain predictable ways, especially when we regard either primary or secondary socialization as possibly incomplete or malformed in basic ways.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">There are definite biological components of these processes. Humans are genetically preprogrammed for a developmental growth trajectory which requires a culturally, socially and linguistically effective environment defined and modeled by significant others, and there is a critical timing and ordered sequences of stages for development to proceed to completion. The processes of internalization and affective involvement in the received order becomes biologically embedded and embodied in the individual in many basic ways. We cannot clearly separate at this time the extent to which these processes of embodiment are genotypic or phenotypic. The human brain and related sensor-motor neural apparatus are biologically developed for the symbolic mediation and organization of the world, and have come to evolutionarily depend upon the presence of a culturally defined environment--in short, symbolic processes are hard-wired in the brain.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">The socio-cultural context must be and remain ordered and regulated in deterministic ways as this provides a form of constraint which lends a sense of order and predictability of pattern to an otherwise, potentially dangerous, chaotic system of socio-environmental relations. To a large extent this order is achieved historically by habituation, tacit agreement and conformation of interactions and response patterns. It is a system of indirect constraint that becomes reinforced by explicit rules of order which regulate, usually in a negative, prohibitive manner, by direct constraint. Tacit and explicit forms of constraint must also come into agreement and coordination, and thus form a secondary feedback system the locus of which is the external socio-context, and they must solve basic problems which are tied to the perpetuation of the social order and to the biological survival and bio-functional maintenance of its constituency. They must solve the problems of production and reproduction of the socio-cultural context, and the maintenance of the individual in relation to it. Thus we refer to the dynamics of a socio-cultural system that has a corporate, institutional structural-functional order.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Socio-cultural organization is also influenced in relation to other cultural groupings and the alternative cultural realities which they present in a larger continuum. Exogenous sources of structuration at the group level are referred to as acculturation and may have a range of different consequences upon the internal organization of a cultural grouping. Socio-cultural groupings can be distinguished in the number of domains of information, the differentiation of the domains of information, the specialization of these domains of knowledge, and the relative degree of specificity/generality of such information, as well as in the kinds and relative organization of different domains of information.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Language is again implicated at this level of analysis as an integral and central component of this structural-functional organization of reality. This central role of language--its structure, function, and contextuality--is implicated with the symbolic-cognitive processes of externalization and internalization of reality, as well as with the socio-cultural processes of symbolic communication </font></font></font><font face="Book Antiqua">that </font> <font FACE="Times"> <font face="Book Antiqua">leads to the concretization and reinforcement of the normal socio-cultural order.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">To some extent, the internal structure of a language is independent and arbitrary of its function in these symbolic processes of mediation--except that upon the surface level of its discursive iteration, in the normal speech settings and contexts in which it regularly occurs, and in its pragmatic and functional effects, it becomes bound and constrained within the normal contexts of its occurrence in important ways. We can say that a language and its structuration, dynamics and directionality of change, are bound within and tethered inextricably to the dialogical contexts in which it arises and takes shape. It remains thus partially non-arbitrary in the sense of being constrained by socio-cultural convention and context.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">A great deal of spoken languages leaves the symbolic meaning of the message implicit, bound as it is within the speech setting in which the message is situated. Language organization also comes to reflect the order and patterning of the knowledge in which it is contextualized and its meaning given shape--culturally defined categories may be highly elaborated or left undifferentiated. Language delimits and defines knowledge and understanding, helping to give it shape and form in the world which is anchored to the actual experience of the communicative event.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Language function must solve two interrelated problems--the efficiency of communication that is linked to the disambiguation of meaning or the reduction of noise of the informational carrying capacity and signal, and the problem of expressiveness of the message in conveying the meaning intended. Efficiency and expressiveness are overlapping, but not the same problems, and at some point the problem of the efficiency of the message leads to a direction which becomes at odds with the problem of increasing the expressiveness of the message. Thus, there is a tendency when the problem of efficiency, or reduction of ambiguity, toward the simplification and reduction of the signal length to the minimum, compared with the opposite tendency of the enhancement of expressiveness towards the elaboration and extension of signal length.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">There are definite speech settings and socio-cultural contexts in which one kind of function will consistently take precedence over the other--in inter-lingual speech settings there will be a premium placed on the disambiguation and simplification of the signal, while within group symbolic communication events, which are highly inbound and frequently oriented toward maintaining an exclusive group boundary within a context, will tend toward the expressive elaboration and extension of messages toward a greater degree of achieved coherence.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Languages vary considerably in the degree to which the its lexicon is elaborated and the degree to which its lexicon and even syntax are bound within the context of the normal speech setting. Languages thus are contextually relative. There is a relationship between efficiency and expressiveness and context boundness versus contextual independence--in general it can be said that messages situated and tied to the context of the communication event have the disambiguation of noise as the implicit aim, while expressive elaboration of a language will tend towards relative contextual independence.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Languages which are more contextually bound will thus have less highly differentiated categories and will thus reflect cultural knowledge domains in a different way. They will tend to be more concrete and practically oriented toward everyday life, hence more basic in the sense of relying heavily upon basic, simply encoded terms. Within such languages, the elaboration and expression of certain types of information, especially a more cultivated range of feelings, ideas or understanding, will tend to be relatively unavailable and not readily encoded within the language--rendering access to the expression and hence concretization of such abstractions relatively problematic.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">More highly differentiated languages will tend to be less context bound, more context independent, will contain a greater frequency of elaborated terms and messages, and will permit more facile access to a wider and finer range of abstract ideas, feelings and knowledge. Any language, furthermore, will exhibit an internal range of variation within which there might be considerable variance in terms of its relative differentiation, relative elaboration and contextuality, and thus we can speak of a relative, variable level of speaker competence of a language which is linked to a speech context.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">It can be expected that syntactically in terms of basic dimensions, languages will also vary substantially in a similar manner. Some languages being more well developed syntactically reflecting its relative contextual independency compared to languages which are less syntactically constrained as demonstrated by systems of overt marking of covert categories of meaning. Thus less highly differentiated languages will tend to show fewer systems of overt marking of such dimensions, and thus its syntactic systems will be less constrained than those which have greater marking and more differentiation.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">A deeper level of language patterning and structure linked to the problems of language production can be said to have less connection and linkage to the contexts of its performance, which are thought to occur more upon the surface patterning. Such a deeper level of structure can be said to be linked to the inherent design features of human language as a symbolic communication system, and are for the most part shared by all languages. Nevertheless, at this more implicit level to patterns of context and constraint can be found to exist, and these may influence the directions in which a language will change.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">When we refer to the dynamics of language change, we can recognize the implicit structure of language by the systematic nature of these changes, and we must acknowledge both exogenous and endogenous sources for such change, and the partially structured nature of such sources. Languages change from without in contact and relation to other languages, and from within in relation to internalized variations of language and the reverberations which context may have upon its implicit patterning.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Language works in another way in the nomic processes of externalization and internalization of information--by their affixation of a term to a definition, and the connotative accretion of differentiated meanings, that word achieves a nomic concreteness which gives it solidity and objectivity of meaning in the external world, and a sense of coherence and subjective validity in the internal world. Thus words serve to fix and precipitate meanings out in fairly patterned ways. Empirical evidence supports the contention that the internal codification of words and meanings is fairly hardwired and critical to the cognitive organization of the mind. Worlds thus have an indexical and lexical reference function in the mind by which meanings and associations of the mind can be referenced and called up by means of the vocabulary to which they are linked.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Thus it becomes reasonable to suggest that different language systems have the consequence of different patterns of organization of the mind, and that speakers of different languages thus tend to carve their world up in ways that are fundamentally different. It has been difficult to precisely demonstrate these differences of patterning as expressed in terms of language. The use of color terminology has come to show that the acquisition of color terms is biologically hardwired, and that cultural and personal developmental acquisition of such terms follows the same course.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">This case does not refute the linguistic relativity of hypothesis</font></font><font face="Book Antiqua">. It </font><font FACE="Times"><font face="Book Antiqua">does teach us that such an hypothesis must be understood in relation to the biological organization of the brain and cannot be applied in a blanket manner to all areas of cognitive organization of the brain. It suggests that in terms of basic categories and dimensions, such as basic color terminology, basic flora and fauna taxonomies, etc.. There is more likely to be greater overlap of both syntax and meaning and similarities than differences between different languages, there is more likely to be a biological substratum for language organization in these domains. If we are to find clear instances of relativity, it is in the degree of differentiation and differential elaboration of non-basic categories and domains of experience, especially those domains and categories which are strongly tied to specific contexts or which are contextually independent in an extreme sense. Cases of the problems of poetic translation are the most apparent instances of such relativity of language at the level of extreme elaboration--cases of elaboration of terms in relation to snow or to technology are cases of strong contextual linkages.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">It is the flexibility of language as a symbolic system which permits the relativity of language to be only a weak form, and that allows rather facile inter-translation between different language systems.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">The processes of internalization and externalization involve language in a central way, but as processes themselves we must also look at the cognitive/perceptual and cultural aspects of the embedding and embodiment of information in context and within the individual culture-bearer in a way that renders two parallel mappings of the world in conjunction/disjunction, and that tends to reinforce the sense of congruity between these mappings.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">For the most part, externally embedded and internally embodied information remains implicit to the linguistic event itself, as an internal part of the contextual background of the event. From this standpoint, we can say that there is no such thing as a completely context independent word or message--the question is the extent to which context becomes intrinsic to the message itself, carried implicitly with it, found within the structure of the language in reference to other terms, than it is contained only in the events surrounding or external to the message and language system itself.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">The processes of internalization and externalization are in a sense mutually complementary and to some extent interdependent, in that they both rely upon the same principle medium of language. The process of internalization is what is referred to as the subjectivation of information in the sense that it is cognitively--affective or connatively available to the mind as something that is coherent, relevant, and as if real in a psychic sense of intimate or intense personal involvement.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">The process of externalization involves the objectivation of information in a material, behavioral or relational sense that is concrete and seemingly real in a concrete, separate sense of impersonal involvement. But objectivation also entails the transference and possibly confusion of internalized feelings and psychic involvements onto things, behaviors or relations that are objectively disembodied and out there in the world.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Differentiation theory pointing to the relative articulation of the phenomenal field of reality suggests that the processes of subjectivation and objectivation may not be completely separate or even distinguishable processes, and people vary in the degree to which these processes become differentiated with rather marked psychic/behavioral consequences in terms of quality of perception, psychic processes of ego-defense which maintain the boundary between self and external world--especially in terms of the rational sophistication of the intellectual and language based processes which mediate and mark these processes as separate.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">The internal organization of knowledge/information takes the form of mind as a relatively coherent and holistic worldview and way of seeing the world. Explained in psychic terms, we can look at basic perceptual processes </font></font><font face="Book Antiqua">that </font><font FACE="Times"><font face="Book Antiqua">are tied to the progressive differentiation of the phenomenal field. In understanding this level, we must recognize the implicit gestalt pattern recognition processes that allow us to rapidly apprehend complex relationships and patterns in the myriad field of stimuli, to progressively make sense of these patterns in more conceptually abstract and linguistically definitive ways.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Because gaps or holes occur in both the perceptual field and in our processing at its various levels, we can speak of the inherent ambiguity of such disorder and the capacity of the mind to repair and fill in such gaps with internal information which is to some measure consistent with the original context and patterning of the processed information. It is in terms of consistent error in this repair process, stimulated by the purposeful gapping or ambiguation of perceptual stimuli, that we can better understand and even to some extent map the internal processes of psychic repair.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Psychic repair processes are linked to different level of memory processes in the mind, memory which is evoked by the linguistic signal or by the perceptual patterning in which the gaps occur. Psychic information is borrowed from embodied memory to fill in the gaps in our perceptual and conceptual fields. Linked to these memory processes are also imagination, dreams and forms of abstract conceptualization which do not depend upon any external reference points or context. Many abstract concepts are given in an internalized sense an embodied concreteness or hypostatization which disguises the fact that there may exist no actual external reference for such lexically encoded concepts or thoughts. In this sense the very language system which serves to link and intermediate internal and external realities, at the same time serves to permanently separate these worlds, and to some extent, disconnect them in any direct way. The psychic repair process permits the direct, sudden and immediate apprehension of the gestalt pattern as a holistic configuration against an implicit background field of information--its success is that it allows the ultimate recognition of the gestalt.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">The same processes which are implicated in the psychic repair of the perceptual field, are implicated in the ego-mediation of the boundary between internal world and external reality, as well as in the processes of externalization </font></font><font face="Book Antiqua">that </font><font FACE="Times"><font face="Book Antiqua">involve particularly psychic constructions and transference in the form. These processes are referred to as psychic projection and can be understood in the sense that we are relying upon internalized psychological constructions to fill in and complete the holes in the disambiguation of objective perceived reality.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">It is in these processes that we can see the cognitive connection underlying the structure and function of human symbolization. Symbolization, with its flexible plausible and contextual structure, permits the immediate disambiguation of information and the immediate and direct gestalt apprehension of the structured constraint of that information.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">We can refer back to the nomic function of the word as a symbol which gives form and definite shape to thoughts and meaning, a marker for an presumably external reference (though in many instances it points to nothing external in the world). It is this function of the word, of naming, which enables the gestalt to a achieve a sudden sense of holistic integration, and for the hypostatization and concretization of constructed, otherwise implicit understanding.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Furthermore, the linkage of such words into ordered systems by principles of constraint enable us to construct rational systems and systems of rationalization by which we can seek to explain and systematically understand reality. Our theories and our ideologies, our religious, philosophical and scientific ways of thinking, such as this one, are all such symbolic systems of nomic ratiocination. The differentiation of language which is determinative of an average or modal level of speech competence is thus directly tied to cognitive styles and degrees of sophistication of modes of thinking and psychologizing about the world in terms which are more or less well differentiated and permit relative levels of symbolic articulation with reality.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Information becomes implicitly embedded in a concretized way in the ordering and symbolic construction of the external world of things and people and relationships between them. Because this information is realistically objective it is perceived as real. Information also becomes explicitly encoded in texts which are by definition linguistic documents or records which are inscribed in a way that they can be transmitted as disembodied information. We may also sight the place of embodied texts as oral recitations, traditions, performances, which are memorized and transmitted orally in a relatively unmodified form. The externalized order of our constructed world comes to have an engineered or carpentered quality which is the reflection and symbolic representation of the mark of human production.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">This theory based upon the internalization and externalization of reality suggests a set of basic methodological techniques and forms of research which permit us to empirically analyze the patterning of information at various levels of its occurrence. Whatever the form or level that such information takes, we must understand that its patterning and understanding as if knowledge to be comprehended in some direct, explicit sense, <u>remains for the most part implicit and in the background</u>--not immediately apparent in the stream of events and phenomena as these are perceived or readily available to our recognition.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Empirically productive methods must clearly elucidate and differentiate for analytical and representational purposes between different forms and levels of information that is situated in the socio-cultural context in interactions, relations and communications between people. It is information that is embedded in the external world, information that is encoded linguistically, and information that is subjectively embodied in the mind, feelings, personality and behavior of the individual.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Thus, just like the subjective informant, we are interested in seeing through the ambiguity of information evident upon different levels of symbolic articulation to discern the gestalt patterning that occurs there and gives patterned structure of the information.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Such methods cannot be designed based upon any sense of universal or a priori significances or with presuppositions at a theoretical level which are themselves implicit and intrinsic to their design, and which would inherently bias these methods in a way that cannot be controlled in their experimental administration.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">A large variety of such techniques have now been devised which perform to these task. They include ethno-semantic elicitation techniques, such as elicitation of basic terms and dimensions, pile sorts, triads, dichotomous, sentence frames, sentence completion, propositional or syllogistic frames, grids, rank orderings, linguistic frames and a variety of perceptual, cognitive and symbolic frame tasks which allow us to systematically elicit many kinds of response patterns from samples of informants in ways which are least intrinsically biased by a priori presuppositions, and which lead us toward a systematic analysis and differentiation of information upon these different levels--procedures of analysis that in the long run might permit the mapping of different cognitive realities and even the informational patterning and symbolic functioning of the brain itself.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">The rational of all such procedures is that they define a minimal contextual frame which, as presented perceptually and cognitive, are inherently ambiguous and therefore incomplete and noisy. The objective of such tasks is constrain response to the ordering or making sense or completion of such tasks such that the differential patterning of responses can be measured and compared in a systematic manner. In completing the tasks in the prescribed way, the subjective informant is relying upon cognitively internalized or contextually externalized information to fill in the gaps and complete the structure in such a way as it successfully yields a gestalt.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Analysis of these tasks in a systematic and controlled way permit the devising of alternative methodological forms of analytical representation which allow us to model the complex patterning of this information in ways which might reveal insight into; 1. the implicit relationships and dimensions underlying and plausibly accounting for such patterning, i.e.; 2. the patterning of pattern; the possible meta-patterning of information at each level, and even eventually at any level; 3. the possible organization, functioning and patterning of such information in the mind and its biological substratum.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">In this quest for making indirectly explicit and manifest otherwise implicit and informational patterning contained in such phenomena at different levels, prediction and control are the key words upon which successful analysis and interpretation depends. Empirical and theoretical apprehension of the organization of information at various levels should allow us to predict with a better than random rate of success the controlled manipulation of such information in terms of response patterns. This is based upon the insight that such patterned structure is relatively stable in a critical way, such that it should recur over time and across a sample of informants, and that it's controlled manipulation should result in alteration of patterns which can be predicted from the structure of the model or representation.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">From the standpoint of a somewhat deterministic computer model of the von Neumann test, we can imagine the sources of input and output as alternative the programmer and the computer as the external and internal sources of information respectively. We can imagine the input interface and the internal program engine which generates outputs as the alternative channels of internalization and externalization respectively. We have in this rather mechanical model a direct analogy to the natural process by which humans construct and change their worlds.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Consideration of the role of AI research in the representation of such information suggests that we can use AI models in either an analogous or in an homologous manner, bringing up the distinction between weak and hard AI. Such research is making many significant breakthroughs, and will no doubt before too long be capable of modeling complex human behaviors/cognitive processes in sophisticated, realistic, albeit in limited and constrained ways. It is not worthwhile to argue the possibilities or promise now open to this research. It is difficult to see how we can ever build a reasonably sized machine anytime in the near future which can perform in a similar manner half as well as the three or four pound human brain, </font></font><font face="Book Antiqua">that </font><font FACE="Times"><font face="Book Antiqua">required evolution several billion years to design. But even if we accomplished this amazing feat, we must still wonder about the difference between a living, sentient brain, and a mechanism that is without real sentience, self-reflection or apperceptive awareness of its own reality. But we must broach the AI problem in some form if we are to go further in our analysis and representation of complex, human forms of information.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">It is apparent that whatever final shape such AI models will come in, they must successfully resolve a number of problems that now beset AI research. One such problem is that of language production and comprehension. It is apparent that the mathematical representation of language as a sign system is inadequate to the representation of language as a symbol system which is capable of managing ambiguity of information which is both intrinsic to the message and extrinsic to the meaning context. Language parsers founded upon the mathematical explanation of language seem to partially solve this problem, at least at the level of formal syntax.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">The alternative representation of conventional AI problems as partially constrained symbol systems suggest that a weak solution to this and other problems will depend upon the development of an alternative means of concisely modeling and modulating strings in a way that meets the predictability and control requirements of such methodological experimentation.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Resolving the language problem in such a manner may also lead to the solution of the problem of modeling complex internal human realities, especially of consciousness and human cognition, suggesting the degree to which language and conscious cognition may be tied in the human mind.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">But computer-based models can be fruitful applied in an extension of basic AI research to the modeling and representing complex external informational patterns as well--patterns of knowledge distribution and informational functioning that are rooted and situated in the socio-cultural context. This is a relatively under-explored and undeveloped area of AI research, because the problem of the socio-cultural context has been largely ignored or restrictively controlled in brain-centered approaches to the conceptualization of the problem. Indeed its restrictive control is more often than not a prerequisite to the delimitation and implementation of an AI model to a specific problem area. It nevertheless remains the case that whatever our AI representations, there is no humanly available information that occurs in a vacuum of some socio-cultural context that somehow implicitly conditions and relativizes that information.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Beyond the resolution of these somewhat different problems in AI research, we can speak of the larger problem of the complete modeling and representing the process of the construction of reality simultaneously at it different levels of informational articulation and analysis. This would demand a kind of solution which would simultaneously solve all the problems of information at the different levels of the symbolic articulation of reality.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">We must consider the role of science in cognition as well as the role of cognition in science. The scientific study of cognition results in a kind of meta-logical understanding of the role played by human cognition in scientific understanding. There is a sense that understanding in a precise and predictable way the nature of our knowledge and way of seeing reality is related to a precise understanding of the limits and constraints imposed by such knowledge in the structuring and information of our science. The theoretical and empirical modeling and representation of our own cognition remains one of the principle frontiers of science.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Framing the understanding of our science as natural systems theory, as an informational model that articulates differently upon different levels of understanding, natural information, information defined, the symbolic structure of human information. Principles that cohere at one order of such natural systems--the physical or chemical or biological--are not the same as those which cohere at the human and symbolic level, though they may underlie such a level in significant ways. But at each level informational patterning and processing takes on distinctive forms and functions that serve to distinguish and separate its functioning from the other levels.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">We cannot explain the organization of the brain or the organization of a society in terms of the genetic sequences of DNA, and we cannot completely explain the process of evolutionary speciation in terms of atomic number and weights. But from an informational standpoint, we can recognize that at each level there occurs discrete form and function which such information takes--a form that is principled and propositionally definite and predictable. We can also recognize that the same entropic informational properties occur universally at all levels--that change is universal, that change is temporally unidirectional, that order is always imperfect, structure minimally ambiguous.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">We are left to philosophize about our science and our cognition. Philosophers like to debate the possibility of creating Artificial Intelligence. In our search for the ultimate criteria of scientific method and validity, we must recognize that those methods and criteria which prove sufficient and practicable for one level of informational order do not necessarily fit the other informational orders--at each level, different kinds of paradigms have emerged which demand a different approach and a different way of practicing and seeing our science in relation to the sets of realities it seeks to comprehend. When we refer to our informational sciences as natural systems theory which are implying some informationally rooted covering law model that applies with uniformity and equal validity in any and every level of natural systems.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Such a model holds that there are universally intrinsic characteristics of all information</font></font><font face="Book Antiqua">. First</font><font FACE="Times"><font face="Book Antiqua">, noise or ambiguity is a form of destructive interference or entropy which reduces the informational capacity intrinsic to any system--ultimately this sense of information and its ambiguity is human in the sense of our understanding of it. But in the larger framework, we can understand that naturally occurring systems do have entropy and structural ambiguity independent of our awareness or recognition of it.</font></p> </font> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">We understand that the laws of thermodynamics apply to all ordered natural systems. The ordering of any system is by definition information. As such it is constrained, delimited, reducible to an ordered propositional understanding, and amenable to techniques of experimental validation which aims at predicting and controlling its structure. What drives our sciences forward, the kind of advance of knowledge we refer to as progressive, is the quest for a relative, empirical kind of certainty in our objective knowledge about the world in which we are situated. It is a form of certainty that is</font><font FACE="Times"><font face="Book Antiqua"> inextricably tied to some methodological means of independent, objective (inter-subjective) measurement, analysis and representation.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">We can conclude that human cognition and symbolic information at the human level is amenable to scientific procedures and empirical modeling. We can have a propositionally explicit and concise understanding of its structure which will allow us to predict in precise and controlled ways its patterning and alteration.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">But at the same must honestly face certain horizons of our scientific understanding and knowledge. There are basic aspects of our reality which we do not yet understand. Our brains remain largely a black box. And even if we are to precisely unlock the mysteries of our brain, we are left with the unsolved riddle of our mind as a form of integrated consciousness and continuous field of information. We do not fully understand language, culture or cognition. There are not yet clear answers to this mysteries, and they are what drive our science onward in its quest for certain knowledge.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">In our cultural evolution, we are soon coming to depend upon the computer, and upon our envisioning of its cyberspace, to such an extent that we will no longer be able to function or advance our science without it or outside of its informational spaces.</font></p> <font FACE="Times"> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font face="Book Antiqua"><b><a name="three">CHAPTER TWO</a></b></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font face="Book Antiqua" size="5"><b>EMBLEMATIC COGNITION</b></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font face="Book Antiqua" size="4"><b>The Anthropological Ground of Meaning</b></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Emblematic cognition is perceptually based symbolic comprehension that constitutes the substratum of all higher level cognitive functioning and that constitutes, figuratively, the phenomenological ground of being. Emblematic cognition is the form of mental organization of reality that appears earliest in human development, and appears to be organized on the basis of certain principles of basic analogical similarity between things, inconstancies of basic properties or traits, diffuseness and lack of specificity of objective representation and distinct part-whole definition, syncretic-synaesthetic concatenation of different modality of experience or representation, the lack of differentiation between the inner experience of a thing and the thing itself--or rather a of objective-subjective unity of such experience in "eidectic" imagery. There is also a direct displacement and concretization of representation such that analogical chains can come to stand in place of different things.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">An emblematic device is fairly mechanical both in the sense that there is a lack of systemic or organic articulation of the parts, and also in the sense of the relative direct, immediate apprehension of the stimulus, without a great deal of conscious mediation or deliberation. Emblematic symbolisms thus appear directly available to our senses and capable of evoking direct, unmediated, basically non-rational, kinds of responses.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">I have chosen the term emblematic because the form of representations of such experience appear to resemble the emblematic devices which incorporated with a single frame of reference pictorial iconography along with literal moral mottos or messages, and this summarizes well the basic symbolic character of such organization.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Such imagery and the form of cognitive-perceptual-affective organization which underlies it is constitutive of a basic modality of human mental patterning that is pan-human, and the first to develop. Subsequent modalities of categorical definition and propositional organization of experience are based upon, derived from, and represents a form of systematic restriction of this form of emblematic representation and cognition.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">The key characteristics of emblematic symbolization appears to be its inherent context-boundness in which the duality of meaning separating the sign from the symbol is indistinct or not fully developed, thus the concreteness of such representation, and the lack of abstract generalization in the mediation of the experience, hence its directness between the external form of the stimuli and the embodied response to it. It is a form of representation which appears to be basic in perception and to underlie more differentiated forms. Thus the circle as a basic form from which other geometric shapes can readily be elaborated might itself be based upon the physiognomic perception of the round human head or the face of the mother who is the babies first significant and important symbolic stimuli. The appearance of a generic, non-descript form of a four legged animal with a tail soon becomes distinguishable in terms of a cow, dog, horse, tiger, or elephant.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Emblematic symbolization is configured in a network of associations which becomes progressively extended and elaborated, and increasingly organized into general categories or subcategories. Such symbolization is premised upon the early development and fusion/differentiation of basic symbolic forms, a basicness that leads to the hypothesis of the existence of certain basic natural categories that underlie more elaborated and derivative forms. Such basic symbolization has the effect of the personification of the objective world and of misplaced concretization of the imagined. It is a process that underlies and precedes more fine-tuned processes of overemphasis, reification and anthropomorphization and zoomorphization.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">At some stage in the early development of the child, after the acquisition of a primary, core set of terms, it appears that the elaboration of emblematic symbolization goes from being a process of additive accumulation in direct response to an immediate environment, to one of systemic self generation in response to alternative, distant and imagined environments, based upon the growing awareness of constancy of different object properties. The child at this point appears to move from a holophrastic stage of speech into a stage of sentential experimentation and overextension of reference.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Acquisition of emblematic representation appears to follow perceptual-cognitive-physiological development of the child, as well as cultural constraints which channel and shape this development. There appear to be few a priori rules guiding the development of analogical chains. Implicit culture may provide perceptual primes for analogical associations upon which such analogical chains are developed. Analogical chains are characterized by the predominance of the horizontal over the vertical dimension of space construction, and by relatively primitive, simple hierarchic organization in the vertical dimensions. Such chains are also characterized by their relatively underdetermined character, a lack of overarching order in which local, direct rules of relationship take precedence over long-distance, indirect rules. But the relative lack of organization and undetermination of such chains is offset by the relative openness of such a system for incorporation--an openness not available to more determined and stable systems.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">The power of emblematic symbolisms in society, of seals, flags, badges, are that the part takes on the properties of the whole, and iconographically comes to stand in place of the whole. There effectiveness is that they appeal to us on a basic, largely preverbal and prelogical level of awareness, evoking responses which do not require a great deal of forethought or deliberative consideration. To a large extent, such symbolism is capable of effectively bypassing or short circuiting the internal control apparatus which the sense-making and reality-testing frames of mind provide for us. Drug-induced and other psychological-physical states have the effect of blurring this boundary and suspending for us the reality testing mechanisms of a more rational consciousness.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">One possibility of emblematic awareness is that it can exist in a world without a central sense of organization or coordination. There does not have to be a meta-logical or symbolic unity to such experience, though culturally there usually appears to be a well developed unity. It is not necessarily or definitively a part of such cognition. We cannot therefore speak of an inherent unity or continuity of experience or sense of being in the same way as might be supposed for more sophisticated modalities of mental patterning. Sense of unity is traded off for, or perhaps achieved within, the directness and immediacy of the emblematic experience, and the moment of its apprehension. Thus, the experience of the whole, of the universal, the cosmic, can be gained in the ecstatic presentation and sudden apprehension of the moment, of the here and the now. Sacred symbolic experience is thus posited directly in the object, in the sign, as the direct embodiment of such experience. The experience itself cannot therefore be readily separated from the sign-symbol which mechanically incorporates it and symbolizes it.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Emblematic representation and emblematic based cognition appears to have basic traits--concreteness and immediacy of the referent, analogical chaining and the quaternary structure of analogical association, iconographic imagery in which the part stands for and assumes the qualities of the whole, a basic unilaterally or alternatively, bilateral symmetry of the basic form, and a basic context boundness.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">This ground of meaning does not go away with the development of more sophisticated forms of cognition, but becomes submerged beneath the developing levels of the mind to constitute the foundational basis for the integration of human awareness about the world. Thus the world of the individual becomes shaped in fundamental ways that are different and culturally defined, and to which we have scant, barely conscious, reference to in our adult lives</font></p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font face="Book Antiqua"><b><a name="four">CHAPTER THREE</a></b></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font face="Book Antiqua" size="5"><b>CULTURAL CATEGORIES AND THE CULTURAL IMPERATIVE</b></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">It is known that cultural knowledge is largely implicit, transparent to the knower, works at the level of common sense, is unevenly distributed over a social landscape and is domain-specific in that it tends to be grouped in categories. A theory of cultural cognition must account for these facets of cultural knowledge, and must explain how the different domains are integrated together to create a coherent sense of world view that is tied to a given cultural orientation.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">A category is defined as a set of mostly implicit associations grouped under the rubric of a general label, such that the label comes to stand for and symbolically represent these associations in relation to other categories. Associations of a category are composed of a diverse, partially open and loosely organized things and relations between things. Such associations may remain relatively ill-defined and implicit only, but the category remains structure systemically as a whole composed of its parts. Categories themselves may be implicit or only imagined ideas that have no actual substantive reference in the real world, and yet nevertheless carry the value of being real as categories. Categories thus carve out spaces or areas or regions in an otherwise continuous mindscape of possible associations and relations.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">From a human standpoint, categories appear to be good to think--lumping and splitting are common processes of any effort in taxonomic classification. Children begin classifying the things of their world from a very early age--almost from the first words spoken which distinguish "da" (dad) and "ma" (mom) from "be" (bird/flying insect) and "wa" (ball). As children grow and extend themselves out into the world, they come to elaborate their categories. Overextension of reference is a common "problem" of such elaboration.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">While many of our categories follow the categorical imperative of exclusive, monotypical sets, closer scrutiny shows that such sets are actually more poly-typic, fluid and overlapping with experience than one would expect. There is a tendency to move from more basic, inflexible, concrete categories, towards more discrete, stable and flexible categories, as the content and ascriptive labels of categories become modified to fit a growing breadth of experience and understanding about a domain of life. Categories change and become modified, especially as experience comes to shape our understanding of the world.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Categories and categorical thinking are important in understanding how culture influence and is expressed through human cognition. Ethnosemantic elicitation of basic terms related to domains, and pile sorts of these elicitations, are considered valid means of describing and configuring such categories and their interrelations. We can elicit not only categorical labels, but the substantive content, evaluative and behavioral evocations, the rationalizations and representations, which are variously associated with such labels.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Stereotypes represent social categories of people, and as such, they summarize and stand in place of a great deal of information about society and social differences.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">A great deal of who we are and our social identity in the world is defined by the categories which we occupy in the place of another's mind. If I am a student, a father, a citizen and a teaching assistant, these categories contain certain social connotations of responsibility, income and of relative status, which are markedly different from those categories of mother, babysitter, resident alien. Frequently, on first meeting another person in a context that is not defined by impersonal service, we pigeon-hole and become pigeon-holed and a great deal of our subsequent responses in the relationship will be determined by the categorical assessments that are made. We can make several hypothesis--that our affinity and ability to interact with another is measurable in terms of the number of categorical elements which are shared in common, or which are complementary in some way to one another, while our distance between people can be measured by the number of such categorical elements are different or in contrast. Sometimes such assessments are mistaken, as we may be relying on obvious cues which are frequently misleading, and that can lead to some embarrassment. Our ability to deal adaptively or effectively with new situations or with strangers is largely determined by the model of categories we carry around in our head which shape our view and definition of the world--if our experiences are limited and our categories narrow, our capacity to make sense of, appreciate, tolerate and relate to alien peoples of different cultures will necessarily be very restricted.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">In general, we can say that the evaluative weighting of social categories which a person occupies, is determinative of the individual's status-role identity, prestige and sociality in society, and will be strongly correlated with his or her socio-economic status, opportunities and average income.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">It is in this manner that we come to label, pigeon hole and identify different kinds of people in the world, and to create a cognitive model of the world of which such people are representative. The internal world of cognitive categories comes to reinforce, and be reinforced by, the social world of cultural categories. This is of course a feedback relationship.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Categories are comprised of sets of labels which exist in an implicitly ordered relationship with one another, and that summarize a great deal of information pertaining to the domain represented by the categories. Categories form associational chains at some level of analysis that comprise and are comprised by categories at another level. Thus our cognitive categories appear to form a complex network of associations.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">We may say that with development, the number and diversity of arrangement of cognitive categories which comprise our world-view increases. We might also speculate that the organization of such categories becomes altered with development and maturation, such that we move to different kind of "meta-models" of increasing sophistication--from simple hierarchical relations, to complex feedback systems. It is a sophistication that is reflected and makes possible a more complex and sophisticated understanding of the world.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">It is also the case that the relative degree of sophistication of our categorical models of the world are correlated with the general degree of stratification and complexity of organization of the social world in which we live, and of our place within it. We do not expect great sophistication from a country bumpkin, though such bumpkin may have great wisdom.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">The reading and response to a given situation in a certain behavioral setting--in a classroom, an employment office, a government office, in the grocery store or at a cross-walk--demands that the categories which we invoke to make sense of the situation and the event be relevant to the moment, enabling us to manage it with success.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">There are many informational sources in understanding and shaping our categories, in life experience, everyday events, psychological attitudes and dispositions, social relations and cultural background.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">There are perhaps general rules of order which must be more-or-less followed in the cognitive house of categories. Categories should not be mutually contradictory or self-contradictory, at least not in any vital or basic way, though categories may comprise or be composed of many contradictory elements. Internal contradiction leads to cognitive dissonance, an experience of uncertainty, anxiety and frustration that is psychically painful for human beings.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Categories have a basic symbolic function, and can be understood in terms of this design. We may also refer to this as the categorical function of the symbol in the differentiation, mediation and construction of the reality. In the first place, categories are summarized by a label that functions metaphorically and symbolically to indexically point to a variety of subsumed associations or meanings. The categorical label is a tag that is used symbolically in place of the entire range of connotations of the category which it subsumes--it is thus a symbolic device. We can act and respond appropriately in terms of the categorical label of ascription, without having to evoke or elaborate the entire range or even a portion of the field of possibilities which it names. At the same time, the ascriptive category as a general, more or less abstract and symbolic label, can be readily expanded and elaborated in such a manner as to meet the demands of a given context.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">The expansion of the categorical label appears to be a systematic process that will most normally occur on only two or three levels of generality-specificity. The more informed we are about a given domain of knowledge, the greater the number of levels upon which we can work in the elaboration of the label.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">The indexical-elaborative function of categories points up their fundamental symbolic functions. Symbols are categorical in form and function. As such symbols have two distinctive functions. The first is to subsume under a general label a host of distinctive, more separate meanings or associations; the second function is to set off the category as a whole, from other alternative categories at the same level of generality-specificity. There is a third function, and that is to allow the category as a whole or in part, to be affixed or subsumed as part of a more general category of meaning, as a subset of that category. It can be seen how these three functions together allow different categories to become integrated into a hierarchically organized system of relations in which any single category is at one and the same time a separate part-whole subsuming other parts, and a subpart of a number of other parts.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">What we define as our categorical primes is dependent upon psychological and cultural preferences, and is determinative of the resulting organization of the system. Whereas Christians have elaborated a cultural value system rooted on the principle of love, Chinese have elaborated a comparable system rooted upon the prime of filial piety and respect.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">There are apparently natural systems of classification--i. e. colors, sounds, natural and abstract shapes, forms and things, which, though conditioned by the cultural context, appear to have a pan-human foundation in neurophysical processes of acquisition, and the patterning of this ordered acquisition appears to occur from the processes of the configuration of ever finer categories from the relatively continuous phenomenological field--i. e., from basic emblematic perception, basic categories become constructed during processes of ontogenetic development and acquisition, process shaped and to some extent controlled by the cultural contexts in which they occur.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">When we act in terms of the label, we are saved from the burden of having to deal with a lot of detail and clutter. The labeling function of categories is what renders most knowledge contained within categories to remain implicit and in the background of our general awareness. If we have occasion to reinforce or defend our categories, we can fall back upon what we know or have learned from experience and begin the process of categorical elaboration. Sometimes conflicts between our categories and our experience entails that we do such elaboration as a defense or reevaluation of our categories.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Understanding the role and place of the cultural context in shaping our views of the world and the construction of our models of it, depends on understanding how the cultural context serves to condition, sanction and directly or indirectly constrain the construction and operation of our categories, especially in social-behavioral settings. We may distinguish what may be referred to as the "common knowledge" which is embedded in the cultural context and exhibits a high level of sharing across a cultural landscape, versus what can be referred to as "private knowledge" which consists mostly of those idiosyncractic categories we have psychologically constructed in our own minds. There is always a dynamic tension between our psychological and the cultural constructions of different categories--in general cultural membership and solidarity demands a certain degree of subservience of our own idiographic understandings to the common knowledge which is contained in our world. We cannot get along well in a cultural world if we do not at some point submit to and shape our worlds according to the received categories of knowledge.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Sharing of knowledge as indicated by consistency of response or consensus, may be seen as diametrically opposed to the variability and openness of a particular category to idiosyncratic construction. The greater the sharing exhibited of a category in terms of its elements, the more common a cultural category it represents. The greater the variety of a categories elements, the more idiosyncratic and psychologically variable that category is. A particular category does not have to be made up of shared elements to be considered culturally important. The fact that a category subsumes a variety of connotations that are psychologically important to a diverse number of people entails that the category itself, as a symbol, is culturally important in function, whether it is culturally well defined or not. The obverse relationship might also be considered, a particular category may be strongly shared in terms of its elements, but remain not strongly represented in terms of the number of people who hold that category--i. e., not psychologically prevalent within the cultural grouping. A great deal of specialized expert knowledge is of this kind. Other kinds of knowledge may be both strongly shared and diverse, indicating that it is a category which is both culturally and psychologically important for a number of people.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Cultural context is necessary for providing us with a common reference point by which we can act in relation to others and evaluate the actions of others. It allows coordination of action and behavior which makes possible social life.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">The category itself is a slippery concept. It is may be composed of many things or or only one thing. It may be sharply defined in contradistinction to other categories, or its boundaries (what it is versus what it is not) may be relatively ill-defined and vague. But the positing of categories are important, because they allow for a symbolic reification of our constructions, regardless of their truth value or actual ontological status in the world--as if they are real. It allows us to treat a member of another race as inferior or unequal because of the color of their skin or other physiognomic features, at to act as if both the category and the reactions which it engenders, are indeed a natural fact of life.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Humans work within a finite number of cognitive categories. These categories subsume a great deal of implicit knowledge and information, and they are organized in some partially determined way. Among the total number of categories which any person holds, there must be some that are understood either psychologically or culturally to be primes against which all other categories are anchored. A certain percentage of these categories will be peripheral and others will be central. A certain percentage will be more highly codified and marked, and others will remain more implicit. A certain percentage of these categories will be shared and others will be psychologically idiosyncratic. In general, the number of categories and the complexity of their organization which a person holds will increase with psychological development and maturation; the number of categories that are culturally defined and are complexly interrelated will increase with the increasing complexity of the socio-political-economic organization of the society.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Categories do not exist in isolation, but always occur within both a psychological and cultural context in relation to other categories, and can only be fully comprehended when construed from this standpoint of the other categories. When we act in the world, whether we are acting alone or in response to others, it is symbolically in terms of and reference to the categories of our mind that we are acting.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">The implicitness of our categories requires more complete understanding. We do not have to unpack a load of connotative associations to some key term in order to use that term in a manner that is symbolically appropriate to the category it represents. We have a facility, like native speaker intuition</font></font></font><font face="Book Antiqua">, </font><font FACE="Times"><font face="Book Antiqua">of acting upon incomplete cues in an effective manner, as if we were actually responding to the whole category. We often only require a few clues or pieces by which to immediately comprehend the entire pattern, and we would not get along very well if we did not have this capacity of responding to the actual part as if it were part of some implicit whole. We not only make active inferences about this relationship and the whole implicit pattern, but those inferences themselves can be left implicit to the nature of our responses to the evocative stimuli or moment.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Not only is knowledge defined in some objective manner shared, but a great deal of implicitness about what we know is also shared, almost necessarily so. We cannot know if another person within whom we are talking with really shares or understands all we are telling them in every way. We must only presume that they are when they shake their heads in agreement. It is not necessary for the other person of the party to really think about everything s/he is hearing in order to nod one's head comfortably in agreement. We must act on the premise that understanding at an implicit level of awareness mutually exists, and that is most often good enough. It is almost certain that two people, no matter how much they may share in common, can come to total or complete agreement on every point. It is not necessary that implicit agreement be completely shared to order to allow the illusion or sense of credibility and mutual understanding to occur.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">We may say that any give category designates or implicitly points to a number of discrete or diffuse regions within a continuum of experience and knowledge. Labeling that category renders those regions more salient and hence available to consciousness than they normally are. It can be said that they enter momentarily, more-or-less, into the preconscious awareness of the mind. Thus the category becomes activated and primed for further elaboration, whether it actually becomes elaborated or not. In such a manner, any number of discrete concepts may be primed for action and elaboration without necessarily being called into action. What does get called into action is the indexical reference function of the key label which either points to itself as a signal or mechanical device, to a specific denotative and literal evaluation or connotative and figurative in value. It is not uncommon that we confuse these different levels of meaning--reading more or less into something than was really said or implied.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Categories and categorical elements form chains of associations. Even taxonomically related entities actually comprise a linear chain of relationship, implying an essential relativity of the level of generality and specificity of meaning of any particular category. Meaning in this sense becomes strung together like beads on a chain.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Categorical labels become strung together in a series of chains which have on an inferential level a transference of truth-value, and on a signal level the phrase structure of a symbolic language. This level of interrelation between categories is articulated in patterns of linguistic structure and production</font></font><font face="Book Antiqua">. It is one</font><font FACE="Times"><font FACE="Futura Md BT"><font FACE="Times"><font face="Book Antiqua"> that involves implicitly propositions about the credibility of a given statement or relationship being true.</font></p> <hr> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font face="Book Antiqua"><b><a name="five">CHAPTER FOUR</a></b></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font face="Book Antiqua" size="5"><b>THE PROPOSITIONAL ORGANIZATION OF WORLDVIEW</b></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Few things exist or events happen in the world that can be embraced by only a single category. Most often the real world is understood in composite terms of multiple categories which are organized in a coherent manner. This organization affects our perception, cognition, imagination and responses to the world. The world of a three-year-old is construed very differently from the world of a forty-year-old, and the world of the President of the United States is structured very differently from that of a schizophrenic street person. But each shares in common the reliance upon implicit categories, and what I refer to as the propositional organization of these categories in order to construct meaningful and integrated symbolic representations of the world.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">The propositional organization of our worldview can be found in the structure of our language (Fauconnier) and in the implicit logic of our semantic understandings expressed through our language. (Hamil) It has also been demonstrated in the organization of cultural understandings in regulating social relationships (Hutchins).</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">The propositional organization of world-view has to do with our need and tendencies to make inferences about otherwise implicit or unknown variables based upon what we do know--a great deal of these inferences have to do with the acceptance of the plausibility or credibility of an hypothesized propositional relation. As with our categories, the propositions by which we construe the reality of our constructions are also mostly implicit, and there is a definite ambivalence between psychogenic or sociogenic propositions. Our psychological propositions of meaning may be at odds with those which are culturally sanctioned. Common sense in this regard, at least at one level, must be understood as those culturally based and widely shared propositional understandings about the world.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Human propositional thinking is appears to be relational in nature--it is concerned foremost with: 1. the status of relationship of one thing to another and of the parts to a whole, and 2. the ascription of identity of a particular instance or thing to membership to one or more distinct categories (x is a kind of Y, or x is a member of Y). Such thinking can also be construed as symbolic, and is intimately related to the construction of categories and symbolic representations of the world. The possible relations and kinds of things are numerous, and vary between dimensions of stative/active, positional/temporal, size/count, complexity/articulation, etc. A number of things might be inferred about basic relational constraints which are in part set theoretic and cybernetic.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">It appears that propositional understanding that is concerned with the relations between things in the world, is to some extent dependent upon the definition and ascribed categorical identity of those things which are being related--the identity of parts conditions the relationships of the whole. At the same time, the inferred relationships between the parts has an influence and conditions to some unknown extent the ascriptive identity of the parts. Thus our understanding of the propositional understanding of reality cannot be gained independently of our understanding of either the categorical construction of the world or its articulation with actual reality.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">In general, propositional understanding is concerned with the credibility of a stated or implied relationship between two or more things or categories in the world, or of the categorical identity (ontological status) of one or more things in the world. Such propositional understanding can be considered to be a necessary form of reality testing that is pivotal to the feedback process between internalized schemas and models and actual experiences in the world. Such reality testing occurs continuously at the inter-sentential level of discursive strips in even causal conversations in which a topic of discussion is proposed, statements are made and contested, and the topic is revised or put away, while conversation shifts to another topic.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">The semantics of language at the sentential level can be understood in propositional terms (as can the semantics of language at the lexical level of the word and the phrase-structure level be understood in paradigmatic terms of categories). In general we may state that a basic sentence contains at least one noun (sometimes left implicit, as in "(you) Run!" as subject and at least one verb (also sometimes implicit, as in "You (are (it))!"). A question or a statement posed as an open remark invites a determination of the propositional truth value of the subject-topic. A remark may be a corollary conditional statement or an auxiliary statement which serves to qualify, demarcate or further contextualize a main subject-topic such that an inference might be made.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">It is in the structure of propositional thinking which deserves further elaboration. Propositional thinking is probably universal and similarly structured (the universality of language and the possibility of inter-translation), but it is also the case that the structure of such thinking is neither rigidly deterministic, available to precise mathematical representation, or in some "deep" sense universal or a priori to its actual "surface" expressions. It appears that propositional thinking is rather loose, plastic and open, and can take a variety of alternative forms. The direction of inference does not necessarily or always follow the same as that for classical two value logic, and the same principles of exclusive identity do not hold. Rather than typifying all propositional thinking as necessarily deductive, it would be better to characterize most styles of rationality as basically abductive such that modus tollens type fallacies do not always hold true. The looser, more plausible structure of natural human propositional thinking suggests that disjunctive sets (x or y) are more basic, and that conjunctive unions (x and y) are more underdetermined and derivative of disjunction. At the same time, it appears that the strict application of the rule of negation (x is not y) may only rarely pertain (depending on the restrictiveness of our categories), such that more often it is more reasonable to assume that (x may be y).</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">It appears that propositional think becomes more rational and more closely approximates the classical rules of logic with greater differentiation and development of the symbolic functioning of the mind--at which point stricter rules of identity and conjunction come to apply and condition our symbolic constructions of reality, at some point rendering more basic emblematic constructions less realistic and credible.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Symbol systems have long been recognized as centrally important to culture, but the precise linkages have remained obscure and imprecise. We must recognize symbol systems as being basically meta-logically in the sense that they both step beyond the purview of the necessarily logic that orders our functional relations with the world, and also constrains and conditions these relations and its underlying logic in critical, if often contradictory ways. Thus symbol systems function to reduce and eliminate the contradictions inherent to our cultural orientation. They are in this sense the principle mechanism of mediation, the boundary-maintenance mechanism by which we maintain internal coherence and achieve external consistency in our relations in the world.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">The meta-logic of symbol systems is rooted in their fundamental ability for allowing for displacement of identity and meaning, such that one thing may come to stand-for or become represented by something else not functionally attached to it in the world. By such a means, virtual opposites can become united under the same identity, allowing for the incorporation of contradiction.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">We can refer to the duality of patterning which enables any system of information to become a dual-processing system that opens up a level of complexity impossible in a simple linear structure of signals. If we can refer to the brain as necessarily logical in its organization, we can refer to the mind as inherently symbolic. Our basic conceptual structure is symbolic. Even our rational systems of math, logic and science are necessarily symbolic in structure.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">It is the symbolic structure of culture and our information systems such as language which undermines any attempt to reduce the structure of these systems to a level of mathematical theory. Symbolic structure is necessarily the basis of human semantics, and we must ask how the mind became organized to function in a symbolic way. Primitive symbolic functioning may be found to occur even in lower order species of mammals. I have witnessed my dog using a little red-haired doll in a symbolic statement to myself. We should not be so anthropocentric in our human pride to presume erroneously, like we did with tools, that we are the only creatures on the earth capable of symbolic processes.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Symbolic process is mostly passive processing in the sense that it can be said to occur in the background of our consciousness. I refer to its basic functioning at this level as "emblematic pattern recognition" among a background field of complex semantic associations. Such pattern recognition allows for displacement and transference of form and content from one frame to another. It consists of an intricate slot and filler scaffolding of the mind which, in its growth, creates mental spaces defined by the surrounding framework, and filled on the basis of the relational patterning formed by the frame.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">In other words, the symbolic calculus employed by culturally and cognitively by individuals is not identical with the kind of symbolic logic employed by artificial intelligence languages. Strictly, the symbolic element of the computer remains at the rather mechanical level of the referential sign. It is a distinctive marker which points to something--itself, a set of signs, etc.--but always to another sign. The human symbol is fundamentally different, not just because it functions by suggestion or may evoke strong emotions in its beholder, but because a human symbol accomplishes more than the merely mechanical semiotic reference function of the sign. A human symbol accomplishes what amounts to psychological identification or reflexive self-reference. As such, strictly speaking, human symbolisms are as meta-logical as computer based symbol systems are logical. The former system is more comprehensive in that it may easily embrace the latter, but the latter may not embrace or incorporate the former. Another way of looking at this is to claim that logic may be at least implicitly necessary to a cultural system, though nowhere explicit, but are usually not by itself sufficient in the explanation of culture and cognition.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">From a relational standpoint, this difference may be more precisely defined in another way. A human symbol is defined by its openness and therefore, by its virtual infinity. As such, a symbol is simultaneously a universal variable and an existential value simultaneously. As such, a symbol is inherently capable of encompassing its own negation in the very moment of its phenomenological affirmation, allowing antithetical and contradictory symbols to be concatenated within the same space, and also allowing the embodiment of a symbol in terms of an anti-symbol. A human symbolism stands for itself at the same time that it stands for something else. This allows for an inherent duality of design in which a symbol may carry two levels of significance and meaning simultaneously.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">We may describe what amounts to a quaternary analogical structure of human symbolism in which the subset of a in space A is related to the subset of b in space B. If we posit culturally a relationship between A and B, and a relationship a to space A and of b to space B, we can optimally infer a correspondence between a and b even though no direct relationship exists. In fact, in any quaternary structure, we can infer any one of the four possibilities of relationship if we are given the other three. This is symbolically permitted, though it may be logically incorrect.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Within human symbol systems, meaning may be informally floated between categories as long as implicit cultural formulas of consistency are not violated. Hypotheticals, conditionals and counterfactuals, including negation, the stuff of contradiction, are enumerable and permissable as long as they do not lead to culturally defined or cognitively available and obvious inconsistency. What is accomplished by such a system is the optimization of meaning without the deterministic search strategy dictated by a formally logical system. Cultural knowledge regularly provides an implicit framework of heuristic strategies which make such optimization strategies functionally plausible. We can say that symbolic meaning in human reality is normally underdetermined from a logical standpoint. It accomplishes its feat by a kind of informal fallacy of the counterfactual identity of difference and the incorporation of contradiction consequent to our exploration of plausible counterfactuals. In fact, cultural logos usually involves a number of informal fallacies, and in this regard we must consider the natural semantic, pragmatic and syntactic function of language as symbolic discourse in the maintenance and mediation of cultural reality.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">What is accomplished is a kind of cultural calculus of confidence based upon quick heuristic estimates of probabilities. The greater the incorporation of contradiction, the less likely and more implausible the conclusions. To the extent that negation is a form of counterfactual, we may say that human symbolism is capable of tolerating a minimal degree of implicit contradiction in its construction of meaning. The principle of non-contradiction intrinsic to logic does not naturally or normally apply in such a system. We may extend this thesis to the problem of comparison, as comparison is also an implicit form of counterfactual construction. Comparison involves the plausible transference of meaning from one context to another, though the conditions for such transfer may be neither logically necessary nor sufficient.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">What does this philosophical digression entail for the role of computers in understanding culture? First, it may be possible to construct a computer based symbolic language which incorporates a basic algorithm and a set of procedures or optimizing strategies for the construction of prototypical counterfactuality within culturally consistent sets, if the notion of logical consequence in such a language were substituted by a notion of cultural consequence, to obtain a minimal paradigmatic account of conditionals. The following is a brief tentative outline of such an algorithm for the construction of prototypical counterfactuals by which we can explore and discover possible inconsistencies, and that satisfy a minimal and unified account of conditionals, whether non-counterfactual, weakly counterfactual or strongly counterfactual and whether they have a single logical link, multiple logical linkages or no logical link:</font></p> <blockquote> <blockquote> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">A. Counterfactual Space Construction:</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">1. Hypothetical statements can be minimally characterized by the reduced form "In situations such that P, Q", or "Q, if P" (Giles Fauconnier,1985 :pg.124)</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">2. Implicature is suspendable in multi-conditional statements such that "Q, if P1, and if P2, and if P3 and if Pn." so that each P is a sufficient condition for Q. Though Q may arise in ~P situations, if it is assumed that all relevant situations for Q are specified, then Q can be taken to arise only in P situations. Counterfactuals may cancel this exhaustivity implicature, such that Q may hold in P or ~P and if ~P is presupposed then ~Q is implicated. (Cornulier, B. de, 1983, in Fauconnier, 1985:pg. 114-5)</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">3. Given a counterfactual of the form "If A, then C", begin with propositions expressing relations in hypothetical space M;</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">a. discard propositions in order to achieve consistency with the counterfactual protasis, A.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">b. eliminate propositions that were in part or in toto consequences of ~A.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">c. discard further propositions to achieve consistency with A and C.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">d. add A to the set of propositions which then defines space H.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">e. the counterfactual A is "true" if C is satisfied in H.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">4. An simplified alternative to 3 above is the following;</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">a. give a "normal" form of M including: proposition ~A consequences of ~A such that none are a consequence of the others combined with ~A and the original propositions remaining will be</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">consequences of either P, ~A, or of P & ~A.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">b. reduce P to P' to be consistent with A, yielding a final structure H in which C is derivable by modus ponens.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">5. A set of heuristic strategies involving the maintenance of the stability of prior events, the tendency to preserve general laws rather than specific propositions.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">6. The presumption of weak consequence that is culturally or cognitively constrained and involves a minimum of processing, rather than of strong logical consequence in which all logical consequences become later presuppositions. We cannot eliminate all logical inconsistencies before setting up counterfactual spaces, as this would involve a maximal search strategy of all possibilities. Heuristic, semi-deterministic search strategies can minimize the search space. (Fauconnier, pg. 122, 172)</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">B. The preceding procedures are based upon a strategy of optimization of partitioned presupposition for propositional space-construction of conditionals in general:</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">7. Presuppositions for given information are considered prototypical and are selected on the basis of strategies of optimization in which SP1 below has precedence over SP2;</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">a. SP1--Avoid contradiction within a space.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">b. SP2--Structure a space M and its parent space R as closely as possible with respect to background assumptions and implicit (i.e. nonexplicit) presuppositions.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">8. Logical consequence is said to be determined in a given space, whether it is accessible or not. Either Q or ~Q are satisfied in the given space. Accessible consequence is said to be undetermined in a given space, that is if it is not determined in that space and if Q and ~Q are both possible in that space. Accessible consequences are said to be explicit presuppositions in a given space after a given moment. Explicit presuppositions are background information established before that moment, and are held to be implicit only if they are set up by a construction at the given moment and not independently before that moment. After the given moment, such implicit presuppositions become explicit. (Once expressed, new information becomes old).</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">The following rules and corollaries are thus set up:</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">a. R1- Asserted part A is satisfied in space M.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">b. R2- Presupposed part P is satisfied in space M.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">c. R3- Presupposed part P is satisfied in parent space R (only if SP2 above).</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">d. C1- if R3, then R3 and R2.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">e. C2- If P is not satisfied in R, then R3 does not apply.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">f. C3- if P is determined in R, then R3 applies (strategy of maximization of similarity of parent and projected spaces)</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">g. C4- if P is undetermined in R, then R3 does not apply because of the possibility of P not satisfied in R (strategy of minimization of similarity of parent and projected spaces)</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">R3 then is the only rule which applies to presuppositions, allowing them to be attached to be simultaneously attached to more than one space. R3 applies recursively as a form of inheritance--if R has itself a parent space, then P optionally is satisfied in that parent space, given that Q is explicitly presupposed at the given time, that their is not Q and ~Q and that parent and projected spaces are structured as closely as possible.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">9. A general optimization strategy is given which defines inheritance and for filling in the space created by the conditional space builder "If X, then ____"</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">When an inherited space M is set up within a parent space, R, structure M implicitly so as to maximize similarity with R. In the absence of explicit contrary stipulation, assume that:</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">a. elements in R have counterparts in M,</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">b. the relations holding in R hold for the counterparts in M,</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">c. background assumptions in R hold in M.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">In general, as long as these conditions are satisfied, then inheritance can be presumed such that the accessible consequences in the inherited space M are the accessible consequences of conditional X plus the explicit presuppositions of R.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">10. Interpretation strategies are guided by optimization in the construction of hypothetical and presupposed spaces. Structural accounts would insist upon a minimal identity between parent and projected spaces--M and M'--and therefore maximum search strategies which would set up a table of all possible relations and then cancel out the least likely. More pragmatic strategies may presume maximum similarity between parent and projected spaces, hence minimizing the search space required. Strategies of optimization would reduce the search space down to a set of four possibilities set up by the paradigm between the dimensions of opacity versus transparency and attributive or inferential versus referential.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">11. Optimization strategy can only be used under simplified circumstances in which the partitioning of parent space R is trivial and the relations obvious and accessible. Relations dependent upon the counterfactual ~A can therefore be directly suppressed without elaborate computation. If the partitioning of parent space is not so obvious, counterfactual space H can be set up any way using the protasis A and the necessary structure imported from R that is required to deduce C. The construction of counterfactual space H will continue have it is set up--more structure from R may be brought in progressively until inconsistencies become accessible, in which case either H will be heuristically "patched-up" or discarded.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">C. These procedures (A & B) may be extended to strategies for comparison involving the incorporation of ambiguity, tautology and for the application of predicate calculus.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">12. It is possible to extend this set of optimization strategies to comparison which sets up relations within spaces as well as between spaces, which brings into play predicate calculus, and which permit dual-processing possibilities allowing for the incorporation of ambiguity, tautology and scope.</font></p> </blockquote> </blockquote> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Such a language might reasonably be derived from Prolog, based as this is upon predicate calculus, and would permit the tolerance of contradiction prerequisite for the deployment of an alternative kind of inference engine in a computer-based "cultural system" founded upon certain domain of cultural defined knowledge.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">A suggestion for such a program would be to write a hyper-language define an alternative kind of relational logic built upon the rapid recombination of simple "and", "or", and not relationships that apply either within or between sets, and which alternatively define the inference strength of a given relationship. Logically, "and" defines a strongly determined plausible relationship of identity, while "or" describes a weaker relationship of difference incorporating plausible counterfactuality, while "not" describes an explicit and intermediate value which serves to block counterfactuality.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">In considering the concept of cultural cybernetics, it would seem as if language must play a central role in the cultural mediation of human adaptive function, and yet exactly how this may be so and what implications this may bear on how we theoretical construe the structure of language remains difficult to determine with precision. We must look at language from the standpoint of its communicative functioning by individuals in social group contexts.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">If we apply a relational logic to the understanding of language as mentioned in the previous section, we must understand temporal constraint as the primary structural limitation of speech and discourse. We normally interpret this in the form of syntactic rules and categories which guide the ordering of string-construction. Yet we mistakenly substitute an implicitly abstract spatial model of the ideal sentence upon the actual patterning which sentences take, and then attempt to derive explanations for the systematic patterns of variation on the basis of consistent transformation rules applied to the basic grammatical form held to be valid in all cases.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">The following is an alternative theory of language grammar based upon the serial ordering of string production which is inherent in the sentential, sub-sentential, and super-sentential grammar. This theory centers upon the cybernetic functioning of language. Again, the formula holds that internal coherence and external consistency of reference are separate yet interdependent measures. In particular, contradiction and incompleteness guide language construction and change. Exogenous change is the independent variable, and endogenous change the underdetermined dependent variable.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">The grammatical aspect of sentence construction and inter-sentential linking is based upon a relational logic. We begin with a Start symbol S, a variably punctuated string of symbols, and a stop symbol s. Each symbol represents either an undetermined subset or a determined element and is represented by an upper case when it stands for a unspecified variable--the symbolic reference, and by a lower case letter when its value has been determined and specified. The order of the string is always from left to right. The punctuation of the symbols of a string and between strings constitute an implicit relation of either conjunction or disjunction or negation (irrelation). The default relation is always an implicit disjunction ("or") and a disjunctively connected string constitutes a undetermined network of all possible relations between the symbols of the string.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Inference always moves in the direction of left to right, or in the direction of the production of a string. Determination involves the establishment of either an "and" relationship or an irrelation. The normal rules of predicate and calculus logic otherwise apply to the use of conjunction and disjunction except that conjunction implies a determined "if-then" inference, while an or implies an undetermined "if-then" inference. We may say that the scope of the disjunction is greater than and contains the conjunction, or that the conjunction is a subset of the disjunction. This is clear from the following truth-table of conjunction and disjunction:</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua"><u>Disjunction</u> </font><u><font face="Book Antiqua">Conjunction</font></p> </u> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">F + F = F F + F = F</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">T + F = T T + F = F</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">F + T = T F + T = F</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">T + T = T T + T = T</font></p> <p> </p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Another way of stating this relationship is to claim that disjunction carries an implicit or plausible conjunction and that conjunction is a constrained form of disjunction. The relationship of irrelation can be said to be the most determined relation of all, simply expressed by the principle of non-contradiction for a determined variable. It is a disjunction without the implied conjunction. Thus a string can consist of any number of symbols linked up by undetermined disjunctive "or" or determined conjunctive "and's" in the following form:</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">S a (and) b (and) C (or) d (and) E (or) F s</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">In this string there are some important rules to note which apply to all strings. In a conjunctive relation, at least the antecedent is always determined. Determination of a variable implies a conjunctive relation following, and assertion of a conjunction implies at least the determination of the preceding variable. In a disjunctive relation, the preceding or antecedent variable must always be an undetermined variable, while the following or consequent variable may be either a determined or undetermined variable.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">One or more disjunctive or undetermined relations in a string implies that the meaning of the string has not been resolved, or of ambiguity in the string, and forces backtracking from right to left at the termination of the string, in the attempt to resolve the residual ambiguity remaining in the string. The ambiguity implied by an or relation in a string can be said to be paradigmatic and implies a verticality to the normally horizontal frame of relations such that alternative, possibly contradictory values may simultaneously occupy the same place in a string. The previous string can be rewritten in the following form to make clearer this paradigmatic ambiguity of the string:</font></p> <p> </p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">S a (and) b (and) C (or) d (and) E (or) F S</font></p> <p> </p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">S a (and) b (and) <u>{c1,c2..cN}</u> (or) d (and) <u>{e1...eN}</u> (or) <u>{f1,f2...fN}</u> S</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">In both instances, the terminal symbol is an upper case S. An upper case S as a terminal symbol implies that the preceding string has not been completely determined though it has been fully connected. It implies a disjunctive relation with the sentence which follows. The start symbol is always an upper case S as it stands in ambiguity of the unproduced string that is to immediately follow it, but may enter into either a conjunctive or disjunctive relation with the preceding string. When the sentence has become fully determined, both start and terminal symbols become lower-case s symbols.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">We may incorporate an implicit probability into this and/or structure of string construction. "And" relations may be said to be strongly conditional--strongly bound by a determined antecedent, as well as weakly consequential. the consequent may or may not be determined. "Or" relations may be said to be weakly conditional. The antecedent need not be determined, and can be strongly consequential, as the consequent may be determined without changing the status of the relation.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Commutability is possible between relations in the "and" case only if both antecedent and consequent are determined, and in the "or" case only if both antecedent and consequent are undetermined. What commutability implies at this sub-sentential level is that the order of the elements may be reversed without altering the nature of the relationship between variables <u>within the string.</u></font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Embedding is the process of subordination of the scope of relations within and between strings. In our notational system, embedding will be expressed by parenthesis--every embedded relation must occur between a left and a right parenthesis. Enclosing relations or sets of relations within parenthesis has the effect of binding the values within the parenthesis to one another and of dividing the string or set of string into multiple relational levels of relational sets and subsets, and of implying a flow of control in the determination of the strings.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Linking is related to embedding, but focuses upon the individual variable rather than the relationship between variables. We may say that basically a determined variable is fully linkable, while an undetermined variable remains only partially linkable, while a negation remains a marked form of unlinkability. A fully linkable variable will accept full enclosure from both directions within its own set of parenthesis, while a partially linkable variable will accept only a single parenthesis from either direction of relation. Both cases are represented in the following string:</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">(S (a) and (b) and C) or (d S.)</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">In this example, we may say that a and C are partially linked variables. b is fully linked with both a and C and is enclosed in its own set of parenthesis. Note that d remains unlinked. Actually both a as the first element and d as the last occurring element are linked to the start and stop symbols respectively, which implies that a is fully linked and d is partially linked. Notice that embedding does not occur in the "C or d" relation, because it violates the rule of commutability which states that both elements of a disjunctive relation must be undetermined variables. Thus we may state that commutability of relations is always implied by embedding and linking. The representation of this loose form of logic can be taken as a set of undetermined strings which move towards greater determination:</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">X (is to) Y (is to) Z.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">becomes with implicitly an undetermined</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">X (or) Y (or) Z.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">with further determination, we might write:</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">X (and) Y (and not) Z.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Understanding the predictable pattern of determination of such inference strings requires the superimposition of inferences entailing categorical identity and the relationship of categories to one another. This appears to hold for syntactical as well as semantic categories.</font></p> <p> </p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">if X and Y and Z</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">(and)</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">if x is X and y is Y and z is not Z</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">(then)</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">x (and) y (and not) z.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">A number of rules can be specified for this movement from less to more determined strings, and a mathematical model of string production and manipulation of this sort can be constructed. For instance, we might hypothesis something like the following:</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">X = (x + x + x + xn).</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">X (xyn)</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">for every particular x, there is some general class of X.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">for every particular x, there is at least one other similar 2x.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">x is to y as X is to Y or x is to X as y is to Y, therefore x is to Y as y is to X.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">for all x, there is at least one X.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">At the same time, there must always be operating a finite set of at least implicit premises which are presumed to be a priori true. These initial premises become the anchor points from which subsequent inferences can be derived, and inference chains constructed. People who employ these inferences. We can say that for any specific proposition to be inferred to be evaluated, a set of at least one major premises and at least one other minor premises must be determined that are vertically related to one another. In general the major premises is a statement of the general category, the minor premises is a statement of relationship of the particular instance to the general category, and the conclusion is the statement of the ontological status of the particular instance.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">The propositional nature of our inferences appears to involve the construction of mental spaces that contain and circumscribe our categories and constructions of reality. Propositions concern the identity and relationship between such spaces. In general, it can be said that, unless specifically contradicted, logical inference as plausibility can be freely transferred between spaces. Giles Fauconnier has elaborated a specific set of propositional rules regarding such inference which I construe to be the foundation of symbolic inference and by which the syntactical patterning of language can be described and represented in a manner consistent with its semanticity.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">In general, we may say that string construction is horizontal (and syntagmatic) in dimension in construction, and that the inferential relationship of premises and determination of conclusions is vertical (syntagmatic) in dimensions and the interrelation of the horizontal and vertical in space construction. The interrelationship of the vertical and horizontal dimensions of has a phrase-structure that involves nested chain constructions.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">In any linkage between propositional elements, we may specify a direction in which inference may follow--left-to-right or right-to-left. Culture and language may to some extent specify this directionality. There is also a top-down or general-specific directionality that is always implicitly present in such inferential chaining.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Important in understanding the patterning of inferential thinking apparent in any given orientation, the relationship to relative contextuality and contextual dependency of the language and the mode of cognition must be taken into account. Implicitness is indeed contextually defined--if we are not familiar with the particular contexts which are being implied, the same sorts of inferences are not available to us.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">All cultural orientations can be expected not only to have certain primes of categories and emblems, but to also have as well certain propositional primes that specify a preferred number out of a broader spectrum of possibilities. We might also claim that different cultures have certain prototypically characteristic habits or styles or modes of thought which is tied to particular configurations of propositional thinking. At the same time, different cultures are liable to have specified special knowledge that may be key operational metaphors or symbolisms which have special inference value and connotations in our understanding of the symbolic construction of reality. Similarly, different cultures also sanction and utilize more informal propositions which may be tied to specific domains and which may be pragmatic or utilitarian in function</font></font></font></font><font face="Book Antiqua">. In other words, </font><font FACE="Times"><font face="Book Antiqua">propositions that may hold for one domain may or may not hold for any other or all domains. These idiosyncratic rules are like irregular verbs in Latin languages or irregular nouns in Germanic languages or spelling in English. We must learn them specifically (usually by trial and error) and few general rules apply.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">We may also claim that for any particular domain, which encompasses a field of action, practice, evaluation and mode of rationalization relating to specific behavioral and experiential areas of life, these are more or less coherent as they are ordered and make sense and they are more or less coherent as they are more or less propositionally determined and structured.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">It can be said that the increasing complexity and hyper-coherence of a diversity of distinct and organically articulated domains in corporate societies, in which any individual can only hope to embrace a few of the total number of possible domains, entails that all domains may come under the umbrella of a single, propositionally coherent cultural orientation that regulates all behavior is less and less likely. In this regard, we can speak of the organization of diversity both socially and psychologically, rather than the multiplication of uniformity. If this is the case, than we can also expect empirical evidence for the operation of a finite number of equivalence structures that serve to mediate the boundaries between psychological and social domains of life, and to integrate these boundaries. Thus, worldview emerges as a stratified form of global symbolic consciousness. In this regard, we might hypothesize the existence of certain meta-symbolisms that refer back to the domains themselves and that serve to organize the totality of experience in the manner of a kind of meta-logos that knowledge about knowledge that regulates the relationship of humans to the world and the social relationships between humans.</font></p> <hr> </font> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font face="Book Antiqua"><b><a name="six">CHAPTER FIVE</a></b></font></p> <font FACE="Times"><font FACE="Futura Md BT"><font FACE="Times"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font face="Book Antiqua" size="5"><b>CONVENTIONAL KNOWLEDGE AND THE CULTURAL CONTEXT</b></font></p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">The cultural context is important to the understanding of how knowledge becomes expressed and articulated in the world, and leads to a predictive understanding of human actions within specific, culturally defined behavioral settings (i.e. getting a haircut in a barbershop, ordering flowers from a florist, having a tooth pulled at a dentist office, attending a catholic mass on a Sunday morning, or sitting in front of the Television watching a movie on a Saturday night.) We may say that cultural context in an empirical sense is the total scope of such behavioral settings. In very social setting in which meaningful interaction takes place between members of a shared cultural orientation. A multi-cultural context can be referred to as a more complex social environment typical of modern state societies in which there are numerous alternate cultural behavioral settings, plus a number of such settings which are typically and by definition inter-cultural.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">But the cultural context has other, namely cognitive and linguistic, facets that are important to understanding how the context, as a universe of symbolisms, situated within a material, carpentered and social environment, serves to constrain, reinforce and sanction human cognition, attitudes and behavior. We cannot escape the prison of culture, and its bars are the invisible chains of the mind.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">It is said that the symbolic patterning of language is arbitrary and that the structure of its patterning is independent of the contexts of its articulation. From a cultural standpoint, this is not quite correct. We cannot imagine an instance of linguistic structure which is free or beyond a particular behavioral setting or cultural context, and we cannot imagine a symbolic structure of language which is entirely unconstrained or free of the unwritten and unspoken conventions of cultural preunderstandings. It is more accurate to claim that all language patterning is relatively non-arbitrary to the extent that it is conventionally constrained by culture, and that is patterning is always relatively dependent upon the socio-cultural contexts of its articulation.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">It is this conventionality of constraint and its relative contextuality which renders all understandings situated and culturally relative. Cultural knowledge is by definition conventional knowledge that means that it is relatively widely shared, available and common to the behavioral settings with which it is implicated. As conventional knowledge, it is most often reinforced by secondary rationalizations and symbolizations which serve to legitimate its efficacy and reify its sense of reality. Rarely do we question the conventions of our understandings, and they come more often as basic habit for which we have a strong preference.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Cultural knowledge is minimally shared. Culture functions and is integrated on the basis of an achieved and implicit consensus of such knowledge. Cultural knowledge is by definition common knowledge. It is more or less inter-subjectively available to a community of culture-bearers. Being minimally shared and definitively common, cultural knowledge therefore depends on some means of objective codification in an organized sign system which enables the transmission of such knowledge.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">A great deal of cultural knowledge is also implicit. That which is explicitly codified is only a small portion of the total amount of information or its patterning represented. Learning the holistic gestalt of a cultural orientation requires being able to successfully infer the implications of cultural knowledge from the patterning and expression of the signals available. Thus, if we can decipher the ideograms or the script of an archaic language, we can thereby figure out the meanings of the surviving texts, and thus piece together portions of the overall patterning of the cultural orientation.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Cultural knowledge comes to be represented and expressed through a set of cultural schemas and models that direct and sanction appropriate behavior in specific settings. These schemas and models can be seen as prototypical shared exemplars around which a cultural orientation becomes defined. Schemas can be taken as sets of scripts or decision trees that organize expected behavior and outcomes from given, standard situations and settings. We may invoke, utilize and amend different schemas as occasions call for, and we come to revise our schemas as adaptation to new situations may entail. Cultural models can be taken as more basic and central cultural conceptual systems which organize a great deal of behavior, and which can be seen to operate meta-logically in the organization of different schemas across alternate behavioral settings. It can be expected that any given cultural orientation may have only one or a few basic models, and that the sign of a culture in transformation is the presence and conflict of two or more incompatible models which lead to discrepant views of reality. A model functions paradigmatically at the level known in science as general theory and lays down the overarching symbolic aegis for the organization and justification of a variety of different schemas and symbolic representations of reality. For instance, the basic cultural model of the Chinese can be said to be one of filial piety that is tied to the patrilineal household organization of the family. This leads to a very different orientation than the cultural model of Americans that is held to be one of rugged individualism and romanticism--a kind of superman model.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">A schema can be considered to be a script or related set of scripts the relationship between which are defined on the basis of domain dependency Those domains being tied to the behavioral settings within which scripts are normally articulated under a set of mutually shared and implicitly understood expectations of reciprocal behavior. Schemas thus represent an implicit level of ordering of behaviorally tied knowledge with defines roles, reactions and appropriate and inappropriate responses.</font></p> <p><font face="Book Antiqua">Models represent structurally more central and basic orientations which are for the most part more normally out of awareness. They are inscribed in the background as the focus of values and general attitudes or expressed rationalizations about the world, as well as in the articulation of social interrelationships in the world.</font></p> <hr> </font></font></font> <p align="center"><font size="3" face="Book Antiqua"><b><a name="seven">CHAPTER SIX</a></b></font></p> <b> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font face="Book Antiqua" size="5">WORLDVIEW</font></p> <font FACE="Times"><font FACE="Futura Md BT"><font FACE="Times"><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="4">An Anthropological Construction</font></p> </font> </font> </font> </font> </b> <font FACE="Times"><font FACE="Futura Md BT"><font FACE="Times"><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The worldview problem has been of central theoretical importance in general anthropological accounts of how human beings come to construct and construe their world. This is a systematic theory of the worldview problem based upon a theory of language, a theory of psychological meaning, and a theory culture as symbolic construction. Worldview triangulates and locates the identity of any particular aspect of human reality between these three sets of factors and the complex, dynamic dialectics which their mutual interaction and constraint produces.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The central question in the world view problem is that of the critical role and status of language in the symbolic mediation and construction of reality. Our language underlies how we view our world as well as our socially based knowledge of the world. Without language, our construction of the human world as we know would not have been possible. But language is as equally conditioned and constrained by factors of human cognition and culture as it may be held to be predetermining of them. It is for this reason that an anthropological theory that takes the problem of language in relation to worldview clearly into account is the most important component of the worldview problem.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <b> <p ALIGN="CENTER"><font size="4">Language</font></p> </b> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">An anthropological theory of language in relation to the world view problem must answer several basic questions. Language change and stability, language structure and patterning, and the central and strategic social functionality of language in the human construction of reality. None of these problems are fully understood from the standpoint of a scientific linguistics.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Language is holistically integrated as a symbolic system which communicates meaning, but its integration is never complete or total. Integration is necessary for a language to function effectively as a communication system.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <b><u> <p ALIGN="center">Language Change</p> </u></b> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Structure and change in a language are caught in a dynamic dialectic around the problem of increasing coherence and decreasing entropy. In human language this becomes critical in spoken discourse when we can properly speak of the phenomena of the linguistic transmission of information. Spoken discourse must effect a resonance not only at the linguistic level of a string of signs, but upon a meta-linguistic level of the symbolisms these signs point to in the world. Thus at the moment of speech production, language must not only be about itself, but about something in the world and about the world that something is within.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Languages must maintain a flexibility of patterning which is a key to their functional adaptability and their boundless productivity. All languages function best at an optimum level of structure. Internal changes tend to increase the coherence of a language system, but a system can become too constrained and thus compromise its external functional flexibility in the world. Thus there are built-in limits upon the amount of structure and degree of variation possible within human language.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Language must affect an optimal trade-off between internal coherence and external consistency in encoding the world--a trade-off</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">accomplished by balancing the structural constraints at the level of the sign--at the level of communication--with the expressive freedom at the meta-linguistic and symbolic level of meaning.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It accomplishes this dynamic equilibrium of an optimal level of functioning by means of a transformational calculus marking the permutation and modification of linguistic components, and a mechanism of mediation marking the transition from one statement to the next.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is at this point that we must see linguistic structure as inherently and inextricably embedded in social context of the discursive speech event. We may properly speak of the phenomenological process of linguistic construction which is guided by certain indirectly implicit and embedded conventions rather than as a structure per se. The rules which guide linguistic structure and its redundancy of pattern in construction in the maintenance of its communicative efficacy, are ultimately social products of shared constraints. They are performance rules that meet certain conventional criteria of social functionality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must separate the question of linguistic performance from the notion of linguistic competence, and tacitly, the notion of parole of the actual speaker-hearer versus langue ideal speaker-hearer. The fact of the inherent sociality and social situation of all language precludes the possibility of language being primarily a psychological phenomena. Competency and Langue are rooted in the inherent, biologically based and evolutionarily rooted human capacity for speech production and language. It is a capacity which all human beings, by definition of their nature, share--just as we have two hands, two eyes, etc. From this fact, and from the common constraints placed upon all natural languages, there arises the notion of the virtual equivalency of all languages to meet, more or less well, the need of human communication. Certain design features of language, such as openness, productivity, symbolization, duality of patterning, are inherent and implicit in the definition of human language. Any system of communication cannot be without these features and be fully regarded as a human language.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We must note and take exception with the idea of the ideal "Structure" of language, especially that this "Structure" must somehow be genetically hard-wired in the brain of the ideal speaker-hearer. We are led by this notion to search for a mathematically correct universal grammar which sees language as a kind of perfect communication machine. This is the point at which we must recognize the critical difference between our own formalistic constructions of abstract language and the informal and functional constructions of natural language. What guides language as on-going speech production is not some formalized and formulaic universal grammar, but the historically and socially embedded constraints that are placed upon speech production--functionally necessary constraints if language is to be language at all.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Natural language accomplishes several feats, which if seen from the standpoint of a formal theory, should be logically impossible. First, it allows the rationalization of meaning by means of certain kinds of fallacies. Secondly, it allows the possibility of the incorporation of contradiction into its structure. It is something that by logical definition would be impossible in a finite state machine. In other words, we must account for the orderly construction of language not in terms of some presumed "Structure" but in terms of an inherent lack of structure that it must overcome in order to achieve its primary functions of communication and expression.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The notion of structure in language is tied up to the problem of linguistic change. Structure must account for, and be accounted for by, the capacity of all languages to change continuously and yet remain by design and definition language. Change must be constrained in certain universal ways. Certain dimensions of language allow for change and make change possible, while other dimensions are held to be unchangeable. Since nothing in the universe seems unchangeable, either we posit some noumenal a priori ideal of an absolute structure or language or we must entertain the possibility that language structure itself may have been evolving.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Again we are left with a basic choice in the study of language between such a language structure. It is one that remains hypothetical and perhaps unproven. The study of language as the phenomena of speech within a social context. It seems, in light of the history of this debate, the emphasis of either alternative results in the devaluation of the other.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">As most people do, pursuing the study of language as a separate phenomena with an underlying universal phenomena has two consequences. Positing a structural relationship between different languages where none may in fact exist, and ignoring those actual social and historical processes and principles of patterning involved in the construction of language as an ongoing discursive phenomena.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A language is composed of many elements upon several interrelated levels of functional process. Change may occur among any of its elements, along any of its dimensions, upon any of its levels. But change may be more likely to occur among some elements or areas of a language than another, while other elements or dimensions may be very resistant to change, and this differential will vary widely between different languages.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The basic mechanism of linguistic change is held to be the stylistic variation which human speech is heir to. The possibility for this variation arises in the openness and productivity of language as a symbolic system of communication--the source of its adaptability and flexibility to produce an infinite variation of meaning, as well as of its intrinsic ambiguity and incorporation of contradiction. This mechanism of stylistic variation of speech pattern drives both internal and external process of change, or what can be called endogenous change and exogenous change. Though it is the primary engine of language change, most stylistic variation fails to catch on and take hold in a language. The determining factors of whether a variation catches on are balanced by two principles, the increase in the communicative efficiency or reduction of ambiguity and the increase of the expressiveness of language, or the augmentation of ambiguity. Furthermore, incorporation of new elements or variations of old elements, may produce reverberations throughout a language which may result in other changes in other elements and aspects of a system, or else create the potential for alteration in other places in the system. Stylistic variation is motivated by numerous social and psychological factors, not least of which are the desire for individual self-expression and the empowerment this brings, and the creation of social speech boundaries which mark status differences between people. The short term variation of language thus obfuscates its long-term stability and its actual rate of development a language may take. We can expect that over the long term, endogenous drift of a language should be rather stable.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Endogenous change has two contradictory consequences. First it drives a language towards greater internal coherence, but at the cost of external expressiveness and variability. Secondly, it accomplishes what may be called evolutionary linguistic divergence and fission, as two groups with a common parent language drift apart to become two entirely separated languages. At first glance, these two consequences of endogenous change appear to be contradictory, but on closer scrutiny we can see how they may in fact be complementary processes in which the drive towards increasing internal coherence will tend to create linguistic boundaries between speakers will none had existed before, resulting in linguistic separation and isolation, and in processes of linguistic schismogenesis.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can see exogenous linguistic change has having an opposite set of effects upon a language. In the first place, exogenous change will tend to increase the variability and reduce the internal coherence of a language. This function will be an inevitable response to the ambiguity of two different speakers attempting to understand one another. Though is increases the internal ambiguity of a language, the overall effect of this kind of change is one of linguistic fusion and convergence. Sometimes such convergence will either dramatically alter the borrowing language, or an entirely new language may emerge from the process of linguistic amalgamation. One aspect of exogenous change is that unlike endogenous change it is over the long run discontinuous and erratic in its effects.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can understand the history of language change then to have been one of an ongoing dialectic between endogenous and exogenous factors of change. This dialectic, as previously noted, revolves around stylistic variability which is functionally motivated and which is an inevitable consequence of the tradeoff in human language between internal coherence and external expressiveness. This dialectic has been one as to reveal few uniform and consistent processes of language change. We can expect that internal and external sources of change are in their effect upon language always in a kind of mutually constraining dynamic equilibrium. Exogenous change can only alter a language so drastically before the language as an effective system of communication breaks down, endogenous changes can only work to constrain a language so much before it becomes too coherent.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <b><u> <p ALIGN="center">Language Structure</p> <p ALIGN="center"> </p> </u></b> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The question of structure in language is an important one. Structure would be better replaced by the term construction and this construction of language follows certain functional and symbolic designs. The rules which guide the construction of language are largely implicit and only indirectly constraining in linguistic production, they are performance rules. It is useful to analyze the construction of language upon three levels of its patterning--the relational level of its sign/symbol that refers to semantics, the syntactic level of sentence construction, and the functional external level of discourse, or supra-sentential context, which refers mostly to pragmatics. But it must be remembered that in actual language patterning these three levels at which the construction of language occurs cannot be clearly separated from one another--semantics, syntactics and pragmatics are interpenetrated by one another.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The beginning point in understanding the internal order of meaning and its relationship to meaning is to understand the root connection between the linguistic sign and the thing in the world that the sign points to. All language structure and meaning comes to focus upon this central relationship. In the case of human language, this relationship is inherently symbolic. The sign does not have to have identity with the thing it symbolizes. It is held to be arbitrary.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">From this standpoint we can argue that the function of structure in language is to construct and mediate a symbolic boundary between internal and external levels of meaning of the sign--its allegedly symbolic duality of patterning. The external functionality of language results in the extrinsic structure, while internal functionality characterizes its intrinsic structure. Extrinsic structure references a background field of relational values that is mostly implicit. Intrinsic structure registers internal value that is explicit. It is a finite sign that incorporates the infinite universe of meanings. It is in this way that linguistic meaning is encoded.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">On the most basic level we can assume that a linguistic element encodes information which is implicitly embedded within a background field of relational values. Explicit encoding must optimize between the principle of economy, or of least effort, and the principle of value, or greatest effect.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In terms of this encoding, certain implicit categories of significance will be left to be inferred or tacitly presumed, and others may be explicit referred to. We make a distinction between overt and covert categories. At this level the problem of syntax is clearly seen as intrinsic to the problem of meaning. Explicit encoding is also seen as a means of marking a relational category or characteristic as especially significant In general, unmarked categories that remain implicitly embedded in the background relational field are considered to be more basic to the structure of meaning. Marking is construed as a means of emphasizing some elements in a field over others, and entails an intrinsic form of valuation, or significant contrast, between marked and unmarked elements or relations. To turn what is basically or implicitly a noun in a normal field of relations into a verb, certain transformations of marking must be effected--similar to change what remains implicitly a verb into a noun, other conventions marking the transformation must be effected.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It is primarily by means of such marking that the variability, productivity and openness of language as a symbolic system of communication is achieved, and it is in terms of transformational rules, the conventional regularity and experimentation in word play that most stylistic variation, hence linguistic modification, come about.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In this framework, it can be seen that meaning is by its design arbitrary. There are no fixed, a priori, absolute or non relative relations which predetermine the significance of any particular sign for all time. This intrinsic flexibility in the use of signs in human language is called the associational value of the element. Each and every sign may be used in a variety of ways. But this usage entails the syntactic marking by means of conventional formula. Syntactic order enters into the transformations of basic meanings by means of the superimposition of conventions in the use of linguistic elements. Even the deliberate violation such conventions must themselves be somehow marked as such.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Meaning and meaning-making in human language is characterized by two features of design. First, basicness presumes an implicit prototypical field of relations which reveal interesting facets about human knowledge. On a common sense level, the basic categories of meaning, though largely cultural constructions, form the substrate of linguistic value and signification. Basicness of categories is widely presumed to be a universal substrate of phenomenological experience and cognition in the world. The case of the near-universal acquisition of basic color terms reveals how our common experience may be similarly ordered upon a subconscious level.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Basicness defines the center of gravity of meaning of a basic category of relational value, but it does not clearly mark the boundaries or outermost periphery of such categories. Basic categories that mark the centrality but not the peripheries of meaning, are usually regarded as mutually exclusive, and therefore as hierarchically related, and tend to be encoded in basic, unmarked, and unambiguous forms. We can speculate upon certain marginal or derivative or secondary categories which serve the function of defining the peripheries of basic categories, and which tend to be mutually nonexclusive and nonhierarchical in relation with one another, and which are more marked, more inherently ambiguous and highly elaborated. We can assume that these secondary categories are more explicitly marked by conventional constraints than are basic categories, because they tend to be more ambiguous.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Another complementary aspect of this is what might be called the embedding of conventional constraint in the implicit field of relations such that categorical markers which are clearly conventional artifices, are nevertheless normally construed as if basic and natural to the background field of relations. This embedding is accounted for in several ways, and it becomes the basis for the inherent stability and conservatism of language, and for its great functionality in the world. It is largely a function of the way information becomes neurally encoded in the brain--not only are basic categories marked out in this way, but a cultural construction which proceeds to delineate a greater number of derivative categories also entails the neuronal embedding of this knowledge in the brain. This embedding of constraint within language is the principle means of increasing the coherence of language and reducing its ambiguity. We must distinguish this implicit embedding of constraint in language from the explicit encoding that marks its normal usage. This implicit embedding follows the contours of basicness and thus serves to mark out and define more clearly the boundaries about basic culturally constructed categories. The more refined and fine tuned the pattern recognition function of a language may be in a certain domain, the greater the number of secondary categories will be marked out as if primary and basic, and the more implicit and basic will be the constraints which achieve this marking, and the less the ambiguity which exists between these categories.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can expect cross-cultural convergence toward the more basic categories of meaning, and greater divergence along the more peripheral categories. We can also expect that if there is a lower limit of the substrate of basicness of relational categories, there may also be an upper ceiling or limit upon the number of derived categories which can become effectively embedded. Expert knowledge is an example of these kinds of limits. Human expertise entails a great sophistication and refinement along focal areas, but great depth is achieved at the cost of breadth. From this standpoint, not only do different cultures very significantly in the number of basic categories they mark out, but also in the number of domains of relation that they mark for such embedding.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In relation to this, it is worthwhile to consider embedding in relation to elaboration. We can expect that wherever we find greater elaboration of certain relational domains, there will also occur greater embedding of conventions upon secondary categories. Elaboration is the explicit marking of secondary categories in such a way as to incorporate greater variability in the patterning. We refer to this as stylization, and it bears an interesting relationship with the communicative function of the enhancement of coherence and reduction of ambiguity. Elaboration recalls the expressive function of language, and is tied up in its marking and explicitness. Elaboration, by virtue of its marking, provides a means of making manifest the marginal and implicitly ambiguous. It should be expected that as elaboration proceeds, embedding of convention follows. We can see clearly the expressive, experimental and exploratory function of language play in the process of elaborating marginal areas of reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is another way of looking at the relationship between embedding and elaboration. Elaboration proceeds where embedding can follow. There are marginal boundaries of all knowledge where, because of the inherent limits of the embedding function, embedding cannot follow elaboration. In these regions, even elaboration must be explicitly constrained, because it no longer serves its function of precipitating embedding. We can expect in these areas to find the most explicit constraints of convention, which are not concerned with expressive elaboration so much as with the reduction of ambiguity by the increase of coherence. We can expect that these areas come to have a certain negative basicness about them in that they point to a center or locus of conventional, categorical constraint which is exclusive and hierarchical, but which leaves the margins to be defined by elaboration. Explicit constraints are thus hedged all about by elaboration, though they appear to share the same categorical imperative of function as do implicit basic categories.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is in the relation between basic implicit categories and basic explicit constraints of elaboration, a certain shadow effect in which such constraints, though conventional and arbitrary, come to acquire a basicness about them that is similar to basic categories. This can be put in another way. Basic categories tend toward the simplification of the explicit encoding, and so do basic constraints. Neither are enumerated or elaborated at any great length, though both are hedged all about by much embedding and elaboration.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In this explanation, we proceed upon a continuum from the most basic and implicit categories of experience, through marginal embedded and elaborated categories of constraint, to basic and explicit categories. There is in this movement a dialectic between implicit meaning and explicit constraint.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">This brings up an important point about language. All implicit relations are virtually encodable, or are capable of being made explicit, whether or not they actually are. This is a basic design feature of human language. All human languages share the capacity for encoding any and every relation possible. Given the paradigmatic structure of certain languages, it certainly holds that certain categories are less readily encodable in some languages than others. The finite structure of any given language may make it extremely difficult to encode some forms of relation and very easy to encode others. This comprehensiveness of language is tied to its productivity and openness as a coherence system.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We have arrived at the point of considering what a language paradigm consists of and what factors may account for a particular organization of a language paradigm. In order to do so, we need to account for the basic structure of the sentence. Intrinsic relational structure is that is specific to the construction of sentences. All other relations that impinge upon the significance of an utterance are to be regarded as extrinsic. Intrinsic meaning is always explicit, except where it has become embedded. Put simply, any language paradigm consists of a control structure which governs the intrinsic structure of language at the level of sentence construction. It is the sentential paradigm of a language which governs the type of marking and transformations possible within the intrinsic structure of a language.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is no need to posit a universal deep structure to the construction of such paradigms, for they remain largely culturally implicit and conservative. It is unlikely that, given the requirements of natural language in terms of the flexible decoding and encoding of the world in a coherent and consistent way, it should be mathematically structured like any finite-state machine. The logic of the paradigmatic structure is largely informal and defined by its exceptions and variations. We can posit certain minimum constraints that any language must systematically incorporate in order to maximize coherence, such that syntax should have an optimum level given the design features inherent in human language. Exactly what these constraints may be will vary widely between different languages, and the results of different sets of constraints will produce differential patterns.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In this regard the lesson of translation from one code to another is information. It entails the transformational encoding of a message in one linguistic order into a correlate in another. A similar process may be happening in normal speech production which produces almost infinite variations upon a few basic constraints. Are there basic patterns upon which such transformations are based for any given language, therefore requiring many rules for transformation, or else are there available to the average speaker a relative large set of schematic linguistic chunks that require only slight marking or alteration to be made serviceable in speech. Evidence of oral traditions supports an hypothesis of such schematic chunking in a language. In a literate context, chunks may remain, but in smaller, more grammatically parseable units. It is also possible that a mixed kind of situation exists for most languages. With some regions of a language governed by basic paradigmatic units or rules, and others less grammatically encoded but more highly schematized. In regard to this aspect of speech production, we really do not know how language works to construct sentences which make sense.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">To examine what a basic sentence is, we must see that it is foremost an explicitly defined relation, or what might be referred to as a relational statement. A sentence serves the function of marking out one particular significant relation, or related set of relations, for some functional purpose. The relation focuses upon the identity of a thing that is the main subject of the sentence. The relation marks in some way the thingness of the subject in some functional way. The entire structure of the sentence then can be construed as the construction of meaning by means of the relational modification of a central subject.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The most basic sentence is a one word utterance or exclamation--this is the most implicit possible form of a sentence and has the most minimal possible intrinsic structure. It consists of a useful beginning in the understanding of sentential structure because it most clearly demonstrates the importance of the background relationship to the definition of a sentence. In this regard, a "Me!" in regard to some context does not function as a normal me in any other sentence or alone as merely a sign without a symbolic referent. To say "Hey!" to someone necessitates a context in which its functional meaning can be interpreted. Such one word sentences must be seen as contextually determined and context bound. The frequency which we might use such single word utterances in the course of conversation might, upon retrospection, defy our normal expectations of intelligibility, though we may do so without any loss of import of significance. This is in marked contrast to a basic sentence form with basic categories and basic constraints, such as "The cat sat on the mat" that is held to be relatively context independent. It is a sentence which effectively contains its own context, and does not present a problem of implicit ambiguity. We may ask "what cat" or "where on the mat" but this call for elaboration merely hedges the central significance of the statement. Yet if we modify a single word, such as "this" or "that", we bring into the sentence the problem of implicit context. Implicitness is the measure of the contextuality of a linguistic element. Basicness is the measure of the codability of an element. Contextuality and codability thus are seen in a converse relation. Contextual relations are less encoded, highly coded relations are less contextual.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">One word sentences cannot be considered as the normal form of a sentence, and thus represent a special case. The minimal structure for a normal, prototypical sentence form is not one word but two--technically known as a subject and predicate or as a topic and comment. Either of these sentential categories may be replaced by a phrase, or a set of phrases, to yield highly complex sentence structures. In one word exclamations, one or other of these is left implicit, though in normal sentential construction this is not paradigmatically appropriate. The more regular sentence structure is conventionally held to be subject, verb and object--languages vary widely in this and the range of variations come to encompass all possible permutations--SOV, VOS, SVO, OVS, OSV, and VSO. But this analysis disregards the cases of objectless sentences and the relation of the verb to the object as a part of the predicate. This has to do with transitivity/intransitivity of a basic dimension of verbs.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">In other words, key paradigmatic relation is between the subject and the predicate. The definition of both subject and predicate are secondary issues. The sentence structure may be considered prefix, infix or suffix in relation to the placement of the subject in relation to the predicate. This is important because it entails the order of modification of sentential structure that can be taken, and because this specifies the subject in relation to the relational predicate as explicit, whereas the modification of individual linguistic elements, which may follow its own prefix, infix and suffix notation, involves the relational modification of a thing or "thingness." The subject then takes on a special relational value, as not the thing modified by a relation, but the thing that modifies the relation. The role and function of the object as part of the construction of the predicate is as a thing modified by the relation. What makes a sentence distinct from any other linguistic element, is that modification includes a subject-predicate relationship in which the subject, as a thing modifies the relation, or an object of the relation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It implies a certain informational value unlike that of things being modified or acted upon. A sentence thus constitutes a relational statement about the world, whatever its alleged truth value, which is a piece of linguistic knowledge about the world. It achieves a function of explicit symbolic relation and value. From the standpoint of human language, there is something of critical importance about this structure of relation. The precise order or nature of this relation may very with different language systems, whether topic-comment or ergative-accusative or active-passive.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">There is no deep or universal structure underlying this basic order of sentence patterning. Whatever is the predominant paradigm of the language will include some degree of implicit embedding of its structure in the language code which will facilitate recognition. Transformation rules are applied to the basic paradigm of a language for three sets of purposes. To account for and generate variable patterns of the sentence structure, to recognize and correct errors in sentence structure, and to translate from one language code to another. Transformation rules are largely implicit and remain embedded, though they guide elaboration of sentences. We employ these rules as a matter of habit and reflex, and these rules are therefore functionally encoded in our performance. They are performance rules and as such remain implicitly embedded in the construction of our sentences.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A paradigm of a language, in lieu of more definitive scientific explanation, well simply be defined as the minimal, most basic constraints which govern the formation of all sentences in a given language. These include basic rules of sentence order, punctuation, modification and marking of components. There appear to be few formulaic and universal paradigmatic constraints underlying all languages. Different languages vary considerably in their paradigmatic organization, and paradigmatic structure remains implicitly embedded in the patterning language takes. When overlaid and brought into constructive, conjunctive coordination with the basic and implicit relational field, these rules become organizationally constitutive of symbolic and relational meaning.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Transformation rules modify sentence structure in relation to the basic paradigm which remains implicitly embedded. To understand the relation of transformational rules to the basic paradigm of a language, we need to understand the relation between the implicit and explicit values at the level of the sentence, and how these are interconnected with implicitness and explicitness at the level of the linguistic element. This is roughly the difference between intrinsic implicitness and explicitness and extrinsic implicitness and explicitness, what has previously been described. Intrinsic implicitness or explicitness involves the relational and positional value of the linguistic component within the framework of the sentence. It is different from that extrinsic value derived as if the element stood alone, outside of the sentence.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Another way of looking at this is to say that the sentence creates its own context of relations which critically intercedes with the relational contexts of any of its elements. This is simply more than the intersection of contextual relations of each of its elements. The intrinsic contextuality of the sentence is based upon its fundamental relational paradigm within any given language, and the embedded and elaborated transformational rules which govern its production and articulation.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The basic paradigm remains largely implicit to the intrinsic structure of a sentence, as do the implicit transformation rules. What becomes explicitly encoded in a sentence construction is the coherence of the meta-relation described by the unique conjunction of the sentence components. In extrinsic structure, relations are implicit and thingness is rendered explicit. With intrinsic structure, relation itself is rendered explicit, and thingness is made implicit beneath the scope of the explicit meta-relation. Bringing diverse elements within the scope of a sentence meta-relation precipitates out in increasingly explicit ways what otherwise remains implicit to the elements themselves. The conjunction of a sentence with each additional element creates diminishing degrees of implicitness, and increasingly explicit specificity of the meta-relation. Sentence construction accomplishes reduction of implicit ambiguity about the meta-relation, and explicit expressiveness about this relation at the same time. A sentence accomplishes a functional symbolic relation which is the foundation of sentience.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The intrinsic positional and associational value of a component within a sentence will determine which transformational rules will apply, at both the sentence and the elemental levels. How a component of a sentence shall be modified, and how the total structure of the sentence shall be modified, will be governed within the control structure of the basic paradigm of the language. This control structure governs the modification and selection of elements in relation to one another in the construction of sentences. Transformations are allowed within the latitude of the system, or may violate the basic rules of the paradigm, as long as the violation is marked by modification as such.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The paradigm controls and delimits the possibilities created by the intersection of the meanings of the components of a sentence construction. Elements that otherwise stand on their own, enter into a complex dialectical of mutual constraint in the sentence context in which their own range of value becomes subordinated and limited by the range of value created by the sentence as a single string. Individual elements, that otherwise are entirely symbolic in function, become dispossessed of their symbolic function within the sentence context for the symbolic value of the sentence itself. The components yield a part of their symbolic function for the sake of the symbolic construction of meaning in the sentence. The rest of their symbolic value becomes suppressed within the symbolic scope of the sentence, and that part emphasized. The functional paradigm governing sentence construction in any language thus facilitates this basic process by imposing a minimal set of constraints upon it.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The sentence as a whole, self-contained unit, thus conveys not only explicit information about the world, but implicit information about its own structural patterning as well. A sentence becomes then, a complex element of a language with its own extrinsic relational value. The punctuation of a sentence, whether it is marked in writing by a period or a question mark, or in speaking by a pause or a rising ultimate tone, bounds the elements within that frame into a closed internal order in which the relational values of each of the components begins to rapidly work upon one another to produce some final composite, relational significance.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The elements bound within the scope of a sentence enter into a complex dialectic of mutual constraint and interpenetration of value. It is a complex calculus, and as sentences are being produced, a dynamic one, with each additional element contributing to the dialectical relations as a diminishing degree of freedom in the final composition. We can speak of a sentence as a complex composition containing a net, if not quite discrete, relational value.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The paradigm of a language is founded upon the differential requirements and coordination of the functions of speaking and hearing, or writing and reading. Intrinsic structure is necessary for the purposes of unencumbered and correct speech production which will maximize either communication or expressiveness, or both, and minimize as much as possible ambiguity. The listening to the speech of others entails the application of embedded transformational rules which will automatically decode and simplify the variability of sentences within the range of the paradigm. The productive elaboration and play with words of one's own speech requires a kind of internal listening or monitoring of one's own speech activities, and a channeling of the stream of speech through the embedded transformational rules.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We are left with a sense in which the dialectic between the basic paradigm and embedded rules of transformation are mutually constraining, in the control of sentence construction. This continuum is also neatly bisected by an axis formed by the dialect between implicit and explicit structure, or what might be better referred to as virtual and possible structure versus actual and probable structure. All rules are implicit except that their instantiation forces upon them a certain functional explicitness that marks the correctness of the construction.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A sentence is a complex and dynamic construction. It is more than just a string of words or signals. The relational order of a sentence becomes a functional formula about a relation in the world. It become a proposition, a statement of value, whose primary significance points beyond itself to the outside world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <b><u> <p ALIGN="center">Social Function and Linguistic Construction</p> <p ALIGN="center"> </p> </u></b> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We are left to consider the wider, external social function of language, a consideration which necessarily involves the supra-sentential level of language construction, the context of language as discourse, and the social functionality of language in terms of its psycho-social and inter-social aspects of symbolic integration.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Language is the principle mechanism available to human beings to create and maintain social boundaries in the world. By its encoding and definition of knowledge, language also becomes the principle medium for the differential distribution of the social stock of knowledge. Speaking and interaction is the principle mechanism for the maintenance of subjectively based internalizations of the culturally constructed world. Language precipitates the meanings, values and helps to solidify the socially constructed world. Language is the basis of rationality and rationalization, and is the principle means of the basic anthropological fallacies upon which the efficacy of the constructed world depends--the fallacies of abstraction, reification and reductionism. Language maintains the deceit and illusion of ideology and false consciousness. It is only by means of our language that we are capable of lying. Language is the principle means of the symbolic encoding of reality that reinforces on a secondary plane the institutional processes of everyday life. Language is the principle means of the expression of our subjective character and interests, and for the realization of our common humanity. It is the principle means for the communication of information upon which complex social organization depends. All of these functions are central to language, and language is central to all of these functions in the social world of humankind.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We cannot every clearly separate these functions from one another in our daily discourse. Many of these are often combined in the same utterance or discursive frame. Often one or another function is super-ordinate in the strategic control or manipulation of language within a given context. The stylistic variation which is the main mechanism of language change is largely constrained within the scope of control of this functional hierarchy. The social success of individuals within the system is often defined by their mastery of the functionality of their language in the construction of reality. This mastery is not only rhetorical or ertistic or a matter of sophistication or refinement. But however pragmatic the strategic deployment of language, it is always poetic. Poetic mastery of one's language becomes the proof of performance, without which the doubt of one's linguistic competency would always remain. In this regard, a virtuoso performance in plain Black English can be used much more powerful effect than the best of the Queen's English.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Language is the principle mechanism for the encoding and expression of information, for the mediation, coordination and control of change in reality. We can properly speak of the legitimating function of language to reinforce humanly constructed realities. Not only does language help to legitimate our human-made constructions of reality, but is itself a principle way of constructing and of institutionalizing this construction as a socially shared and corporately enduring pattern.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Finally, language is the central mechanism for the integration of human reality, between internal maps and external constructions, and between the subjective sense of psychological self and the objective social world of the other. Language is an intrinsic part of our human identity and identification in the world. Not only is the world internally encoded in the brain in terms which are primarily linguistic, but human experience itself finds its principle expression and embodiment in the world via language. We may refer to the self-monitoring action of an inner voice of the mind which is the artifact of our social discourse and internalized counterpart of our spoken voice. Language defines the construction of human reality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Cognition</p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The question of human cognition as a sub-problem of the Worldview problem concerns what can be called the psychological construction of meaning in the world. From an experiential standpoint, such meaning must be regarded as phenomenological, inherently subjective in orientation and as temporally constrained. Psychological meaning must also be considered as symbolic and functionally constructed in the world, holistically integrative, adaptive within the world, and as primarily mediated by language. Human meaning, its basic design and construction in the world, must be considered as a relational system that follows its own informal logic and has its own calculus of construction.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A relational theory of meaning is based upon the idea that meaning is composed of basic minimal units, or constructs, of meaning which are encoded in the brain, which are used in the complex and systematic construction of reality, and that underlie the systematic organization of mind. These minimal units of meaning are called "mememes" and they are psychologically organized into a sophisticated mimetic system of meaning that depends upon and incorporates the inherent linguistic system.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Mememes can be considered as the rudimentary constructs of human experience, constructs which representatively frame our selective perception of the world. As such, mememes relationally indelibly fuse semantic value with the very act of experience and perception itself. Mememes are preceptual in that they underlie and compose the more complex mental-cognitive constructions that we refer to as concepts and conception. The mimetic system has, as one of its principle organic functions, the organization and processing of human memory and meaning associations.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">It must be reiterated that mememes themselves are basic constructs of cognition. They are thus emblematic and are by definition composed of several sorts of perceptual stimuli. As sign-symbols they are schematic bits and pieces of experience which we compose together to create chunks of knowledge about the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Mememes therefore encode three kinds of coordinate information--relational thingness, relational rules, and relational values. Each is a separate sign/signal that performs a distinct function in the integration of experience, in two forms, at the complex level of the systemic mind, and at the basic level of the neuronal and biochemical organization of the brain. These mememes constitute basic symbols, as well as the basic components of more complex symbols.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The psychological construction of reality is based upon the integration of several coordinate systems of the brain to produce what can be called the systemic control hierarchy of the mind. The overarching product of this hierarchy is a sense of self incumbent with psychological ego-identity in the world, and which accompanies the identification in the world. We internalize parts, pieces and people of the world as if a corporate part of our own psychological, subjective identity, and we externalize our own organic identity in the world, such that the world comes to symbolically, psychologically embody our own internal experiences.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We can refer to gestalts as discrete states and frames of mind or consciousness. The constraint of temporality upon our phenomenological flow or stream of consciousness is based upon the focal momentary limits of our attention and short term memory. We can attend to only a small set and focal area at any one moment. Consciousness is integrated by the synthesizing of a series of discrete frames of attention that are punctuated by transitions. The effect of the mind is to block out such transitions from our awareness, and to create a coherent and consistent pattern of awareness which encompasses more than we are able to attend to at any one moment.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A consequence of this when coupled the symbolic nature of our identity of experience, is that we are able to entertain several possible versions of reality outside of our immediate awareness. Much of our attention is guided by the ability to fuse several alternative versions together to create a composite image free of the discrepancy of transition. Mental illness and hallucination is a clear example of this process of conscious fusion--in which case it amounts to an intrinsic psychotic confusion because it is no longer functionally ordered or constrained in relation to an external world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We may in this regard appropriately refer to what may be termed the control structure of human consciousness, one which is functionally, strategically oriented in relation to the external world. This control is accomplished by a complex and dynamic coordination of the various systems of the brain under the systemic hierarchy of the mind. The analogy of this function is of a common blackboard that the several systems access asynchronously. It frames problems functionally defined, and prioritizes them in relation to their functional importance. This is part of the interpretive function of the mind which is tied up with the problem of maintaining an integration and identity based upon a dynamic equilibrium with the outside world. The mediation of change is the most important aspect of this function, and in this regard we refer to the intrinsic power of psychological knowledge and control.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Culture</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"></font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua">It is a paradox that we have elaborated an entire science of cultural anthropology though we do not have a central, paradigmatic definition of its central principle--the concept of Culture. To rehabilitate a notion of culture as a static, timeless, spatial circle, I proffer the idea of culture as a stable sense of boundary which we bring to our experience and integration of reality. It is a sense of boundary which occurs upon several levels, which is phenomenologically experienced and which is quite fluid and permeable. The delimitations of this cultural boundary constitute the horizon of our world view. In this regard the boundary is principally symbolic in the more conventional meaning of the term. All symbols have some material referent or substantial significance in the world. When we refer to the cultural construction of reality, we refer to the symbolic construction of the world as a meaningful place built around a central sense of identity. We can refer to several other systems of symbolization besides our version of worldview which allow for the holistic integration of our experience of the world, and which serve to bound our view of the world in significant ways--mythology, common sense, ideology, philosophy, art, science and religion.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Culture as boundary comes to clear focus when we consider the cultural bounding of our own worldview, boundaries that normally remain invisible in their embedding in our world, until we come into direct confrontation with basic cultural differences that tend to relativize and make apparent the facticity of our own boundaries. We are left with a non-absolute notion of the relativity of values and views, of a fundamental normative relativity defined within the arc of human variation. We find anthropological abnormality in functional terms of the transitions that undermine our boundaries and conceptions of normality, and which tend to disintegrate our sense of symbolic totality.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">When we refer to the concept of culture, we must also take into account the inherent sociality of human experience. Humankind is by definition a social animal in a socially constructed world. In this regard, it is clear that we should speak of social construction versus social structure and thereby highlight the processural aspects of human performance and practice which this entails. Social relations exist in the world as part of a range of interpersonal transactions that involve some form of symbolically mediated reciprocity that concern the distribution of people in relation to vital resources in the world. Such relations are always relative and tend toward uneven distribution. Asymmetry in human social relations arises as the result of their manipulation and the institutionalization of uneven social relations. We thus come to find ourselves predominantly constrained and defined by our social positionality in the world. Not only is our worldview likely to be in large measure a function of our own culturally relative biases, but also of our own particular socially-relative point of view. This kind of social relativity of our worldview has not yet been taken fully into account in terms of the worldview problem, though we can understand the relationships between psychological identity, linguistic power and stylistic variations that underlie language change, the legitimating functions of institutionalized systems of symbolization such as mythology and ideology, and our socially constrained sense of proportion and perspective about the world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">The cultural boundaries that exist in the world are defined by the boundaries that we are born and raised with, and that, as adults, we continue to impose upon our world.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> </font><b><font FACE="Book Antiqua" SIZE="4"> <p ALIGN="CENTER">Conclusion</p> <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </font></b><font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">We are left with a paradoxical sense of the world view problem. We attribute diverse forms of relativity to the central fact of the inherent holistic integration of human worldview, by which people come to construct and construe their worlds in fundamentally different ways. It is because of this integration and its complexity that we cannot clearly separate the roles of language, culture or cognition. We make these analytical distinctions purely for heuristic and ertistic convenience, but we must see them as inextricably bound up one within the other. Though language is clearly at the center of the nexus of relationships, it is also itself as determined by culture and cognition as it may be determinative of them. And yet, the paradox arises when we consider that this holistic integration which accounts for the range of relativity of world view and for the lack of absolute or a priori knowledge, is itself based upon certain universal principles which account for the integration of reality. Though the results of integration are historically distinct and different in each case, the underlying conditions and constraints accounting for these differences are the same.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Though our world view is holistically integrated and functionally adapted, it is not ever completely so. The fact to render it complete leads to the superimposition of basic symbolic fallacies upon our experience of reality which have their own maladaptive consequences. In relation to worldview I am arguing for a reality orientation. We are, by virtue of our unfinished nature and our acquisitive dependency upon culture, defined anthropologically by our world openness. We can account for this fact that our constructions of reality must be functionally adaptive in an ever changing world, and thus no fixed system of constraint will suffice for long to sustain our sense of order about the world or of our relation with it. This anthropological openness which characterizes our language, cognition and culture, has been both a vice and a virtue. It is a source of both the symbolic ambiguity and symbolic unity by which we experience the world in a dialectical manner.</p> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY">A great deal more will be gained than lost by amending our views about absolute structures that determine all things in our world, to think about how we have constructed our world, and the functional principles and relational patterns which underlie the processes of our construction of reality. The fact of this fundamental paradox of worldview, that we can have a world that is both relative and universal, itself lies upon the inherent antinomial structure and identity of the human symbol, for the capacity of the symbol to incorporate contradiction and find identity in difference. We end up with a different kind of symbolic structure underlying our vision of the world than the kind many of us would want to superimpose, we end up with the sort of dialectical contradiction in the symbolic totalization of reality with which Claude Levi-Strauss dealt so well.</p> </font> <p> </p> </font> </font> </font> <font FACE="Arial"> <font FACE="Times,Times New Roman" SIZE="2"> <p> </p> <hr> <p><a name="Copyright">Blanket Copyright</a>, Hugh M. Lewis, © 2005. Use of this text governed by fair use policy--permission to make copies of this text is granted for purposes of research and non-profit instruction only.</p> <p>Last Updated: 08/25/06 </p> <hr> <p> </p> </font> <p> </p> </font> <p align="center"> <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> s="na";c="na";j="na";f=""+escape(document.referrer) </script> <script language="javascript1.2" type="text/javascript"> s=screen.width;v=navigator.appName if (v != "Netscape") {c=screen.colorDepth} else {c=screen.pixelDepth} j=navigator.javaEnabled() </script> <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> function pr(n) {document.write(n,"\n");} NS2Ch=0 if (navigator.appName == "Netscape" && navigator.appVersion.charAt(0) == "2") {NS2Ch=1} if (NS2Ch == 0) { r="&size="+s+"&colors="+c+"&referer="+f+"&java="+j+"" pr("<A HREF=\"http://www.TheCounter.com\" TARGET=\"_top\"><IMG"+ " BORDER=0 SRC=\"http://c1.thecounter.com/id=515383"+r+"\"><\/A>")} </script> <NOSCRIPT> <a HREF="http://www.TheCounter.com" TARGET="_top"><img SRC="http://c1.thecounter.com/id=515383" ALT="TC" BORDER="0" width="88" height="31"></a> </NOSCRIPT>  <p ALIGN="CENTER"> </p> </body>