INTRODUCTION

Chapter Eight

Symbolic Systems

Symbols are things, word, objects, actions, that represent, or stand for, a variety of possible significances or meanings that are not directly or mechanically represented by the symbol. Human symbolization is unique to human systems and to patterns of human cognition, language and understanding of their world. All things human are symbolic, even mundane things defined by actions or the most practical or utilitarian of purposes, like tools or common human behaviors. We cannot escape the power and magic of our own processes of symbolization, or the symbolic transformation of our world and of ourselves within it.

Human symbols have come to take of a set of design features, arbitrariness, independence, productivity, openness, indirect reference, linguistic and paralinguistic codification, plasticity of form, duality of patterning, inheritance and frame dependency, multi-level relativity and differentiability, that have made them a powerful basis for a system of natural, cultural intelligence that has formed the basis for the rise of human civilization and for the invention and construction of alternative human realities.

Human symbolization has granted us as well the sentience and capacity for empathetic understanding, for imagining ourselves from others point of view, which capacity also allows us the possibility for discovering entirely new ways of seeing the world and for the intelligent, sentient, and apperceptive exploration of our worlds.

The Symbolic Construction of Human Reality

Human beings cannot but help construct their realities internally in a symbolic manner, and these symbolic realities, as fortuitous and factitious as they may really be, serve in a compulsory and inexorable manner to direct and influence human behavior in all settings and contexts. It does not matter whether or not these constructions are psychologically idiosyncratic and unique, or if they are socially contrived and culturally shared. Indeed theories of psychology and human behavior are variant viewpoints about the processes and structures by which symbolic constructions become organized, developed and articulated in terms of human behavior. Our sense of identity and the organization of our sense of reality rests critically upon the adaptiveness and adjustment of our constructions in the unfolding contexts of everyday life.

Human symbolic constructions serve as filters for our perception of reality, and as forms for the molding of our conception and rationalization about reality. In other words, symbolic organization of human consciousness affects attitudes and behaviors at every level of mental process--from first order precepts to nth order imaginings, dreams and ideational process. The process of the symbolic filtration of reality serves to select and modify signals received from the environment, and to organize these signals into gestalt arrays that are multi-tiered and multi-layered with significations that are representational in the metaphorical and symbolic sense that things immediate and mechanical stand possibly for many other things remote and spiritual or "magical." The quality and variability of such screens of reality are vast and widely differentiated, and depend largely upon the degree of developmental differentiation achieved by an individual and by a socio-cultural grouping as well.

This process of symbolic construction is linguistically mediated and relative to the linguistic medium in which communication and cultural transmission becomes achieved.

This is so much the case that it can be reasonably argued that a large part of the development of our symbolic apparatus of mind hinges and involves centrally the development of our linguistic apparatus for creative expression and adaptive response in socio-linguistic contexts. We cannot clearly separate these problems, nor should we.

As a linguistically mediated process, it is also invariably a social process, and there is no construction, no matter how psychologically solipsistic and idiosyncratic, that is not fully a social construction that carries social significations however implicit and inferential to the overt form of expression.

Human beings thus suffer a phenomenological paradox that no matter how symbolically solipsistic their worldview, attitudes and behavioral sets may be, these are also inexorably and compulsively loaded with significant content that is social and cultural in inference and origin. It is clear from the case of feral and severely deprived children that their capacity for the symbolic organization of reality is as equally impaired as are their capacities to engage in meaningful social relationship and behavior on any more than a rudimentary and gross level of interaction.

It follows that the development of human consciousness and intellectual capacity follows and interacts with human social development and biological human growth and development, and involves centrally the refinement and stadial maturation of the symbolic apparatus of selective and constructive consciousness, coupled with the development of increasing degrees of magnitude of linguistic performance competence.

Memory is not only stratified, specialized and systematic, but it is probably also symbolically constructed, and even long term memory is subject to selective conditioning by present circumstances and influences, such that our remembrance and relation to past events is subject to retrospective editing and adaptation to render them relevant to current contexts. This process is akin to the editing and revision of history in terms of present interpretation relevant to current frameworks, and in fact both processes, which introduce a form of fallacious rationalization to our arguments and viewpoints, may operate in a similar or common manner due to the same kind of symbolic mechanisms which allow for the continual review and reevaluation of embodied experience in adjustment to changing situations.

The Brain as an Evolved Symbolic Apparatus

The human brain may be the final frontier of our sciences. The implied quest of a hard anthropomorphic artificial intelligence framework based upon cognitive science models is the replication as much as possible of brain function, by means of either hard wiring or programming or some hybrid combination of both. This is the model derived from the Turing Test.

The human brain is unique of all living forms for its size and sophistication. It is perhaps unique in the universe for its tremendous complexity. The human brain has evolved from earlier brains that were simpler and less sophisticated, and it is clear that the brain stem, medulla, the cerebrum, the inner cortex and then outer cortex of the cerebellum that serve respectively increasingly higher order functions that range from involuntary control over vital organ functions to voluntary motor coordination of movement and muscles, to pain and pleasure, to basic emotions and thence to progressively higher order reasoning patterns that include not only symbolic relational connections that may be thought of as analogously determined, but even to logical rational structures that are more rigorously deterministic.

Though we have made significant strides in understanding brain function and patterning, especially through advanced imaging technologies that allow us to see the functional patterns of living brains, as a more or less integrated system it still remains largely a black box, an as yet unsolved scientific mystery.

What is striking about the human brain is not only its complexity, but its underlying sense of chaos and beauty when looked at both anatomically as a growth of neural brain tissue from the brain stem outward to the outer layers of the cerebellum, and in terms of its layering and progressive differentiation/integration of increasingly sophisticated functional capacities. It is this sense of the functional organization of the brain as a symbolic system to produce the human mind, including sense of self and sense of purpose, value, etc., the ghost or spirit of the machine, if one will, that is perhaps the least well understood to date and the most important aspect of the human brain to understand.

What also seems remarkable about the human brain is its apparent adaptability and capacity for condition to a relatively wide range of alternative behavioral and adaptive settings. There is perhaps good reason for this from an evolutionary standpoint and it is clear that the human brain at birth is not fully developed, and the mark of human nature from an evolutionary and developmental standpoint is not only its capacity for cultural conditioning--its world openness and freedom from instinctive constraint or rigid fixed action patterns, compared to most other mammalian species--but also its delayed post-partum period of maturation which is extended to years, and which depends, in great measure, on its environmental stimulation and conditioning for its development to occur. And this conditioning is not the kind of behavioristic Pavlovian form we expect of salivating dogs, but the kind of learning that follows from modeling experience and representational behavior like play. In other words, for stimuli, we do not get automatic response, but differentiated reaction sets that are symbolic in form and displaced from its immediate referents. The result is the rapid acquisition of complex behavioral patterns and sets, and the habituation of behavioral patterns and skills that are of relatively high order complexity and sophistication.

We can say unequivocally that the human brain is tied critically to and is at least partially dependent upon the active stimulation and symbolic conditioning of its environment, upon multiple levels and in multiple forms. The brain in its environmental context constitutes therefore a semi-deterministic system. The brain carries in part its environment with it, in terms of its active and passive memory structures and related functional structures, whether specialized or generalized, that serve the adaptive function of memory--this includes dreaming, fantasy, day dreaming, unconscious behavior, implicit or buried knowledged, repressed memory, etc. These are internalized knowledge and experiential-based structures that are subject to continual inputs and modification or revision based upon critical or significant events. The brain in fact depends greatly upon this internalized map of its world, and its capacity to map the world in an on-going way as well as the ability to continuously update its maps on the fly as experience and adaptive circumstances demand. Much of this processing is probably subliminal or unconscious, but may also involve conscious and deliberative mechanisms of human willpower and rationality, as well as somewhat less directive forms of fantasy and play behavior.

Modeling & Symbolic Representation

The defining characteristic of the human species is that human beings think, speak and act in symbolic terms. There is a universal grammar, psychology, cultural framework and even content that is associated with human symbolic behavior & attitudes. There is almost no part of human behavior or thought process that has not been conditioned and pre-structured by human symbol forming, constructive cognition. Even human perception is largely symbolic both in its original form and in the manner that it becomes parsed up and reemployed after the phenomenal act of perception. Acknowledgement of and careful attention to human symbolic behavior, and its implications for our society, our understanding of ourselves, and of our world, for our social relations, actions and their consequences, forms the basis for a unified field of the human sciences and for comprehending human systems.

To search for biological determinants of human behavior in an exclusive or primary sense is to miss the defining emergent aspects of human systems. Even Ludwig Von Bertalanffy himself, a successful biologist by background and originator of General Systems theory, had enough sense to see beyond biological determinism as a sufficient explanation of human behavior, and to seek answers in terms of emergent properties of human systems where they belong--that is the symbolic structuring of human experience at all levels and in all ways. The continuing promulgation of theories of biological determinism in relation to human behavior, in the various forms this has taken, largely ignores and sidesteps the issues of symbolization and symbolic structuring of experience because these realities are difficult to quantify and even more difficult to experimentally manipulate. We may for instance see mental illness largely as the rise of discrepancies and contradictions of symbolic process, or else the break down and loss of integrative function of the symbolic apparatus in guiding adaptive human behavior, hence there is little reason to resort to biological pre-determinants underlying behavior.

This being said it can also be claimed correctly that symbolic human behavior is rooted in human evolution, and thus in human biology in the sense that human beings appear unique in the sense of having evolved a set of physical characteristics that are intrinsic to their symbolic behavior and the cultural construction of reality that is the by-product of this behavior. It is not the purpose of this brief essay to elaborate these characteristics in any detailed manner, but only to mention that these traits collective form a complex of traits that make human culture possible, and that without any one of these traits, we cannot imagine the existence of human culture in the anthropological form that we have come to know it.

We are already in need of qualifying our previous statements on a number of key points. It is not my intention herein to elucidate an entire framework for human systems theory. There would be many ramifications of such a framework--an alternative form of symbolic linguistics, symbolic psychology, models for education & development, rehabilitation & institutional reform. My primary intention at this point is merely to elaborate some key ideas that can be associated with human symbolic process and to thereby highlight its importance to an understanding of General systems.

I will define a model as a form of design that serves as a symbolic representation of an analogical or similar design that exists either in reality or in our imaginations. I will define a symbol by its key function, and that something that "represents" something else, usually by some form of indirect association. A symbol does not have to be similar to the thing that it represents--usually a model is similar by scale or by structural composition to the thing that it represents. A symbol must merely evoke a set of responses from a person that occurs in association with the thing being represented. Usually the thing represented also has a cognate or abstract symbolism that occurs in the mind's eye of the beholder, and that also has a linguistic form also associated with this thing. We can claim that all models are symbols, but not all symbols are necessarily models in the strict sense of the term. A model represents something in reality, a symbol functions to represent things in the world, and hence to say "symbolic representation" is really a kind of emphasis of a single set of complex processes that occur in modeling and symbolization. We may claim loosely that all symbols are in fact models of things in the world, or alternatively imagined. A schizophrenics symbols are largely imaginary, for instance, though for the beholder of these symbols they are as real as any that may be touched or available to the larger collective.

Human symbolic process has several interesting aspects of its articulation: 1. it brings us to confrontation of the anthropological relativity of our own awareness and knowledge of the world, and of our ability to see the world in "objective" form; 2. It leads to the cultural construction of reality, that is "shared" and thereby made coordinate in a collective sense with a group of people, that is "naturalized" in the sense that it is made to appear or function on a level as if "instinctive" and reflexive, that is linguistically and behaviorally transmitted between people, that creates a social level of organization of human systems that is semi-integrated and that feeds back upon the psychological construction of the self in the world.

We build models of reality in our heads--we do this continuously, on a daily basis in fact, and when we sleep and dream it is our dreams that are the symbolic mediators and negotiators of our experience, upon an unconscious level. The models of our reality we depend upon for accuracy and reliability for getting us through our days, and for ordering our world in a manner that make sense to us. Because the world is ever changing and complex, there is an almost continuous need to modify and moderate our models of reality in order that they remain functionally adaptive. We discard old models that are no longer applicable, and we develop new models on the basis of learning. Human beings in fact learn all their lives, and what they learn are to build and refine models of reality upon multiple levels--we are sophisticated when our models are complex and elaborative, and such sophistication allows us in turn to respond to events in our world in ways that in turn appear sophisticated and based upon such elaborated models.

Human beings have a central weakness--without our symbolic models to guide our behavior, we would not be able to function, and would quickly become maladaptive and perish as a consequence. We depend upon our models, and this in a general sense can be called "symbolic dependency." Because our models tend to merge together into larger adaptive frameworks, as psychological & cultural systems, we tend to function with rather open model systems where reference points overlap, boundaries are indistinct, and there is the possibility for much substitution and free-play in our formulations and the functions they are made to serve.

It follows therefore that a Systems based approach that is centered upon the challenge of developing and improving human systems, would seek to make explicit and elaborate the systems-based aspects of modeling in order to render this central articulatory and mediational mechanism of human adaptation more available and technologically useful than it already seems to be. I do not refer only to a form of "symbolic engineering" that relies upon the manipulation of imagery with special effects--indeed the whole of Hollywood can be seen as an industry that is based upon such symbolic engineering. I am referring more directly to the technological development of alternative working systems in a practical sense, understanding that technically such systems have symbolic organization and expression.

Modeling in a more technical sense is a constrained and elaborated form of activity of what we do everyday anyway in our construction of symbolic realities. More careful and studied aspects of modeling as small scale engineering or computing projects, allow us to develop alternative systems based upon our the flexibility of our imagination and understanding of reality, to create new forms and new possibilities thereby. Through modeling, we are able to experiment with these possibilities and bring them "true" to form on a workable level of reality.

I have emphasized the concept and problem of modeling because, methodologically speaking, it stands in central importance to the articulation of our meta-systems framework. Developing means that allow us to model systems in a reliable and efficient way, enables us to directly articulate the framework in a larger context. Modeling extends into every area of interest and endeavor within our framework, and therefore providing a general, broad-range and multipurpose modeling framework provides us with a central articulatory mechanism for the framework, as a direct extension of our planning and design endeavors.

But modeling stands in importance in more than a methodological or operational sense, because we are referring to a broader sense of activity of symbolic representation when we refer to modeling, and we are therefore not just talking about model making or the construction of scale models, etc., but we are also talking about the construction in both a theoretical and applied sense of the entire meta-systems framework as a viable alternative worldview that is capable of competing with symbolic ideologies and adaptive orientations that are extant and predominant in the world.

Without making a systematic modeling approach a central part of the articulatory frameworks, and without generalizing and adapting this modeling approach to a broader range of interests and involvements that are defined by the framework, the model formation and organization process would run helter-skelter and amok, as it so often seems to happen in the larger world that lacks any explicit frameworks of organization and coordination of action. By such means we can put into motion a kind of strategic developmental process, similar to the process of evolution, by means of the transmission of symbolic information and symbolic exploration of the environment. Rather than going at the issue in a blind manner as biological evolution does, we can approach it instead in terms of deliberative efforts and conscious planning and design. We can seek developmental progress in terms of systems integration and automation by an arbitrary means, rather than leaving such processes mainly to chance as they have largely been in our history.

One of the critical features of human symbolization is that it is arbitrary, and this sense of fundamental arbitrariness of symbol systems is a key defining feature of human systems--we have a choice, and by having such a choice, we have the source of doing both great good and perpetrating great evil. It is the arbitrariness of symbolic design that provides us great freedom from natural constraint, and also puts us chronically and forever upon the horns of a basic moral dilemma about our potential goodness or capacity for evil.

We do not necessarily seek to invest this alternative worldview with a moral agenda or a code of conduct or normative code of evaluation of right and wrong, or good and bad, though there does exist a meta-ethical component to such a framework. The larger purpose of such a framework is that we can free ourselves from such narrow agendas and moralities, and for once approach the world with a more open frame of mind, formalized and collectively received as such. We do so largely for practical and adaptive reasons, and a great deal that passes for a sense or suggestion of a moral code of ethics within the framework is done so largely and primarily on practical grounds.

It becomes valid to ask, for instance, what might constitute a "healthy" model for a particular kind of system in a particular set of circumstances. We can test our model out through demonstration and control of contexts in an experimental manner, and derive our measures and determinants of health for a particular kind of system in an empirical manner. From a larger meta-systems standpoint, a relatively "healthy" specimen might not necessarily be an "good" thing in the larger context--a "healthy" lion in the African savanna is probably a good thing--the same creature displaced to a flock of sheep in New Zealand would probably not be a good thing.

Symbolic Cognition & Human Knowledge Systems: The Noetic Revolution of Human Civilization

The binding problem is a central problem in overcoming the mind-body dilemma in both philosophical perspectives of human reality and epistemology as well as in cognitive science and artificial intelligence models of the human brain and mental operation. Basically, we must ask how the brain organizes itself, and integrates its various networks and centers of neural activity, to achieve human consciousness and mind, especially in consideration of highly developed states of human reason and intellect. Analytical approaches have sought mechanical solutions to this central problem, in terms of neural networks and models of the neuron, but these solutions fall short of a complete solution to this kind of problem.

In the anthropology of knowledge there occurs a very similar problem in the question of (1) linking human cognition to symbolic behavior and (2) extending symbolic behavior to the cultural construction of human reality and to definitions of human culture. This problem is not in fact unrelated, and the theoretical-methodological solution I developed for the latter question in terms of symbolic framing provides a potential solution for the former problem as well.

We may say at the outset that if the human brain is looked at from the standpoint of human systems theory, then we can understand clearly that the mind is the central emergent property of the integration of the brain, and the components of the brain maintain themselves in a complex and dynamic kind of equilibrium, involving normally a diurnal-nocturnal cycle of sleep and wakefulness. We can further say that because symbolic behavior and integration appears to be the uniquely defining characteristic of human mind, as opposed to that of other known animals, then we can understand that the emergent integration of the mind has to do with the mechanical organization of the brain to produce symbolic awareness. This symbolic awareness is behaviorally expressed and linguistically encoded and articulated.

We can attribute by inference states of mind to other species of animal, especially obvious in highly intelligent animals. Experiments with primates teach us that primate intelligence is as sophisticated as human intelligence in many dimensions and shows many of the same basic components of symbolic self-awareness and self-reflection that is characteristic of human conscious awareness. Primates in captivity take readily to human cultural preoccupations and patterns, and primates in natural settings have demonstrated the emergence of rudimentary cultural adaptations and expectable variability of patterning between different groupings.

If we examine what is unique about human knowledge systems, and universal to these systems, compared to inferable animal states and systems of knowledge, we can apply primarily the trait of "world openness" to human knowledge systems versus what can be called an "Uexkullian closed world" of the animal. We may state a continuing human plasticity to learn and adapt to the environment on the basis of cognitive processing of perceptual inputs and behavioral interactions that continues throughout the life cycle. We can refer as well to what can be called the cognitively directed behavior that is relatively independent of instinctual constraints or basic drives, though obviously influenced by these drives. Human beings demonstrate a remarkable degree of voluntarism and arbitrary willpower, as well as a cunning of foresight and planning.

Human knowledge systems can be said to be symbolic systems of encoded signals that have a material form and that demonstrate basic design features of human language. We may refer to these as linguistically encoded cultural texts. These systems provide largely directive or alternative relative templates that are used for guiding human behavior, or alternatively for the symbolic justification and rationalization of events. In preliterate or oral societies, knowledge systems largely took the form of mythologies and associated magical lore that were utilized to explain and organize the world, including human social relationships. Story telling has been an important part of this process. Encoding often to the form of ritual performance and even architectural construction and aesthetic design in folk arts.

With the advent of systems of writing, attributed in the main to the need for record-keeping connected to the rise of large scale state-organized systems, and the advent of craft and labor specialization as well as the rise of a formal priesthood, human knowledge systems took on a sense of developmental differentiation that allowed a new level of understanding and comprehension of the world to be achieved. Associated with this is a sense of abstraction and awareness of conceptual independence of ideas from realities. Associated with this also is the classical idea of the "Birth of Tragedy"--the rise of an Apollonian virtue theory of the rule of law and order and the regulated organization of human society. Vast repositories of knowledge thus developed that represented organized collections of texts and these provided a framework for extended and systematic systems of knowledge transmission.

The next revolution of human civilization arrived with the advent of mass printing technologies, which allowed the broad dissemination of texts and provided a basis for increasing rates of literacy. Associated with the advent of printing in Europe was the rise of the Renaissance as well as the early development of a form of market capitalism and early forms of craft and cottage industrialization. The key noetic transformation of human knowledge systems was at this period of time the rise of science and the rise of a non-idealized and naturalized view of humankind. With this came the active exploration of the world and of worldview, and the development of a broader range of alternative systems of knowledge. Associated with this was the questioning of basic precepts and dogmas by which traditional cultural knowledge and worldview had been organized, particularly as a product of a Medieval Scholasticism that was focused on the problem of the exegetical translation and interpretation of sacred texts.

The most recent revolution of human civilization has occurred essentially in the last fifty years with the rise of electronic broad-casting media and especially digital forms of knowledge recording and storage. I see the advent of the Internet and newer satellite based wireless technologies to be an extension of the same processes begun with the radio and television broadcasting of the previous era, as well as with photographic and film recording technologies.

We are today in the midst of this newest knowledge revolution and we do not know the consequences of this in terms of the patterns of integration of our world. We may say clearly that we are dealing with symbolic and organizational structures in the world that are essentially obsolete and that are anachronisms of the past standing in the way of future progress. There is also no way to knowing for certain the outcomes of this direction of development. What can we expect from the future of development. I'm inclined to think that the next knowledge revolution of human civilization will be the achievement of comprehensive systems of integration that are fully automated and that might be based upon hybrid or exotic forms of quantum knowledge storage and manipulation.

Of Symbols and Power

Universal to human beings time-immemorial and worldwide is that they traffic in symbols, and this trafficking in symbols is a source of both objective and subjective power for all people. Successful truck with symbols results in the increase of power, and a sense of growing empowerment in the world. Unsuccessful negotiation with symbols results in the loss of power and a growing sense of powerlessness in the world. The paradox of human reality, and the anthropological relativity of this reality, is that though humans must deal in the world in terms of the world, the manner in which they thus deal are defined symbolically. When they love another person, they love that person not as the person in and of oneself, but as a symbol, as an living embodiment of something in the mind of the lover. Human beings have no choice but to deal with the world, and other people, in terms symbolic to their nature. Wherever we watch the parade and pageant of power in the human world, there we will find human actors who are manipulating and managing key symbols, and serving as embodied symbols, within a larger social system.

I bring up the fundamental relationships between symbols and power in human reality for several interrelated reasons.

First, human beings are in a sense prisoners of their own symbol systems, and they cannot escape these prisons, as they are carried around in their own heads and constrain all way may do or even wish to do. We may refer to a fundamental symbolic solipsism of human consciousness that is the foundation of the anthropological relativity of human reality. This influences not only our attitudes, our worldview, our knowledge, but our behavior and our social relations as well.

Second, these symbol systems are fundamentally arbitrary in the sense of not being bound by natural instinct or genetic endowment or hormonal fluctuations. We have a not unlimited capacity to manipulate, control and select our own symbol systems, even if the overarching tendency is for these systems to dominate and control us.

Third, these symbol systems are the primary mechanisms that mediate our adaptive behavioral relationships with our environment. They are the principle mechanism of human cultural integration and social-environmental adaptation on earth, and they are the universal basis for human cultural ecology.

Fourth, human relationships and human society in general is organized on the basis of human symbol systems. We would be loathe to admit it, but even our most intimate relationships, and even always our most intimate relationships, are in essence a kind of symbolic acting out and elaboration of our own fantasies, in our own heads. It is not that all other people are merely or only "objects" of our own symbolic dreams, because there occurs an important process of interaction and negotiation of symbolic forms between people.

One of the key characteristics that partition off the psychotic from the normal is the lack of social rapport and in a sense the fixation and inflexibility of internalized symbolic structures. For neurosis, we find a basic social dependency and rigidity of symbolic structures that are incapable of being modified, particularly through self-initiated efforts.

The key difference therefore between what we can call normal and abnormal appear to me to be in terms of the cultural sharing of symbolisms and the mutual reinforcement and modification of these symbolisms, probably upon multiple levels of their articulation. Abnormal behavior becomes deviant to the norm to the degree that such behavior is idiosyncratic and not shared in any cultural sense.

The relativity of cultural patterning and social order arises from the social consequences of the symbolic relativity of human behavior and consciousness. The tremendous variation of cultural patterning worldwide demonstrates several things: 1. that cultural patterning is independent of genetic constraint; 2. that cultural patterning is highly susceptible, as systems, to processes of symbolic construction and modification; 3. that cultural patterning arises in the interdependencies of human social interactions and symbolic mediation of these relationships through time and across space.

I bring up the topic of symbols and power because I want to emphasize the tremendous power that symbols and symbolisms have for human behavior and human "nature." What we do in a material sense are without meaning if they are not imbued with symbolic importance. There is a great deal of room for error and manipulation in symbols, this is the source of their power and adaptive capacities for human beings. The world attaches tremendous importance to vital symbols, even the importance of life and death itself, and there is thus much power to be gained in the manipulation and control of symbolic forms in social life.

Symbolic Systems & the Human Construction of Reality

Heinz Werner, in his thorough treatment of the problem of human symbolization as organic process, defined symbolism as the capacity, uniquely human, for allowing one thing to stand for, or represent, another, so much so that we can refer to a form of symbolic displacement in which the symbol frequently becomes the stand-in, the proxy, and the effective substitute for the reality it represents.

The cognitive structure of symbolic behavior has been sufficiently analyzed and empirically documented, in terms of the gestalt pattern recognition functions, grouping, linking, and the use of analogical relational structures in the organization of everyday experience. The dialectical structure of this in mythology and in meaning has been aptly substantiated by Claude Levi-Strauss, and the semantic construction of symbolism in language elaborated by Giles Fauconnier. The use of logic and its influence to symbolism has been aptly demonstrated as well.

It is safe to say that human experience, understanding and the behavioral encounter and response with the larger world, is symbolically structured and preconditioned by previous symbolically organized experience that is brought to bear unconsciously upon the current moment of apprehension.

It is also safe to say that this experience and its symbolic structure is organized in a complex but fairly ordered manner that is available to our systematic study and measurement. In other words, the structure of symbolic logic that is characteristic of human cognition and cognitive function is available ultimately to our understanding and modeling, and guides our endeavors in learning how the brain functions organically, and in developing models of artificial intelligence.

I have in the course of my own anthropological research developed symbolic framing methodologies, in language, visual recognition, cognition, memory, and in behavioral applications, that yield direct empirical evidence to the structural patterning of human symbolic structure, its cultural and psychological patterns of variation, and its application to various kinds of problem sets. This kind of methodological framework has proven itself to be of great value in the facilitation of learning in many areas, at all age levels, in testing and evaluation, and potentially in rehabilitation. It has as yet unexplored value in linguistics and in language acquisition, in cognition and in cognitive development, and in social relations and human development and individual/group behavior. The productivity of this methodological framework, and its adaptability to a broad range of alternative applications makes it a preferred choice of techniques in the systematic study of human systems.

Theoretically, it leads to an empirically substantive resolution of the classic worldview problem, especially when we combine with this notions of complementary and relativistic frames of reference.

The application of symbolic framing methodologies points clearly to an empirical ground for the presumption that symbolic structure underlies human cognition, perception and behavior, and has a consistent order of its patterning that takes on predictable results in testing and experimentation. The implication of this is that by these methodologies we have significant empirical evidence to support a claim for the human symbolic construction of reality, as a natural process of human adaptation and survival that leads to cultural patterns of social organization.

It was in the research and development of these methodological frameworks that I was lead to development of a human systems framework, and by extension to natural systems and meta-systems frameworks of understanding. The discovery of general systems thinking was only after the fact of this development.

Theory and models of the human or anthropological construction of reality stem directly from this methodology and its application to real systems. Human reality may be said to be symbolically constructed, and even though we may be inclined first to see pragmatic or utilitarian functions in things we have and do, we can never fully alienate the symbolic components of those functions, or their implications for their value and function in the world. We can even make the case that the symbolic component of any constructed system is the primary function of that system, not matter what its other material or pragmatic functions may serve as well.

We refer to the symbolic transformation of experience as being when the symbols come to take the place of the real referents to which symbols originally referred, and hence human behavior becomes symbolically motivated and 'sublimated' in ways that may not otherwise be forthcoming from a person on the basis of purely pragmatic or functional considerations. This transformation occurs unconsciously and psychologically as much as it may occur in crowds or groups, or in social contexts.

This symbolic transformation of experience is related directly to issues of child cognitive development as well as to issues of behavioral reform and rehabilitation of abnormal or aberrant behavior. Child cognitive development is symbolic in its growth and transformation, and this process is largely one of increasing differentiation of form and function of experience, and increasing degrees of displacement and flexibility of application of symbolic referents in behavioral response, upon increasing levels of sophistication. This process is directly tied to primary language acquisition processes, and for this reason language is considered intrinsic to the symbolic mechanism of human consciousness.

This reference of symbolism and symbolization is not merely the material forms of symbols, flags or religious icons, that are common and immediately apprehended as such, but refers instead to a very basic level of human cognition and apprehension of everyday experience in the world, in all or most areas of human behavioral involvement. Normal waking consciousness is as symbolically constructed as is our dreaming awareness. These two worlds become confused for schizophrenics, for instance, as it may become for normal people under unusual circumstances.

Symbolic Transformation & Differentials of Human Symbolic Behavior

Acquired human behavior is environmentally rooted and the process of acquisition is largely a symbolically structured one, serving symbolic purposes and functions as well. Symbolic acquisition of behavioral response pattern serves purposes of internalization of control structures, sublimation and channeling of libidinal impulse and aggression to more constructive forms of behavior, motivating action and initiative, and providing a context for creativity, imaginative play and constructive behavior. Unlike biological control mechanisms which are largely set, automatic, and sometimes triggered by specific kinds of stimuli, the symbolic control mechanisms that surround culturally defined and shaped behavior needs to be regularly reinforced and reemphasized in order to remain strong and powerful. It requires an external context for effective demonstration and ritual reinforcement. It requires as well regular participation, inculcation and the use of mechanisms for inter-subjective evaluation and rehabilitation. Educational institutions are some of the forms of socio-cultural institutions that have been developed specifically serving these sets of needs in human beings.

I refer to the phenomenon of symbolic transformation as the somewhat revolutionary cultural consequences that the acquisition of symbolic behavior has had for human beings, both upon individual and group levels of articulation. Symbolic transformation refers in a gross sense to the sense of displacement of symbolic reference and attachment to forms that may be disconnected or otherwise dissimilar to the original causes or referents to which they are attached through a process referred to as symbolic transference. As an example of the consequences of symbolic transformation, we may refer to the capacity to set entire nations of people to make war and to risk their lives in the process, based upon what are entirely ideological symbolisms that are not directly tied to the problems of survival of the organism or reproductive success of the individual as a biological entity.

In other words, symbolic behavior affects the capacity in human beings to acquire alternative, variable forms of human behavior, in consistent ways, that are not the immediate result of biological factors of determination or biological control mechanisms, and which serve either directly or indirectly any sense of biological interest of the organism, either in terms of response to immediate circumstances or adaptive behavior to local or general conditions. Human beings can be in fact quite readily induced into consistent forms of behavior that actually may hurt individual or group capacity for survival, or run deliberately against the grain of their biological well being as a organism in the world.

Of course, the fallacy of symbolic reification, that serves somewhat as a symbolic mediation device that serves to naturalize and make seem normal and inherent what is otherwise and in a fundamental sense arbitrary and artificial, and that serves frequently as a system of defensive rationalization maintaining the integrity of life-experience, can often take the form of biological naturalization of behaviors or acquired patterns of behavior, that can therefore be acted upon as if natural or instinctual and construed that way.

Money is a great symbolic device--it stands for many things--wealth, power, freedom, well-being. Making money, often by whatever means, is received commonly as a principle objective of human behavior, whether it proves to be by hook or by crook. Though the value orientation towards making money is regarded largely as a "materialistic" value system, the concept and function of money in the world, in state societies with large scale market economies, is almost entirely symbolic. This is not to claim that money cannot buy things that are necessary, or that it cannot lead to survivorship and affluence. But it is to say that money may be used for the purchase of things needed for survival, like food or water, etc., but it is more often than not used for a much wider range of purposes, most of which have little or nothing directly to do with human survival. We can frequently trade in kind for food, and we can even hunt or gather our own food, as our ancestors once commonly did, or grow our food and cultivate it by our own efforts. But money can allow us to buy food, clothing, etc., eliminating the necessity of acquiring or making it for ourselves.

Thus we can see that it has been by means of a basic and common symbolic form, a device like money, that we have effected a basic transformation of human social organization from that of a cultural pattern rooted in hunting and gathering, to that of one that is rooted on the market exchange of commodities, ownership of property and capital, and the organization and appropriation of productive labor. This has been a symbolic transformation that has been accompanied by a transformation of our social organization and of the way we adapt in our material world.

If we make the claim that money is a tool, an object of material possession, then we can say that a tool is a symbol, and a symbol is a tool as well. The fact that the earliest stone tools used by Hominids were generalized to a range of functions, and were deliberately shaped and adapted to special functions, came thereby to acquire cognitive and symbolic significance for the tool maker/tool user, and this does not thereby render insignificant the symbolic value of tools or the functional value of symbols as tools, or the requirement for an enlarged cerebral-cranial capacity to learn to use and adapt tools more effectively, as symbolisms and as tools.

It may be argued as well, especially by cultural or historical materialists, that the economy and material means of production and social organization changed before the need for money arose as a common, standard medium of exchange was introduced. This may well be true, but certainly the rise of situations that demanded such a standard medium, particularly in state societies, also created the context for the symbolic importance and function of money, and the pattern of organization and adaptation itself became possible as a result of this symbolic transformation in the use of money as a standard medium of exchange.

The symbolic transformation of humankind from a species of animal bound by the constraints of nature, to an individual and a social entity that is capable of arbitrary, intentional and independent behavior, in the process becoming thereby bound to the constraints of symbolic behavior and culture instead, has been both a boon and a bane to human kind. It has permitted an unprecedented level of evolutionary success, the rise of sophisticated civilizations based upon scientific knowledge, the cultivation of the arts, refinement of values and sensibilities. It has permitted the realization of alternative realities through the development of human constructive and creative capacities that are the outcomes of they symbolic adaptation and acquisition. But at the same time, it has been a mixed blessing, as it has assured us of well of almost equally destructive and violent capacities, capacities for individual and social deviancy and perversion of behavior, for cheating and manipulation and exploitation of both people and nature.

By means of symbolic transformation, we are capable of behavior in ways far out of proportion to our natural biological limitations, needs or capacities. By such means as well we are capable of modifying our behavior quite flexibly, and are capable thereby of learning new forms of symbolism and acquiring new kinds of adaptive behaviors.

If we observe wolves, for instance, we can observe one troop of wolves, and pretty much describe the entire behavioral repertory of all members of that wolf species. We can generalize from a single pack of wolves to all packs of the same kind of wolf. We can do the same for almost all species of animal, except perhaps for a few species of primates for whom rudimentary cultural patterns of acquisition and transmission has been documented, and possibly as well for some pods or family groups of cetaceans, who may also have acquired learned, proto-cultural patterns of behavior.

It is primarily and especially in human beings that we cannot easily generalize or explain behavior from one group to the next, or even from one individual to another, and the problem of comparison and comparative analysis of behavior becomes especially complex and problematic. And this is primarily because almost all of human behavior has been symbolically transformed and culturally acquired and transmitted. If we hypothesize anywhere from 7,000 to more than 30,000 distinct languages that once occurred within the past millennium, we can specify at least that many if not more distinctive cultural systems that were associated with each of those languages, and this does not include the dialectical patterns of variation found within and between traditional culture areas, or the sub-cultural groupings, marked by distinctive style patterns and behavioral sets unique to particular groupings in particular periods and places.

We cannot expect so much variation of pattern among human groupings to be accounted for on the basis of genetic variation alone, as the human species simply is not that genetically variable. We are all basically of a single common species with but minor sub-species and iso-clinal variations. We are no where near the genetic variation encompassed by the household dog, Canis familiaris, that has been the result of cultural selection and breeding regimes for many centuries, and that has led to at least 150 unique types of distinct canine breed, each with their distinct patterns of appearance and associated dog behaviors.

What we can say, beyond any reasonable doubt, is that human cultural patterning and behavior, often quite conservative in form and structure, is quite variable and permits of a wide range of alternative possibilities that lead to possibly an infinite number of possible cultural configurations. No two cultural patterns in the history of humanity have been alike, though there have been many cases of parallel or analogous development of aspects and traits of culture, and frequent cases of homologous development due to shared heritage or as the product of acculturative transmission.

The fact that cultural acquisition and transmission is non-genetic, occurs as the result of learning and environmental relation, entails that cultural traits and patterns can be transmitted widely and very quickly, and cultures can change rather dramatically over short periods of time.

It becomes the case therefore, clearly, that there is a wide range of variation of pattern of response behavior associated with different cultural backgrounds and trajectories, and that we can speak of symbolic differentials of such behavior as characteristic of all human beings and as reflecting in a rather particularistic and relative manner the cultural and sub-cultural differences occurring between groups of people, as well as the psychological differences between individuals.

The basis of my dissertation thesis was that such differentials were probably less random and idiosyncratically variable, and more systematic and indicative of multi-level sharing between different groupings, than might otherwise be thought to occur if we are looking at surface patterns alone. It was hypothesized that structural isomorphisms and consistencies of pattern, often not directly available to immediate observation, would emerge and become available through comprehensive and detailed analysis and logical deduction. I believe this is pretty much what we uncovered, in spite of the challenges of conducting such research, such as issues of statistical significance & random sampling, issues of interpretation, biased response, distinguishing between psychologically idiosyncratic and culturally nomothetic responses, etc.

Understanding such differentials in a systematic way, and being able to correlate these differentials strongly to basic groupings, provided not only an empirical handle for measuring cultural pattern, defined in terms of symbolic behavior, as well as a means for systematically comparing different patterns of cultural and symbolic behavior, but it provided as well a vehicle for investigating the structure of human symbolic behavior and cognition, patterns of deviance from normal symbolic function, and finally it offered what proved subsequently to be a very productive set of tools for both rehabilitating and facilitating the acquisition and adjustment of symbolic behavior.

If we are to get at a true sense of the organization of diversity in human reality, then we must do so in an ordered and systematic way that allows us to make sense of so much complexity. We must find the structural reasons and variables for such diversity and for its capacity for adaptive organization, and then we must learn to apply these reasons in our schemes for constructing a better world that can not only handle and tolerate such differences, but promote such pattern variation in a way that it can be truly productive and adaptive for all humanity.

There is every justification for wanting to do so. The reasons, though complex, resolve to a simple set of central issues that have always affected humankind in the most dramatic and tragic of ways. If these kinds of symbolic cultural differentials underlie the kind of parallax frequently occurring between people, psychologically and behaviorally, and between groups of people socially and culturally, that lead, among other things, to destructive aggression and perpetration of acts of violence against people or the coercive use of the threat of violence in order to exploit people, then understanding these differentials in a precise, measurable and systematic manner may provide us the means for designing symbolic-cultural systems that effectively mediate human adaptation and serve to prevent or at least inhibit the occurrence and prevalence of human violence and exploitation in the world. If we wish to create a more secure and peaceful world, provide an effective framework for the mediation of differences and the resolution of conflict leading to war and violence, then we must consider the scope and possibilities afforded by such an approach to human cultural adaptation.

Symbolic Linguistics

The word is a verbal or linguistic symbol. It is technically defined as a morpheme, or the minimal unit of language that carries meaning. The kind of meaning carried by a word is symbolic, and this is defined as the ability for the word to represent something else, or, usually, a number of different things other than itself.

All known languages are constituted by words as symbols. Word symbolisms may be elaborated phraseologically or summarized holophrastically by a single word sentence, depending upon our need and intentions for communication. Word symbolisms therefore have an inherent malleability about their structure and their use in language that permit them to be deployed in a wide variety of ways.

Disambiguation of meaning is usually the primary communicative function of language, though not always, and deliberate ambiguity is sometimes the goal. But symbolic ambiguity in language will be induced and increased when and if a word is found representing more than one set of meanings at the same time in a single phrasal context, or alternatively when the representational meanings of a word are not apparent, vague or clearly specified at all. Words bereft of context, or decontextualized, either internally or externally, are usually received as inherently ambiguous and therefore meaningless.

In the theory of symbolic meaning, ambiguity is like noise in an informational system. Noise is indeterminancy of pattern that results in interference of communication. Loss of meaning is found to occur when symbolic systems break down or no longer have adaptive relevance in the environment in which they are articulated. This can result in psychological distress and disorientation, as well as in a breakdown of social order and integration.

In this process of the disambiguation of meaning we find clearly the gestalt pattern recognition of words as figures against a background of context--the symbolic meanings represented by a word in context constitute the relationships between the figure of the word and the background of the context in which the word is embedded. Native speaker intuition therefore can be described as the "aha" experience of sudden gestalt pattern recognition in a set of words in which the figure/ground relationship suddenly becomes disambiguated and its significance immediately apprehended to the listener.

The pattern recognition processes tied to word recognition and in turn to feed-forward word production are complex and are related to the hard-wiring and software programming of the brain and the primary sensory and speech production apparatus. For spoken words, it begins with auditory recognition and I believe somewhat spontaneous memory association that allows meanings of a spoken word in context of the speech event to be "unpacked" and searched for relevance. Task associations reveal that, for new language learners, the ability to hear the word correctly and clearly rests upon the ability to make the phonemic-phonetic distinctions of the sound modulation pattern of the word, and this becomes reflected in the spontaneous spellings of words by second language learners. It seems highly correlated with the phonetic-phonemic pattern of speech recognition that is common to the learner in the learner's own mother-tongue or primary language. Once a word is learned, this recognition of the sound pattern unique to a word and to a speaker becomes almost automatic or what I would call cerebrally reflexive in the mind. Reinforcement of the word, by chronic usage and learning, sets the program in the mind in a definite manner.

Memory associations, as well as behavioral associations, appear to reinforce pattern recognition processes even at the base perceptual level of auditory pattern discrimination and speech articulation. Representations of symbolic meanings are undoubtedly tied and consonant with such memory and behavioral associations, and it is suspected the basis of symbolic meaning is a relational system based upon words and the pattern associations connected to words. The human mind can be thought to be programmed around and for the purpose of processing and using human language for the purposes of thought and behavior.

This argument is not to confuse a strong case for linguistic determinism with a modified form of linguistic relativity of experience--those who are deaf or otherwise without language will still think and see the world in terms of perceptual experience the same as those who use language, but it is thought that the range of this experience and the capacity for articulation and manipulation of experience will be drastically effected as a consequence of the lack or loss of language. I suspect that language has a great deal to do with the organization of the mind, being the basis for the "software" programming of the brain. Two speakers of different and mutually unintelligible languages see and experience the world in similar ways, but think about the world in terms of different programs. It is like trying to cross a Microsoft word processing program with a Aldous word processing program--the two sets of code are incompatible to one another. The two programs are probably more or less equally efficient in being able to digitally process words, and are capable of producing more or less the same documents, but the structures and topography of meaning that is found in each program will not be identical at all.

For deaf people who are fluent in a sign language in a community of deaf signers, it is apparent that sign language occurs in similar regions of the human mind as that for normal verbal speech, and therefore the consequences of a sign language would be very similar for those with a verbal language as a primary pattern. For those lacking any language or means of communication though, it is likely that the capacity to organize and comprehend experience must be severely restricted and limited.

It is important to understand that symbolic meaning of the software program of the mind, encoded in human language and reinforced through memory and behavioral associations, and deposited in a distributed manner in the brain in intricate, complex and malleable neuronal networks, as a web of interconnections with numerous nodes, may occur at several places and at several stratified layers simultaneously, and it is this layering and the simultaneous and consequential co-occurrence or activation of these stimulated webs in different parts of the brain that produces symbolic meaning and links this meaning to words.

It is a mistake to believe that linguistic relativity is based on the notion that a word determines one's experience at some level--such as the word red allowing us to see or facilitate our ability to see red. The word as a symbol is arbitrary by design, and thus meaning associated with a particular word is non-obligatory--the facilitation of the experience of the color red through the word "red" is an evocation or elicitation of the memory and behavioral associations that are tied to the word. Any word would be a suitable substitute for red. Of course, having a clearly distinguishable word for a particular association or set of association does facilitate the capacity to think about that set of associations, even in a reflexive or automatic manner, but it is possible to think about or imagine for instance the color red even without having a name for the color, though without a direct name for the experience, I suspect that such a thought pattern is very emphemeral or transient, and somewhat inherently ambiguous, just as the background of experience is ambiguous without a figure to contrast it to.

In this sense, words as symbols have a clear indexical function in the filing system and organization of information in the brain. It must be so, or otherwise the flood of experience in the mind would be overwhelmingly chaotic. This indexical function of the filing system is efficient in the sense that it saves the brain from devoting an otherwise disproportionate amount of energy to think about all the things it would need to think about to make sense of the world. The use of a word allows the mind almost immediate, reflexive access to a given profile of experience across a spectrum of meaning, or association complex, even to the point that in normal speech processes the word itself may replace and stand for the experience and association complex it represents in a nominative fashion, implicitly suggesting or invoking the meanings without having actually to activate the full range of experience subsumed by the name. I believe words are normally deployed and articulated in just such a manner in the course of normal speech, with the option always being there of begin able to zero in on the elaboration of key words and their meaning associations.

Words in phrasal and sentential context create a new level of meaning containing its own context and having its own synergism, and thus words in phrasal or sentential strings are part of a system of language that is built upon the linking together of individual word-symbols in larger constructions. Symbolic meaning that emerges as the result of such linguistic constructions is different and more explicit than the kind of rudimentary and largely unconscious meanings that are associated with word symbols in isolation. Constructive meaning is largely conscious and to some extent explicit. There occurs therefore multiple overlapping layers of symbolic meaning attached to any single speech event or set of speech events, the ground being the memory and behavioral associations that are unconsciously and somewhat reflexively attached to single symbol words, and the figure of speech being the linked, mutually constraining meanings that arise from the phrasal or sentential construction of a string in context, mostly conscious and deliberate and therefore requiring greater focus of attention and effort. I think in the neural pathways of the brain, the associations between words become the shared networks occurring between and branching out from multiple successive sources of the brain, creating a kind of animation effect of the mind, like a set of movie frames being run past one's eyes and made to look as if an active image occurs. I think the brain works fairly much in this way, and is capable of removing the sense of the gap and break between words to foster the illusion of the phenomenological continuity of experience.

Sometimes words are merged in the course of speech to an almost continuous set of sounds and normal speech in many languages often flows with but brief or even absent pauses between words. For a non-native speaker to listen to a foreign language, with the inability to recognize the sound or meaning pattern of the language, the language tends to be perceived holophrastically as a single continuous, punctuated string of sounds. In the vast number of instances, the connection between the word, its sound and form, and the things it represents is ultimately arbitrary and largely a matter of convention. Only in a few instances may we infer an onomatopoeic function to a word, or trace a word to an onomatopoeic root. Words can have a sonorous quality, and it is the sonorous quality of similar or complementary words that is the basis of meter, song and poetry. The challenge of course in these artistic forms are to match sound pattern with meaning in a consonant and provocative manner.

The basic symbolic function of a word is to name something, or the nominative function. The most basic word takes the form of a "name" and even other syntactic categories of words may ultimately be understood in their basic form as "names" or intrinsic nouns. Naming is the most basic form of symbolic representation we have, and it goes almost without saying that the same name may refer to multiple things, and multiple names may refer to the same thing. Names are the most prototypical word forms, and the most basic function of word symbols.

Derivative from names are two basic types of word form, and these are the class of nouns that name a person, place, thing or a quality, serving as a main subject and an object and a second class of verbs generally naming a relation, an action, a state or condition, used to link a specific noun or "noun-topic" to a larger context of relations.

In English, derivative of nouns are a special class of modifiers referred to as adjectives, and derivative of verbs are a special class of modifiers referred to as adverbs. The class of adverbs and adjectives overlap due to the fact that bound morphemes like the suffix "-ly" added to an adjective generally allows it to be used as an adverb. Derivative of or at least proximally related to adjectives are another special class called determining articles.

Words are organized into multiple overlapping sets that accomplish communication of information about the world, primarily by establishing a relationship between a word and its symbolism. These sets are aspectual in designation. Though words are often used singly, if this is not done in context of its specific reference and intention, then the significance of the word may be ambiguous and lost to the audience or receiver. Words set in strings serve to create their own context, and the string construction of such context is necessary to the disambiguation of symbolic reference in words, as well as to the designation of relationship between word symbolisms. Sentential strings carry their own intra-sentential context that allows the meaning of the string as a whole to achieve displacement from the actual speech setting itself. It creates flexibility and the possibility for precision and generalization in the use of words.

We may identify in the constructive articulation of any language two general phenomena--the processes of elaboration and summation of meaning. This refers on the one hand to the phrasal structure of word strings primarily involved in the process of elaboration, and the nominative or holophrastic structure of names primarily involved in the process of summation of meaning. The articulation of any string in any language involves the expansion or reduction of the length of the string, and an alteration of the communicative value of the string accordingly. There is a trade-off between communicative efficiency and communicative efficacy that is achieved through the dual processes of elaboration and summation. Since summation is the most basic structure, we assume that communicative condensation for the achievement of efficiency tends to be the basic modality of speech--elaborative code aiming at achieving communicative efficacy tends to be the derivative modality of speech.

I would tentatively distinguish language stratified at the following levels:

1. word symbol--holophrastic meaning

2. phrase structure--phraseological elaboration

3. sentential structure--inter-phraseological constructions

4. inter-sentential constructions

Linguistic development and acquisition may occurs in this way, in this set of stages, and for any language there may be a set of implicit and explicit rules, or operating instructions, which govern the pattern of articulation of speech at each of these four main levels of the stratification of speech and language.

We may speak of the phraseological structure of language, and the ready interchangeability of words with alternative phrases. A phrase may be defined as a natural unit of language that is rooted in oral communication, and that involves a string of words that stand in substitute to or modify a single word. Expressive elaboration in any language is always achieved through the modification of sentences through phraseological modification. Phraseology is an effective manner of embedding and elaborating meaning in a sentence frame. In general a phrase is an incomplete sentence, or a sentence that does not stand on its own, but may be embedded within another sentence.

The acquisition of language by children generally replicates this process, as young infants quickly move from a holophrastic stage of one word sentences that merely designate or indicate a thing in the environment, a mood, a relationship, a need, to the formulation of simple phraseological strings with drastically reduced grammar and inappropriate use of symbolic reference, to increasingly well organized and correctly structured sentential strings that largely replicate the speech of adults. This is achieved by about 5 years of age in the child, and is the precursor to the child's first efforts at learning to read, spell and write.

Rules of order emerge in the organization of a language as a system of expressive communication that constrains or sets limits on how we may use words and phrases in relation to other words in the construction of strings. These rules of order are known as the phrase structure syntax or grammar. They allow us to effectively use words in terms of a larger system of symbolic meaning and communication that has predictable structure and pattern in its organization.

A universal "deep structure" of the brain, referred to generally as the language acquisition device, is held to be based upon an inherent transformational grammar of human language. This inference of an LAD may miss the essential point that phrase structure constraint is necessary to any language as a communication system that is based upon the designation and elucidation of symbolisms through words. Such a system resides primarily in a community of speakers who share the same words with similar meanings, more or less, and do not arise as the result of biological processes but as a function of mutual agreement and achievement of convention in the course of development of a speech community. We are referring to rules that are part of cultural linguistics, or what we may call a language culture.

Such syntax or rules of order generally arrange words into types or categories of meaning, depending upon their function and position in the construction of sentences. Rules are arrived at by implicit agreement that is achieved through common usage. I believe that we cannot really investigate the origin of this system, as it has been a process of continuous development from the period of earliest proto-language, and I suspect that we may find a single tree of human language with a trunk that derives from the remotest periods of the past to the present, and within which all contemporaneous languages are represented by one branch or another. The form of the languages that human beings have spoken has changed dramatically in every possible way, and there are in fact an infinite number of different language systems possible in human terms.

Rules of language structure render the linguistic system orderly and predictable. It makes possible native listener intuition, especially in situ of the conversational or communicational setting. Rules of language are so well worked out in fact that they are capable of fairly precise discrimination and designation of terms and their meanings. This function of specification and clarification is necessary if a language system is to achieve the degree of coherence and consistency it needs to be effective in its essential function of coordination of human behavior.

In terms of symbolic linguistics therefore, we cannot ultimately separate semantic from syntactic or pragmatic functions in the expression of language--all these functions remain bound up in the language system as a whole. We analytically separate them in terms of designation of aspect of a word--in English the word "run" generally is used as a verb to designate the fast motion of an animal sprinting, but it can also be used as a noun to designate either an area over which one runs, or a period of time during which a run occurs. These functions are aspectual features of the word "run" as symbolon in the linguistic culture of English.

It is the system as a whole that changes through a process of continuous point by point modification. These modifications may occur at many different places throughout a language system and because such systems are multi-level in their articulatory patterning, changes may occur simultaneously upon several levels. We may in fact see the typical syntactic categories of a language as basically semantic aspects or features that are applied to words.

We must in terms of systematic language change inquire about the possibilities of certain selective factors operating upon language dynamics. It seems for instance that some aspectual features of a language are preferably selected over others and that certain directions of change in a particular language achieve a kind of momentum that seems largely irreversible if not quite inevitable. Because languages are relatively undetermined in their structure, as with many functional communication systems, the same thing may be said in more than a single way, and the same words may carry multiple meanings. At each point in the articulation of a sentence, for instance, an alternate set of words or word constructions are possible, and the outcome of the sentence will depend upon the terms selected. Such alternation enhances the flexibility of the structure of language as a general purpose system of communication, and is keeping with the idea that it is the structure of the sentence as a whole, and by extension, the language as a whole, that is important.

The basis of most language change is the addition of new words or the modification of old words by the accretion or loss of meanings. We should not discount the loss of old words by their disuse or replacement by new words. Linguistic displacement, or replacement of old words or expressions by new words, or the replacement of old meanings by new meanings, entails that a language remain functionally streamlined and unencumbered by too much basic choice.

For any active language system, we can probably designate a core vocabulary of less than a thousand words that will be used more than 90 percent of the time in most ordinary circumstances in a language, and we would be surprised to find that the majority of these words point to the same basic symbolic referents in most languages. There is probably a range of 3 to 5 thousand other words that are necessary to permit flexible communication in a language system to be deployed under most circumstances and in most behavioral settings of the language context. Most of these words will be used far less frequently and their use will vary widely depending on context--we expect less agreement of these terms by their symbolic referents between different languages than with the core vocabulary. Together, these auxiliary and core vocabularies can be said to constitute the practical or working lexicon of a language.

Languages typically function by the use of bound morphemes that carry no intrinsic meaning but modify the words to which they are attached. The function of such bound morphemes is largely to designate or mark the syntactic part of speech that the composite morpheme takes on as an aspect of its meaning--determining what kinds of words it may come before or after within a sentence.

To understand and be capable of using a distinct linguistic system is to have fully incorporated that language system into the hard-wiring of the human brain and nervous system and the software programs of the human mind. Because speech is generated on the fly, feed-forward, there is little time for the brain to anticipate or prepare the ordering and selection of words, and as much as possible, this entire process of speech production is back-grounded as something that occurs in a more or less automatic and even "reflexive" manner. We do not generally need to think about every next word we choose--if we did our conversations would be slow and very boring. We have a way of by-passing the need to make conscious decisions regarding word selection in sentence construction by the fact that we base our construction on received templates of various kinds, and we select alternative templates in also a semi-automatic manner entailing minimal choice or fore-thought. The templates themselves can then be evoked and modified as needed in a fairly plastic manner to achieve the correct or desired form of expression. This entire process seems to be ultimately guided by higher order mental structures of the human mind, and the entire speech apparatus appears ultimately in control of either one's own higher order brain structures, or in indirect control by the brain structures of other speakers.

Symbolic Framing Systems: Conflict Mediation, Symbolic Adaptation & Counter-structural Frameworks

Symbolic Framing is a body of methods I developed preparatory, during and after my doctoral fieldwork in Malaysia in 1993-4. This body of methods has been based upon the application of gestalt theory to understanding patterns of behavioral and cognitive response to stimuli, based upon pattern recognition and pattern projection, and the organization of experience that is measured and correlated between different tasks, between different individuals and between different groupings of individuals, especially across cultural boundaries.

What was revealed repeatedly and consistently from this research was strongly patterns of clear cut cross-cultural differentials in behavioral response patterning across a broad range of tasks, that were in general analyzed and recorded for their physical patterns without an effort to interpret or score these patterns within some interpretive framework of purported symbolic significations. Though we used instruments like Thematic Apperception Tasks and Inkblot Tasks (Harrower and Rorscharch) we only scored them in terms of the whole-part whole, type of response elicitation, location and frequency and so forth, and we may no effort to interpret this data in a psycho-diagnostic or psychoanalytic manner.

The consequence of this research was the conclusion that human behavioral response varied considerably within group and across group patterns, and there was significant patterns of response grouped and differentiated according to gross cross-cultural differences. Follow-up analysis and subsequent post-doctoral work in China tended to validate and reconfirm these finds on a significant level, leading to the conclusion that humans are in terms of worldview and behavioral response patterning culturally relative in basic ways, even though reasons for these patterns cannot be clearly explained in an organic way.

I reached the conclusion that these methods can be extended in a number of areas, for facilitation of learning in language acquisition, cognitive development, of knowledge, for rehabilitation from psychological disorder or distress, for purposes of behavior modification and reform. I determined as well that it was probably possible to conduct a number of controlled experiments in natural and culturally defined human behavioral settings, in order to discover complex patterns of response that are typically elicited in comparable settings. The value of this would be to show the direct connection and linkage between more formal studies to more natural settings, showing the relevance of the same general conclusions across a broad range of possible contexts.

I also reached a conclusion that symbolic framing methods were not only of virtually unlimited productivity, but they had already been largely relied upon in everyday settings, even if we did not obviously see them or interpret their patterns in the manner of "symbolic framing." Facets of these methods are deployed regularly, daily in fact, by many people in fields as diverse as education, criminology and psychology, without a label or coherent methodology being attached to the methods and techniques deployed. Symbolic framing becomes then and therefore a frame of reference, and a methodological framework, which describes a wide range of possible methodological applications to the general issue of understanding in depth and breadth the nature of human behavior.

I managed in the course of work in China to apply this body of methods systematically to the problems of advanced English instruction and to the challenges of adult second language acquisition in a foreign language, which, by the fourth month, brought credible and significant results in terms of rapid improvement in the auditory and speaking capability of my students, on average. The significant break through came in focusing not only and exclusive upon non-visual modalities of learning a foreign language (namely enforced speaking and hearing) but in providing multiple structured behavioral settings in which students were forced to become productive in English in a variety of ways that were not only interesting but mostly fun for them to do.

Though it has been ten years since the first fieldwork was initiated, I have not changed my mind or altered my professional opinion about the significance of this body of methods, and the general methodological framework that defines them in a larger context as being generally, theoretically significant.

Symbolic framing, not as methodology, but as a natural human pattern of behavioral response, underlies the creative and constructive capacities of all human endeavor, and provides the symbolic foundations for cognition, and the cognitive foundations for cultural and behavioral organization. It comes to play a vital role in the symbolic mediation of conflict, or potential conflict, in the behavioral adaptation to changing circumstances, and in the counter-structural processes that punctuate and intermittently reinforce everyday life in its normal operational flow.

Human Systems

by Hugh M. Lewis

Last Updated: 09/17/09