These are basic things we know about language and knowledge
that shape our understanding of how they relate.
Postulates for this view
- Everything cannot be known about anything. Whatever you can tell me about
a pencil, for example, I can always add to your knowledge. Thus it is that
all knowledge is selective.
-
Human knowledge is an imposition of humans on their environment.
What we call knowledge is not delivered to us by the world "out there";
rather, we organize the world to know particular things about it. Thus,
we speak of the enacted environment.
-
Humans know by employing language. Language is used to
sort things out for awareness and importance. With language we store,
we recall, we share knowledge.
Our Study
We want to explore the ways in which we employ language, looking both at
the structure of Language, and the rhetorical character of language.
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What we know about the impact of the Structure
of Language
Semantic Dimension: Naming
- We see things with the sophistication of the vocabulary of our Language.
The words that we find used in a language are used in context. Thus, we
can perceive as we have vocabulary that allows us to see and as we need
to see different things our vocabulary changes or our Language fails us.
- Different terms applied give different views. A thesaurus lists synonyms
-- words that mean the same. But words have shades of meaning and those
shades provide slightly different meanings. Thus, different words give
us different perspectives.
- Names permit generalization and classification. All things and all moments
are in some sense unique. So when we use names to talk about the similarities
in things or moments, we abstract out particular characteristics for emphasis.
The vocabulary of our Language delimits such generalization and classification.
We generalize across similar cases and we generalize across time.
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Syntactic Dimension: The Whorf-Sapir
Hypothesis
The
Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis presents the evidence that
the structure of a Language -- English or Hopi, for example -- influence basic
processes of perception.
- Noun centered. Indo-European languages such as English are noun and
abstraction centered. A well-formed English sentence takes a noun and
says something about it. Other languages are verb centered. A well-formed
sentence in their syntax may, for example, name an action and then specify
who or what participates in the action. The implications are profound.
Things in rest is the normally perceived condition in Indo-European languages.
Things are put into motion. Things in motion are normal in the verb-centered
Languages.
- Space/time metaphysics. Indo-European languages construct life by relating
things to each other in space and to track changes in past/present/future.
Other languages construct life differently. For example, they may have
as their basic differentiation the manifest and the unmanifest. Anything
that can not be touched or felt is of a different order. Time does not
matter as much as directness of experience.
- Two-valued. Indo-European Languages and their logics tend to stress
opposites. Thus, A cannot be non-A, and non-A cannot be A is a basic premise.
Old and young, male and female, smart and dumb, and such pairs are the
way we perceive in Indo-European Languages. Other languages tend to see
things more naturally as continuums. Age is a continuum.
- Static. Indo-European Languages feature state of being as a natural
form. Action is added. In other Languages, times of rest are merely interludes
in action. Change is natural.
Together these variations among Languages structure perception.
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The Rhetorical Character of Language
carries the same powers as the Structure of Language
We know this intuitively. We know that we must develop
a facility to use language differently in different settings: differently
at home in the presence of our parents than at a mall with our friends; differently
in a classroom than in a bar; differently in a church than in a confrontation.
- Words cluster with each other into meaning systems. Words
do not occur at random but the use of particular words then invoke other
words. Example: War metaphor. The words in a cluster serve to single out
things, events, and characteristics for awareness and judgements of importance.
- Meaning systems relate words to each other and imply relationships
expected in experience. If a war metaphor is used, casualties are expected
and victory marks the end of the events. Thus, the clusters of terms set
up predictions about events.
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Meaning systems involve:
- Description. The meaning systems provide a vocabulary and relationships
among that vocabulary with which people, events, or things are described.
- Evaluation. The vocabulary and relationships are used to express
approval or disapproval; like or dislike; admiration or condemnation.
Some words praise; others condemn.
- Action. The meaning systems provide a vocabulary to direct action
in particular directions.
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Meaning Systems are Socially Grounded
- The power of language to influence perception would imply an anarchy
of knowledge and experience if it were not that language is social. Meanings
systems emerge from social processes. This gives them continuity and power
to maintain themselves which frames particular messages. Thus, as individuals,
we can pronounce variations on meaning systems by using the resources
of language such as metaphor and analogy. But we are always tied to variations
on socially endorsed frames.
- Cultures, subcultures, and groups -- Communities -- develop language
of their own.
- Cultures. That different cultures have different language should
be obvious. Certainly, at the cultural level, different Languages
are spoken, but we also know that those of different cultures have different
ways of talking about things. The British, for example, do education
differently than we do, even though we "are divided by a common language"
as Winston Churchill put it.
- Subcultures. Although this one may be a bit more difficult, we
also have a clear notion that African Americans have a different style
of discourse than do Euro-Americans. Similarly, we know that the language
we hear in the center-city streets of American cities are different
from what we hear in the suburbs. What we hear in the boardroom of a
corporate office is different from what we hear at a union meeting.
These different ways of talking arise from different subject matters
and different assignments of importance in the various subcultures.
These in turn lead to different evaluations and different ideas about
appropriate action. And, of course, as we learned in the sociological
influences of language, these different ways of talking become the glue
that hold these subcultures together.
- Various other groups. Even within small groups of people -- my
wine tasting group, my academic department -- we have particular vocabularies
that we can employ without definition when talking to each other and
that leads to common understandings, evaluations and ideas about appropriate
reaction.
- Socially, we
- learn language patterns
- continually repeat patterns in sharing information, judging the
world around us
- urge others to join us in responding to the events of our lives,
and coordinate our response.
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How Communities Use a Meaning
System
We shift now from defining what meaning systems are and
how they are used to focus on how they are used by communities to orient,
understand, and respond to the events that occur within them.
- When encountering experience meaning systems are employed to understand
it. If we look at a community that has just encountered an event it is
trying to come to terms with, we may see several meaning systems competing
to explain the events. We hear lots of voices speaking for, and appealing
to, the community to understand this way or that way.
- Over time, those many voices begin to diminish in quantity as particular
explanations (and thus particular meaning systems) develop greater power
as more people flock to them. Some important spokesperson -- the President,
for example -- may declare a particular explanation to be the "correct"
one. Thus, we may reach a consensus. Of course, we may not reach a consensus
and the different ways of understanding events -- pro-choice and pro-life
viewing abortion -- define our schism.
- Competing explanations (framed by the different meaning systems)
compete with two tests:
- Reality Tests. We have learned that meaning systems make predictions
about events. Once we have begun to apply a meaning system, it provides
a plot of what people are going to be like, how things are going to
turn out, and what the consequences are of actions we might take. If
things turn out as that particular meaning system predicts, the usefulness
of that meaning system to the community is enhanced, and the community's
faith in its power increases. If character and events turn out differently
than the meaning system predicted, the power of the meaning system ebbs
as the community's faith erodes.
- Social Tests. Meaning systems exist to coordinate the people in
a community. When large numbers of people begin to employ a particular
meaning system to explain events and coordinate their response, the
faith in a meaning system is increased and its power enhanced. As larger
numbers find other meaning systems more useful, the power of a meaning
system diminished.
- The ebb and flow of the power of meaning systems. As time passes,
communities use their most powerful meaning systems to explain events
and respond to them. Those proving most useful through the reality and
social tests grow in power. Those proving less useful begin to fade.
- For a community, a meaning system:
- Leads to relative agreement on what they are dealing with,
- coordinates action to give a community response,
- and celebrates the unity of the community.
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The Life of a Meaning System
We now take yet a different perspective. We want to look
at meaning systems as organic, living organisms that are born, mature, live,
and die. We want to tell the story of meaning systems.
- Meaning Systems are born.
- They emerge as new ways of talking about experience.
- They develop strength as their influence spreads as more use them
to explain their experience and their ability to explain their reality
is proven. Eloquent spokespersons who can wield them dramatically and
effectively can be important, but ultimately the success depends on
their usefulness to a broad community.
- There is a diffusion process here in which small communities begin
to develop the meaning systems, to declare them, and they spread to
be useful to broader publics.
- When the broader community has incorporated the meaning system,
can use it to encounter its experiences, it has matured.
- Meaning systems that live in a community are taught as people
are initiated into the community.
- Education is the learning of meaning systems.
- The learning takes place as parents teach their children, as teachers
teach their students, as everyone learns new lessons.
- Communities often develop rituals that signify the acquisition
of mastery over meaning systems: the high school diploma, the license
to practice, the PhD oral examination.
- Meaning systems will change over time.
- Each use of a meaning system to explain some new event puts that
meaning system at risk. In its use by the community, the community will
adapt the meaning system so that it may be effectively used.
- Changes in meaning systems will stick or erode according to their
power in social use.
- The Death of a meaning system. Meaning systems die when they fail
the tests in their use. The death may come by:
- conversion. When the events of the world prove a meaning system
of ill-use in explaining those events, or when events go other than
the meaning system predicted, the community may turn to another meaning
system in a dramatic conversion. Examples: Americans going to war after
Pearl Harbor, a spouse discovering the adultery of a loved one.
- bleeding off adherents. Since meaning systems must have the power
to guide a community in developing a common understanding and a common
response, when large portions of the community lose faith in a meaning
system, its life is gone. Examples: the death of the New Deal political
motive, a growing worry about the soundness of a company by its employees.
- death or retirement of proponents. Often those who are comfortable
with a meaning system pass from power in the community. If they fail
to teach that meaning system to others, the meaning system dies. Example:
the end to segregation of the races.
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Meaning Systems in Use: How Meaning Systems
acquire the Power to Shape Understanding
Meaning systems exercise power. With them, the powerful
of a community shape the community's response; without them, their power is
useless because their pleas are not understood. Where does this power come
from?
- Through metaphors and analogy, language expresses understanding in
terms of meaning systems that are normally applied to other matters. Examples:
seeing our sports in the metaphor of war; studying language with a metaphor
of life.
- Ways of systematic understanding are elaborations of such metaphors.
Example: seeing human beings as machines in which motion can be see as
isolated movements of body parts, parts can be replaced, and output can
be measured.
- Most new understandings develop this way. Example: seeing cigarette
smoking as addiction.
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Words and the Four Orders of Language
- Kenneth Burke notes that there are four different orders of language:
four domains -- apparently distinct -- in which words are used.
- The Natural. The natural order is the order of physical reality.
Things in the natural order have physical existence. Except at the extremes
these things can be perceived with easily with our senses. They take
up space and their change over time is marked by changes in physical
characteristics.
- The Verbal. The verbal order is the order of language use. It includes
words which describe grammar, rhetoric, poetics, logic, dialectic, symbolism,
and so forth.
- The Socio-political. The socio-political order is the order of
personal and social relationships. It includes things like rights, justice,
democracy, marriage, love, obligations, duty, and so forth.
- The Super-natural. The supernatural order is the order of the religion
and mysticism.
- When we form rhetorical messages we cross these orders. Thus, "father"
is a natural condition of biological descendance between males and their
children. But we most often think of "fathers" in terms of a socio-political
relationship -- the responsibilities to raise children, to prepare them
for the world, to love them, and to shelter them from harm and develop
their abilities. In fact, many people are fathers without a natural relationship
to a child. We, in fact, use father in one of these senses -- the natural
or the socio-political to construct our relationship with the divine.
The Christian Lord's Prayer appeals: "Our father, who art in heaven .
. ."
- The power of language emerges from the ways in which we use language
to cross these orders. We give "marriage" reality with the ring, a natural
symbol of a socio-political relationship, made so by a verbal act "With
this ring, I thee wed." We develop natural, physical behaviors such as
hugging and kissing that express the unobservable relationship of love.
War is a complex human activity with natural implications of destruction,
initiated and organized socio-politically with typical verbal patterns
including the invoking of the deity in support of the socio-political
justice of our cause.
- In our culture, the "natural" has the most reality for us because
our culture is physically oriented. But the socio-political that is where
we live our lives is constructed in the verbal.
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Anomy and Stability
- In this lecture, we have tried to increase your consciousness of
the ways in which language works to shape our understanding.
- In normal times, such an exercise is required to make you conscious
that understandings are shaped in word use. This is because in these stable
periods we simply use meaning systems, we do not think of them as meaning
systems at all but as truth. Example: We did not think of the Cold War
as a metaphor for foreign policy when we were in the midst of it; it was
merely the way we understood the world.
- In times when meaning systems are disputed, we develop an understanding
that in fact the use of meaning systems is somewhat arbitrary. We see
the power that meaning systems have to shape our understanding. Example:
The dispute over abortion and women's choice has made the moment when
life begins an issue; in earlier times we simply understood it.
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Summarizing the Epistemological
Influences of Language
- Words cluster in patterns of use we call meaning systems.
- Meaning systems allow us to see and to relate things in socially
understood patterns.
- Communities use communication to figure out what is happening, and
to choose and coordinate response to it.
- These meaning systems are born, mature, change, and die.
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