From the Private to the Social
And Back
I'll see if I can summarize what we have looked at thus far in The Instruction of Imagination:
Language is not a general-purpose communication technology. It is a communication technology socially constructed to do a specific job: it "allows speakers to intentionally and systematically instruct their interlocutors in the process of imagining the intended experience—instead of directly experiencing it. The speaker provides the receiver with a code, a plan, a skeletal list of the basic co-ordinates of the experience—which the receiver is then expected to use as a scaffold for experiential imagination. Following the code, the interlocutor raises past experiences from memory, and then reconstructs and recombines them to produce novel, imagined experiences."
"Each human individual lives in a private, experiential world that is different from that of the others, and is inaccessible to them. This is a foundational fact about our experiential nature, and it is the foundational obstacle to communication that language, as a social invention, set out to circumvent."
Once humans had this new technology, it changed everything. "Individuals were still living in the here-and-now of private experiencing (we still do), but additional elements began to penetrate their worlds from the outside, things they did not experience but were told about. If there ever was a Copernican moment in the history of humankind, this was it . . . Individuals began to learn to imagine events that happened to others, and learn how to take them into account in their own decisions."
Now humans live with two worldviews, one private-experiential and the other social-linguistic. "Communicative success rises as the space between the two worldviews shrinks."
The author now turns to describing in some more detail how the private-experiential and social-linguistic spaces are related, how language and meaning are generated and understood through these spaces, and how specific words and phrases themselves make up a different level of this structure.
At the heart of the sign lies the signified, an isolated point on the symbolic landscape—the trace of the foundational act of mutual-identification. It is collectively marked by the signifier, the mutually identified form of the sign; it is held in place by the web of semantic connections to other signifieds in its neighborhood; and it points at the experiential cluster, a fuzzy set of private experiences, clustered around the experiential-anchor, the actual experience that was mutually identified by the interlocutors.
The leftmost plane is the private-experiential, and the middle plane represents the social-linguistic. The experience plane is described as analog precisely because it is a space of "blooming, buzzing confusion," whereas the social-linguistic is digital because those experiences are captured as discrete bits (the "signifieds," which are not necessarily individual words) and organized relative to each other.
It's important to note that the private-experiential plane shown here is everyone's private-experiential world. When we read the diagram from left to right, we watch language being created. But we can also understand the diagram from the point of view of understanding language:
The sign "chair," for example, constructs in the minds of English speakers an association between (i) the signifier tʃɛər; (ii) the signified chair, semantically interconnected on the symbolic landscape with the signifieds stool, armchair, upholstery, legs, table, furniture, comfortable, sit, and many others; and (iii) a private cluster of chair-related experiences—chairs of different sizes and shapes, their look, smell and feel, various sitting experiences and so on—centered around the experience-anchor of some very familiar type of chair, which, at some point in the past, found its way into the mutual-identification event (or consecutive set of events) in which they learned what the sign meant.
And also from the point of view of producing and processing language:
It is easy to see that this triadic structure, like that of a three-part rocket, is specifically designed for the instruction of imagination. The intent to talk about a chair emerges in the speaker's mind at the private-experiential level: the object of the will to communicate is something in the cluster of chair-related experiences; the experience activates the signified that is attached to the cluster, thus translating the inaccessible, private intent into a term that is already mutually identified; the signified activates the mutually identified signifier; which activates actual pronunciation. The listener hears and analyzes the stream of speech, and isolates the signifier; the signifier activates the signified; which then raises the experiential cluster in the listener's imagination—from the private chair-experience of the speaker, through the collective mutual-identification of "chairhood," to the chair-imagination of the listener.
And, finally, this view also explains why communication can be so fraught with problems and misunderstandings:
And it is also easy to see the fragility of the sign as a discrete instructor: for different speakers, the signified chair points at different clusters of private experiences. This is also the case with the other signifieds in the neighborhood, which means that the webs of relations around the signified chair may also be different to this extent or the other. Mutual-identification is always a matter of degree, and the potential for miscommunication always remains. The listener may always imagine something different from what the speaker intended. This is why we spend so much of our speaking time trying to decide what we mean by the words we use.