Frances to interested listers... If it may be correctly claimed by pragmatists, it is signs that come before any psychical acts to include feelings and sensings or willings or thinkings and reasonings with knowings. The signs of or in the psyche however need not be the symbols of language, and the psychical act need not be discursive. Even newborn babies after all can think to some degree, but only by way of signs. The non-discursive thought of the mind may come before the symbols of language, but not before some kind of signs. (The term "sign" in pragmatist semiotics is deemed the umbrella under which falls "icons" and "indexes" and "symbols" as the main kinds of signs that can exist in any sign situation or act of semiosis.)
For pragmatists signs are found to enter the brain and mind of the being and its body by way of their consciousness, in that beings experience phenomena that are given uncontrolled to their psyche. The psyche of the being cannot generate its own experiences epiphenomenally on its own without the prior experience of phenomena. Even the original stuff of evoked notions and stimulated visions and prodded associations in the mind are derived from objective external phenomena, which upon getting it or taking it the mind may of course store it in memory where it is remembered. Back in the primal state of the human brain there are signs given to it that in effect are the psyche and its acts. There are no other kinds of devices before signs that psychical acts are constructed of, hidden somewhere in the deep dark reaches of the cerebral structure. If the brain has no signs, then the brain along with the body and the being is dead. The mind furthermore is simply a brain full of signs. Psychical acts like thoughts are not made of some mystical entities that are then signified by signs, but rather the thoughts are the signs and the signs are the thoughts. In the evolution of humans it is intelligence that came before language, because the dumb brute brain of a primitive subhuman animal or any nonhuman organism cannot be filled with symbols. All that nonhuman organisms or mechanisms can do is to reduce any signs given to them or taken by them into raw indexic signals. These crude brutes simply do not have the brains to do otherwise. In regard to signs that reside inside and outside the mind of the brain, we might start with the spoken symbols of languages in the mind and then go outward. Now, written signs are external symbols for speech sounds, and other codes are external symbols for written marks. Going inward, spoken sounds are symbols of verbal languages, yet speech and its languages are not symbols of mental things like say ideas and thoughts, but rather they are the ideas and thoughts. Mental constructs of the mind are not made in some mystical inner system other than signs acquired as phenomena. Signs are not used by the signer to stand for or symbolize those distant constructs. The signs rather are the mental constructs. If there are no signs in the brain, then there is no mind nor thought nor psyche. To complicate matters, it is further claimed by Peircean pragmatism that (1) there are continuing representamen that are not signs, and that (2) there are existing representamen that are signs; but whether it is likely that the human brain could bear or yield representamen that are not signs, to allow its mind some mental action like pure responsive feelings or sure stimulative sensings, is not yet fully clear to me. The pragmatist consensus seems to hold that the mind in its totality is solely a brain full of only representamen that are signs, and that any say thought is in the signs and not in the mind, although the mind with its signs can indeed be in thought. My philosophic study into this kind of stuff is still primitive and tentative, but the stance of realist pragmatism on the issues at hand seems to remain the best thrust so far. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, March 13, 2010 3:29 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Thought always precedes speech Michael writes: "You can't think, at least at a high level of abstraction, without words. And you can't learn words without learning to speak and hear. So, you learn to speak and hear, then learn to think, and then learn to write. All the ideas come later, as you learn to control and reassemble the materials of art." I claim this is wrong in almost every regard, Michael. We all have thoughts and feelings before we ever learn how to put them into words. When Hannah Arendt wrote, "All thinking is in words, speechless thought cannot exist," she also had it flat wrong. Writers struggle to find the right words -- how could that be if their thoughts are in words? How could you ever mis-speak yourself? Rock-climbers, chefs, chess-players, even tennis-players -- they're thinking all the time, just not with words. The notion always precedes the word in the writer. Writers constantly talk of the frequent time-consuming struggle to find the images and actions -- and then the words to express them -- that will produce the effect they want. Consider the four stages of an "act of art". (That phrase need not be fully defined here. My notion behind it will be serviceably clear in a minute. I'm not using the word 'art' in a judgmental sense.) The four stages of a writer's creative act are: 1) a craving for an effect; 2) imagination of the specific material that will produce the effect; 3) conjuring of the words to "express" that material; 4) judgment and selection. The first stage is a craving for an effect on the sensibility and awareness of anyone viewing the work. This first stage is a "generic" yearning in the sense that the specific satisfier of the effect-wanted is not yet identified. When Whitemore was writing his play, BREAKING THE CODE, about Alan Turing, there came a point when this generic intuition came to him: Repeatedly TE LLING the audience that Turing was smart won't do it; now I need to have Turing SHOW them. That was the generic effect-wanted. His next intuition was this: Turing should be in a lecture hall, giving a mind-blowing lecture on cybernetics. But that intuition was still to an extent generic; Whitemore then had to find the right words. In the last stage his sensibility judged those offerings of imagination - yes to that one, no to that oneb& The intuitions (1) of that generic effect-wanted right here, (2) of the "material" that will produce it, and then (3) of the apt words, are three separate actions in the mind of the writer. Each of those stages has to (4) get the approval of sensibility. T.S. Eliot, in his theory of the "objective correlative", overlooked that third stage -- finding the optimal words to express the "maerial". He called for "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events", but he apparently failed to appreciate that the objects aren't the "formula" that readers encounter on the page; they encounter words. A layman and a good writer may both bend themselves to describing the same hurricane, or battle, or a certain
