Question about signs

AKMA remarks on a seemingly hasty and confused NPR piece about "symbols" and evolution:

I’m persuaded that we do better to theorise about meaning on the broader, more prevalent evidence of non-verbal expression and inference.

As AKMA notes, NPR's Alix Spiegel enjoys making huge radio leaps in causality and time without acknowledging that we are leaping. I would merely note that this seems in line with numerous other signs of flimsy, careless, and negligent editorial oversight inside the All Things Considered production effort. Not the first time to wonder if the program should be named Certain Things Adverted To Via Single Source Marketeers, Attention Deficit Disorder, and Punishingly Cute RadioTricks (CTATVSSMADDAPCRT.)

All Things Considered

One problem with the piece is, it mushes various signifying modes into one catchall word, "symbol." An entire field deriving from Pierce and de Saussure in the last century tried to make some headway in sorting out different modes of signification, even as grammar theory and rhetorical analysis looked more closely at the conditions of making meaning, the tricks of arranging signifiers and the tropes that mould, bend, and transfer signification. But hey, this is NPR radio, we're doing science here, not egghead, or even eggcorn,stuff not on the radar of our sponsors.

My question for AKMA is, to what extent he views "non-verbal expression and inference" to be distinct from linguistic entanglement. That is, are we to view verbal language as a subset of a larger realm of signifying powers that may use different sensory and expressive means, but share, at some more basic level, the same structures that produce meaning? Or is it more a matter of other modes of representing meaning that fall completely outside the material, means, and ends of verbal forms and communicative structures?

I ask because while it certainly seems worth saying that the study of meaningful articulations all too frequently remains narrowly concerned with verbal forms of language, it seems equally fair to suggest that in our haste to comprehend all kinds of signs, artifacts, and modes of expression within terms like "symbol," we tend to minimize the role of words, of linguistic structures. We tend to see the verbal element as non-problematic, which might be the same as saying we tend to not see them at all. We overlook our linguistic medium with all its peculiar properties and peculiarities and still not very well understood manners of development in time, we take its apparent transparency for an open window, and leap to conclusions about evidence, truth, objectivity, and so forth with NPR-like ease.

So that's my question to AKMA, who has a longstanding fascination with non-verbal expression, but not just to him -- to you as well, allthingsconsidering reader: If human nature involves making signs, do our modes of expression in all their multifarious glory relate to the verbal order, and if so, how, or do they seem to you to exist free from it?

GoogleMe

When Google

enables everything I blog, and knows every blog I regularly read,

and is the substrate of my email, docs, photos, groups, blog searches, videos, appointments, news interests, books, map queries, purchases, finances, scholarly research, web searches, mobile platform, ad sensing, and





soon my wireless provider








and for $999 my Genome reader,

spidering the text of my DNA and relating it to ancestors, physicians, populations, datasets, marketers, political strategists and advertisers across Google Earth




and under Google Sky










I should probably be anticipating a few questions, like, which is trending toward greater ontological heft: me or GoogleMe, and which will command a higher price?

And if not yet I, my kids will need to know:

Should they love Google?

Ought they pray to it?

or



::





Foolishly seek to hide?

equivocal signs

SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) - Washoe, a female chimpanzee said to be the first non-human to acquire human language, has died at the age of 42 at Central Washington University. . ..

Washoe had a reported vocabulary of about 250 words. She taught sign language to three younger chimps who remain at the institute, CWU spokeswoman Becky Watson said. They are Tatu, 31, Loulis, 29, and Dar, 31. . ..

For Washoe to be considered "reliable" on a sign, it had to be seen by three different observers in three separate instances. Then it had to be seen 15 days in a row to be added to her sign list.

But claims about Washoe's language skills were disputed by scientists who believed that language is unique to humans. Among those who doubted that chimps could use language were MIT linguist Noam Chomsky and Harvard scientist Steven Pinker.

• Chomsky contended that the neural requirements for language developed in humans after the evolutionary split between humans and primates.
• Pinker contended that primates simply learn to perform certain acts in order to receive rewards, and do not acquire true language.

So, evident intelligibility, along with uncertainty that this should be understood to be language.