Shared Meaning as the

Basis of Humanness

Imagine that you have just been kicked in the knee. How do you
respond? Your immediate physical response is probably an upward
jerk of the leg. Perhaps a rush of air and a surprised gasp escapes
your lips. In a behaviorist's terms, the blow to the knee is considered
the stimulus and your direct, physical response is your jerking leg
and cry of pain. This physical response to the stimulus of being
kicked is the same for most humans.
In addition to this physiological response, you are likely to have
additional reactions that are not as predictable. How do you respond
to the person who kicked you? You may kick the person in return.
You may apologize for being in the way. You may flee. Your response
to the person who kicked you depends on how you interpret the inci­
dent. Do you perceive it to be an act of aggression, an accident, a
playful joke? Your interpretation of the incident is in tum based on
the situation and the cues you pick up from the person who kicked
you. If you are in a crowded space and the kicker smiles apologeti­
cally, you are likely to interpret the act as an accident and to respond
accordingly. If you have been reading quietly in an empty room and
the kicker glares at you menacingly, you are more likely to interpret
the kick as an act of aggression than as an accident.
Symbolic interactionists are interested in the process of assigning
meaning to actions and in the responses that follow. The meaning that
you assign to being kicked determines how you will respond to the
kicker and, in tum, how the kicker will respond to you. That is, how
you perceive the incident will determine how you feel about it and
your subsequent course of action. This perception will also be the
basis for how you store the event in your memory and recall it later.
A jerk of the knee and a cry of pain may be predictable, universal,
physical responses. However, there is nothing inherent in the inter­
pretation that can be placed on the event. To symbolic interactionists,
the most interesting aspects of human behavior are those that take
place when we assign meaning to our own actions or interpret the
actions of others. Although it is possible to chart direct stimulus­
response patterns in human behavior, symbolic interactionists main­
tain that these patterns are of limited interest in understanding hu­
man behavior and institutions. Most noteworthy behavior involves a
process of interpretation between stimulus and response. Thus, the
interesting question for the student of human behavior is not what

63
 the objective stimulus is (for example, the blow to the knee), but
what meaning the receiver of the kick assigns to the stimulus (that is,
how the blow is perceived). It is the process of assigning meaning
that determines how people feel and act.
Symbolic interactionists claim that symbolic activity mediates
between stimulus and response. In this essay, we explore the impli­
cations of being symbol-using creatures who interpret the world. We
also discuss human thought as a process of symbolic gestures
achieved through the acquisition of language. From this perspective,
social behavior is a manifestation of shared patterns of symbolic
meaning.
The philosopher Ernst Cassirer, in Reading 6, "A Clue to the Na­
ture of Man," suggests that "physical reality seems to recede in pro­
portion as man's symbolic activity advances." By this he means that
symbol-using creatures do not exist in a direct state of nature. To
exist in a state of nature is to be nonconscious, nonreflective, and
nonsymbolic. In such a state the organism is propelled directly by
the forces of nature, which include internal physiology and the exter­
nal environment. In contrast, the symbolic creature is able to compre­
hend, comment on, and organize behavior in accordance with ab­
stract representations that are removed from the state of nature. This
does not imply necessarily that humans are "superior'' to animals,
nor that we do not have an animal form (biologically and physiologi­
cally). The point is that most noteworthy human activity is symbolic
(abstracted from a direct state of nature). Thus the symbolic inter­
actionist focuses on human behavior and culture primarily as expres­
sions of meaningful symbol systems.
A comparison with elephants illustrates this point. W hen el­
ephants meet, one places its trunk in the mouth of the other. Body
temperature and fluids in the mouth indicate whether each elephant
is in a state of arousal or aggression or is passive. This encounter
triggers the appropriate response----copulating, fighting, fleeing, or
traveling together. The elephants, as far as we can tell, do not think
about this encounter; they do not interpret the event and assign
meaning to it. They simply engage in a series of stimulus-response
behaviors with each other in a direct state of nature.
The difference between humans and elephants is that humans do
not respond directly to the physical environment. Rather, humans
impose symbolic interpretations on experiences and draw conclu­
sions based on these interpretations. It is true that we are attuned to
odors and other physiological manifestations of our fellow humans
and that we may experience these directly rather than through a
process of interpretation. But most of our responses to others are

64 Humans as Symbolic Creatures

determined by our interpretation of various cues. These cues include
physiological features, gestures, and accessories and adornments,
such as clothing and other symbolically meaningful items.
Those of you who have driven across a border into another coun­
try know that it is the duty of border guards to ascertain whether
you are bringing merchandise into (or out of) the country in viola­
tion of international or national laws. These guards cannot read your
mind. Nor can they experience directly whether you are telling the
truth when you claim not to be carrying illicit goods. The guards
must infer your intentions based on symbolic cues, such as the type
of car you are driving, your gender, and the style of your clothes and
hair. In other words, the guards guess at your integrity based on
their symbolic interpretation of you and the situation. Similarly, the
police officer who stops a motorist cannot experience directly
whether the accosted driver will be hostile or compliant. The officer
must make an inference based on available symbolic cues.
Sociologists are interested in the signs people use to make infer­
ences and the reliability of these signs for predicting the intentions of
others. This predictability is not a function of directly reading the
"natural" world. Rather, it is the product of the symbolic codes
through which we assign meaning to objects. Human behavior is not
determined directly from our encounters with the physical world.
Our bodies are physical entities that exist in the physical world, but
our experience of our own bodies, of other people, and of things in
our environment is anchored in the internal conversation that consti­
tutes our conscious thought.

Symbolic Meaning: It's the Name, Not the Thing

Herbert Blumer is credited with first use of the term symbolic
interactionism to define the approach to the study of human behavior
and society that we have been discussing (Fine, 1990). Blumer, who
was a sociologist at the University of California , Berkeley, suggested
three basic premises:

• Humans act toward a thing on the basis of the meaning they as­
sign to the thing.
• Meanings are socially derived, which is to say that meaning is not
inherent in a state of nature. There is no absolute meaning. Mean­
ing is negotiated through interaction with others.
• The perception and interpretation of social symbols are modified
by the individual's own thought processes (Blumer, 1969, p. 2).

Shared Meaning as the Basis of Humanness 65

 Naming (Assigning Meaning)
When we make sense of a person, space, or occasion, we attach
meaning to it. This process is known as naming. Naming has three
elements: a label, a cognitive-emotive evaluation, and a recom­
mended course of action. The conceptual names we have for per­
sons, spaces, and things include each of these three components.
Consider a round, hollow tube made of glass with a single closed
end. We can label it a glass. But glass is a fairly abstract term, and we
might each be imagining a different type of glass. Let's say that we
further narrow the meaning of the label by imposing additional clas­
sifications-for example, the glass has a stem attached. This descrip­
tion suggests a wine glass, which we may evaluate subjectively as,
perhaps, an elegant sort of glass or a decadent sort of glass. Regard­
less of the specific glass that we each have in mind, we are in agree­
ment as to its general purpose. That is, we know the recommended
course of action toward the object that we have labeled a glass: It is a
container from which we can drink.
Philosophers, linguists, and cognitive social psychologists agree
that to name something is to know it. This process of object identifi­
cation is central to human perception and appraisal. Humans name
things and then respond according to the implications carried by the
name. They do not respond to the essence of the thing itself. Thus,
we say that human behavior involves not just a response to a stimu­
lus but a process-naming-that mediates between stimulus and
response.
Try the following exercise. Work up some saliva in your mouth.
How does it feel? Now spit it into a glass. How does it look? Now
drink it up. Most of you will probably respond to this last request
with some hesitation. Yet we have simply asked you to reabsorb a
substance that, in fact, you swallow continually all through the day.
Why did you hesitate? Probably because you have an aversion to
spit. This aversion is not a direct response to the natural essence of
the substance. It is an aversion to the name, not the thing. Your reac­
tion is based on a symbolic process whereby you have conceptual­
ized bodily fluids that have left the body as repulsive. The name spit
implies an evaluative response ("Yuck!") and a course of action
(avoidance). You do not respond to the nature of the fluid. Instead,
you assign meaning to the fluid and respond to that meaning.
Cassirer reminds us of the words of Epictetus: "What disturbs
[people] are not things, but their opinions and fancies about things."

Symbols and Signifying

Emotional and behavioral responses to environmental stimuli are
shaped by this naming process. Thus, behavior differs not in response
66 Humans as Symbolic Creatures
to a particular stimulus but in response to the meaning human actors
assign to the stimulus. In Jane Wagner's "The Search for Signs of In­
telligent Life in the Universe" (Reading 4 in Part I), Trudy attempts to
teach her space churns the difference between a can of Campbell's
soup and Andy Warhol's painting of a can of Campbell's soup. One is
soup, the other is art. Warhol's rendering of the can of soup is not
merely a stand-in image for the soup itself; rather, as "art" it consti­
tutes a class of meaning unto itself. In contemplating the painting, a
person doesn't consider whether the actual soup tastes good; rather,
the person evaluates the "worth" of the painting based on what he or
she knows about art. "Soup" and "art" are both abstract ideas, al­
though each term conjures a different meaning. These different mean­
ings imply different lines of action or responses toward the object.
Similarly, the conversation we are now having, in which we are re­
moved from one another's immediate presence, would not be pos­
sible if we did not share the abstract ideas of "book," "reading," and a
similar symbolic system called "written English."
What are these symbols that we use to assign meaning to our
experiences? S ymbols are abstract representations. For example, a
rectangular piece of cloth with red and white horizontal stripes and a
blue square filled with white stars in the upper left-hand comer has
significance beyond this physical description-it is a s ymbol, an
abstract representation, of the United States of America.
A flag is a symbol not only of the nation "for which it stands" but
also of the social convention of dividing the world into mutually
exclusive geo-political units known as "nations." The U.S. flag not
only stands for what is considered uniquely American, but also sym­
bolizes a distinction from other nations. To be American is also to not
be Russian, for example. Thus, a symbol defines both what some­
thing is and what it is not. The essence of the item you hold in your
hands at this moment is tree pulp flattened and pressed into con­
nected sheets with splotches of ink all over them. Most likely you do
not think of the item this way, but rather as a book with abstract
symbols in the form of written language for you to absorb. It is also
likely that you do not consider the book as a source of toilet paper,
although its natural essence has properties similar to those contained
in toilet paper.
Reading 5, is a short story by Harlem Renaissance artist and
writer Langston Hughes. This story illustrates the significance of
"naming" -the focus of this section. Hughes's characters are ponder­
ing the significance of "Negro blood." Physiologically, there is no
difference between white and black blood. This short reading illus­
trates the point that the difference is symbolic. In this case it is the
idea of what Negro blood represents that is significant. Hughes's
story is an example of a cultural system of meaning.

Shared Meaning as the Basis of Humanness 67

 The study of semiotics and sociolinguistics is the study of the
cultural systems of meaning that are conveyed through various sym­
bolic representation. Roland Barthes, for example, has studied food
symbolism. All societies have cultural systems that signify what
foods can be eaten and what foods should be excluded; how certain
foods are supposed to be grouped (e.g., breakfast, lunch, dinner, or
appetizers, main courses, desserts) and the various rituals of use
("table manners," "picnics," "feasts"). In Reading 4, Trudy's space
chums have difficulty comprehending the distinction between
"soup" and "art" because they do not share the symbolic under­
standing whereby an apparently similar physical image is assigned to
entirely different domains of meaning (food/ art). In both examples,
the symbolic system signifies how things are supposed to be grouped
(classified) and how we are supposed to feel about them. Thus:

Naming = Assigning symbolic meaning to things/

persons/ events
Symbolic meaning = A sign system that conveys messages
about how to feel about and respond to
the thing/ person/ event.

In the context of Hughes's story, identifying certain people as having

"Negro blood" conveys the symbolic message that black blood is less
desirable and more problematic than white blood. This message (the
sign) is mutually understood by people who share a cultural system
of meaning-in this case, a system of racial prejudice.

Symbols, Experience, and Culture

Because symbols are abstractions, we can use them to transcend the
concrete environment and to have experiences that are not rooted in
time and space. Abstraction also allows us to remember, fantasize,
plan, and have vicarious experiences. When we imagine something,
we formulate an image, a symbolic representation, of something that
is not present in the immediate state of nature. Remembering is a
similar activity. When we fantasize and make plans, we are manipu­
lating symbolic images. Vicarious experience allows us to learn by
observing the actions of others; we need not experience everything
ourselves to comprehend what someone else is experiencing. This
is a key element in individual survival and in the transmission of
culture.
In Reading 7, Joel Charon describes in detail the importance of
symbol systems. He demonstrates the theme that, without symbol
systems, human experience and culture would not be possible. To
comprehend the significance of the human ability to engage in sym­
bolic abstraction, consider how much time you spend in the presence

68 Humans as Symbolic Creatures

of your intimate friends versus how much time you spend thinking,
remembering, fantasizing, and planning about them. Ask yourself if
it would be possible for you to experience "love" for someone if you
could not imagine (represent conceptually) the person when he or
she was not actually physically present.
The final reading in the "Naming" subsection is a selection from
case studies written by neurologist Oliver Sacks. In ''Yes, Father­
Sister," Sacks describes a woman who, because of neurological disso­
lution associated with language processing, has ceased to have "any
'center' to the mind." She is no longer able to comprehend or express
symbolic meaning. All social roles are the same for her and can be
interchanged at will. Thus, someone in her presence can be "Father,"
"Sister," or "Doctor" at any given moment. Imagine how disconcert­
ing it would be if one of your parents named you indiscriminately
"child," "parent," "lover," "salesclerk." People who are unable to
engage in appropriate symbolic activity are islands isolated from
meaningful relationships.

The Source of Symbolic Systems

ofMeaning:Language
The primary way by which humans exchange symbolic meaning is
through language. Language is a system of symbols that allows hu­
mans to communicate and share abstract meaning. Language gives
humans the capacity to become social creatures--which is to say, the
capacity to comprehend and to participate in culture. The purpose of
Part II is to demonstrate the importance of language as a set of sym­
bols and to show the relationship between language and thought. We
also consider how meaning is transmitted through social interaction.
The basic unit of language is the word. Words are symbols that
denote the meaning of something. Words can be conveyed through
writing, speech, and sign. The power of words to represent the range
of human activity can be seen in the following exercise: Try listing
words for as many emotions as you can think of. Then read your list
to someone else. Chances are that the person will comprehend the
states of being that each word suggests. Now, select an emotion
word that is well understood among those who share your language
and attempt to communicate this emotion to someone through direct
physical contact without the use of words. General emotions such as
anger, lust, and fright may possibly be communicated by touch.
However, it is likely that the list of emotion words that you gener­
ated conveys a much wider range of emotion and greater emotional
subtlety than you can communicate effectively without resorting to
words. Does this exercise show that there are more emotions than

Shared Meaning as the Basis of Humanness 69

 there are ways of expressing them? No. It implies that there are as
many emotions as there are words for describing them.
Words assign meaning to our experiences. In many instances a
physiological state of arousal is meaningless and may even go unno­
ticed until the experience has been named. Consider, for example, a
young man who, while traveling by plane, experiences a shaky stom­
ach and sweaty palms. He is unable to ascertain whether he is expe­
riencing airsickness or attraction to the woman sitting next to him.
Both experiences entail the same physiological responses, but differ­
ent courses of action are deemed appropriate, depending on whether
one labels the experience "nausea" or "love."
Recall that, in Reading 2, Charon quotes from the autobiography
of Malcolm X. In this book, Malcolm X tells of a fellow prison inmate
who taught him that words are not benign by showing him in a dic­
tionary the different meanings associated with the terms black and
white. Meaning consists not only of isolated words or names but of
the additional ideas and experiences associated with particular
words. Another instructive exercise is to note words that have paral­
lel definitions in the dictionary but carry very different connotations.
Spinster and bachelor are a case in point. Both are defined simply as
the male and female state of being unmarried. But spinster raises
much less attractive images in the minds of most people than does
the term bachelor.

Language and Social Behavior

Language, thought, and social behavior are closely related. We inter­
act with each other by observing ourselves and steering our behavior
according to our interpretations of the expectations of others. This
process is internal; we talk with ourselves about how to name situ­
ations, how to name our role in the situation, and how to assign
meaning to others in the situation. We determine recipes for action
based on the meaning we assign to the situation and experience feel­
ings about the situation depending on how we have defined it. With­
out language, we would be unable to assign meaning to our own
actions or to bring our actions into line with the expectations of our
culture. We would be unsocialized.

Language and Socialization

The social philosopher George Herbert Mead (1934; see Reading 27 in
Part III) theorized that language acquisition is an interactional pro­
cess. The meanings that the child learns to assign to things in the
environment, including the self, derive from interactions with signifi­
cant others. The child does not simply learn to name a spherical ob­
ject ''ball." She learns that a certain activity associated with the ball,

70 Humans as Symbolic Creatures

such as hurling it across space, meets with particular responses from
those around her. She also learns that these responses are either posi­
tive or negative and come in the form of reactions toward herself.
Thus, she learns that she is the source of the activity that generates
the response. She also learns that in certain situations, for example, in
an enclosed space, people react more negatively when she hurls the
ball than they do when she is on the green stuff called "grass."
The child also learns to distinguish the response of differently
named persons in her environment. "Dad" may praise her "athletic
ability" when she hurls the ball. "Mom" may attempt to "settle her
down." In this way, the child learns to form complex associations
among persons, things, and situations. Most importantly, the child
learns what stance to adopt in a given setting in relationship to spe­
cifically named others and objects. This process of learning "names"
and the associated rewards and punishments is the foundation of
human socialization.
The readings in this second subsection ("Language and Social
Behavior") illustrate the necessity of language in order for human
development to occur and for social interaction to proceed normally.
In Reading 9, sociologist Kingsley Davis describes the case of a
young girl who was subjected to extreme isolation during crucial
developmental years. In presenting her case, Davis considers the
hypothesis that social intercourse is necessary for the development
of language and intellectual activity. In Reading 10, three social psy­
chologists report on some of the social and interactional limitations
that occur in people who suffer from neurological disorders that
affect their ability for language.
Another case from the files of Oliver Sacks follows in Reading 11.
This one, the title story from his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife
for a Hat, tells of a man who has retained his ability to think in ab­
stractions, but who can no longer relate abstractions to particular situ­
ations and practical experience. His conceptual ability is fine; but his
common sense is lost. As you read, think about how concepts become
infused with experientially based, socially significant meanings. In
this case, the man has lost his ability to comprehend the emotive­
evaluative components of concepts. He does not experience meaning.

Language and Thought

As powerful as a single word may be in assigning meaning, the full
power of language is in the relationship among words, or the struc­
ture of language. Words are juxtaposed in such a way as to convey
one meaning rather than another. For example, the words cat, dog,
and chases each suggest a particular meaning. The first two are nouns
that denote certain types of four-legged mammals, and the third is a

Shared Meaning as the Basis of Humanness 71

 verb that names a particular action. Presumably we have a shared
understanding of the general class of meaning to which these words
refer. Now, consider the alignment of the words "dog chases cat" and
"cat chases dog." Does each combination suggest the same events?
Try writing other possible combinations of these three words. How
many of these combinations make sense to you?
The structure of language, called syntax, comprises the rules of
grammar. Syntax allows humans to combine words to create strings
or clusters of meaning more complex than the meaning suggested by
isolated words. The syntax of a language also permits us to convey
entirely different meanings by recombining symbols, as in the ex­
ample of cat, dog, and chase. Another interesting feature of syntax is
that humans appear to learn and use the rules of language without
necessarily being aware of what these rules are. For example, al­
though most people can give an example of a "yes or no" sentence
(for instance, "Is your car red?"), very few could state the formal
rules for constructing such a sentence. Nevertheless, people recog­
nize when the rules have been violated. (We will return to this
simple but profound point in Part IV in discussing the similarities
between language syntax and "social grammar." As with rules of
grammar, people are implicitly aware of the rules of interaction and
recognize when these rules have been violated, but cannot state ex­
plicitly what these rules are.) Thus, the power of language derives
from human ability to employ rules to convey meaning without nec­
essarily being aware of the rules. Humans are continually able to
represent new meanings, and these novel combinations will be un­
derstood by others, provided that the combinations follow accepted
syntactical structure.
Linguists refer to the ability to formulate novel but mutually
understood statements as the generative property of language. Hu­
mans generate their own ideas and codes of meaning; in other
words, language and meaning are not predetermined by nature. The
extent of this generative ability is profound-it allows small children
to formulate novel sentences (rather than just repeating
preprogrammed speech) and nuclear physicists to develop abstract
and complex theories.
Nonetheless, not all combinations of words are equally meaning­
ful or likely to be generated. W hat is intriguing is that people can
ascertain the difference between "gibberish" and mutually compre­
hensible strings of words.
The meaning of what is generated is determined by the underly­
ing structure of the language, or the particular "patterns of dis­
course." Different languages entail distinct patterns of meaning.

72 Humans as Symbolic Creatures

These language patterns profoundly influence culture. In short, dif­
ferent languages provide different ways to make sense of ourselves,
others, and our circumstances.
During the past few decades, social scientists have debated
whether language shapes thought or thought comes before language.
Mead theorized that, in the process of learning language, the mind
develops and becomes structured in a manner that reflects the
individual's culture. Anthropologists, too, have pursued the claim
that distinct languages cause people of different cultures to view and
think about the world differently. For instance, many anthropologists
demonstrate ways in which different cultures divide up "time" and
"space" as expressed in their various languages. Some cultures ex­
press time in a nonlinear way as compared with Western linear con­
ceptions, for example. Think about what your relationship to time
might be if you could refer only to the concepts of "now" and "not
now" and had no notion of "past" or "future."
In contrast, linguists such as Noam Chomsky consider language
an innate human ability. Chomsky has made a convincing case that
the "deep structure" of language is more complex than anyone could
"learn" through social contact alone. He argues instead that one fea­
ture of the human brain is an inborn "computational modality." That
is, humans are "hardwired" to comprehend and generate abstract
representations and to piece together complex strings of words that
require them to compute various possible lines of meaning and asso­
ciation. This activity is so complex and so unavailable to general
consciousness that, according to Chomsky and his supporters, it
would be impossible for children to perform the incredible mental
gymnastics required to communicate if the brain were not hardwired
for language.
One of Chomsky's students, Stephen Pinker, author of the popu­
lar book The Language Instinct, offers a simple but noteworthy illus­
tration of the computational modality using these three statements:

Ralph is an elephant.
Elephants live in Africa.
Elephants have tusks.

Pinker continues thus:

Our inference-making device [innate computational processor] ...

would deduce "Ralph lives in Africa" and "Ralph has tusks." This
sounds fine but isn't. Intelligent you, the reader, knows that the Africa
Ralph lives in is the same Africa that all the other elephants live in, but
that Ralph's tusks are his own. (1994, p. 79)

Shared Meaning as the Basis of Humanness 73

 Pinker 's point is that people make this distinction on the basis of
common sense, that there is nothing in the words themselves that
conveys this common sense; thus, the meaning is not logically ex­
plicit. The fact that people can make the distinction without hesita­
tion is, for Pinker, a demonstration that people "know" things inde­
pendently of the words used to express them. Thus, the way people
think about and structure understanding precedes the language they
use to express this understanding. Language itself contains so many
ambiguities and oversimplifications that humans must have a larger
picture in mind before speaking, otherwise we all would be unable
to fill in the blanks and sort through the ambiguities with such un­
conscious ease.
For Chomsky and Pinker, "mentalese" exists independently of
expressed language and consists of (1) innate computational ability
and (2) practical, nonlanguage-based experience with the environ­
ment. Thus, a specific language is either independent of thought or
merely a shorthand expression of "mentalese." It certainly does not
structure thought.

Language: Innate or Socially Produced?

We include a discussion of this debate in this essay because the de­
bate itself is indicative of the split between social scientists who insist
that behavior is based on innate biological and physiological proper­
ties and those who assert that human behavior is largely determined
by social factors.
Which side do we take? As a matter of fact, we think that there is a
more useful and accurate (albeit more complex) way to think about
human behavior than either of these dichotomous positions. We agree
in part with Chomsky-the ability for abstraction and linguistic com­
putation is innate, a fundamental property of humanness. But what is
the source of the conceptual abstractions that the mental processors
are acting on? This puzzle is the untold story in contemporary lin­
guistics and the impetus for the selection of readings in Part II. Let's
explore two possibilities: (1) Perhaps humans are all preprogrammed
with information as well as the ability to process this information;
we're born knowing the actual content of abstract symbols. Or
(2) perhaps the meaning of abstractions is something we learn only
through experience with the natural world and interaction with
others.
Let's return to Ralph the elephant. If humans were prepro­
grammed with information, infants would be born knowing all there
is to know about elephants, Africa, and tusks. Clearly this is a silly
speculation. Let's assume, then, that we comprehend the distinction
between the sharing of one Africa by many elephants and the posses-

74 Humans as Symbolic Creatures

sion of tusks by single elephants because we have learned a distinc­
tion between being physically located in a space and possessing
physical traits. Our ability to generalize these experiential observa­
tions and to incorporate them in language is the computational ele­
ment that Chomsky refers to.

Language, Thought, and Social Interaction

Our capacity for the abstraction and computation that is necessary to
process language may be innate, but the actual content is learned
through social contact. What Chomsky and colleagues can't tell us,
as observers trying to make sense of human behavior, is the signifi­
cance of Ralph in particular and of elephants, tusks, and Africa in
general. This significance-people's attitudes, feelings, and behavior
toward such strings of words-is determined by the context in which
the words appear and the attributes people have learned to associate
with these contexts. This is a social process. That is, the human ca­
pacity for the abstraction and computation that is necessary to pro­
cess language may be innate, but the actual content is learned
through social contact. Adults use language to teach children not
necessarily how to think about, say, elephants/tusks/Africa but
what to think about these things-and subsequently, how to re­
spond. People don't need to be taught how to respond physiologi­
cally, as, for example, what to do physically when kicked in the knee.
But the range of possible social responses to being kicked that occurs
to a person, and her or his understanding of their appropriateness
and consequences, are the result of having been taught, through
language, what he or she should think about the incident. The name
that we each ascribe to an experience acts as a sort of shorthand that
shapes our subsequent thoughts about how to respond to the situa­
tion. In this way, language, experience, and thought continually in­
teract-they are mutually determining.
A helpful analogy is the relationship between computer hardware
and software: Here, the human brain is the hardware and language
the software. Humans are born with brain hardware that enables us
to engage in complex, computational, abstract, representational
thought, but the content-what we process-is input by others who
provide us with meaningful ideas through the activity of language.
In the same way that a fully functional computer cannot operate
without being switched on and fed some software, there is consider­
able evidence that children who are not exposed to language fail to
develop normal conceptual abilities.
Oliver Sacks explores this issue in his book about the congenitally
deaf, Seeing Voices (1989). On the basis of several case studies, Sacks
asserts that those born without hearing are endowed with the same

Shared Meaning as the Basis of Humanness 75

 intellectual capacity as those who can hear. But in an oral-based cul­
ture, the congenitally deaf, in the absence of aural stimulation, fail to
develop conceptual thought. The cognitive hardware of the congeni­
tally deaf child may be in perfect working order, but the hearing im­
pairment (deficient perceptual hardware) gets in the way of the nec­
essary start-up. The child's language ability never really gets turned
on. For this reason, many deaf children are mistakenly assumed to be
developmentally retarded. However, when a congenitally deaf infant
is exposed to sign language, the child not only proceeds along a nor­
mal course of cognitive development, but actually begins to commu­
nicate in sign earlier than hearing infants learn to talk. Some special­
ists suggest that the ability for communication is switched on before
the infant's vocal cords are physically ready for speech. Signing in­
fants don't have to wait for their vocal chords to develop.
Studies of "feral children" -children raised in isolation, who are
often assumed to be retarded-,suggest similar conclusions. The ca­
pacity for abstract thought may be innate but, in order to develop
this capacity, the child must be exposed to language-based social
interaction. When the child lacks such access, then he or she is effec­
tively denied access to the "switch" (language-based interaction) and
the "software" (a specific language) through which conceptual
thought develops. The implication is that humans require social
stimulation and exposure to abstract symbol systems-language-in
order to embark upon the conceptual thought processes that charac­
terize our species.
Thus, human experience is given meaning and is organized
through language, and the ability to form complex strings of words
and to communicate verbally is innate. But the source of the meaning
assigned to the words is social.

Experience and Conceptualization

In the late 1600s, the philosophers Gottfried Leibnitz and John Locke
are said to have exchanged letters in which they debated the follow­
ing question: Imagine a man who is born blind. How will he learn
the difference between the concepts "triangle," "square," and
"circle"? Like all children, he can be given blocks to play with. The
"platonic solids" consist of blocks that are triangular, cubed, and
round. The child could learn to tell the difference through his sense
of touch. He could feel each one, be told the name and then, when­
ever someone mentioned the name (e.g., "triangle") he would have
an idea of what the triangle was. Now here is the question: What
would happen if the man were suddenly able to see and the three
different blocks were set in front of him? Would he be able to see the
difference and name them accordingly, or would he still have to feel

76 Humans as Symbolic Creatures

each one? According to Locke, the man would not necessarily be able
to see the different shapes. His conceptual understanding of the
shapes would be based in his experience of touch. Leibnitz disagreed.
He believed that the man would be able to conjecture what each was
based on the concept that he held in his head (a concept that was
rooted in the experience of touch, not sight).
One of the questions that interests sociolinguists is the relation­
ship between experience, perception, and conceptualization. As
Oliver Sacks points out in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,
"seeing" is a matter of conceptualization, not just sensory perception.
We use our conceptual knowledge to make sense of what our senses
are seeing. More interesting still is the point that meaningful concepts
resonate with experience. A "glove" is really not the same thing as "a
continuous surface unfolded on itself with five outpouchings." The
implication is that we learn conceptual meaning in context. Socially
meaningful concepts reflect specific experiences, experiences that are
visceral and imbued with feeling. Thus, when studying how children
learn to assign meaning to concrete things in their environment, we
have to take into account both the social content and the context of
experience.
The Russian linguist and social psychologist Lev Vygotsky wrote
extensively on the relationship between language and thought dur­
ing the 1920s, but his writings have only been available in English
since 1960. Writing independently of the North American debate
regarding linguistic determinism, Vygotsky, like his fellow Eastern
European social scientists, was inclined to see a mutual relationship
between individual neurological-cognitive processes and social
learning.
According to Vygotsky, children make sense of their environment
by grouping things (persons and objects) that seem, through their
own experiences, to be connected. The result is "complex thinking,"
or grouping seemingly related things into "complexes." Concepts
generated from the complexes stand in as abstract representations of
meaningful relationships between concrete things and experiences.
For instance, a child's experiential complex for the family dog might
consist of "Ruffy, big, furry, tail, bite." Conceptual thinking replaces
the complex when the child learns the general name for the com­
plex-"dog." Initially the child may attempt to interchange the spe­
cific name, "Ruffy," with the general name, "dog." She may also
experience fear whenever she hears of a "dog" because her complex
or cluster includes the experience "bite."
Comprehending a parent's explanation that "the dog will only
bite you if you pull its tail" is an illustration of the child's ability to
generalize based on abstract thinking. It is also an illustration of the

Shared Meaning as the Basis of Humanness 77

 child's ability to learn vicariously through language. The child
needn't experiment with pulling the tail of every dog that she en­
counters to gain an understanding of the conceptual relationship
between tail pulling and biting. Rather, she uses the words to formu­
late a more general idea and to encode both the specific experience
and her general interpretation of it in her memory. Thus, she begins
to develop a lexicon of experientially based but socially influenced
"names" complete with evaluatory and action codes ("Dogs can bite
so beware.").
Vygotsky (1961) bridges individual and social cognitive linguis­
tics through his idea of "pseudo-concepts," generalizations like con­
cepts but actually complexes:

In the experimental setting, the child produces a pseudo-concept every

time he surrounds a sample with objects that could just as well have
been assembled on the basis of an abstract concept. For instance, when
the sample is a yellow triangle and the child picks out all the triangles in
the experimental material, he could have been guided by the general
idea or concept of a triangle. Experimental analysis shows, however, that
in reality the child is guided by concrete, visible likeness and has formed
only an associative complex limited to a certain kind of perceptual bond.
Although the results are identical, the process by which they are reached
is not at all the same as in conceptual thinking.
Pseudo-concepts predominate over all other complexes in the child's
thinking for the simple reason that in real life complexes corresponding to
word meanings are not spontaneously developed by the child: The lines along
which a complex develops are predetermined by the meaning a given word al­
ready has in the language of adults . ... This language, with its stable, per­
manent meanings, points the way that a child's generalizations will take.
The adult cannot pass on to the child his mode of thinking. He merely
supplies the ready-made meaning of a word, around which the child
forms a complex.... The pseudo-concept serves as the connecting link
between thinking in complexes and thinking in concepts. Verbal inter­
course with adults becomes a powerful factor in the intellectual develop­
ment of the child. (pp.67-69)

The point that we derive from Vygotsky is that, in normal cogni­

tive development, children operate at the nexus of practical experi­
ence and pre-established concepts. Even as they are forming experi­
ence-based groupings of things in their environment, children are
learning to use ready-made words that are based on conceptualiza­
tions that are already socially established. Thus, both the child's own
experiences and social influence, through pre-existing language, play
a role in the development of language and cognition. The resulting
conceptual knowledge is a combination of experience and social
learning. Concrete experiences enable the child to comprehend in an

76 Humans as Symbolic Creatures

embodied, fully feeling way but, without pre-existing language, the
child would not be able to transcend the immediate experience and
"make sense" of it in a more general way.

Language, Thought, and Culture

We can discuss language and cognitive structure from one additional
angle. Chomsky and others, in their zeal to make the point that hu­
mans have an innate capacity for representational computation, have
rejected the notion that the particular language of a culture deter­
mines the way in which members of the culture classify persons,
objects, and events. Anthropologists disagree, as we've already
noted, along with scholars working more recently in such areas as
discourse theory and cultural studies. We make the case in Part II
that language categories do in fact structure the way in which indi­
viduals perceive, organize, evaluate, feel about, and respond to their
experiences and environments.
Language, as we have already noted, has evaluative and emotive
components that make up concepts. Concepts, as Vygotsky details,
do not necessarily emerge through direct experience but, rather, are
handed down to us through social intercourse with other members
of our culture. These concepts shape the way we focus on, catego­
rize, evaluate, respond to, and remember people, objects, and events;
in other words, language does structure how we think.
Consider the following string of words: Race is not biologically
significant; it is only skin deep. When considered from a chromo­
somal perspective, this statement may indeed be correct. But is it
representative of social reality as you know it? The chromosomes of
humans with brown and pink skin may be identical, but the words
black and white carry an entire history of meaning in this country and
shape, to a large extent, the way in which Americans are inclined to
see, evaluate, and remember others. In short, "race" in the United
States is socially significant.
In learning the customs and belief systems of their culture, people
learn to classify humans in a variety of ways. They learn that hu­
mans can be big, small, short, tall, fat, brown, black, yellow, white,
and so forth. And each of these "names" includes emotive-evaluative
components and behavioral cues.
Let us stress the point one more time--left to themselves, free of
pre-existing cultural influence, children would develop "complexes"
that reflect their particular experience with their environment. The
meaning that they would attach to words (that is, the abstract con­
cepts and names that emerge from complexes) would thus accurately
portray the world as they experienced it. Note that this path of learn­
ing leads to a process of stereotyping-if the child is bitten by a big

Shared Meaning as the Basis of Humanness 79

 fluffy animal that she later comes to name "dog," she may, through
experience, later presume that all such creatures are scary. In other
words, her conceptual notion would stand in for "real" experience
and would shape her response to such creatures. However, as gen­
erations of social scientists have demonstrated, children do not learn
in a vacuum. More likely, they begin forming complex associations
between named objects, people, and spaces, by asking, "What's
that?" The concepts given to them by others contain preconceived
associations that reflect shared cultural evaluations. For example, a
child who has no direct experience with lions can still learn to iden­
tify a picture of one-and, most importantly, will absorb whatever
emotive-evaluative-behavioral cues are expressed by the adults ex­
plaining what a lion is. Thus, a child can become "scared" by the
thought of a lion without ever encountering one, because he or she
has been taught that lions are "scary."
This process of "naming" has serious implications for the struc­
ture of society. For instance, without ever having encountered a
Mexican American before, an Anglo American middle-class em­
ployer can find himself wondering whether a young "Mexican­
looking" job candidate from Texas is likely to be "lazy." The sources
of such a stereotype are subtle and many. The employer may not
even be aware that he is evaluating the candidate on the basis of a
preconceived stereotypical framework. His response is based on a
cultural representation that may have no connection to his direct
experience or the abilities of the prospective employees.
By studying the way in which names are associated with other
emotive-evaluative words, we can learn a great deal about the way
in which culture, through language, shapes the thoughts of individu­
als. The power of language is not simply in words but in the manner
in which words can be combined to create clusters of meaning. Read­
ing 12, "Metaphors We Live By'' (Lakoff and Johnson), and Reading
13, ''The Social Lens" (Zerubavel), describe ways in which specific
language forms reflect cultural ideas and how these ideas, in tum,
shape how we think and talk. These metaphors and lines of distinc­
tion that make up our everyday understanding reflect social divi­
sions, not natural ones.
The process of naming is an act of categorization. To categorize is
to impose conceptual categories of meaning on things, grouping
them in a way that makes them related and gives them order. But
categorization also presents problems, which are the subject of Read­
ing 14, "Mindfulness and Mindlessness," by Harvard psychologist
Ellen Langer. What she calls mindlessness is characterized by auto­
matic perceptions triggered by a few salient cues. This mode of
"shortcut" perception is efficient to the extent that it allows humans

80 Humans as Symbolic Creatures

to process massive quantities of information quickly and efficiently.
The dangers, however, include the omission of other relevant fea­
tures of the object or person in question and the perpetuation of ste­
reotypes. Langer's thesis is that the names or categories that people
use to give meaning to things suggest certain possibilities and omit
others. She describes several cases in which seeing something
through one category leads to not seeing some surprising things.
All languages suggest categorical relationships based on notable
symbols. In the absence of specific information, people use these
general word-based categories to impose meaning on other people,
things, and events and to form judgments that they then rely on to
guide their behavior. A border guard, in the absence of any other
information, may see a male with a shaved head and five earrings in
one ear and infer, based on categorical associations among clusters of
symbols, that the person is a punker trying to smuggle drugs into the
country. We all have a tendency to make these types of inferences.
What is your general image of the border guard? Where did you get
this information? Your ability to envision a border guard, even if you
have personally never encountered one, is a process of symbolic
abstraction. You conjure up the image based on a classification
scheme. Chances are that the border guard you imagine is based on a
stereotype. This stereotype is most likely male, wearing some type of
uniform, and carrying a gun.
In Reading 15, "Changes in Default Words and Images Engen­
dered by Rising Consciousness," Douglas Hofstadter speaks about
default assumptions, which are preconceived notions about the
likely state of affairs symbolized by words. Default assumptions
have a tendency, in Hofstadter's words, to "permeate our mental
representations and channel our thoughts." For instance, given the
words cat, dog, and chase, you are likely to think first of a dog chasing
a cat.
This line of thought reflects a default assumption that, all else
being equal, the dog is more likely to chase the cat than the other
way around. Default assumptions are based on prior experience and
knowledge of circumstances. They are useful in that people cannot
always afford the time it would take to consider every theoretical
possibility that confronts them.
Nonetheless, it is possible that default assumptions are wrong.
An interesting question is how we might know if we are wrong.
Another is whether we change our default assumptions if the facts
of the situation prove us wrong. If, for example, the shaved motorist
does not have drugs in the car, will the border guard revise her
categorical expectations regarding the relationship between male,
shaved head, earrings, and drug use? Or will she reaffirm these

Shared Meaning as the Basis of Humanness 81

 general expectations with an account to herself of why this particu­
lar incident was not as expected? She may decide that the person
does, in fact, have drugs in the car; she was simply unable to find
them. Thus, the general category shaved head = punker = drugs is
confirmed. Furthermore, the category may now be associated with
deviousness as well.
Default assumptions are only one type of language-based catego­
rization. Hofstadter is particularly interested in sex-based categoriza­
tion. To stimulate discussion of sexism as a product of the relation­
ship between language and thought, we have included a satire
written by Hofstadter, "A Person Paper on Purity in Language," in
which he draws an analogy between sex-based and race-based lan­
guage differences.
In Reading 16, "Riicism in the English Language," Robert Moore
considers some of the racial stereotypes and values that are signified
in the asymmetries of everyday speech. Reading 17, the final selec­
tion in Part II, is a brief excerpt from a novel by New Zealand author
Sue Reidy. This is a humorous look at a youthful attempt to make
sense of sexuality in a world where adults use euphemistic language.

Conclusion
Consider another illustration from Stephen Pinker (1994). The fol­
lowing are real headlines he took from various newspapers:

Child's Stool Great for Use in Garden

Stud Tires Out
Stiff Opposition Expected to Casketless Funeral Plan
Drunk Gets Nine Months in Violin Case
Iraqi Head Seeks Arms
Queen Mary Having Bottom Scraped
Columnist Gets Urologist in Trouble with His Peers (p. 79).

Pinker's intent is to show that people's ability to comprehend the

double meanings in each of the headlines is indicative of an innate
processing ability, a cognitive structure that can handle the complexi­
ties and ubiquitous ambiguities of language. We agree that the com­
putational ability required to recognize these double entendres is
innate and universal, but we also believe that the content of each-or
rather, its double content-and, more significantly, the fact that
people find the phrases funny, are due to social processes.
When you have completed the readings in this section, you will be
in a position to re-evaluate the relationship between language and

82 Humans as Symbolic Creatures

thought. We are not concerned with the deep structure of generative
grammar, which we agree is probably a universal human feature.
Rather, we are interested in the lexicon of meanings available to indi­
viduals-the concepts through which they make sense of their experi­
ences, encode these in memory, and feel about and act on them. T hat
is, we are interested in what is said, not said, and how it is said­
what names do and don't exist and the evaluative-emotive compo­
nents of those names. We believe that different languages represent
reality differently; that particular languages highlight certain features
of life and leave others in the haze of "preconceived" thought.
Names/words/concepts reveal certain lines of action and possibili­
ties to individual humans. In this way, although it may be theoreti­
cally possible for all humans to generate infinite and similar gram­
mars and lexicons of meanings, it is not probable that members of a
given culture will do so. And that which is unnamed is unknown.
The idea has been summarized by the mathematician and philoso­
pher Bertrand Russell: "Language serves not only to express thought
but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it."
The assertion that humans process all experience through socially
constructed symbol systems has been a source of both caution and
enthusiasm. The tension between abstract thought and direct experi­
ence is expressed in the following quotation from a brooding poet in
Hyperion, a science fiction novel:

Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things. As pure and
transcendent as any idea that ever cast a shadow into Plato's dark cave of
our perceptions. But they are also pitfalls of deceit and misperception.
Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact
that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words
means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion
of reality which language brings .... [Yet] here is the essence of [human­
kind's] creative genius: not the edifices of civilization nor the bang-flash
weapons which can end it, but the words which fertilize new concepts ....
You see, in the beginning was the Word. And the Word was made flesh in
the weave of the human universe. Words are the only bullets in truth's
bandolier. (Simmons, 1990, pp. 190-191)

To conclude, we emphasize that the process of associating mean­

ing with objects, persons, and events is an ongoing negotiation. In
making sense of your world, you negotiate abstract meanings with
others (interpersonal negotiation) and you negotiate with yourself to
maintain a "fit" between your existing conceptual frameworks and
concrete experience (intrapersonal negotiation). This negotiation
is done through language; even as you experience "unnamed"
thoughts, emotions, and acts, you make sense of them by "fitting"

Shared Meaning as the Basis of Humanness 83

 them into the language categories available to you. For instance, if
your culture has a category for "lover" that includes the default as­
sumption that the pairing consists of one each of the two sexes and
you are paired with someone of the same sex, then you may find
yourself without a "name" for this person when conversing with
others who want to know about your attachments. Your experience
may lead you to search for "alternative names" that stretch the cat­
egory of "husband/wife" to include those who have same-sex part­
ners. In this way you are generating new concepts reflective of indi­
vidual experience, but the fact that you have to search for a name for
what you do is structured by the existing cultural classifications.
"Meaning" is not simply "out there"; it is something that is cre­
ated and re-created through everyday interactions. The process re­
flects the complex interplay between individual experience and so­
cial structure. Individuals are constantly working to "fit" their
individual thoughts and experiences into a form that can be ex­
pressed and shared with others. As you read the articles in this sec­
tion, ask yourself: How do significant categories of language carve
up my world? How do various concepts shape who I think I can be
and what I think I can do? What are some of my default assumptions
as a result of having absorbed the concepts of my culture? Am I
aware that my language reflects a cultural value system?

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Shared Meaning as the Basis of Humanness 85