What do you think?
Rate this book
Symbol Formation
Hardcover CLARK UNIVERSITY PRESS (1963) 111783607X 978-1117836072 B000YCDKBK Product 9 x 6.1 x 1 inches Shipping 2 pounds
Hardcover
First published March 1, 1984
2 people are currently reading
29 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 4, 2021
I was enticed by the overall framework that Werner and Kaplan take towards language. Their starting point is aligned with the traditions that have influenced embodied cognitive science. They draw on Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, J.J. Gibson, Jacob von Uexkill, philosophers and ecological psychologists who argue that to understand any experiential phenomenon (whether perceptual experience, thought, or language), we need to take into account the subject as an embodied organism that evolved from and is in constant interaction with its environment. The system that constitutes the mind is not found in the nervous system alone but extends to the body and world. Werner and Kaplan take this insight and ask where the meanings we encounter when we use linguistic symbols comes from.
The authors' approach is to understand the symbolic significance of language as analogous to the 'symbolic' significance of objects of perceptual experience. We can perceive a smile as expressing happiness, or a heavily clouded sky as expressing the potential for rain. Similar, we can perceive a certain word or sentence as expressing a certain semantic meaning. The major difference between perception of the environment and 'perception' of language is that the symbolic significances of the latter are conventional/learned and they do not possess overt qualities that correspond with the material vehicles (i.e., the syntacical, phonetic, or lexical properties of the linguistic expressions) that stand in for those significances. In contrast, the meanings of objects we perceive in the environment do possess overt features that correlate with their material make-up; the person who smiles is in a mental state of happiness, and so the smile may 'symbolize' happiness.
In the first part of the book, the authors propose their basic theory of linguistic meaning. We perceive the environment in terms of affordances, or opportunities for behavior depending on the material make-up of the object of perception and on our embodied capacities and skills. Young infants perceive only affordances, before they undergo a certain, developmental shift. Infants become capable of perceiving an object not as an affordance (which is also totally context dependent -- the behavior an object affords will be appropriate to the overall environment, situation, or activity in whose context that object is encountered). They also become capable of contemplating the object, as something that could exist independently of its environment and that could stand in for significances other than those that amount to the behavior that the object would otherwise afford.
How is this shift possible? The authors argue that we come to develop new embodied skills in relation to an old, familiar object. These skills amount to a "schematization" of the object; or, in other words, we "internalize" the object in a certain way so that it possesses a form that differs from its previous perceptual form which afforded strictly a certain behavior. Through development of skills, we come to encounter objects for new features, amounting to a new schema of the object. The authors argue that this schema possesses certain "intrinsic features" that correspond or have isomorphic similarities to the words we use to refer to the object.
This is the crux of the authors' theory, and unfortunately it is also the most wobbly part of their account (which is responsible for my dissatisfaction with the book). The authors claim that there is some isomorphism between the intrinsic features of the internalized schema of an object, and the linguistic features of the word or phrases used to denote the object. This is supposed to fly in the face of our commonplace belief that the relations between words and objects are purely arbitrary (unless we're dealing with onomatopoeic words). But the authors barely give any examples of this correspondence, and they do not explicitly spell out what kinds of features of the schema or the linguistic expressions are the ones that correspond.
An example the authors give is that when we perceive a hand whose finger points upwards, this may correspond with the word "rising" (rather than "falling"). This example makes evident that the authors aren't identifying physical shapes or other low-level properties of an object as the relevant feature that corresponds to some feature of the word that denotes that object. But what are the relevant features of the finger pointing upwards, and of the word "rising" -- the features that would enable their correspondence? The authors leave this a mystery. I get the impression that they've just kicked the can down the road; their theory is compatible with a certain claim that contradicts their assumptions. This is the claim that words and their meanings are arbitrarily associated, and only once we learn those words do they change how we perceive objects, so perhaps words are implicit in our perceptions of those objects; and it is this quasi-linguistic character of perception that enables us to intuit that something like a finger pointing upwards may 'correspond' with the word "rising."
In the second part of the book, the authors focus on spelling out the ontogenesis of linguistic capabilities. Infants first need to perceive objects as coherent and determinate and separate from their environments. Only once this perception is secured can they come to use words to refer to those objects. The first media through which infants represent objects are gestural/motor; infants point to, touch, or mimic the motions of an object. Later they use their voices to mimic objects in an onomatopoetic manner, and ultimately they come to schematize objects (in the way named above) so that their vocalizations may correspond with objects in non-onomatopoetic manners.
I was very dissatisfied with this part of the book. The authors' claims are either extremely commonplace and uninformative; or they are actually just plain wrong (e.g., it is now known that infants do not start off with perceiving a blooming, buzzing confusion but rather can discriminate between objects very early on). Moreover, they attempt to cite various experiments to support their more speculative claims, but either these experiments' methodologies seem very fishy, or the findings of these experiments do not evidently support their claims.
I got so disheartened by this second part of the book that I didn't continue on to the third (in which the authors explore more sophisticated linguistic phenomena, such as inner speech and pathologies that involve language such as certain experiences of schizophrenia). As a whole, I'd say that the first 3 chapters of this book are very worthwhile reading. I think there is promise in the overall framework the authors use, and they make a few insightful claims (e.g., linguistic meaning is derivative of the meanings of affordances that we perceive). But their specific claims are either unclear or incorrect, and they do not produce convincing arguments to defend their claims
The authors' approach is to understand the symbolic significance of language as analogous to the 'symbolic' significance of objects of perceptual experience. We can perceive a smile as expressing happiness, or a heavily clouded sky as expressing the potential for rain. Similar, we can perceive a certain word or sentence as expressing a certain semantic meaning. The major difference between perception of the environment and 'perception' of language is that the symbolic significances of the latter are conventional/learned and they do not possess overt qualities that correspond with the material vehicles (i.e., the syntacical, phonetic, or lexical properties of the linguistic expressions) that stand in for those significances. In contrast, the meanings of objects we perceive in the environment do possess overt features that correlate with their material make-up; the person who smiles is in a mental state of happiness, and so the smile may 'symbolize' happiness.
In the first part of the book, the authors propose their basic theory of linguistic meaning. We perceive the environment in terms of affordances, or opportunities for behavior depending on the material make-up of the object of perception and on our embodied capacities and skills. Young infants perceive only affordances, before they undergo a certain, developmental shift. Infants become capable of perceiving an object not as an affordance (which is also totally context dependent -- the behavior an object affords will be appropriate to the overall environment, situation, or activity in whose context that object is encountered). They also become capable of contemplating the object, as something that could exist independently of its environment and that could stand in for significances other than those that amount to the behavior that the object would otherwise afford.
How is this shift possible? The authors argue that we come to develop new embodied skills in relation to an old, familiar object. These skills amount to a "schematization" of the object; or, in other words, we "internalize" the object in a certain way so that it possesses a form that differs from its previous perceptual form which afforded strictly a certain behavior. Through development of skills, we come to encounter objects for new features, amounting to a new schema of the object. The authors argue that this schema possesses certain "intrinsic features" that correspond or have isomorphic similarities to the words we use to refer to the object.
This is the crux of the authors' theory, and unfortunately it is also the most wobbly part of their account (which is responsible for my dissatisfaction with the book). The authors claim that there is some isomorphism between the intrinsic features of the internalized schema of an object, and the linguistic features of the word or phrases used to denote the object. This is supposed to fly in the face of our commonplace belief that the relations between words and objects are purely arbitrary (unless we're dealing with onomatopoeic words). But the authors barely give any examples of this correspondence, and they do not explicitly spell out what kinds of features of the schema or the linguistic expressions are the ones that correspond.
An example the authors give is that when we perceive a hand whose finger points upwards, this may correspond with the word "rising" (rather than "falling"). This example makes evident that the authors aren't identifying physical shapes or other low-level properties of an object as the relevant feature that corresponds to some feature of the word that denotes that object. But what are the relevant features of the finger pointing upwards, and of the word "rising" -- the features that would enable their correspondence? The authors leave this a mystery. I get the impression that they've just kicked the can down the road; their theory is compatible with a certain claim that contradicts their assumptions. This is the claim that words and their meanings are arbitrarily associated, and only once we learn those words do they change how we perceive objects, so perhaps words are implicit in our perceptions of those objects; and it is this quasi-linguistic character of perception that enables us to intuit that something like a finger pointing upwards may 'correspond' with the word "rising."
In the second part of the book, the authors focus on spelling out the ontogenesis of linguistic capabilities. Infants first need to perceive objects as coherent and determinate and separate from their environments. Only once this perception is secured can they come to use words to refer to those objects. The first media through which infants represent objects are gestural/motor; infants point to, touch, or mimic the motions of an object. Later they use their voices to mimic objects in an onomatopoetic manner, and ultimately they come to schematize objects (in the way named above) so that their vocalizations may correspond with objects in non-onomatopoetic manners.
I was very dissatisfied with this part of the book. The authors' claims are either extremely commonplace and uninformative; or they are actually just plain wrong (e.g., it is now known that infants do not start off with perceiving a blooming, buzzing confusion but rather can discriminate between objects very early on). Moreover, they attempt to cite various experiments to support their more speculative claims, but either these experiments' methodologies seem very fishy, or the findings of these experiments do not evidently support their claims.
I got so disheartened by this second part of the book that I didn't continue on to the third (in which the authors explore more sophisticated linguistic phenomena, such as inner speech and pathologies that involve language such as certain experiences of schizophrenia). As a whole, I'd say that the first 3 chapters of this book are very worthwhile reading. I think there is promise in the overall framework the authors use, and they make a few insightful claims (e.g., linguistic meaning is derivative of the meanings of affordances that we perceive). But their specific claims are either unclear or incorrect, and they do not produce convincing arguments to defend their claims
Displaying 1 of 1 review