Understanding language is a process that extends far beyond
knowledge of vocabulary and grammar. Where there is no sharing
of experience beyond what a particular language sequence
expresses, there is no understanding. This sounds like a
difficult expectation. To be met, the non-expressed must be
present in the listener, reader, or writer. Language must
recreate the non-expressed, through the sequence heard, read, or
written, and related to it, beyond the words recognized and the
grammar used. Behind each word that people comprehend, there is
either a common practical experience, or a shared pragmatic
framework, or minimally some form of shared understanding, which
constitute what is known as background knowledge. "The limits of
my language mean the limits of my world," Wittgenstein
promulgated. I would rephrase, in an attempt to connect
knowledge and experience, "The limits of my experience are the
limits of my world." Self-constitution in language is such an
experience.
The first level of the indirect relation established between
someone expressing something in language and someone else trying
to understand it is concentrated in a semantic assumption: "I
know that you know." But is it a sufficient condition to continue
a conversation, let's say about a hunted animal, fire, or a tool,
as long as the listener knows what the hunted animal or fire is?
Many who study semantics think that it is, and accordingly
devise strategies for establishing a shared semantic background.
These strategies range from making sure that students in a class
understand the same things when they use the same words, to
publishing comprehensive dictionaries of what they perceive as
the necessary shared knowledge in order to maintain cultural
coherence at the appropriate scale of the group or community in
question. In the final analysis, these strategies correspond to
a semantically based model of cultural education driven by the
Chomskyan distinction between competence and performance. They
identify the problem in the incongruence of our individual
dictionaries (vocabulary), not in the diversity of human
practical experiences. The assumption is that once people
understand what is in language, they apply it (pragmatics as
"uses and effects of signs within the behavior in which they
occur," according to J. Lyons). We know by now that after a
certain stage of unifying influences corresponding to industrial
society, this congruence becomes impossible when the scale of
human experience changes. The examples given at the beginning of
this chapter are evidence of this fact.
What I maintain throughout this book is that language is
constituted in human experiences, not merely applied to them.
Performance predates competence. Recognition, of an utterance, a
written word, a sentence, is itself an experience through which
individuals define each one of themselves. Within a limited scale
of existence and experience, the homogeneity of the circumstance
guaranteed the coherence of language use. As the number of
people increases, and as they are involved in increasingly
varied experiences, they no longer share a homogeneous pragmatic
framework. Consequently, they can no longer assume the coherence
of language. Progressively, ever diversifying practical
experiences cause words, phrases, and sentences to mean more and
different things at the same time. Instantiation of meaning is
always in the experience through which individuals constitute
their identity.
Examination of the various elements affecting the status of
literacy in the contemporary world of fragmented practical
experiences opens a new perspective on language. Within this
perspective, we acknowledge how and when similar experiences
make the unifying framework of literacy possible and necessary.
We also acknowledge from which point literacy is complemented by
literacies and what, if anything, bridges among such literacies.
Direct experience and mediated experience are the two stages to
be considered. In particular, we are interested in language at
the level where direct experience is affected by the insertion
of gestures, sounds, and initial words.
Indirectness implies awareness of a shared reference-the
gesture, the sound, the word-that is simultaneously shared
experience. At this level, there is no generality. Patterns of
activity are patterns of self-constitution: in the act of
hunting, the hunter projects physical abilities (running,
seeing, ability to use the terrain, to grab stones, to target).
In relation to other hunters, he projects abilities pertinent to
coordination, planning, and reciprocal understanding. Within
this pragmatic framework, a level of indirectness is
constituted: confirmation, or what cybernetics identifies as
feedback, in all biological processes. Along this line, the
initial (unuttered and obviously unwritten) "I know that you
know" becomes subsequently "I know that you know that I know."
Coordination and hierarchy within the given task come into the
picture. Indeed, if we consider the experience as the origin of
meaning in language, the sequence of assumptions is even larger:
"I know that you know that I know that you know." It
corresponds to a cognitive level totally different from that of
direct practical experiences.
In a way, this threefold sequence shows how syntax is enveloped
in semantics, and both in the pragmatics that determines them.
Applied to the hunting scene, it says, "I know that you know
that I am over here, opposite you, we are both closing in on a
hunted animal, and I know that you are aware that you might throw
your spear in my direction; but the fact that we share in the
knowledge of who is placed where will help us get the animal and
not kill each other by accident." At a very small scale of human
experiences, the sequence was realized without language. Patterns
of activity captured its essence. At a larger scale, words
replaced signs used for coordination. Writing established frames
of reference and a medium for planning more complex activities.
The language of drawings, for what eventually became artifacts,
confirmed the sequence in the built-in knowledge. The Internet
browser, a graphic interface to an infinity of simultaneous
experiences of sharing information, frees participants from
saying to each other, "Hello. I am here." It facilitates a
virtual community of individuals who constitute the experience
of real-time neurosurgery, or the virtual concert mentioned at
the beginning of this section. In similar ways, new patterns of
work in the civilization of illiteracy constitute our
work-place, school, or government, based on the same pragmatic
assumptions.
Between the primitive hunters and those who in our days identify
their presence by all kinds of devices-a badge, a pager, a
mobile phone, an access card, a password-there is a difference
in the means and forms used to acknowledge the shared awareness
that affects the outcome of the experience. Even the simple act
of greeting someone we think we know implies the whole sequence
of feedback (double confirmation, each participant's awareness,
and shared awareness). This says, probably in too many words:
1.
To understand language means to understand all the others with
whom we share practical experiences of self-constitution. 2.
All the others must realize this implicit expectation of
communication. 3.
Each new pragmatic context brings about new experiences and new
forms of awareness. This understanding can go something along
the line of, "I know that you know that I know that you know"
what the hunted animal is, what fire is, which tool can be used
and how; or in today's context, what surgery is, what a brain is,
what a virtual concert is, what a certain activity in a
production cycle affects, what the function of a particular
government office is. Otherwise, the conversation would stop, or
another means of expression (such as recreating fire, or
demonstrating a tool) would have to be used, as happened in the
past and as frequently happens today: "I know that you know how
to drive a car (or use a computer), but let me show you how."
Confirmation in language, gestures, and facial expression signals
the understanding. Whenever this understanding fails, it fails
on account of the missing confirmation. When this confirmation
is no longer uniquely provided by means characteristic of
literacy-let us recall modern warfare, technology controlling
nuclear reactors, electronic transactions-the need for literacy
is subject to doubt. Since the majority of instruction conveyed
today is through images (drawings), or image and sound
(videotapes), or some combination of media, it is not surprising
that literacy is met with skepticism, if not by those who teach,
at least by those who are taught. In the pragmatics of their
existence they already live beyond the literate understanding.
This applies not only to the Internet, but just as well to
places of work, schools, government, and other instances of
pragmatic activity.