Functioning of language cannot be expressed in rotations per
second (of a motor) or units of processed raw materials (of a
processing machine). It cannot even be expressed in our new
measurement of bits and bytes and all kinds of flops.
Expressions, opportunities for exchange of information, and
evaluations are the output of language (to keep to the machine
model and terminology). But more important is another output,
definitive of the cognitive aspect of human self-constitution:
thoughts and ideas.
We encounter language as we continuously externalize our
biological and cultural identities in the act of living as human
beings. Attempts within primitive practical experiences to
capture language in some notation eventually freed language from
the individual experience through sharing with the entire group
practicing such notation. Even in the absence of the originator
of whatever the notation conveyed, as long as the experience was
shared, the notation remained viable. Constituted in human
praxis, notation became a reality with an apparent life of its
own. It affected interactions as well as a course of action, to
the degree that notation could describe it. Notation predates
writing, addressing small-scale groups involved in relatively
homogenous practical experiences. As the scale grew and
endeavors required different forms of interaction, the written
evolved from various co-existing notations based on constitutive
experiences with their own characteristics. Together with the
experience of writing, an entire body of linear conventions was
established.
Circumstances that made possible the constitution of ideas and
their understanding deserve attention because they relate to a
form of activity that singles out the human being from the
entire realm of known creatures. Ideas, no matter how complex,
pertain to states of affairs in the world: physical, biological,
or spatial reality embodied in an individual's
self-constitution. They also pertain to the states of mind of
those expressing them. Ideas are symptomatic of human
self-constitution, and thus of the languages people have
developed in their praxis. What we want to find out is whether
there is an intrinsic relation between literacy and the
formation and understanding of ideas. We want to know if ideas
can be constituted and/or understood in forms of expression
other than verbal language, such as in drawings, or in the more
current multimedia.
Humans not only express themselves to (enter into contact with)
one another through their sign systems, but also listen to
themselves, and look at themselves. They are at once originators
(emitters, as the information theory model considers them) and
receivers. In speech, signs succeed themselves in a series of
self-controlled sequences. Synthesis, as the generation of new
expression by assembling what is known in new ways appropriate
to new practical experiences, is continuously controlled by
self-analysis.
Pre-verbal and sub-verbal unarticulated languages (at the signal
level of smell, touch, taste, or language of kinesic or proxemic
type) participate in defining sensations directly, as well as
through rudimentary specification of context. The relationship of
articulated language and unarticulated sub-verbal languages is
demonstrated at the level of predominantly natural activities as
well as at the level of predominantly socio- cultural activities.
One example: Under the pragmatic conditions leading to language,
olfaction played a role comparable to sight and hearing,
effectively controlling taste. This changed as experience
mediated through language replaced direct experience. Within the
pragmatics of higher efficiency associated with literacy, the
sense of smell, for example, ended up being done away with. The
decrease of the weight of biological communication, in this case
of chemo-physical nature, is paralleled by the increase of
importance of the immaterial, not substance-bound, communication.
Granted, there are no ideas, in the true definition of the word,
that can be expressed in smell. But practical experiences
involving the olfactory and the gustatory, as well as other
senses, affect areas of human practical experiences beyond
literacy. Identification of kin, awareness of reproduction
cycles, and alarm can all be simulated in language, which slowly
assumed or substituted some of the functions of natural
languages.