Probably one of the most important aspects of current pragmatics
is the connection between knowing and understanding. We are
involved in many activities without really understanding how
they take place. Our e-mail reaches us as it reaches those to
whom we send messages, even though most people have no idea how.
The postal system is easier to understand. We know what happens:
letters are delivered to the post office, sorted, and sent to
their destinations by bus, train, plane, or boat. Determining
the paths of an e-mail message is trivial for a machine, but
almost impossible for a human being. As the complexity of an
endeavor increases, chances that individuals constituting
themselves in the activity know how everything works and
understand the various mechanisms involved decrease. Still, the
efficiency of the experience is not diminished. Moreover, it
seems that knowledge and understanding do not necessarily affect
efficiency.
This statement is valid for an increasing number of practical
experiences in the pragmatics of the civilization of
illiteracy-not for all of them. We can conceive of complex
diagnostic machines; but there is something in the practical
experience of medicine, for example, that makes one physician
better than another. We can automate a great deal of other
activities-accounting, tax preparation, design, architecture-but
there is something implicit in the activity that will qualify a
certain individual's performance as above and beyond our most
advanced science and technology. There are managers who know
close to nothing about what their company produces but who
understand market mechanisms to such an extent that they end up
winners regardless of whether they head a bank, a
cracker-producing factory, or a giant computer company. These
managers constitute themselves within the experience of language-
the language of the market more than the language of the product.
Therefore, it is useful to examine the evolution of knowledge
and understanding within succeeding pragmatic frameworks, and
the role language as a mediating element in each of these
frameworks.
The sign of language represents the contradictory unity of the
phonetic and semantic units. Within a limited scale of
experience, literacy meant to know what is behind the written
word, to be able to resuscitate it, and to even give the word new
life. As the scale increases, literacy means to take for granted
what is behind the written word. This implies that dictionaries,
including personal dictionaries, as they are formed in
constituting our language, are congruent. Learning language is
not reducible to the memorization of expressions. The only way
to learn is to live the language. With knowledge acquired and
expressed in language comes understanding.
Humans are not born free of experience. Important parts of it are
passed along in the biological endowment. Others are transmitted
through ever new human interactions, including those of
reciprocal understanding. Neither are humans born free of the
evolutionary cycle of the species. The relative decline of the
olfactory in humans was mentioned some pages ago. With the
relative loss of sensory experience, knowledge corresponding to
the respective sensorial perception diminishes. Linguistic
performance is the result of living and practicing language, of
existence as language. Relating oneself to the world in language
experience is a condition for knowing and understanding it. The
language of the natural surrounding world is not verbal, but it
is articulated at the level of the elementary sensations
(Merleau-Ponty's participative perception) that the world
occasions, when human beings are engaged in the practical
attempt to constitute themselves, or instance, by trying to
change or to master their world. They perceive this world, after
the experience, as stabilized meanings: clouds offer the hope of
rain; thunder can produce fire; running deer are probably pursued
by predators; eggs in a nest testify to birds. The complexity of
the effort to master the world surrounding us increases over
time. Tasks originating in the context leading to literacy are
of a different degree of complexity than those faced in
industrial society and than those we assume today.
Between the senses and speech-hence between nonverbal and verbal
languages-numerous influences play a role. Words obviously have a
cognitive condition different from perceptions and are processed
differently. Speech adds intellectual information to the
sensorial information, mainly in the form of associations,
capable of reflecting the present and the absent. Interestingly
enough, we do not know everything that we understand; and we do
not understand everything that we know. For instance, we might
know that in non-Euclidean geometries, parallels meet. Or that
water, a liquid, is made up of oxygen and hydrogen, two gases. Or
that the use of drugs can lead to addiction. Nevertheless, we do
not necessarily understand how and why and when.
Within the civilization of literacy the expectation is that once
we know how to write something, we automatically know and
understand it. And if by some chance the knowledge is
incomplete, inconsistent, or not maintained, if it loses its
integrity through some corruption, it can be resuscitated
through reading or can be made consistent by comparing it to
knowledge accumulated by others, and eventually redeemed. As
writing has failed us repeatedly within practical experiences
that transcend its characteristics and necessity, we have
learned that the relative stability of the written is a blessing
in disguise. Compared to the variability of the speech, it is
more stable. But this stability turns out to be a shortcoming,
exactly because knowledge and understanding are context
dependent. Within relatively stable contexts this shortcoming is
noticed only at rare intervals. But with the expectation of
higher efficiency, cycles of human activity get shorter.
Increased intensity, the variability of structures of
interaction, the distributed nature of practical involvement,
all require variable frames of reference for knowledge and
understanding. As a result of these pragmatic characteristics, we
witnessed progressive use of language in equivocal and ambiguous
ways. Acceptable, and even adequate, in the practical experience
of poetry, drama and fiction, of disputable relevance in
political and diplomatic usage, ambiguity affects the literate
formulation of ideas and plans pertinent to moral values,
political programs, or scientific and technological purposes.
The same pragmatic characteristics mentioned above make necessary
the integration of means other than language and its literate
functioning in the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge.
This addresses concerns raised in the opening lines of this
section. Fast-changing knowledge can be acquired through means
adapted to its dynamics. As these means, such as interactive
multimedia, virtual reality programs, and genetic computation,
change, the experience of accessing knowledge becomes, in
addition, one of understanding the transitory means involved in
storing and presenting it. Many practical experiences are based
on knowledge that no other means, literacy- based means included,
could effectively make available. From advanced brain surgery at
neuronal levels to the deployment of vast networks, which
support not only e-mail but also many other meaningful human
interactions-from space exploration to memetic
engineering-focused understanding and a whole new gamut of highly
efficient practical experiences, involving knowledge never
before available, make up the pragmatic framework of the
civilization of illiteracy.