Commentary on:
The poet who could smell vowels
Times Literary Supplement November 14 2007
(article on Ferdinand de Saussure by John E Joseph)
Please don’t be frightened off by the symbols; they are made fearsome for a purpose: Suppose we have a hundred things. These can all be physical objects, or words, or speech sounds. Now suppose we sort them into (say) two categories, A and non-A, based on three, two-valued (+/-) properties, X, Y, Z. The properties could be natural ones (+/-solid, +/-edible, +/-pronounceable) or social (+/-kosher, +/-english, +/-posh). Each thing can be described by its value on the three properties (e.g., +-+). Let’s say that to be in category A you need to have a + on property X, otherwise you are in category non-A.
Now I hope that this exercise has left you a little lost in a bunch of meaningless formal symbols. So even if you followed well enough to be able to tell me that a thing that was -++ would be a non-A, you would still have little idea of what the things, or the properties or the categories were. This would be true even if you spent years categorizing examples I fed you, in the form of “Would a -+- be an A or a non-A?”
This is an example of the arbitrariness of symbols (which is what A/non-A, X/Y/Z and +/- are here). Words too are symbols. Whether a mushroom is edible or not is not a symbol, but its name “A” and the names of its properties are. Saussure is best known for stressing the arbitrariness of symbols, but apparently that was already well known from Scottish sources before his time. Saussure also had synesthesia, which means, for example, that for him vowels had a smell, and this helped him see (or feel or taste) associations between words and objects that most of us do not see. He perhaps thought that such associations somehow provided a bridge between the arbitrary shape of symbols and the natural shape of the things that symbols signify.
But Saussure’s main contribution, which he derived from his English lineage (via Mill from Hamilton) was the view that (what we would today call) cognition is “differential”: it is somehow based upon encoding differences in terms of the kinds of +/- properties illustrated above. This led to structuralism. We don’t see things as absolutes. We see them in terms of a network of formal contrasts. An A is an A because it is +X. The “representation” of a thing then becomes the set of +/- values on its properties.
This is all fine as far as it goes, but there is a problem: Just as my behaviour could very well be described as categorizing when I used the rule “All and only A’s are +X” to reply to questions like “Would a -+- be an A or a non-A?” I could do that task till doomsday without ever knowing what an A or an X was, and with no way to recognize one if I saw it. This is called the “symbol grounding problem.” Today, cognitive science tends more toward computationalism than structuralism, but both approaches are insufficient to explain cognition, and for much the same reason: Because arbitrary symbols — whether part of a structural diagram, or a computational algorithm, or, for that matter, an English sentence, are merely (as the philosopher John Searle calls them) “squiggles and squoggles.” Their connections with the things they signify are parasitic on the meanings in our heads, and what we have in our heads is definitely not just more squiggles and squoggles.
To ground symbols, to put concrete flesh on their arbitrary bones, be they ever so systematically structured, the symbol system first has to have the direct sensorimotor capacity to categorize the physical objects that its symbols signify — not merely after something has magically reduced them to a symbolic description. And the “shape” of sensorimotor capacity (like the shape of objects themselves) is not symbolic or arbitrary: it is analog and dynamic. This is not synesthesis, but esthesis, and it requires a mechanism for learning and identifying categories that a symbol system alone will always lack.