The ecoDarwinian Paradigm:

In a Landscape of Suggestions

Richard Ostrofsky
copyright © Richard Ostrofsky, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4357-1325-3

Talk #8 Language
A sign is everything which can be taken as significantly
substituting for something else. This something else does not
necessarily have to exist or to actually be somewhere at the
moment in which a sign stands in for it. Thus semiotics is in
principle the discipline studying everything which can be used
in order to lie (author’s italics). If something cannot be used to
tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot
in fact be used ‘to tell’ at all.
– A Theory of Semiotics, (1979), Umberto Eco

The techniques of autostimulation are extremely various. Just as

one can notice that stroking oneself in a certain way can produce
certain only partially and indirectly controllable but definitely
desirable effects (and one can then devote some time and
ingenuity to developing and exploring the techniques for
producing those desirable effects in oneself), so one can also
come to recognize that talking to oneself, making pictures for
oneself, singing to oneself, and so forth, are practices that often
have desirable effects. Some people are better at these activities
than others. Cognitive autostimulation is an acquired and
intimately personal technique, with many different styles.
– Elbow Room, Daniel Dennett

Thea: You have to say something about the relationship between

suggestion and language. I don’t see how any number of suggestions could
add up to a plain statement of fact. A suggestion is one thing; a statement
is something else entirely. How do you get from one to the other?
Also, I’m not clear on the difference between signs and symbols, as
both, obviously, have suggestive power in your terms. I’ve read somewhere
that symbols make the difference between human language and other types
of communication in nature, but I have no idea what that difference is.

Guy: You ask good questions. All living things are suggers.
Responsiveness to suggestion is a characteristic of life. But amongst the
creatures on this planet, we humans are in a class by ourselves, and it’s
language that makes us so. The human animal is a “time binder” in Alfred
Korzybski’s apt phrase. With language we recall the past and conceive
imaginary futures as no other animal can do.

Thea: So far as we know.

Guy: Admittedly. We don’t know what other creatures are thinking. But
if they have anything like human consciousness, we find no sign of it.
Even with persistent and ingenious efforts, success in teaching even some
sign language to chimpanzees has been modest, while research on the
communication of whales and dolphins remains inconclusive. By contrast,
every normal child, raised by normally caring human adults, acquires the
rudiments of competence in its family’s language by the age of four or so;
and the works of language-based culture are obvious everywhere.
We humans are animals, but remarkable animals; and there’s no
denying that language, for our species, is a central, biological fact. We
could not be the kind of animals we are without it. Most of what appears
specifically human depends on language, in one way or another.

Thea: All right. I’ll grant all that. But tell me how you get words and
factual statements from the bare concept of suggestion. I can’t see how
that is possible. Suggestions and statements seem to belong to entirely
different categories.

Guy: The answer isn’t obvious. We’re talking now about an

evolutionary development that took millions of years, a biological
threshold that only one species has clearly crossed, a strange ecological
experiment whose results are not yet in. There were a number of steps
involved.

Thea: You’re going to explain how simple suggestions like animal cries,
body posture and touch concatenate and structure themselves into signs,
then into symbols and then into true statements – words linked by the
grammar of a full-blown language. Is that right?
Guy: I’ll do my best. I have to begin by reminding you that signs and
symbols and eventually the statements of a language are not just
suggestions, but re-suggestive structures: reliable sources of suggestion to
an entity (a sugger) capable of receiving and responding to them as such.

Thea: All right. But first, please remind me why you are introducing
these notions of suggestion and re-suggestive structure to begin with. Why
not start with signs?

the sign
Guy: Because the sign is already a complex affair: a stable structure of
some kind, that tenders fairly consistent suggestions to various suggers
who encounter it. The unit of communication must be something much
more primitive. I call this a suggestion because its attributes seem very
close to that word’s ordinary meaning.

Thea: I remember you saying that the quality of a mother’s touch is a

suggestion, not yet a sign for the infant. But you added that it will soon
become a sign. Could you expand on that?

Guy: A sign is a special kind of suggestion, in which one thing (called

the signifier) is taken to represent, substitute, or “stand for” something else
(the signified). That concept of “standing for” is left rather vague in what
I’ve seen of semiotic theory. Umberto Eco just says that a sign can be used
to lie – to stand for something that isn’t there. I would say that the signifier
re-suggests the signified – comes reliably to suggest it. The type and
quality of this re-suggestion corresponds to the various types of sign.

Thea: There are many different types, are there not? We have words like
cue, portent, trace, icon, emblem, symptom and symbol for different kinds
of sign. A thesaurus would give many more.

Guy: Yes indeed. And I think one of the strengths of the suggestion
paradigm is that it allows us easily to characterize these different types.
For example, a cue is a suggestion to say or do something. A portent or
omen is the suggestion conveyed by a small event that something
important is about to happen. A trace is the lingering suggestion left by an
event that occurred in the past. A symptom is the manifest suggestion that
something not directly visible is occurring. An icon is a graphic re-
suggestion of a concept or scheme of concepts. And so on.

Thea: Where does the concept of information fit in?

Guy: Well, when you ask that question, you need to remember that the
word “information” is used with several different meanings. In the
engineer’s sense it is just a measure of variability with no semantic content
at all. In the manager’s sense, it is meaningful news of what is happening
in his world. I have yet to see a coherent account of how this gulf is
bridged: from the raw measure of potential variability to the “meaning”
(whatever that is) that managers and everyone live by.

Thea: I remember you saying that information is a difference that makes

a difference. Doesn’t that definition bridge the gap?

Guy: Indeed it does, but only by muddying the distinction between the
ordinary and technical senses of the word “information.” Bateson’s idea
was sound, but it would have been more precise to say that a suggestion is
a difference made or presented to a sugger’s body that suggests a
difference in its understanding or activity. The “meaning” of that change
(to that sugger at that time) is the change suggested.

Thea: Isn’t that circular? “A suggestion is a difference that suggests?”

Guy: Of course it is. Suggestion is the primitive concept here. I don’t

think it can be defined in simpler terms. Difference (and sameness) are
themselves suggestions. But a sign, now, can be defined as a material or
cognitive structure that acts as a reliable source of suggestion. And
information (in the ordinary, managerial sense) is a sign – or concatenation
of signs – that suggests one understanding and/or course of action rather
than another.

Thea: What is a symbol then? That’s the difficult concept that I’ve never
really understood. What turns a mere sign into a real symbol?

from signs to symbols

Guy: For human biology, that is the crucial question. Suggestions and
signs are common throughout the natural world, but symbols are rare and
special. True symbols – as distinct from signs – make language possible,
and vastly extend the possibilities of transmitted “culture.” No other
species, in its natural lifestyle, communicates with true symbols, so far as
we know.

Thea: That seems strange. Many species have some form of

communication. You’d think some creatures would have at least simple
languages, like the animals in children’s books and Walt Disney movies.
But they don’t, do they? Why not?

Guy: That is just the question Terrence Deacon raises in his book, The
Symbolic Species, the best biological account of language I’ve seen. Why
do we observe complex and effective signing systems in the non-human
natural world, but no true languages at all, not even simple ones? Deacon
reports that an 8-year-old stumped him by asking this when he was giving
a talk on science at his son’s school – and that this question set him on the
path he takes in his book

Thea: How does he answer it?

Guy: Deacon’s argument makes two main points: 1 First, the human
brain accounts for only about 2% of our total body weight, but roughly
20% of our total energy budget. 2 From that perspective, far from being
biological generalists, our species has chosen a most extraordinary
specialization, based on a massive commitment of metabolic resources to
that particular organ and its functions. Second, our facility with symbols
differs not just quantitatively, but in qualitative terms from the handling of
signs. True symbol processing is a complex and rather strange effect
requiring a specialized, sophisticated brain. It represents much more than a
simple enhancement of the common sign handling capabilities that other
species enjoy. In Deacon’s view, symbol processing actually impedes the
response to signs, and is a different process entirely.

Thea: Why? What is the difference? What is so special about symbols

that even a creature as human-like as a chimpanzee has trouble grasping
what comes so naturally to a human two-year-old?

1 See Deacon, p 99, 408.

2 See Appraising the Brain’s Energy Budget, Raichle and Gusnard at
http://www.jsmf.org/meetings/2003/nov/PNAS_Commentary.pdf.
Guy: Deacon defines the symbol as a sign that points to other signs
rather than to events in the real world. In my terms, a symbol is a re-
suggestive structure that suggests other such structures. Either way, a
symbol’s referential power derives from its position in a network of other
symbols. It is not just a correspondence between a signifier and signified.
Rather, the symbol works as a sort of cognitive “seed” round which any
number of associated symbols may collect. It is “understood” by the way it
stands in association and contrast with the other symbols in its network.
Even a simple language, Deacon argues, would require such indirect
and abstract pointing of symbols to one another, rather than to direct
referents, and would set a heavy evolutionary premium on this specialized
capability. For this reason, he says, language will be an all-or-nothing
proposition: As a species, either you have it or you don’t.

Thea: I think I see what you’re driving at. One senses that qualitative
difference in the contrast between a religious symbol and an ordinary sign
– for example, the red octagonal STOP sign at a street corner. The cross of
Christianity, the crescent moon of Islam, the Jewish star of David, and the
re-entrant yin-yang of Taoism, are understood as representing different
clusters of belief and practice that stand in contrast to one another. By
contrast, the red octagon at the corner is just a simple command to stop.

Guy: The most ordinary words of English, or any other language, must
be understood in the same way. The simplest words – like “tree” or
“table,” “run” or “sit,” “blue” or “yellow” – are understood by association
and contrast with the names of other objects and processes and qualities:
“up” in contrast with “down;” “go” with “stop”; the color names in
contrast with one another. Like signs, words serve as loci of re-suggestion
for your, my and everybody’s experience of what they name, but the
significant differences that they invoke are anchored to one another.
Every word we use might be said to “drain” a certain area of
experience (as a valley collects the run-off from an area of the earth’s
surface) by suggesting some typical instance of the thing or event at point.
You could say that language organizes the landscape of suggestion into
separate basins in contrast with one another. It does so by providing the
appropriate word (not some other word) when an event within its
catchment area occurs.
Thea: An example, perhaps? Your metaphor of “drainage” is losing me.

Guy: Any word in any language is an example: A word like”cat” drains

your experience of cats (in a manner of speaking), by collecting your and
everybody’s total experience with cats under one label.
Conversely, to use that word “cat” is to suggest to a listener or reader
to recall his own experience with cats. Unless some more urgent
suggestion overrides, his prototypical image of a cat, supported by all his
experience of cats, is brought to mind. Your word communicates to the
extent, and only to the extent, that your listener’s experience with these
animals is similar to your own.
Or take Isaiah’s great metaphor, “All flesh is grass.” 3 (I think Gregory
Bateson discusses it somewhere.) Ordinarily, the word “grass” just refers to
the little plant that covers a golf course. But with this comparison, the
prophet is not saying that flesh is green and needs watering every few days.
Rather, in placing our experience of flesh within the catchment area of
“grass,” he brings out and draws upon more subtle properties: The fragility
and transience of grass, its withering, its unity with the earth, etc.
In speaking of areas of experience drained by a certain word, I am
playing the same trick: forcing a word beyond its normal meaning to catch
and channel a “flood” of suggestions about some other matter entirely.
The availability of metaphors like these is not an incidental property but a
core feature of language. If you define metaphor as the raising of analogy,
then all language is ultimately metaphoric in nature insofar as it lumps
individuals that are only roughly similar into the same category.

language as system and structure

Thea: But where do our words come from in the first place? A word’s
meaning is just a matter of convention, is it not?

Guy: For the most part. There are a few words whose sound appears to
have been suggested by the phenomenon they name: The word “whisper”
sounds a bit like a whisper; the word “slam” sounds more like a slamming
door. This is probably not an accident. But there is nothing noticeably cat-
like about the word “cat,” nor spade-like about “spade.”

Thea: But surely, even in such cases, something must have suggested the
connection between the word’s sound and its meaning?

3 Isaiah 40.6-8.
Guy: No. Or, if at all, so long ago that the connection has been
completely forgotten. Both the sounds and the meanings of words evolve
and (more-or-less) stabilize in ecological fashion. For example, no one
ever took a decision to call a spade a “spade.” Or if they did, it was so long
ago and so anonymously that it scarcely matters. What established that
word and every other was a kind of spontaneous consensus within a speech
community. Language, like culture as a whole, and like a natural eco-
system of living creatures, is made by all but not by any.

Thea: A neat example of cognitive ecology.

Guy: Indeed. Any human language is a re-suggestive system of

inexhaustible wealth, allowing the expression of thoughts as infinite as the
sentences that can be formed. But it has no particular author or designer,
and it is stabilized more by the spontaneous convergence of usage than by
the legislation of grammarians and lexicographers.

Thea: How does this convergence happen?

Guy: Language authorities and dictionaries play a role today, but mostly
the convergence of speech must be a swarm effect, based partly on the
desire to be understood, partly on a brain predisposed by its architecture to
mimicry, and partly on a desire to sound cool and original but not too
much so. As in a swarm, each speaker is influenced mostly by his own
personal speech community, though there will certainly be broadcast and
stigmergic influences as well.
Basically, though, what happens is that young children imitate the
speech sounds they are hearing, learn new words and then generate
language by over-generalizing from what they take to be grammatical
rules. They are corrected by adults. People (both kids and adults) pick up
on each other’s speech mannerisms to define themselves as a group. How
language got started, we may never know, but once proto-humans took to
making vocal sounds as they worked or played or nursed their babies or
just sat around, it’s not hard to imagine how speech communities might
converge to make and expect particular noises in particular situations. I
think the expectations of others must have been as important for the
evolution of language as our simian penchant for imitation. There is a pull
as well as a push for reliable conventions – in language as in other areas of
culture. The streams of suggestion flow both ways.
Thea: And your emphasis on suggestion helps keep both directions in
mind.

Guy: I would say so. Our brains are so wired that the behavior of others
is taken as a suggestion to do likewise: “Monkey see, monkey do!” as we
say. And at the same time our performances always offer positive or
negative feedback to our social counter-players, who in turn provide
suggestions to us. It is indeed a kind of cybernetics – though based on
loose suggestion, not tight control. The conventions of language are
indeed a neat example of cognitive ecology: loosely stable, varying subtly
from one neighborhood and city to another, and drifting gradually over
time.

Thea: All right. I can see how language evolves. But how did it get
started?

Guy: How could we know? To coordinate effort? To rouse group spirit?

To intimidate enemies? To soothe children? To impress lovers? To appease
gods? For all these possibilities together? There are lots of theories, but no
way to decide between them. One conjecture is that language must have
been closely connected with tool making, though it would have been
quickly used for every other purpose as well

Thea: Why do you think so?

language and tool making

Guy: Remembering the Baldwin effect, the crucial question is this:
Given that the brain needed for symbol use and language was huge and
metabolically expensive, what sort of life style, made the investment in
such a brain worthwhile? I think it was our ancestor’s preparation and use
of tools that made those bigger brains worth what they cost.

Thea: You might think intelligence would need no justification. that

greater intelligence would be worth having under any circumstances.

Guy: But not at any price. If you keep in mind the enormous energy
budget of a human brain and, historically, the high death rate for women in
childbirth – squeezing the huge craniums of their babies through that
narrow birth canal – then it’s obvious that our intelligence is costly. So
you have to ask what our simian ancestors were already doing, that made
them evolve an exaggerated brain as the giraffe evolved an exaggerated
neck? Our best guess is that they were already using simple tools – as
chimpanzees do today: A twig to winkle grubs out of the tree bark. A stick
or rock to dig up roots or as a weapon.

Thea: And that would be enough? Other creatures use simple tools or
weapons, without developing language.

Guy: Other creatures use found objects as simple tools and weapons.
Few, if any, alter the sticks or rocks they find to improve them for an
intended purpose. The guess is that it was tool-making, and the teaching
of tool-making and using, rather than just tool use, that drove the evolution
of language. Indeed, it’s possible that our gift for abstract symbols and
language is already implicit in tool-making, to some extent.

Thea: How so? You’ll have to spell that out.

Guy: To prepare a tool for an intended purpose is to move indirectly –

perhaps very indirectly – toward a desired result. That needs implicit
recognition that the shortest way to your goal is not always a straight line –
both in physical space, and in a conceptual space of possible action as
well. First, to prepare a tool, you need to contemplate alternative
possibilities. That is already to enter the realm of hypotheticals – our
peculiar human specialty.
Second, and even more suggestively, to prepare a tool you must
relinquish your main purpose temporarily – put it on a mental stack, as
programmers say – in order to do something else first. And, as I just
explained, a similar relinquishment, or temporary letting-go, is precisely
what symbols require. You have to let go of the signifier’s direct
association with its signified to permit indirect associations with other
signs. Along these same lines, the intention to shape this tool to augment
its effectiveness for action toward that imagined goal already has a kind of
instrumental grammar to it. Since modern chimpanzees are known to adapt
found materials as simple tools, it seems likely that our primate ancestors
were already doing so – thereby placing upon themselves (per the Baldwin
effect) an evolutionary pressure to do it better. At first, symbol processing
may have been a happy by-product of virtuoso tool-use, but it could then
be selected for in its own right. A vocal tract adapted for clearly audible
modulations of breath would have been the last stage of the process.
Thea: You lost me back there. When you said that tool use already has a
kind of instrumental grammar, what did you mean?

Guy: I’m only speculating here. But recall the point I made earlier: that
the cognitive detachment needed to make a tool (before you get around to
doing what you really want to do), is the same as that needed for language.
In both cases, you have to let go of your immediate focus – put your real
goal on a mental stack– so as to attend to something else first: the tool in
one case; the web of associated symbols in the other.
We could also say that in preparing and using tools, we make a
cognitive separation between subject and object, and between purpose and
instrument that did not exist before. We must envision a self doing X to Y
with, or by means of Z. We must consider the alternatives of doing X to Y
both with and without Z. Then, when it seems worthwhile, we can delay X
and Y long enough to reach for Z, or to prepare Z for our purpose.
The actions of animals and very young children have an immediacy to
them which adults regain only on rare occasions, or with a good deal of
training. The key problem about the evolution of language is to understand
what made that loss of immediacy worthwhile. But once it had evolved
for the preparation of tools, it would be available for other uses as well.

Thea: Language, then, is a by-product of increasingly sophisticated tool-

use – tools not just conveniently found, but crafted for a purpose.

Guy: I’m suggesting that as a hypothesis, yes. Clever primates already

using simple tools. Imitating one another in doing so (as non-human
primates are known to do) would gain adaptive advantage – a superior
capability to consider, decide among and communicate alternative
possibilities. They would have shifting social relationships to keep track of
as well. The Baldwin effect would place an evolutionary premium on
doing better and more consistently what this promising beast was already
doing crudely and haphazardly. Language, tool-use, imitative learning,
unsocial sociability – the whole anthropoid complex – would then advance
and refine itself as an integrated package. Probably, it is still doing so – we
modern men and women, languages and literatures, tools and technologies,
society as we know it, being just interim results.
Thea: Yes, I can see how this evolution could happen. You’re winning
me over, I have to admit. This whole story is sounding more plausible to
me now than when we started these talks.

Language as a medium of suggestion

Guy: Here’s another turn of the argument: We can also think of
language and tool use as media – in Marshall McLuhan’s sense. Then, as
media, they would themselves be messages carrying strong suggestions of
their own, apart from their various uses and contents. The central message
of weapon-and-tool use would have been a kind of arms-race for more and
better weapons and tools. The central message of language would have
been for more language – improved articulation and discrimination of
sounds, richer vocabulary, more elaborate grammar. And finally, as you
say, the modern human body and brain.

Thea: You could almost describe the Baldwin effect as a generalized

version of McLuhan’s law that “The medium is the message.” In this case,
it is the life-game you are playing that has the crucial, long-term effect.
But this raises some interesting questions: How are suggestions passed
through language different from those transmitted in other ways – through
pictures, for example? Or through gestures, or by example? Apart from
that “arms race” for better linguistic and tool-using skills, what other
“messages” did our ancestors receive from their use of language? How did
the nature of language shape these creatures’ thinking?

Guy: Yes, those are very good questions. A lot of ink has been spilled on
the cognitive implications of language and our addiction to it. Art students
have to train themselves to paint the distinctly bluish snow before their
eyes, not the white snow that language has made their brains expect. Some
people practice meditation to turn off the flow of language in their heads.
Thinkers like Pierce and Whorff and Nietzsche have emphasized how
words shape the way we think. Nietzsche wrote about “the prison-house of
language” (which didn’t stop him from writing). Wittgenstein, in the same
vein, sought to liberate philosophy from what he called “the bewitchment
of language.” It’s a truism that philosophy in German, French and in
English have three distinctive flavors – at least partly due to the different
flavors of the languages themselves.
Language is a very powerful medium, but it does have its traps for the
unwary and its limitations for everyone. Still, it’s hard to separate the
biases and limitations of language from those of its human speakers. There
may be a tendency to blame language for what are really human
weaknesses.

Thea: Of statistics it’s said that figures don’t lie, but liars figure.
Something similar might be said of words.

Guy: That confused and misled people use them. Yes. But there must be
more to it than that. There’s no doubt that some ideas are more difficult to
express in one language than another.

Thea: What interests me is not so much the moods and cadences and
concept-repertoires of various languages, as our dependence upon
language itself. If we were two deaf mutes without sign language, with all
communication between us limited to touching and pointing, our
relationship would be quite different, I imagine. Or, at the other extreme, if
we had direct access to each other’s thoughts – again, our relationship
would be very different. In either case, we wouldn’t be having these
conversations.

Guy: No, we wouldn’t. In one case, we wouldn’t be able to have them.

In the other, we wouldn’t need to. Language is for creatures who are
divided one from another, but need to communicate as best they can. And
who have complex communications needs that are worth the biological
costs involved. If all you have to say is “There’s food over there!” or
“Watch out for that predator!” or “I think you’re very attractive, and I want
to mate with you!” then you don’t need language, or a brain capable of
handling it.

Thea: Apart from tool-use then, what did we need language for?

Guy: One can only speculate, based on the things we use it for today.
We use language to gossip – to tell stories which may or may not be
truthful. We use it to make promises that we may or may not intend to
keep. We use it to frame rules and commands as well as casual suggestions
to do this or that – or to direct and color attention. Our hominid ancestors
probably did all these things as they had means to do so.
Most importantly, perhaps, they may have used language to give
themselves suggestions – as you hear young children doing sometimes. 4

4 See, for example, Talking to Oneself as a Selective Pressure for the

We adults do it too, when we think that no one is listening, and writers do
it a lot. Until quite recently, language was conceived and studied mostly as
a medium of inter-personal communication, with the inner “stream of
consciousness” considered as parasitic on language as we know it today.
But inner speech, even with grunts and monosyllabic exclamations, may
have aided hominid cognition long before true languages evolved, and
before there was a neural architecture capable of handling them. Indeed the
selection pressure for that evolution may have been partly the cognitive
advantage of some auto-suggestive capability. Tool-use, social living,
language and consciousness may have evolved together as our hominid
ancestors gave themselves pep-talks and running pre-linguistic
commentary on what they were doing, or on what was happening to them.

Thea: You’re saying that our ancestors may have used language not only
to pass suggestions to one another but to pass suggestions to themselves.

Guy: Yes. If we take Minsky’s model seriously – with all those mental
agencies competing for influence – then techniques for passing complex
internal suggestions could be extremely useful. One part of the brain could
provoke another to do what otherwise could only be triggered from the
outside. The advantages of such cognitive auto-stimulation are obvious.
We use it all the time, even today.

Thea: But why would this auto-stimulation be handled through

language? And, given that language is its medium, what would the
cognitive consequences be?

Guy: Language permits a cognitive dissection of one’s immediate

situation, and a cognitive transcendence of it. Animals and very young
children seem to experience their world as an immediate suchness – an
over-all state of affairs. Their senses inform about various aspects of
current reality; and their eyes jump around, gathering and collating visual
details; but they experience the scene around them as a whole – an
immediate present. Through the medium of language, for older children
and adults, objects do not appear so much as unique particulars but more
as instances of familiar types. The same happens with actions and
processes and qualities. We no longer see that situation; we see a tawny cat
stalking a red bird pecking at something on the lawn.
Nor are we limited to the present. With language we can self-
Emergence of Language, Mirolli and Parisi, (2006).
 stimulate the kind of internal “seeing” that we call memory or
imagination. I can remember the black cat eyeing the yellow bird
that I saw yesterday. I can imagine a mauve cat with purple polka-
dots stalking an orange bird with blue stripes. And I can suggest
that you do the same, and have just done so.

Thea: Are you saying that memory and imagination depend on language
– that creatures without language do not remember or imagine?

Guy: That is disputed. They clearly remember in the sense of learning

from experience; and they can imagine in the sense of wanting something
and going after it. But it is highly doubtful that their subjectivity in doing
so is the same as ours.

Thea: There are big gains, but also losses from this trick of
categorization. For fighting, or making love, or just sitting in the park
watching the grass grow, it’s good to turn it off sometimes. But that’s not
so easy. It has to be taught as a special skill, in disciplines like zen or yoga.

Guy: True. The medium of language, once you’re in the habit of using
it, sends a powerful message of categorization. It sends other messages as
well. A painting shows you a whole scene at once, with details that you can
examine as you will. By contrast, language is sequential, and sends a
powerful message of analysis and seriality – a rendering of events into
serial narratives. Like music, you must follow language through time,
(though the new medium of hypertext is changing this to some extent), as
narrative, as dialogue, as argument. To use language well takes patience
and leisure – more than most people have these days.

Thea: What you’ve just said may be the central issue of psychotherapy
as a talking cure. Few people have the time or money to invest in it, even if
they have the inclination. Since Freud’s time, various efforts have been
made to make it cheaper or faster – not entirely without success. But there
are limits here. It may take only one therapist to change the light bulb, but
the process takes quite a lot of two people’s time.

Guy: There’s at least one more message: Language provokes strife by its
very nature. To open your mouth on any subject is to tempt someone else
either to disagree with you, or to push your thought a bit further. To put a
thought into words is either to join an argument or start one. And this
feature of speech is still more the case with literature. As a writer, I know
this only too well.

Thea: It doesn’t stop you. You love language, and you love to talk. All
the more when someone is sure to disagree. And never more than when
you’re talking about something deeply controversial, as we’ve been doing.

Guy: Guilty, your honor. Language can be used for dialogue, but it
provokes debate. When you have a text that is supposed to be authoritative
– like a constitution, or a bible, or even a textbook – you either need a
pope, or a supreme court to expound (with more words) what its words
mean, or you must live with permanent argument about their meaning.

Thea: Who was it who said, “You should never speak unless you can
improve on silence?”