A quickie: The linguistic sign & language as a collection of interlinked systems

I’m thinking of language as a phenomenon of cultural evolution. But let’s start with Latour. He distinguishes between intermediaries and mediators as forms of connection between individuals (Assembling the Social, p. 39):

An intermediary, in my vocabulary, is what transports meaning or force without transformation: defining its inputs is enough to define its outputs. . . . Mediators, on the other hand . . . transform, translate, distort, and modify meaning of the elements they are supposed to carry.

As a first approximation I take it that the texts themselves, whether written or spoken, are intermediaries while our various explications of the text, from the most casual (as in office chatter about the book you read the night before, or the movie you saw) to the most formal presentation in a professional journal, are mediators. That is – let me be explicit about this – language combines these two kinds of Latorian objects into a single object. It is not one or the other; it is both.

Let me refine that. Sound and syntax are intermediaries while meaning is a mediator. Meaning is always negotiable, but sound and syntax are, in a given instance, transparent.

Now I want to introduce my current terminology for cultural evolution. I use coordinator as the general term for the genetic elements of cultural evolution. Language is thus a system of coordinators. I recognize several kinds of coordinators. A coupler is a kind of coordinator through which the temporal activities of two or more nervous systems are synchronized. The phonological system is thus a system of couplers. Can I extend this to a writing system even though writer and reader are not co-present? Worth a thought.

A designator kind of coordinator that is linked to a neural characterization of some phenomenon. To a first approximation, the content lexemes of language (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) are designators in this sense. In actual speaking and writing, of course, lexemes are ultimately realized as strings of phonemes. A given lexeme will be realized in speech by various strings of phonemes depending on this and that (e.g. number for nouns, tense and so forth for verbs). The lexeme’s meaning, of course, is that neural characterization (of some phenomenon); it is a Saussurian signified. Taken together the lexemes and phonemes are part of the internal structure of language as a Latourian intermediary.

I have also introduced the notion of a target as a kind of coordinator that can serve as the point of comparison for imitation, whether the creation of an artifact that imitates some model, or the imitation an actor’s behavior in a process of whatever kind. In an oral culture would a myth or folktale be a target in this sense? That’s a tricky one.

In general different performances will not be word-for-word alike one another. What’s the same is the story, which is ultimately carried by those neural characterizations the lexemes are linked to. As the story unfolds those component entities result in the cumulative construction of “the story” in its internal neural characterization (trajectory in the sense of dynamical systems theory).

More later.