Part 4: The need for symbols

In my last post I explained that words are symbols and that we can commit surrogation errors on them as easily as anything else. What does this imply in light of the fact that my entire explanation was just a set of written words?

What is the substance?

You may have noticed this already: I’ve said things like, “Pursue wealth directly instead of buying the sportscar,” but the word “wealth” is itself just a symbol for something! Do we all hold the same definition of that word? And even if I give a very specific definition like, “enough money to live comfortably off of just the investment income,” this is still just another set of symbols…

Not exactly, though. Words can only fit together in certain ways, so the more words I use, the more definitions you’d have to twist to get the wrong idea of what I’m saying. You’re searching your own experiences for something that matches your definitions of the words I’ve strung together…

Which brings us to a big point: The only real “substance” is your own raw experience. You have some idea of what “wealth” is because someone has shown you a particular set of experiences and told you to associate them with “wealth.”

Do me a favor and look at something red. That’s the substance. The word “red” is not the substance; the experience you’ve just had is the substance. The only point of my saying “red” was to get you to have a particular experience—and then recall that particular part of it. Now remember a phrase I kept using back in Part 1: “Is this what it feels like to be wealthy/a winner/high-status?” This is what I was getting at: your feelings/sensations constitute raw experience, and symbols are meant to point to specific types of experiences.

But if symbols can be mistaken for their substance (surrogation) then why do we keep using them, opening ourselves up to these errors? I’ve identified two distinct reasons we need symbols.

Need 1: Simplicity in communication

When I talk about the distinction between “a college degree” and “competence,” that word “competence” hopefully points you to the same kind of experience that I think of when I hear the word “competence.” And that illustrates one of the great features of our world of symbols: we can communicate quickly! Without a shared language full of shared symbols, I’d have to take your hand and run over to, say, someone giving an impressive speech, or someone skillfully building a wall, or someone accurately measuring chemicals—just to convey that concept of “competence.” In fact, I’d probably have to show you all three examples plus several more (plus several negative examples) before you’d actually formed a concept of “competence” that was close enough to my own. What a chore! Instead, through the miraculous tool of language, we’ve all implicitly agreed to learn the same concepts—that is, we use the same rubric for chopping up our experiences into sets of symbols.

A note on Language efficiency

Yes, we “chop up our raw experiences” into sets of symbols. Does that sound a little reckless, like something’s getting lost in the process? That’s because it is. Here I need to call out a feature of language that is going to become relevant in a later post, and that’s simply the fact that that languages are (mostly) efficient:

Imagine I’m at a conference and you text me, “How does the speaker look?” I answer, “They look very professional.” Yet you don’t know anything about the speaker’s shirt color, or whether they’re wearing a jacket, or the cut of their pants (or skirt, or dress), and so on. Many parts of the experience have been lost in communication. Of course, you could always ask follow-up questions and get answers to all of those things, but it would take longer. Don’t take this fact for granted! We happen to have a language where the concept of “professional” only takes one word, but the concept of “White shirt, silver tie, navy suit in a well-fitting modern cut, black Oxford shoes” takes many words. Imagine if our language had a word, “dester,” which meant, “Wearing a white shirt, silver tie, navy suit in a well-fitting modern cut, and black Oxford shoes.” And imagine if we lacked the word “professional” and instead had to say, “They look powerful, but not in an intimidating way, only in a helpful way, but not subservient either; and they look alert and ready, but not for a sport or combat, more-so for an intellectual activity.” Whew.

Here I want you to notice that our languages represent some information very readily and other information with more difficulty. And there’s a reason for this. Without going into too much detail: our languages have evolved to use short, single words for the concepts that are most common, and they require longer, numerous words for concepts that are expected to be less common. “White shirt, silver tie, navy suit in a well-fitting modern cut, with black Oxford shoes” just isn’t a concept that needs to be expressed very often. On the other hand, we find that “Powerful, but not intimidating, only helpful, but not subservient; and alert and ready, but not for a sport or combat, for an intellectual activity” is a concept that we do use fairly often: “professional”.

Need 2: Partialization in thought

So we see that language takes our complex raw experiences and strips them down to just the concepts that are most commonly communicated. We might assume, then, that our private thoughts reflect our true experiences, and the act of communication just simplifies them for the sake of efficiency. However, that’s not the case—actually we need that efficient simplification all the time.

Let’s return to “red.” What is “red?”

Each of these images gives you a distinct experience with its own nuances and details. But if you’re at an intersection and you need to decide whether to stop or go, it’s helpful to reduce your experience to “red” or “not red.” Regardless of whether you’re communicating to someone about it, you’ll perform that reduction. And regardless of whether you’re a verbal thinker, visual thinker, etc., you’ll be holding the concept of red in your mind. If you actually noticed everything during the experience of looking at a traffic light, you wouldn’t be able to pay attention to the act of driving.

I’m going to call this act partialization, borrowing the term from anthropologist Ernest Becker’s work Denial of Death. To partialize an experience is to take account of only a specific part of it, ignoring the rest.

Let’s take another example: I’m “sitting in my apartment” right now. I would’ve had that thought even if I wasn’t currently sharing it with you. That’s what showed up in my mind. In that initial observation, I didn’t take special note of the reflectivity of the pavement outside my window, or the sound of my refrigerator to the right of me, or the amount of people outside and what that might imply about the busyness of my neighborhood, or the direction of the wood grain on my desk. And even that—”my desk”—is a product of partialization. I glance at it and think, “desk”; I don’t pay attention to the exact height, or length, or smoothness, or what’s supporting it above the ground. And so on.

So even without you, my audience, I’m still partializing my world without even trying. A lot of information is lost! But this is necessary, because otherwise I’d be overwhelmed by experience. We have finite minds and finite time to process a world of infinite detail and infinite possible experiences.

In that vein, here’s a third example. In rare cases, people who are born blind can have their sense of sight instated by surgery. But they don’t immediately start functioning as sighted individuals. They describe a confusing and utterly overwhelming in-pouring of colors and shapes, and it takes them months to learn how to mentally mark where objects begin and end and how perspective changes their apparent size and shape. Yes, they have to learn how to see “wooden desk by a window” instead of seeing the raw information of “brown here, and lighter brown here, and then bright grayish, but there’s still a similar brown below that, etc.” This is partialization. We reduce patterns of visual data into “materials.” Then we reduce clumps of materials into “objects.” Then we reduce collections of objects into “settings,” and we reduce the changes of objects into “movements.” And then we reduce patterns of movements and settings into “narratives.” And those narratives are what we think to ourselves and what we tell to other people.

Summary

We need symbols because we need to break down our complex experiences into simple comprehensible parts—both for easy communication with others and for easy comprehension ourselves. I’ll stop there for now. In my next post I’ll build upon these ideas to highlight another pitfall in our world of symbols. It has to do with the fact that our language plays such a major role in how we break down our experiences into concepts.

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