in other animals has in turn an important consequence for the first agent. A sexual act or a combined protective act against danger is furthered. In other cases, the con¬ sequences turn out useful to the species, to a numerically indeterminate group including individuals not yet born. Signaling acts evidently form the basic material of lan¬ guage. Similar activities occur without intent in man; thus a babe’s scream attracts the attention of an adult and evokes a response useful to the infant, although the cry itself is an organic overflow having no intent. So too a man’s posture and facial changes may indicate to another things which the man himself would like to con¬ ceal, so that he '‘gives himself away.” “Expression,” or signs, communication of meaning, exists in such cases for the observer, not for the agent.
While signaling acts are a material condition of language they are not language nor yet are they its sufficient condition. Only from an external standpoint, is the original action even a signal; the response of other animals to it is not to a sign, but, by some preformed mechanism, to a direct stimulus. By habit, by conditioned reflex, hens run to the farmer when he makes a clucking noise, or when they hear the rattle of grain in a pan. When the farmer raises his arms to throw the grain they scatter and fly, to return only when the movement ceases. They act as if alarmed; his movement is thus not a sign of food; it is a stimulus that evokes flight. But a human infant learns to discount such movements; to become interested in them as events preparatory to a desired consummation; he learns to treat them as signs of an ulterior event so that his response is to their meaning. He treats them as means to consequences. The hen’s activity is ego-centrie; that of the human being is participative. The latter puts himself at the standpoint of a situation in which two parties share. This is the essential peculiarity of lan¬ guage, or signs.
A requests B to bring him something, to which A points, say a flower. There is an original mechanism by which B may react to A’s movement in pointing. But natively such a reaction is to the movement, not to the pointing, not to the object pointed out. But B learns that the movement is a pointing; he responds to it not in itself, but as an index of something else. His response is trans¬ ferred from A’s direct movement to the object to which A points. Thus he does not- merely execute the natural acts of looking or grasping which the movement might instigate on its own account. The motion of A attracts his gaze to the thing pointed to; then, instead of just transferring his response from A’s movement to the native reaction he might make to the thing as stimulus, he responds in a way which is a function of A’s relationship, actual and potential, to the thing. The characteristic thing about B’s understanding of.4’s movement and sounds is that he responds to the thing from the stand¬ point of A. He perceives the thing as it may function in A’ s experience, instead of just ego-centrically. Similarly, A in making the request conceives the thing not only in its direct relationship to himself, but as a thing capable of being grasped and handled by B. He sees the thing as it may function in B’s experience. Such is the essence and import of communication, signs and meaning. Some¬ thing is literally made common in at least two different centres of behavior. To understand is to anticipate together, it is to make a cross-reference which, when acted upon, brings about a partaking in a common, inclusive, undertaking.
Stated in greater detail; B upon hearing A, makes a preparatory reaction of his eyes, hands and legs in view of the consummatory act of A’s possession; he engages in the act of grasping, carrying and tendering the flower to A. At the same time, A makes a preparatory response to B’s consummatory act, that of carrying and proffering the flower. Thus neither the sounds uttered by A, his gesture of pointing, nor the sight of the thing pointed to, is the occasion and stimulus of B’s act; the stimulus is B’s anticipatory share in the consummation of a trans¬ action in which both participate. (The heart of language is not “expression” of something antecedent, much less expression of antecedent thought. It is communication; the establishment of cooperation in an activity in which there are partners, and in which the activity of each is modified and regulated by partnership. To fail to under¬ stand is to fail to come into agreement in action; to mis¬ understand is to set up action at cross purposes. Take speech as behavioristically as you will, including the elimi¬ nation of all private mental states, and it remains true that it is markedly distinguished from the signaling acts of animals. Meaning is not indeed a psychic existence; it is primarily a property of behavior, and secondarily a property of objects. But the behavior of which it is a quality is a distinctive behavior; cooperative, in that response to another’s act involves contemporaneous response to a thing as entering into the other’s behavior, and this upon both sides. It is difficult to state the exact physiological mechanism which is involved. But about the fact there is no doubt. It constitutes the intelligibility of acts and things. Possession of the capacity to engage in such activity is intelligence. Intelligence and meaning are natural consequences of the peculiar form which interaction sometimes assumes in the case of human beings.
Primarily meaning is intent and intent is not personal in a private and exclusive sense. A proposes the consummatory possession of the flower through the medium or means of B’s action; B proposes to cooperate — or act adversely — in the fulfillment of A’s proposal. Secondar¬ ily, meaning is the acquisition of significance by things in their status in making possible and fulfilling shared cooperation. In the first place, it is the motion and sounds of A which have meaning, or are signs. Similarly the movements of B, while they immediate to him, are signs to A of B’s cooperation or refusal. But secondarily the thing pointed out by A to B gains meaning. It ceases to be just what it brutely is at the moment, and is responded to in its potentiality, as a means to remoter consequences. The flower pointed to for example, is portable; but apart from language portability is a brute contingency waiting for its actualization upon circum¬ stance. But when A counts upon the understanding and cooperation of B, and B responds to the intent of A, the flower is contemporaneously portable though not now actually in movement. Its potentiality, or con¬ ditioning of consequences, is an immediately recognized and possessed trait; the flower means portability instead of simply being portable. Animism, the attribution of desire and intent to inanimate things, is no mysterious projection of psychical traits; it is a misinterpretation of a natural fact, namely, that significant things are things actually implicated in situations of shared or social pur¬ pose and execution.
The logic of animism is simple. Since words act upon things indirectly, or as signs, and since words express the significant consequences of things, (the traits for the sake of which they are used), why should not words act also directly upon things to release their latent powers? Since we “call” things by their names, why should they not answer? And if they assist us as our friends do when ap¬ pealed to, is not this proof they are animated by friendly intent; or if they frustrate us, proof that they are filled with the same traits which inspirit our enemies? “Anim¬ ism” is thus the consequence of a direct transfer of proper¬ ties of a social situation to an immediate relationship of natural things to a person. Its legitimate and constant form is poetry, in which things and events are given voice and directly communicate with us.
If we consider the form or scheme of the situation in which meaning and understanding occur, we find an involved simultaneous presence and cross-reference of immediacy and efficiency, overt actuality and potentiality, the consummatory and the instrumental. A in making the request of B, at the same time makes the incipient and preparatory response of receiving the thing at the hands of B; he performs in readiness the consummatory act. B’ s understanding of the meaning of what A says, instead of being a mere reaction to sound, is an anticipa¬ tion of a consequence, while it is also an immediate activ¬ ity of eyes, legs, and hands in getting and giving the flower to A. The flower is the thing which it immediately is, and it also is means of a conclusion. All of this is directly involved in the existence of intelligible speech. No such simultaneous presence of finality and agency, is possible in things as purely physical — in abstraction, that is, of po¬ tential presence in a situation of communication. Since we have discovered that all things have a phase of poten¬ tial communicability, that is, that any conceivable thing may enter into discourse, the retrospective imputation of meanings and logical relationships to bare things is natural; it does no harm, save when the imputation is dogmatic and literal. What a physical event imme¬ diately is, and what it can do or its relationship are dis¬ tinct and incommensurable. But when an event has' meaning, its potential consequences become its integral and funded feature. When the potential consequences are important and repeated, they form the very nature and essence of a thing, its defining, identifying, and dis¬ tinguishing form. To recognize the thing is to grasp its definition. Thus we become capable of perceiving things' instead of merely feeling and having them. To perceive is to acknowledge unattained possibilities; it is to refer the present to consequences, apparition to issue, and thereby to behave in deference to the connections of events. As an attitude, perception or awareness is predictive expec- I tancy, wariness. Since potential consequences also mark the thingifself, and form its nature, the event thus marked becomes an object of contemplation; as meaning, future consequences already belong to the thing. The act of striving to bring them existentially into the world may be commuted into esthetic enjoyed possession of form.
Essence, as has been intimated, is but a. pronounced instance of meaning; to be partial, and to assign a meaning to a thing as the meaning is but to evince human subjec¬ tion to bias. Since consequences differ also in their consequence and hence importance, practical good sense may attach to this one-sided partiality, for the meaning seized upon as essence may designate extensive and recurrent consequences. Thus is explained the seeming paradox of the distinction and connection of essence and exist¬ ence. Essence is never existence, and yet it is the essence, the distilled import, of existence; the significant thing about it, its intellectual voucher, the means of inference and extensive transfer, and object of esthetic intuition.
In it, feeling and understanding are one; the meaning of a thing is the sense it makes.
Since the consequences which are liked have an empha¬ tic quality, it is not surprising that many consequences, even though recognized to be inevitable, are regarded as if they were accidental and alien. Thus the very essence of a thing is identified with those consummatory conse¬ quences which the thing has when conditions are felicitous. Thus the essence, one, immutable and con¬ stitutive, which makes the thing what it is, emerges from the various meanings which vary with varying condi¬ tions and transitory intents. When essence is then thought to contain existence as the perfect includes the imperfect, it is because a legitimate, practical measure of reality in terms of importance is illegitimately altered into a theoretical measure.
Discourse itself is both instrumental and consummatory. Communication is an exchange which procures something wanted; it involves a claim, appeal, order, direction or request, which realizes want at less cost than personal labor exacts, since it procures the cooperative assistance, of others. Communication is also an immediate enhance¬ ment of life, enjoyed for its own sake. The dance is accompanied by song and becomes the drama; scenes of danger and victory are most fully savored when they are told. Greeting becomes a ceremonial with its prescribed rites. Language is always a form of action and in its instrumental use is always a means of concerted action for an end, while at the same time it finds in itself all the goods of its possible consequences. For there is no mode of action as fulfilling and as rewarding as is concerted con¬ sensus of action. It brings with it the sense of sharing and merging in a whole. Forms of language are un¬ rivalled in ability to create this sense, at first with direct participation on the part of an audience; and then, as literary forms develop, through imaginative identifi¬ cation. Greek thinkers had distinguished patterns in Greek literary art of consummatory uses of speech, and the meanings that were discovered to be indispensable to communication were treated as final and ultimate in nature itself. Essences were hypos t at i zed into original and constitutive forms of all existence.
The idea put forth about the connection of meaning with language is not to be confused with traditional nominalism. It does not imply that meaning and essence are adventitious and arbitrary. The defect of nominalism lies in its virtual denial of interaction and association. It regarded the word not as a mode of social action with which to realize the ends of association, but as an expression of a ready-made, exclusively individual, mental state; sensation, image or feeling, which, being an existence, is necessarily particular. F or the sound, gesture, or written mark which is involved in language is a particu¬ lar existence. But as such it is not a word, and it does not become a word by declaring a mental existence; it becomes a word by gaining meaning; and it gains meaning when its use establishes a genuine community of action. Interaction, operative relationship, is as much a fact about events as are particularity and immediacy. Lan¬ guage and its consequences are characters taken on by natural interaction and natural conjunction in specified conditions of organization. Nominalism ignores organiza¬ tion, and thus makes nonsense of meanings.
Language is specifically a mode of interaction of at least two beings, a speaker and a hearer; it presupposes an organized group to which these creatures belong, and from whom they have acquired their habits of speech. It is therefore a relationship, not a particularity. This con¬ sideration alone condemns traditional nominalism. The meaning of signs moreover always includes something common as between persons and an object. When we attribute meaning to the speaker as his intent, we take for granted another person who is to share in the execution of the intent, and also something, independent of the persons concerned, through which the intent is to be realized. Tersons and thing must alike serve as means in a common, shared consequence. This community of partaking is meaning.
The invention and use of tools have played a large part in consolidating meanings, because a tool is a thing used as means to consequences, instead of being taken directly and physically. It is intrinsically relational, anticipa¬ tory, predictive. Without reference to the absent, or “transcendence,” nothing is a tool. The most convinc¬ ing evidence that animals do not “think” is found in the fact is that they have no tools, but depend upon their own relatively-fixed bodily structures to effect results Because of such dependence they have no way of dis¬ tinguishing the immediate existence of anything from its potential efficiencies; no way of projecting its conse¬ quences to define a nature or essence. Anything whatever used as a tool exhibits distinction and identification. Fire existentially burns; while fire which is employed in order to cook and keep warm, especially after other things, like rubbing sticks together, are used as means to generate it, is an existence having meaning and potential essence. The presence of inflammation and terror or discomfort is no longer the whole story; an occurrence is now an object; and while it is absurd to hold (as idealism virtually does) that the meaning of an existence is the real substance of the existence, it is equally absurd not to recognize the full transformative import of what has happened.
As to be a tool, or to be used as means for consequences, is to have and to endow with meaning, language, being the tool of tools, is the cherishing mother of all signifi¬ cance. For other instrumentalities and agencies, the things usually thought of as appliances, agencies and furnishings, can originate and develop only in social groups made possible by language. Things become tools ceremonially and institutionally. The notoriously con¬ ventionalized and traditional character of primitive uten¬ sils and their attendant symbolizations demonstrate this fact. Moreover, tools and artifices of agency are always found in connection with some division of labor which depends upon some device of communication. The statement can be proved in a more theoretical way. Im¬ mediacy as such is transient to the point of evanescence, and its flux has to be fixed by some easily recoverable and recurrent act within control of the organism, like gesture and spoken sounds, before things can be inten¬ tionally utilized. A creature might accidentally warm itself by a fire or use a stick to stir the ground in a way which furthered the growth of food-plants. But the effect of comfort ceases with the fire, existentially; a stick even though once used as a lever would revert to the status of being just a stick, unless the relationship between it and its consequence were distinguished and retained. Only language, or some form of artificial signs, serves to register the relationship and make it fruitful in other contexts of particular existence. Spears, urns, baskets, snares may have originated accidentally in some consummatory consequence of natural events. But only repetition through concerted action accounts for their becoming institutionalized as tools, and this concert of action depends upon the use of memoranda and com¬ munication. To make another aware of the possibility of a use or objective relationship is to perpetuate what is otherwise an incident as an agency; communication is a condition of consciousness.
Thus every meaning is generic or universal. It is something common between speaker, hearer and the thing to which speech refers. It is universal also as a means of generalization. For a meaning is a method of action, a way of using things as means to a shared con¬ summation, and method is general, though the things to which it is applied are particular. The meaning, for example, of portability is something in which two persons and an object share. But portability after it is once apprehended becomes a way of treating other things; it is extended widely. Whenever this is a chance, it is applied; application ceases only when a thing refuses to be treated in this way. And even then refusal may be only a challenge to develop the meaning of portability until the thing can be transported. Meanings are rules for using and interpreting things; interpretation being al¬ ways an imputation of potentiality for some consequence.
It would be difficult to imagine any doctrine more absurd than the theory that general ideas or meanings arise by the comparison of a number of particulars, eventuating in the recognition of something common to them all. Such a comparison may be employed to check a suggested widened application of a rule. But generalization is carried spontaneously as far as it will plausibly go; usually much further than it will actually go. A newly acquired meaning is forced upon everything that does not obviously resist its application, as a child uses a new word whenever he gets a chance or as he plays with a new toy. Meanings are self -moving to new cases. In the end, conditions force a chastening of this spontane¬ ous tendency. The scope and limits of application are ascertained experimentally in the process of application. The history of science, to say nothing of popular beliefs, is sufficient indication of the difficulty found in submit¬ ting this irrational generalizing tendency to the disci¬ pline of experience. To call it a priori is to express a fact; but to impute the a priori character of the generaliz¬ ing force of meanings to reason is to invert the facts. Rationality is acquired when the tendency becomes cir¬ cumspect, based upon observation and tested by deliber¬ ate experiment.
Meaning is objective as well as universal. Originat¬ ing as a concerted or combined method of using or enjoying things, it indicates a possible interaction, not a thing in separate singleness. A meaning may not of course have the particular objectivity which is imputed to it, as whistling does not actually portend wind, nor the cere¬ monial sprinkling of water indicate rain. But such magi¬ cal imputations of external reference testify to the objec¬ tivity of meaning as such. Meanings are naturally the meaning of something or other; difficulty lies in discrimi¬ nating the right thing. It requires the discipline of ordered and deliberate experimentation to teach us that some meanings delightful or horrendous as they are, are meanings communally developed in the process of com¬ munal festivity and control, and do not represent the polities, and ways and means of nature apart from social arts. Scientific meanings were superadded to esthetic and affectional meanings when objects instead of being defined in terms of their consequences in social interactions and discussion were defined in terms of their consequences with respect to one another. This discrimination per¬ mitted esthetic and affective objects to be freed from magical imputations, which were due to attributing to them in rerum natura the consequences they had in the transmitted culture of the group.
Yet the truth of classic philosophy in assigning objec¬ tivity to meanings, essences, ideas remains unassailable. It is heresy to conceive meanings to be private, a property of ghostly psychic existences. Berkeley with all his nom¬ inalism, saw that “ideas,” though particular in existence, are general in function and office. His attribution of the ideas which are efficacious in conduct to an order estab¬ lished by God, while evincing lack of perception of their naturalistic origin in communication or communal interaction, manifests a sounder sense of the objectivity of meanings than has been shown by those who eliminated his theology while retaining his psychology. The incon¬ sistency of the sensationalists who, stopping short of extreme scepticism, postulate that some associations of ideas correspond to conjunctions among things is also reluctantly extorted evidence of how intimation of the objectivity of ideas haunts the mind in spite of theory to the contrary.
Meanings are objective because they are modes of natural interaction; such an interaction, although primar¬ ily between organic beings, as includes things and energies external to living creatures. The regulative force of legal meanings affords a convenient illustration. A traf¬ fic policeman holds up his hand or blows a whistle. His act operates as a signal to direct movements. But it is more than an episodic stimulus. It embodies a rule of social action. Its proximate meaning is its near-by con¬ sequences in coordination of movements of persons and vehicles; its ulterior and permanent meaning — essence — is its consequence in the way of security of social move¬ ments. Failure to observe the signal subjects a person to arrest, fine or imprisonment. The essence embodied in the policeman’s whistle is not an occult reality super¬ imposed upon a sensuous or physical flux and imparting form to it; a mysterious subsistence somehow housed within a psychical event. Its essence is the rule, com¬ prehensive and persisting, the standardized habit, of social interaction, and for the sake of which the whistle is used. The pattern, archetype, that forms the essence of the whistle as a particular noise is an orderly arrangement of the movements of persons, and vehicles established by social agreement as its consequence. This meaning is independent of the psychical landscape, the sensations and imagery, of the policeman and others concerned. But it is not on that account a timeless spiritual ghost nor pale logical subsistence divorced from events.
The case is the same with the essence of any non-human event, like gravity, or virtue, or vertebrate. Some con¬ sequences of the interaction of things concern us; the consequences are not merely physical; they enter finally into human action and destiny. Fire burns and the burn¬ ing is of moment. It enters experience; it is fascinating to watch swirling flames; it is important to avoid its dangers and to utilize its beneficial potencies. When we name an event, calling it fire, we speak proleptically; we do not name an immediate event; that is impossible. We employ a term of discourse; we invoke a meaning, namely, the potential consequences of the existence. The ultimate meaning of the noise made by the traffic officer is the total consequent system of social behavior, in which individuals are subjected, by means of noise, to social coordination; its proximate meaning is a coordination of the movements of persons and vehicles in the neighbor¬ hood and directly affected. Similarly the ultimate mean¬ ing, or essence, denominated fire, is the consequences of certain natural events within the scheme of human activi¬ ties, in the experience of social intercourse, the hearth and domestic altar, shared comfort, working of metals, rapid transit, and other such affairs. “Scientifically,” we ignore these ulterior meanings. And quite properly; for when a sequential order of changes is determined, the final mean¬ ing in immediate enjoyments and appreciations is capable of control.
While classic thought, and its survival in later idealisms, assumed that the ulterior human meanings, meanings of direct association in discourse, are forms of nature apart from their place in discourse, modern thought is given to marking a sharp separation between meanings deter¬ mined in terms of the causal relationship of things and meanings in terms of human association. Consequently, it treats the latter as negligible or as purely private, not the meanings of natural events at all. It identifies the proximate meanings with the only valid meanings, and abstract relations become an idol. To pass over in science the human meanings of the consequences of natural interactions is legitimate; indeed it is indispensable. To ascertain and state meanings in abstraction from social or shared situations is the only way in which the latter can be intelligently modified, extended and varied. Mathe¬ matical symbols have least connection with distinctively human situations and consequences; and the finding of such terms, free from esthetic and moral significance, is a necessary part of the technique. Indeed, such elimina¬ tion of ulterior meanings supplies perhaps the best pos¬ sible empirical definition of mathematical relations. They are meanings without direct reference to human behavior. Thus an essence becomes wholly “intellectual” or scientific, devoid of consummatory implication; it ex¬ presses the purely instrumental without reference to the objects to which the events in question are instrumental. It then becomes the starting point of reflection that may terminate in ends or consequences in human suffering and enjoyment not previously experienced. Abstraction from any particular consequence (which is the same thing as taking instrumentality generally), opens the way to new uses and consequences.
This is what happens when the meaning of the traffic officer’s signal is detached from its own context, and taken up into, say, written and published language, a topic of independent consideration by experts or by civic admini¬ strators. In being placed in a context of other meanings, (theoretically and scientifically discussed), it is liberated from the contingencies of its prior use. The outcome may be the invention of a new and improved system of sema¬ phores which exercise regulation of human interaction more effectively. Deliberate abstraction, however, from all ulterior human use and consequence is hardly likely to occur in the case of discourse about a signal system. In physical science, the abstraction or liberation is complete. Things are defined by means of symbols that convey only their consequences with respect to one another. ‘Water’ in ordinary experience designates an essence of something which has familiar bearings and uses in human life, drink and cleansing and the extinguishing of fire. But H20 gets away from these connections, and embodies in its essence only instrumental efficiency in respect to things independent of human affairs.