Nature, Communication and Meaning

"Language is always a form of action and in its instrumental use is always a means of concerted action for an end" (p. 144).

"there is no mode of action as fulfilling and as rewarding as is concerted consensus of action" (p. 145).

February 19th, 2008.  The "Dewey Drums" project.

Meaning and communication were dependant on each other as they evolved in nature.  Throughout Dewey's fifth chapter, the importance of social interaction to the development of meaning is paramount.  "If we had not talked with others and they with us, we should never talk to and with ourselves" (p. 135).  He goes on, "Because of converse, social give and take, various organic attitudes become an assemblage of persons engaged in converse, conferring with one another, over-hearing unwelcome remarks, accusing and excusing.  Through speech a person dramatically identifies himself with potential acts and deeds; he plays many roles, not in successive stages of life but in contemporaneously enacted drama.  Thus mind emerges." (emphasis mine.)

Meaning and mind are social conditions of nature.   Dewey relates how natural movements and sounds in animals led to communication, "but they became language only when used within a context of mutual assistance and direction" (p. 139).  "The story of language is the story of the use made of these occurrences." These movements, like pointing and speaking in humans, operate through an object and an action, to allow the one being spoken to to see the object from the point of view of the speaker.  "He sees the thing as it may function in B's experience.  Such is the essence and import of communication, signs and meaning.  Something is literally made common in at least two different centres of behavior.  To understand is to anticipate together" (p. 141). 

"Possession of the capacity to engage in such activity is intelligence" (p. 142).

With language perception becomes possible, instead of merely coming into contact with things, we can name and identify them, move them out of the world of immediate experience and into reflection.  "To perceive is to acknowledge unattained possibilities" (p. 143). Here we start to see Dewey's discussion of tools, means, ends, the useful arts, and now words coming together. 

And with language and meaning the idea of the essence rises.  I believe Dewey intersects with James and Wittgenstein here, "Essence...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 subjection to bias...Essence is never existence, and yet it is the essence, the distilled import, of existence...In it, feeling and understanding are one" (p. 144).  And more directly to Wittgenstein's family of relations, "Thus, the essence, one, immutable and constitutive, which makes the thing what it is, emerges from the various meanings which vary with conditions and transitory intents."

Once we have words and essences, their meanings can become independent of their original objects.  This happens through discourse, as humans use old meanings in new contexts.  These become logical systems of their own.  Dewey illustrates this point through the use of legal language, which conveys the essence of ideas which are not found in the objects in nature.  I think this discussion is a reference to justice and possibly to morals.

I think this is also true of art, "art fixes those standards of enjoyment and appreciation with which other things are compared; it selects the objects of future desires; it stimulates effort.  This is true of the objects in which a particular person finds his immediate or esthetic values, and it is true of collective man" (p. 159).  Thus art, while not intentionally, is a critic of society.