What goes on when we write? Informally, I describe this process as follows: humans turn complicated reality into into discrete categories, which can be encoded and saved to a brain external substrate (e.g. a notebook). In this way, writing allows people to reason with complexity beyond their "initially given" biological and physiological capacities through written representations.
While this all may seem obvious enough, I would like to point out that the above account is a much more general account of 'writing' than one may typically encounter. For instance, 'writing' might be described as "visible speech", a process that is essentially subordinate to a greater linguistic capacity. Language in the view of many is given—linguistic items (like words) contrast with each other in a special sort of system we are innately endowed with.
In contrast, by the account given here the representation of words (or some other division of speech) specifically is but one type of a more broader making human meaning-making capacity, which also explains how we can make use of written equations, musical scores, tally marks, etc.
Listless philosophizing
In writing the previous post on David Allen's Getting Things Done system, I discussed one specific application of writing – the creation of TODO lists to organize, manage, and execute projects of any scale. Writing down lists of things is a commonplace way of "remembering" lists of items. So much so, that when a waiter at a restaurant doesn't jot down a customer's order, this is a matter of praise ("good memory!") or concern ("are you sure you can get my order right?"). The technology of writing and lists has become so commonplace that not using it has become the "marked" (not default, less common) way of doing things.
Lists are not "complete" languages in the way we normally think about language—complex meaning-making systems that can express a whole score of meanings. Yet, there is order to them and they can be written. Essentially, I think that useful lists are built off of meaningful contrasts.
Suppose you have to remember to bring the following items to your friend's house tomorrow:
What do you remember? How would you verbalize your thoughts if asked to?
Person A:
Okay, got it! I'll bring a desk, a pad of paper, the corner of a mouse pad, and a shirt draped over a chair. Additionally, I'll bring a fidget spinner on top of a Spanish-English dictionary (but not covering the text "SPANISH-ENGLISH", a scientific calculator that must be OFF, and a red metronome that is not aligned with the table top.
Person B:
Remember to bring: headphones, metronome, spinner, Spanish-English dictionary, calculator, Bible.
Person A sounds like either a smirking college freshman in an intro to philosophy class, an exhausted artist, or a non-human. This same person might tell you "time to get a watch" if you ask what time it is. On the other hand, Person B proceeds in a way we would expect, naming the human-identifiable items that stand out, from left to right.
What's going on here? Naturally, us (humans), when doing some task such as making sure we bring a set of items somewhere, will sort through lots of sensory information and pick out a small number of essential features to "compress" the content of what we have to remember. In most cases, this will involve putting words to reality (i.e. using the names of things we already have) and keeping track of these more abstract categories, rather than trying to reconstruct our entire perceptual experience. In this way, when we write, or even orally describe things in words, we make meaningful structure explicit on otherwise "messy" phenomena (like sound waves or photographs).
In making a list of items to remember or write down, a concise and unambiguous set of labels sufficient to pick out the relevant items from other candidate items serves as our system of representation.
"Please hand me the yellow dictionary"
When Person B lists "headphones", this may only be an adequate description if it is clear to this person what is meant by "headphones"; a more elaborate label like "black headphones" might be necessary for picking out this item if Person B had to distinguish these headphones from some other headphones, for instance. "The dictionary" may be appropriate to pick out the Spanish-English dictionary in the first image, but if the dictionary had to be picked out among other yellow colored volumes, a different label would be become necessary.
What features are meaningful or useful to us will depend on the task at hand—what the list being created is being used for. Certain properties may be more salient to us to use to differentiate items laid out before us (e.g. color). But as seen in the second photograph with three yellow dictionaries, these properties only become salient to us in context. Though I think, certain sorts of contexts are more common than others.
Picturing meaning
Humans can create systems of contrasting items, regardless if those things correspond nicely to physical entities in the world (yeah, yeah... I'm assuming lots of things exist). The items used above in the list examples (dictionaries, spinners, headphones...) are recognizable objects we can see and hold in our hands. We recognize them as wholes—you would certainly not be pleased if your friend returned you two half-headphones in place of the one pair of headphones you lent out.
One domain I've experienced meaningful contrast making is in talking about drawing, photographs, and other two-dimensional representations of decidedly three-dimensional places.
Consider this photograph:
A Photograph of Mirror Lake at Yosemite National Park
As I see it, there are no discrete elements that can be identified and said to belong to this image in the same way that you could identify and count the words or characters making up this text. However, we could create something like a "grammar of photographs" and reduce photographs to a number of discrete types.
We can produce a data-set summarizing a collection of photos. Suppose I'm working on fixing some technical issues with how I take landscape photographs:
Name Date Time horizon_straight exposure
001.jpg 1/2/18 07:00 no under
002.jpg 1/2/18 07:02 no ok
003.jpg 1/2/18 07:03 yes ok
004.jpg 1/2/18 09:03 yes under
...
From a large collection of photos (many gigabytes), I may extract only the meaningful contrasts between these photos I am interested in for improving my photography skills. In the above hypothetical example, I code two categories 'horizon_straight' and 'exposure' to see when I take crooked or straight photos and when I correctly adjust the lighting of my photos (on one crude metric).
'Compressing' the information of this photograph in this way is psychological or phenomenological – it deals with human experience of representation rather than the actual form that representation takes. What makes a system discrete is a finite set of elements defined by oppositions to one another.
This idea is borrowed from Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), most well-known as a founding figure for the discipline of linguistics. Saussure distinguished between speech (parole), the actual tokens of language use, and language (langue), the underlying semiotic (symbolic, meaning-making) system. Saussure was keen to point out how his semiotics (which he called "semiology") could be extended beyond the representation of speech.
Evidently, we use symbolic systems to represent many things besides strings of words, e.g. musical scores, mathematical equations, tables and charts, traffic signs, ... The secret sauce is discrete signs which form a system in how they behave differently contrasting with each other.
The write approach
Contrasting items can be represented graphically. Already, we looked at two examples of this above, the creation of lists (which you read in text) and the analysis of a fake photo collection (which was presented in a data table).
An application par excellence of the human knack (i.e. cognitive bias) for making sense of complex, continuous phenomena by creating discrete solutions is the use of written systems, which I'll define as the technology of discrete graphic representation. With our natural knack for seeing patterns (even if they aren't there) and making categories, us humans find ways to represent all sorts of information into writing.
A particularly useful sort of writing system are those representing speech, which most people become well-practiced in through years in school. In the list examples first given, writing would be used to represent words which we already attach to some concepts.
The concepts writing represents don't have to be verbal though, as shown in the photograph example where a new concept or category 'horizon_straight' was introduced to talk about a fairly specific thing we could consider while looking at landscape photos.
Provided a person remembers how to use that particular system, writing permits rapid encoding and decoding of information onto a relatively substrate independent "external mind" (e.g. a word processor, sheet of paper). The use of writing, as opposed to a picture or some less explicitly structured data, guarantees certain information can be preserved, provided a knowledge of the system (or "code") being used.
Externalizing the act of representation of information, we can navigate new maps of meaning. Writing will allow me to edit the contents of this post later to improve its organization. Ha! But, if this had just been me arm-chair philosophizing orally over a cup of coffee, that "editing" would be a much different sort of process.
Labels: cognitive artifacts, language, linguistics, memory, philosophy, psychology, semiotics
