Signs, meaning and the nature of abstraction

The basis of communication is abstraction. This equals that.

Obama=change. McCain=experience. Sarah Palin=pig. A well groomed pig, to be specific and to interpret recent political rhetoric from the stance that nothing a presidential candidate says is truly offhand.

Contemporary discussions of communication (at least in semiotics which is the field that seems to take the broadest approach) use the term “sign” as the basic unit of discourse (a term for “communication” used by semioticians).

The discussion of course is about abstraction, the human ability to use one thing as a proxy for another thing. Two fingers held up to a fellow hunter, for instance, can represent a pair of birds in a tree. The word “dog” represents a four-legged mammal with fur and a long tail. A tap on the arm represents a call to pay attention.

We share some of these abilities with animals. The bower bird, for instance, constructs pimpin’ cribs to attracted fluttering females. The message: I’m healthy, love me. Good bower=good genes. But, really, we humans kick animal butt when it comes to abstraction.

Cognitive neuroscience investigates how our brains store information from the sensory world and store it in electrical circuits made up of neurons. The brain then draw generalizations (abstractions) from that information, noting trends among objects and using common characterists to generate create abstract categories. This bird and that bird make bowers, thus they go in the same category, one designated by the verbal abstraction “bower bird.”

The English word abstraction derives from the Latin abstractus, past participle of abstahere, to drag away. The root prefix is abs - or, “to pull” or “draw.”

Relevant definitions from Webster’s include: “disassociated from any specific instance”; “expressing a quality apart from an object”; “having only intrinsic form with little or no attempt at pictorial representation or narrative content.”

That last one is puzzling, but I’m going to ignore it for now.

Much debate has revolved around how concrete the relationship is between symbols, sounds and images (signs) and the objects (concepts, physical objects, etc.) with which they are associated (signified).

In fact, many of the differences between the various approaches in literary and cultural theory seem to hinge on the nature of link between sign and signified.

One of the biggest schism, for instance, was that of liberal humanism, the traditional approaches the English studies, and structuralism. One simple difference among the many between them was that liberal humanist critics saw the meanings of words as immutable, while structuralists saw meaning as a fluid thing that changed over time. (Warning: I might be over reaching here.)

Structuralism began with the work of the French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who wrote that “The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.”

Thus, in the structuralist view, words are decoupled from the things they represent. (Onomatopoetic words might be seen as having a closer connection, because there is a sensory link between sign and signified.)