<p> Symbols by S.I. Hayakawa [From Language in Thought and Action]</p><p>This basic need, which certainly is obvious only in man, is the need of symbolization. The symbol- making function is one of man's primary activities, like eating, looking, or moving about. It is the fundamental process of the mind, and goes on all the time. -- Susanne K. Langer</p><p>Man's achievements rest on the use of symbols. -- Alfred Korzybski</p><p>Animals struggle with each other for food or for leadership, but they do not, like human beings, struggle with each other for things that stand for food or leadership, such things as our paper symbols of wealth (money, bonds, titles), badges of rank to wear on our clothes, or low-number license plates. For animals, the relationship in which one thing stands for something else does not appear to exist except in very rudimentary form. A chimpanzee is said to be capable of being taught to drive a car, but there would be one thing wrong with its driving: its reactions are such that if a red light shows when it is halfway across the street, it will stop in the middle of the crossing, while if a green light shows while another car is stalled in its path, it will go ahead regardless of consequences. In other words, so far as a chimpanzee is concerned, the red light can hardly be said to stand for stop; it is stop.</p><p>Let us then introduce two terms to represent this distinction between the "red light is stop" relationship, which the chimpanzee understands, and the "red light stands for stop" relationship, which only the human being understands. To the chimpanzee, the red light is, we shall say, a signal, and we shall term its reaction a signal reaction: that is, a complete and invariable reaction that occurs whether or not the conditions warrant. To the human being, on the other hand, the red light is, in our terminology, a symbol, and we shall term the human reaction a symbol reaction; that is, a delayed reaction, conditional upon the circumstances. In other words, the nervous system capable only of signal reactions identifies the signal with the thing for which the signal stands; the human nervous system, however, working under normal conditions, understands no necessary connection between the symbol and that for which the symbol stands. Human beings do not automatically jump up in the expectation of being fed whenever they hear a refrigerator door slam.</p><p>Human beings, because they can understand certain things to stand for other things, have developed that we shall term the symbolic process. Whenever two or more human beings can communicate with each other, they can, by agreement, make anything stand for anything. Feathers worn on the head can be made to stand for tribal chieftainship; cowrie shells or rings of brass or pieces of paper can stand for wealth; crossed sticks can stand for a set of religious beliefs; buttons, elks' teeth, ribbons, special styles of ornamental haircutting, or tattooing can stand for social affiliations. The symbolic process permeates human life at the most savage as well as at the most civilized levels. Warriors, medicine men, police officers, nurses, cardinals, and queens wear costumes that symbolize their occupations. Athletes collect trophies and college students collect membership keys in honorary societies to symbolize victories in their respective fields. There are very few things that people do or want to do, possess or want to possess that have not, in addition to their mechanical or biological value, a symbolic value.</p><p>Fashionable clothes, as Thorstein Veblen pointed out in his Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), are highly symbolic material, cut, and ornament are dictated only partly by considerations of warmth, 1 comfort, or practicability. The more we dress up in fine clothes, the more we restrict our freedom of action. But by no means of delicate embroideries, easily soiled fabrics, starched shirts, high heels, long fingernails, and other such sacrifices of comfort, the wealthy classes manage to symbolize the fact that they don't have to work for a living. The not so wealthy, on the other hand, by imitating these symbols of wealth, symbolize their conviction that, even if they do work for a living, they are just as good as anybody else.</p><p>Again, we select our furniture to serve as visible symbols of our taste, wealth, and social position. We may choose a house on the basis of feeling that it "looks well" to have a "good address." We trade in perfectly good cars for later models, not always to get better transportation, but to give evidence to the community that we can afford such luxuries. (I once had an eight-year-old car in good running condition. A friend of mine, a repairman who knew the car, kept urging me to trade it in for a new model. "But why?" I asked. "The old car's in fine shape still." "Yeah, but what the hell," the mechanic said, "all you've got is transportation.")</p><p>With the changes in American life since Veblen's time, many changes have taken place in our ways of symbolizing social status. Once, a deeply tanned skin indicated a life spent in farming and other outdoor labor, and women in those days went to a great deal of trouble shielding themselves from the sun with parasols, wide hats, and long sleeves. More recently, a pale skin has indicated confinement in offices and factories, while a deeply tanned skin suggests a life of leisure---of trips to Florida, Sun Valley, and Hawaii. Hence, a sun-darkened skin, once considered ugly because its symbolized work, came to be considered beautiful because it symbolizes leisure. And pallid people in New York, Chicago, and Toronto who cannot afford midwinter trips to the West Indies find comfort in browning themselves during visits to tanning salons. Recently, concern over the health hazards of too much sun has affected the symbolism of suntans yet again.</p><p>Food, too, is highly symbolic. Religious dietary regulations such as those of the Catholics, Jews, Moslems and Hindus are observed in order to symbolize adherence to one's religion. Specific foods symbolize specific festivals and observations in almost every country---for example, cherry pie on George Washington's birthday and haggis on Burns' Nicht. Eating together has been a highly symbolic act throughout all of human history. "Companion" means one with whom you share your bread. Such complicated and apparently unnecessary behavior leads philosophers, both amateur and professional, to ask over and over again, "Why can't human beings live simply and naturally?"</p><p>The trouble is that, as Suzanne K. Langer has said, "The symbol-making function is one of man's primary activities. . . . It is the fundamental process of the mind, and goes on all the time." One may try to live a simple life with little concern for symbols of affluence, social status, and the like, but one soon discovers that the rejection of symbolism is itself symbolic. Wearing a necktie is symbolic, but not wearing a necktie is equally symbolic. Parents and children have had bitter quarrels in recent years over hair styles---long, short, spiked, shaved. Such quarrels are not really about hair but about the symbolic meanings involved in how hair is worn.</p><p>Perhaps some of us would like to escape the complexity of human life for the relative simplicity of such lives as dogs and cats lead. But the symbolic process, which makes possible the absurdities of human conduct, also makes possible language and therefore all the human achievements dependent upon language. The fact that more things can go wrong with motorcars than with wheelbarrows is not reason for going back to wheelbarrows. Similarly, the fact that the symbolic process makes complicated follies possible is not reason to return to a cat-and-dog existence. To understand the symbolic process is to be able to use it to advantage; not to understand it is to remain forever its victim. 2 Language as Symbolism</p><p>Of all forms of symbolism, language is the most highly developed, most subtle, and most complicated. Human beings have agreed, in the course of centuries of mutual dependency, to let the various noises that they can produce with their lungs, throats, tongues, teeth, and lips systematically stand for specified happenings in their nervous systems. We call that system of agreements language. For example, we who speak English have been so trained that when our nervous systems register the presence of a certain kind of animal, we may make the following noise: "There's a cat." Anyone hearing us expects, on looking in the same direction, to experience a similar event in his or her nervous system---one that would have led to an identical verbal response. Similarly, we have been so trained that when we are conscious of wanting food, we make the noise, "I'm hungry."</p><p>There is no necessary connection between the symbol and that which is symbolized. Just as one can wear a Los Angles Dodgers baseball cap without being a Dodgers fan, so can one make the noise "I'm hungry" without being hungry. Furthermore, just as social rank can be symbolized by diamonds in the ears, by tattooing on the breast, by gold ornaments on the watch chain, by a thousand different devices according to the culture we live in, so the fact of being hungry can be symbolized by a thousand different noises according to the culture we live in: "J'ai faim," or "Es hungert mich," or "Ho appetito," or "Hara ga hetta," and so on.</p><p>However obvious these facts may appear at first glance, they are actually not so obvious as they seem, except when we take special pains to think about the subject. Symbols and things symbolized are independent of each other; nevertheless, all of us have a way of feeling as if, and sometimes acting as if, there were necessary connections. For example, there is the vague sense that we all have that foreign languages are inherently absurd: "Foreigners have funny names for things; why don't they call things by their right names?" This feeling exhibits itself most strongly in those American and English tourists who seem to believe that they can make the people of any country understand English if they shout it loud enough. Like the little boy who is reported to have said, "Pigs are called pigs because they are such dirty animals," they feel that the symbol is inherently connected in some way with the thing symbolized. Then there are the people who feel that since snakes are "nasty, slimy creatures" the word "snake" is a nasty, slimy, word. (Incidentally, snakes are not slimy.)</p><p>The Pitfalls of Drama</p><p>Naivete regarding the symbolic process extends to symbols other than words, of course. In the case of drama (stage, movies, television), there appear to be people in almost every audience who never quite fully realize that a film or television show is a set of fictional, symbolic representations. An actor is one who symbolizes other people, real or imagined. But Larry Hagman, who plays the wicked, cunning J. R. Ewing on television's Dallas reports that fans sometimes denounce him for J.R.'s ruthless behavior. Robert Young, the actor who played the title role in Marcus Welby, M.D., has often been asked for medical advice. During congressional hearings in the 1980's, actress Sissy Spacek, Jessica Lange, and Sally Field testified before Congress on the farm crisis, not because of their farm experience but because they had acted in films depicting the difficulties of farm life. In perhaps the most famous example, scores of astonished patriots rushed to recruiting offices to help defend the nation when, on October 30, 1938, the United States was "invaded" by an "army from Mars" in a radio dramatization of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds.</p><p>The Word is Not the Thing 3 The above examples illustrate some confusion toward words and what, if anything, they stand for. There would be little point in mentioning these incidents if we were all uniformly and permanently aware that symbols are independent of what is symbolized. But we are not. Most of us have, in some area or other of our thinking, improper habits of evaluation. For this, society itself is to blame: most societies systematically encourage, concerning certain topics, the habitual confusion of symbols with things symbolized. For example, if a Japanese schoolhouse caught fire, it used to be obligatory in the days of emperor worship to try to rescue the emperor's picture (there was one in every schoolhouse), even at the risk of one's life. (If you got burned to death, you were posthumously enobled.) In our society, we are encouraged to go into debt in order that we may display, as symbols of prosperity, shiny new automobiles. Strangely enough, the possession of new automobiles even under these conditions makes their "owners" feel prosperous. In all societies, the symbols of piety, civic virtue, or of patiotism are often prized about actual piety, civic virtue, or patriotism. During the 1988 election campaign, George Bush visited a flag-making factory to show that he was a patriot. In one way or another, we are all like the student who cheats on exams in order to make Phi Beta Kappa: it is often more important to have the symbol than what it stands for.</p><p>The habitual confusion of symbols with things symbolized, whether on the part of individuals or societies, is serious enough at all levels of culture to provide a perennial human problem. The charge aginst the Pharisees, it will be remembered, was that they were obsessively concerned with the symbols of piety at the expense of an adequate concern with its spirit. But with the pervasiveness of modern communication systems, the problem of confusing verbal symbols with realities assumes peculiar urgency. We are constantly being talked at, by teachers, preachers, salespeople, public-relations counsels, governmental agencies, and movie sound tracks. The cries of the hawkers of soft drinks, detergents, and perfumes pursue us into our homes, thanks to radio and television---and in some households the sets are never turned off from morning to night. Our mailboxes are stuffed with advertising. Billboards confront us on the highway, and we even take portable televisions and radios with us to the seashore.</p><p>We live in an environment shaped and largely created by hitherto unparalleled semantic influences: mass-circulation newspapers and magazines which are given to reflecting, in many cases, the prejudices and obsessions of their reporters and editors; radio and television programs, both local and network, almost completely dominated by commercial motives; public-relations counsels who are simply well-paid craftsmen in the art of manipulating and reshaping our semantic environment, but fraught with danger; it is only a slight exaggeration to say that Hitler conquered Austria by radio. Today, the full resources of advertising agencies, public-relations experts, radio, television, and slanted stories are brought to bear in order to influence our decisions in election campaigns, especially in presidential election years.</p><p>Citizens of a modern society need, therefore, more than that ordinary "common sense" which was defined by Stuart Chase as that which tells you that the world is flat. They need to be systematically aware of the powers and limitations of symbols, especially words, if they are to guard against being driven into complete bewilderment by the complexity of their semantic environment.</p><p>The first of the principles governing symbols is this: The symbol is not the thing symbolized; the word is not the thing; the map is not the territory it stands for</p><p>4 The symbol IS NOT the thing symbolized The map IS NOT the territory The word IS NOT the thing</p><p>Maps and Territories</p><p>There is a sense in which we all live in two worlds. First, we live in the world of happenings that we know at first hand. This is an extremely small world, consisting only of that continuum of things that we have actually seen, felt, or heard----the flow of events constantly passing before our senses. So far as this world of personal experience is concerned, Africa, South America, Asia, Washington, New York, or Los Angeles do not exist if we have never been to these places. Desmond Tutu is only a name if we have never seen him. When we ask ourselves how much we know at first hand, we discover that we know very little indeed.</p><p>Most of our knowledge, acquired from parents, friends, school, newspapers, books conversation, speeches, and television, is received verbally---that is, in words. Most of our knowledge of history, for example, comes to us only in words. The only proof that we have that the Battle of Waterloo ever took place is that we have had reports to that effect. These reports are not provided by people who saw it happen, but are based on other reports: reports of reports of reports, which go back ultimately to the firsthand accounts of people who did see it happening. It is through reports, then, and through reports of reports, that we receive most knowledge: about government, about what is happening in the Middle East, about what movie is showing at the nearest theater---about everything, in fact, that we do no know through direct experience.</p><p>Let us call the world that comes to us through words the verbal world, as opposed to the world we know or are capable of knowing through our own experience, which we shall call the extensional world. Human beings, like any other creatures, begin to make their acquaintance with the extensional world from infancy. Unlike other creatures, however, human beings begin to receive, as soon as they can learn to understand, reports, reports of reports, reports of reports of reports. In addition, they derive or receive inferences---conclusions drawn from some sort of evidence. These inferences may be made from reports or from other inferences. By the time a child is a few years old, [the child] has gone to school and to Sunday school, has made a few friends, has spent some hours watching television, he or she has accumulated a considerable amount of second- and third-hand information about morals, language, history, nature, people, games---all of which information constitutes one's verbal world.</p><p>Now, to use the famous metaphor introduced by Alfred Korzybski in Science and Sanity, this verbal world ought to stand in relations to the extensional world as a map does to the territory it is supposed to represent. If child grows to adulthood with a verbal world in his head that corresponds fairly closely to the extensional world that he finds around him to his widening experience, he is in relatively small danger of being shocked or hurt by what he finds, because his verbal world has told him what, more or less, to expect. He is prepared for life. If however, he grows up with a false map in his head---that is, with a head crammed with error and superstition---he will constantly be running into trouble, wasting his efforts and acting like a fool. He will not be adjusted to the world as it is; this lack of adjustment may have all manner of serious consequences. </p><p>5 Verbal (Intensional World) Extensio Reports Experience Map Territory nal World</p><p>Some of the follies we commit because of false maps in our heads are so commonplace that we do not even think of them as remarkable. There are those who try to protect themselves from harm by carrying a rabbit's foot. Some refuse to sleep on the thirteenth floor of hotels---a situation so common that many hotels, even in our scientific culture, skip "13" in numbering their floors and rooms. Some hope to make their teeth whiter by changing their brand of toothpaste. some plan their lives on the basis of astrological prediction. All such people are living in verbal worlds that bear little, if any, resemblance to the extensional world.</p><p>No matter how beautiful a map may be, it is useless to a traveler unless it accurately shows the relationship of places to each other, the structure of the territory. If we draw, for example, a big dent in the outline of a lake for artistic reasons, the map is worthless. If we are just drawing maps for fun, without paying any attention to the structure of the region, there is nothing in the world to prevent us from putting in all the extra curlicues and twists we want in the lakes, rivers, and roads. No harm will be done unless someone tries to plan a trip by such a map.</p><p>Similarly, by means of imaginary or false reports or by false inferences from good reports or by mere rhetorical exercises, we can manufacture at will, with language, "maps" that have no reference to the extensional world. Here again no harm will be done unless someone makes the mistake or regarding such "maps" as representing real territories.</p><p>We all inherit a great deal of useless knowledge, and a great deal of misinformation and error, so that there is always a portion of what we have been told that must be discarded. It should be noticed that there are three ways of getting false maps of the world into our heads: first by having them given to us; second, by making them up for ourselves by misreading true maps; third, by constructing them ourselves by misreading territories. But the cultural heritage that is transmitted to us---our socially pooled knowledge, both scientific and humane, has been a valued principal because we believe that it gives us accurate maps of experience. The analogy of verbal worlds to maps is an important one which will be referred to frequently throughout this book.</p><p>6</p>