Lips in language and space

imaginary places in James Dawson's Australian aborigines (1881)

Paul Carter

pp. 105-128

in: Bill Richardson (ed), Spatiality and symbolic expression, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015

Abstract

What happens when you try to understand where someone else lives? You want to give a sympathetic account of the environment they inhabit. You recognize that any representation of the place where they live, work, and die will reflect inherited conventions of classification, and that these will naturally foreground elements, experiences, and relationships considered vital in their practical philosophy for maintaining life and procuring well-being. You may possess a comparable cultural self-awareness; but, even if you have this introspective streak, you are constrained by the language you speak, and the circumstances of the interaction, to focus your inquiries on those features of the physical surroundings that signify to you. Such a constraint is not fatal to the discussion if the person you are interrogating is, in Peirce's terms, an "interpretant" of the 'same description" as yourself,¹ but what if the generalized signs or symbols you are using—words, sentences, and even the performative conventions of speaking—correspond to no equivalent concept in your interlocutor's language or system of symbolic representation? Note that this is not strictly a Whorfian objection.

Cited authors

Peirce Charles Sanders