“…Motives must be distinguished from conscious goals and intentions; motives ‘stand behind goals’ and stimulate the achievement of goals. If goals are not directly given in the situation, motives encourage goal formation. However, they do not generate goals, just as needs do not generate their objects” (Leontiev 1971).
Emotions are internal signals that reflect the relationship between motives and activities caused by motives. Alexey Leontiev reduced emotions to a reflection of meaning: “Emotional processes include a broad class of processes of internal regulation of activities. They perform this function by reflecting the meaning of the objects and situations that affect the subject, their significance for his life” (Leontiev 1971). It seems to us that this is not quite correct historically, because if meanings preceded emotions, then monkeys would be like robots, and we would now need to look not for a bridge from emotions to meanings, but for a bridge from meanings to emotions. In fact, meanings arose from emotions. Emotions still are a large part of the content of meanings, if only because they reflect processes in the body. “Primordial emotions are the subjective element of the instincts which are the genetically programmed behavior patterns which contrive homeostasis. They include thirst, hunger for air, hunger for food, pain and hunger for specific minerals etc.” (Denton et al. 2009). Meaning is a symbolization and mediation of emotions.
In humans, emotions, as one of the origins of meaning have gone beyond the instinctive response to signals: in the long evolutionary process of mediation, the emotional content of meanings has been partly rationalized so that meanings and emotions form a unity. Humans do not have meaningless emotions: they explain emotions in order to understand them. Meaning, in turn, has a certain emotional significance. This significance comes to the fore in values as meanings ordered by preference: Milton Rokeach called values “cognitive representations and transformations of needs” (Rokeach 1973, p. 20).
This understanding of values emphasizes their reflected and mediated nature. There is also another understanding that seeks to emphasize the continuity between the biological and the cultural in humans, according to which needs and values (as representations of needs) are not an exclusive feature of humans, but are inherent in all living beings: “Value is a more abstract category than organisms, since it is the one thing that all organisms pursue” (Frisina 2002, p. 217). Values are both subjective and objective phenomena: they are given to humans in their imagination and in their being. For the subject, the circumstances of the environment, things, events all appear as values: positive (goods or opportunities) or negative (evils or risks).
Human feelings—both direct perceptions and emotions as motive-oriented feelings—are always meaningful, they are to some extent abstract or mediated. Meanings, in turn, are to some extent sensory, they are always concrete or material. The dual nature of meaning as generalization and feeling is evident in etymology. We use the terms “meaning” and “sense” synonymously, since in Russian there is a word for both: smysl. The sensory and concrete side of smysl (sense) is indicated by its etymological origin in some European languages, where it is derived from “feeling.” The abstract and communicated side of smysl (meaning) becomes clear in Russian word smysl that is derived from “think,” “we send” (Chechulin 2011).
At the same time, motives and sociality are what distinguish meaning from mere information without sense and direction. The concept of information and the information science itself may have emerged when people began to view nature as a specific part of culture that has no agency or subject in itself.
Those motives, emotions and ideas that do not find expression in the results of an individual’s activities remain forever hidden in the depths of his mind. They do not exist for society and do not constitute meaning. They remain mental facts or mental processes that exist only for the subject of these motives, emotions and ideas. This is one extreme at which meaning disappears. The other extreme is when meaning degenerates into a dead result, detached from the society of people, their motives, emotions and ideas. In this case, it turns into a material abstraction and loses all meaning, becomes an empty artifact, an incomprehensible archaeological find. For example, any written symbol has meaning only when it is involved in human activities, that is, when it has a subjective side. Since the symbols of the Minoan Linear A script cannot be “involved” in our activities, in our context, they remain undeciphered.
The structure of culture
Mental facts and artifacts are extreme points at which all meaning vanishes. They point to two fundamental properties of meaning: determinateness (certainty) and direction. Where one of these properties disappears, the meaning itself is lost.
Depending on the direction (towards things, people or ideas), three sides of meanings can be distinguished: (1) material action, or making; (2) social action, or communicating; (3) abstract action or thinking. The identification of these three directions in human culture is in itself the result of the accumulation of meanings, of cultural evolution. Each direction has its own function: making is translated into technology, communicating into organization, thinking into psychology.
Depending on the determinateness, three planes of meaning can be detected: content, expression and norm. Meaning is inextricably linked to natural language. As Roy Harris said, a language community is not a congregation of talking heads, a tongue cannot be considered in isolation from the physical actions of humans. Humans are not just language-users, but language-makers (Harris 1980, preface). If humans make language through their actions, the opposite is also true—they define their actions through language. The idea of distinguishing between the planes of content and expression in languages comes from Louis Hjelmslev’s Prolegomena to a Theory of Language (1943). We develop his idea further:
● First, the environment is reflected in humans, their instincts, practices and intellects, thus forming the content of meanings. The plane of content embraces the significance of meanings. Meaning as such is often identified with the signification or signified. However, although the signified is in some ways closest to the human mind, meaning cannot be reduced to it.
● Second, humans, their motives, preferences and goals are reflected in the environment, shaping the expression of meanings. The expression plane contains signs as material aspects of meaning or signifiers. Man himself as a biocultural being, as a product of both biological and cultural evolution, is also to some extent an expression of meaning.
● Third, stable moments of interaction between humans and the environment are reflected in human activity and its results, forming its norms. The norms plane compiles the stable ways of functioning or principles and rules of meanings.
Three functions and three planes of meaning reveal the structure of culture. The following “table” demonstrates the nodal points at which functions and planes of meaning overlap. We do not give detailed explanations for the “table,” but invite the reader to look into it for himself. It should be noted that the actual structure of culture is of course much less ordered than shown in the “table,” which only serves to simplify and visually explain our theses.
Illustration 1. The structure of culture
* Programs and techniques are understood here in the broadest sense, like any program and any method of material action. W. B. Arthur uses the term “design” in this case (Arthur 2011, p. 91).
The initial stage of the evolution of meanings was characterized by a small variety of actions and their results. Stone and wooden tools, rules of nomadic life, knowledge and skills of hunting and gathering, simple oral language and fetishistic ideas made up the meager stock of Paleolithic meanings. The actions of Paleolithic man were limited to the appropriation and consumption of natural objects, and the means of his activity were reduced to consumer articles. He was just beginning to form a cultural niche, his home in the natural environment.
2. Uncertainty,