§ 2. The Process of Acquiring Meanings
Familiarity
The first problem that comes up in connection with direct understanding is how a store of directly apprehensible meanings is built up. How do we learn to view things on sight as significant members of a situation, or as having, as a matter of course, specific meanings? Our chief difficulty in answering this question lies in the thoroughness with which the lesson of familiar things has been learnt. Thought can more easily traverse an unexplored region than it can undo what has been so thoroughly done as to be ingrained in unconscious habit. We apprehend chairs, tables, books, trees, horses, clouds, stars, rain, so promptly and directly that it is hard to realize that as meanings they had once to be acquired,—the meanings are now so much parts of the things themselves.
Confusion is prior to familiarity
In an often quoted passage, Mr. James has said: "The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion."23 Mr. James is speaking of a baby's world taken as a whole; the description, however, is equally applicable to the way any new thing strikes an adult, so far as the thing is really new and strange. To the traditional "cat in a strange garret," everything is blurred and confused; the wonted marks that label things so as to separate them from one another are lacking. Foreign languages that we do not understand always seem jabberings, babblings, in which it is impossible to fix a definite, clear-cut, individualized group of sounds. The countryman in the crowded city street, the landlubber at sea, the ignoramus in sport at a contest between experts in a complicated game, are further instances. Put an unexperienced man in a factory, and at first the work seems to him a meaningless medley. All strangers of another race proverbially look alike to the visiting foreigner. Only gross differences of size or color are perceived by an outsider in a flock of sheep, each of which is perfectly individualized to the shepherd. A diffusive blur and an indiscriminately shifting suction characterize what we do not understand. The problem of the acquisition of meaning by things, or (stated in another way) of forming habits of simple apprehension, is thus the problem of introducing (i) definiteness and distinction and (ii) consistency or stability of meaning into what is otherwise vague and wavering.
Practical responses clarify confusion
The acquisition of definiteness and of coherency (or constancy) of meanings is derived primarily from practical activities. By rolling an object, the child makes its roundness appreciable; by bouncing it, he singles out its elasticity; by throwing it, he makes weight its conspicuous distinctive factor. Not through the senses, but by means of the reaction, the responsive adjustment, is the impression made distinctive, and given a character marked off from other qualities that call out unlike reactions. Children, for example, are usually quite slow in apprehending differences of color. Differences from the standpoint of the adult so glaring that it is impossible not to note them are recognized and recalled with great difficulty. Doubtless they do not all feel alike, but there is no intellectual recognition of what makes the difference. The redness or greenness or blueness of the object does not tend to call out a reaction that is sufficiently peculiar to give prominence or distinction to the color trait. Gradually, however, certain characteristic habitual responses associate themselves with certain things; the white becomes the sign, say, of milk and sugar, to which the child reacts favorably; blue becomes the sign of a dress that the child likes to wear, and so on: and the distinctive reactions tend to single out color qualities from other things in which they had been submerged.
We identify by use or function
Take another example. We have little difficulty in distinguishing from one another rakes, hoes, plows and harrows, shovels and spades. Each has its own associated characteristic use and function. We may have, however, great difficulty in recalling the difference between serrate and dentate, ovoid and obovoid, in the shapes and edges of leaves, or between acids in ic and in ous. There is some difference; but just what? Or, we know what the difference is; but which is which? Variations in form, size, color, and arrangement of parts have much less to do, and the uses, purposes, and functions of things and of their parts much more to do, with distinctness of character and meaning than we should be likely to think. What misleads us is the fact that the qualities of form, size, color, and so on, are now so distinct that we fail to see that the problem is precisely to account for the way in which they originally obtained their definiteness and conspicuousness. So far as we sit passive before objects, they are not distinguished out of a vague blur which swallows them all. Differences in the pitch and intensity of sounds leave behind a different feeling, but until we assume different attitudes toward them, or do something special in reference to them, their vague difference cannot be intellectually gripped and retained.
Children's drawings illustrate domination by value
Children's drawings afford a further exemplification of the same principle. Perspective does not exist, for the child's interest is not in pictorial representation, but in the things represented; and while perspective is essential to the former, it is no part of the characteristic uses and values of the things themselves. The house is drawn with transparent walls, because the rooms, chairs, beds, people inside, are the important things in the house-meaning; smoke always comes out of the chimney—otherwise, why have a chimney at all? At Christmas time, the stockings may be drawn almost as large as the house or even so large that they have to be put outside of it:—in any case, it is the scale of values in use that furnishes the scale for their qualities, the pictures being diagrammatic reminders of these values, not impartial records of physical and sensory qualities. One of the chief difficulties felt by most persons in learning the art of pictorial representation is that habitual uses and results of use have become so intimately read into the character of things that it is practically impossible to shut them out at will.
As do sounds used as language signs
The acquiring of meaning by sounds, in virtue of which they become words, is perhaps the most striking illustration that can be found of the way in which mere sensory stimuli acquire definiteness and constancy of meaning and are thereby themselves defined and interconnected for purposes of recognition. Language is a specially good example because there are hundreds or even thousands of words in which meaning is now so thoroughly consolidated with physical qualities as to be directly apprehended, while in the case of words it is easier to recognize that this connection has been gradually and laboriously acquired than in the case of physical objects such as chairs, tables, buttons, trees, stones, hills, flowers, and so on, where it seems as if the union of intellectual character and meaning with the physical fact were aboriginal, and thrust upon us passively rather than acquired through active explorations. And in the case of the meaning of words, we see readily that it is by making sounds and noting the results which follow, by listening to the sounds of others and watching the activities which accompany them, that a given sound finally becomes the stable bearer of a meaning.
Summary
Familiar acquaintance with meanings thus signifies that we have acquired in the presence of objects definite attitudes of response which lead us, without reflection, to anticipate certain possible consequences. The definiteness of the expectation defines the meaning or takes it out of the vague and pulpy; its habitual, recurrent character gives the meaning constancy, stability, consistency, or takes it out of the fluctuating and wavering.
§ 3. Conceptions and Meaning