September 17th, 2007 Fred McVittie
Or ability to give names to the objects, events, actions, and properties of the world may have had some odd and unpredictable effects on the development of consciousness. It seems likely that, in the historical narrative of language development, the first fully established and culturally shared language elements or words were those for concrete objects and entities: man, tree, mountain. And even is this word/object connection was not primary in the development of the species, it is certainly our first introduction to formal language acquisition as children. Our story books and primers and full of brightly coloured pictures of apples and zebras with the corresponding label firmly attached alongside. This building of language on a foundation consisting of the naming of things has the inevitable effect of forming a very close association between the ontology of words and the ontology of things. Words, and more critically the concepts which those words exemplify, only feel ‘real’ when they have the properties of identifiable objects.
One significant property that is possessed by all objects is that they each have a location in space. Every entity we give the word ‘tree’ to is found at a particular location; ‘There is a tree’ we might say, indicating that location. The attachment of words to things means that when we point to these things we seem also to be pointing to the place where the word and the concept is. We know intellectually (even if we are wrong) that the conceptualisation is taking place in our brain, but it feels like the tree, and the concept of the tree, are over there.
This also applies (although perhaps less so) to actions and attributes: concepts which are realised linguistically not as nouns but as verbs and adjectives. We can easily point to (something) red or (someone) running and the end point of this pointing is a particular location in space. Again, we do not feel that the object and the concept are separate, the action or attribute somehow out there while the concept is ‘in here’. We experience both concept and ‘object’ simultaneously and holistically as existing at that location.
There are some concepts however which do not, and possibly cannot, be easily conceived of as occupying a particular spatial location. Many of the concepts we have words for simply cannot be pointed at (or more accurately, cannot be pointed at easily. I may argue that we often modify our concepts to allow some form of pointing to be possible). Such unlocatables include emotions (which we might try to locate in the body, but are never entirely satisfied when X marks that particular spot), interpersonal, political, and institutional structures such as ‘the law’, ‘art’, and ‘nationality’, and pretty much any word/concept ending in ‘-ness’: happiness, consciousness, etc. Obviously these ideas, whilst they may be attributed to particular classes of entity or behaviour, do not have concrete referents and cannot be pointed at. We might point at a person who seems to exhibiting consciousness, or at a painting on the wall of a gallery, or at a policeman that we know is involved is somehow ‘upholding the law’, or at a nationalist symbol such as a flag, but we cannot point to the thing itself. Moreover, when we point at these things, we do not feel entirely sure that we have identified the place where the concept is really happening. ‘The Law’ is not part of the adjectival property of a policeman in the way that ‘red’ is a property of a pillar box, ‘art’ seems to be somehow larger or more variable than its single instantiation may suggest, and the design of flags may change without that affecting the concept. When we try to point to such concepts we feel as if we are constantly missing, when we point we miss the point one might say.
Regardless of the inherent impossibility of attributing such abstract concepts with a specific location in space, the unconscious tendency we have to attempt such attribution, a tendency built on the foundations of an early association of concepts with concrete objects, means that we nevertheless often make the attempt. A concept without a location is felt as less real than one with such a location. Abstract concepts have no location in space. To make our abstract concepts seem real we give them a location artificially. Intuitively real concepts involve the marriage of the conceptual and the perceptual, and sometimes, in order to keep it real, such marriages are not made in the Heaven of material objects but are arranged on the Earth of abstract ideas.
Posted in Abstract, Language, Object, Space | No Comments »