Newsgroups: bit.listserv.csg-l
Date:         Wed, 18 Nov 1992 10:35:45 EST
From:         "Bruce E. Nevin" <bnevin@CCB.BBN.COM>
Subject:      code metaphor

[From: Bruce Nevin (Wed 921118 10:35:06)]

The problem with using words like proposition and belief in new
PCT senses that have no connection with natural language or
formal "language" is that they are misleading to readers who are
consciously or unconsciously committed to the conduit metaphor of
communication that has prevailed since the stoics and especially
since Locke.  In this metaphor, a message or belief inside the
sender is translated or encoded into a code of sounds or marks
(writing) and then translated or decoded back into a message or
belief inside the receiver.  The obvious alignment of your
Layered Protocol theory of communication with this metaphor,
which enhances its palatability to most audiences, gives me
severe intellectual indigestion.  Our discussions over the past
almost two years have not made it clear to me where you stand on
the literal merit of the metaphor.

To see that this metaphor is wrong you have to recognize that a
code has no information structure in it other than that imparted
to it by the process of encoding; that is, on this view an
utterance can exhibit only such information structure as was
previously present in the message or belief held to be "in" the
sender.

There is no warrant for claiming that perceptions associated with
an utterance (as the meanings of the utterance) are structured in
the way that the utterance is, and there is much to suggest that
they are not.

Suppose that we were to try to uphold such a claim.  If the
structure in utterances follows from prior structure in
perceptions to be conveyed by them as "messages," then we could
reasonably expect languages to be alike to the extent that
people's respective universes of perception are alike.  We would
furthermore expect that agreement about words would constitute
agreement about the associated perceptions.  But the structural
likenesses across languages are mostly formal matters not bearing
strongly on differences of meaning or information, and the
differences across languages with respect to semantic ranges of
words and the like are striking and seem to far exceed what
plausibly might be differences in the perceptual hierarchies
(apart from language) of their speakers.  Furthermore, while we
might expect the information structures found in utterances to
change over time or vary from one community to another (viz. for
participants in a scientific subdiscipline with advancements in
the science), we would not expect archaisms of language to
persist despite changes in the organization of perception (as
they do), and we would not expect change and variation in
language to be independent of changes in perceptions or
"messages" being "encoded" (as they frequently are).

Perceptions are structured by the organization of the perceptual
hierarchy and we presume by structure that really does exist in
the environment.  Some of this is structure in a social
environment: if people went away it would be no more, and if the
participants in the particular community went away or even if
they were replaced by people who had learned (sufficiently)
differently, it would likewise be no more.  The structure that is
in utterances heard by a child learning language was previously
learned, in a comparable environment, by those participating in
it and thereby perpetuating it.

There is good reason to suppose that the global information
structure of a discourse (including conversation, Penni) is a
reflection of the organization of nonverbal perceptions, but the
linearization of that structure in a particular discourse
embodies constraints to which the essentially parallel nature of
perceptual control is not subject.  Even preferred ways of
linearizing are socially institutionalized.  We prefer a temporal
metaphor for story telling ("and then what happened?").  People
in certain other cultures find this incomprehensible and prefer a
metaphor of spatial arrangement, and such cultures differ in the
background pattern presumed for this arrangement.  We find such
discourse meandering and incoherent.  Other cultures have
developed yet other conventions, relatively little is known as
study of this has only recently been taken up in earnest, and
indigenous cultures are being wiped out at a rate of a dozen or
more a year.

It seems probable that words and some multi-word constructions
(and their reductions) are correlated with variously ramifying
networks of nonverbal perceptions in the human perceptual control
system, perhaps at the category level as Bill has proposed.  But
the particular correlations, and changes in them, are learned and
negotiated socially, they are not byproducts of perceptual
control.  It does not take much exploration of bilingual
dictionaries even of languages so closely related as French and
English to see that words taken as basic translations have
different ranges.  That the differences in category-level
perception that presumably follow have insufficient behavioral
consequences to support a strong form of the Whorf-Sapir
hypothesis is I think due to the fact that behavioral
consequences are constrained by perceptual control quite
independently of the conventions of language.  This too indicates
that language cannot be a code, since the structure that is in
utterances cannot be an encoding of prior structure in
perceptions taken as a "message."

I suggest that it is a worthwhile challenge to formulate a brief
statement of your Layered Protocol Theory of communication in PCT
terms without recourse to any vestige of the message/code/conduit
metaphor.  I think it will be stronger for the exercise.  I
certainly will be much happier with it.

        Bruce
        bn@bbn.com
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