Portrait Gallery of Sketches and Echo Chambers II
Intervals and Respites to Complement
The Subjective Self: A Portrait inside Logical Space
Harwood Fisher
Section 3. For Chapter 11: Pocket Guide Map of the Three Determinants of Structuring
Section 4. Sentience and Opposition: A Synaesthetic Sketch
Section 5. For Chapters 13 and 14: Sketches to be seen Before Reading Chapters 13 and 14
NotesPortrait Gallery Illustrations
Diagrams
Plates
MusicPocket Guide Map of the Three Determinants of Structuring
Three Dimensions of the Logical Space of Self
Framing, self, and mind. If you've now completed the book's chapter 10, the circles of the portrait background should be set deeply in place, and they should be fading into points, hidden beyond its frame. You'd be poised to view the details of the portrait foreground, where I depict the movement and logic of the 'I'. It should be a contrast to the two passionate tendencies that I've reviewed. One, the passion toward reductionism; the other, toward a conflating of the thinker/knowledge categories.1 They are, after all, tendencies by which the subjective self has been all but denied.
I'd like to start you off now with a guide to your viewing of the portrait's foreground. To make the guide, I continue my sketches, outlining framing, as a way of organizing thought in an expandable space, seen and conceived from the vantagepoint of the subjective self.
I also outline bracketing, showing how it isolates the ‘I,’ driving it into the inner space of the subjective self. There, the ‘I’ is assigned the object status of its symbolizations, and from there, its schematizations are projected. So, you can see that the act/operation of bracketing serves to move boundaries, and that the results, in new schematizations, expands indexicality, causal range, and modal potentialities.
The two processes (framing and bracketing) result in the two different sorts of organization (categorial and schematic ordering). I outline, too, how the third process, negation, mediates the two organizations, providing bounds and complements, when categories are framed; and contracting and expanding indexicality and causal range, when propositions are schematically laid out (cf. Horn, 1989).
In these terms, the logical space of the self is a series of inclusive structures. Mind must be included within self as a manifestation of a living being. Therefore, thought is something that appears within orders of natural classificatory structures—and these within the self’s logical space. This view is of the mind within the subjective self’s logical space. Sketching this picture should frame a point of view, from which to begin to explain how it is that mind—with all its replicable stable structures—is unique to the individual person.
(Just as in relation to the previous section of this Portrait Gallery, you listened to the Harry Lime Theme; now you can trot out a video of The Third Man. Listen again to the musical theme. But now, do so, as you watch the chase through the underground sewers and their unlit corners. In the negative, look for and find icons for the missing person. Where is the unique individual, when you look among the icons of the categorial orderings and of the schematizations that the individual leaves behind?)
The self, as an agent, navigates two orders—at least—since it refers to both subjective experience and itself as an object. This is what happens relative to a natural ordering, because sentience, as a life function, requires both these levels, albeit with varied degrees of consciousness. As we search for the individual--including for your own self, as an individual--there may very well be no way of recognizing that self. But there are these halls of mirrors that you find as reflections of what your experiences must have been.
Even with no recognition of the self as a self, even if you are as unaware of your self as T. S. Eliot's "pair of claws" is of a goal for its dogged movements, there are unique sentient experiences. The pair of claws must experience a hill in the sand to climb it; and it must translate the hill experience to an objectification of its movable claws. While this is a sensory-motor coordination and not a central one, sentience is not altogether absent. It's divided between a reception experience and motor action. If sentience has this "split reference;" can we not look for it, where the individual can reflect on itself? In the case of Hamlet, the self can receive signals from a domain of information; and, therefore, you might say, the self takes into itself information that can become a realm of meanings. Claudius betrayed the King. Hamlet knows this, and he has a realm of meanings, which after some thought and observation, include its implications. Yet, acting on any of these meanings would require Hamlet to have more knowledge of his own signals, as they'd be directed outside the self. He thinks about the fact that he could do a variety of things, and these are motor considerations, involving a separate realm of meanings about the self. Hamlet’s ‘I’ tries to coordinate its identity consonant with its proportioning values to each of its realms.
Time framings. When discussing the Cogito (both in the book and in section S2 of the Portrait Gallery), I've shown three levels of reference by which the 'I' can refer to itself. In Michael Lockwood’s (1989/1992) terms, the first and second orders of reference of the self are as agent. They are all situated outside the flow of time. In contrast, mind, itself, composed of a series of propositions—including first person propositions—and their schematizations is framed in temporal partitions, which are the self’s projections within mind. Let's call these time framings. (I should point out that Lockwood, like many others, describes the 'I' in terms of mind. This involves cognitive units, like propositions. When you get a chance, look again, at the various distinctions, I've made in the Portrait Gallery and in the book to show differences between mind and self. Also see note 2 for this section.)
To see how these time framings might take place, visualize a Faustian ‘I’, leaping and flying over time partitions, as if they were fences, which cordon off events from each other, but not from the categorial flexibilities of memory and imagination. This Faustian 'I' is on the third level of reference, and can leap over any of the time framings, you or I can make.
What goes on in the inner workings of a time framing? If I enter into a dialogue with you, I can look at the propositions of that dialogue as representative of the thoughts in my mind, and I can also look at other propositions as the context of my mind. All of this is subject to temporal partitions I project, depending on my schematizations. So, all these propositions are related to a context bounded into schematic subspaces. These subspaces feature the context, articulated now as actions and outcomes and assigned a temporal position. Since I am in the dialogue with you, I am relegated to this or that schematization as agent--and sometimes as the object of the action, too. On the third level of reference, when I escape to it, I can view these schematizations from my perspectives on my own memory and imagination.
Now, for some sort of moment, I can be actively engaged in making a time framing. If I keep my perspective focused on the recent flow of time and events, that would be one temporal schematization. But contiguous to it is a second framing; the propositions of the dialogue relegated to the neighboring near past. If I think deeply, searching the vistas of my memory, I’d maintain my temporal perspective (from the present moment); yet I'd see that some guiding beliefs are present in subspaces of the same past time to which the dialogue is relegated. I might recall part of a context of a distant past time at which I might have learned, acquired, and incorporated these propositions as guiding principles. I can even imagine applying them to a future situation. Thus, mind can occupy a space, with subspaces, all of which can accommodate movement, action, objects, and sequences of these relative to goals, outcomes, and situations. Hence, while framing, as time framings, includes the schemata of mind, it includes the more inclusive category of mind and its subcategories, like memory, as a more primary division of a space within the space of the subjective self.
Of course, when the moment of the Faustian 'I' passes, when I'm no longer in a reflective position to leap to an overview of time framings and to create a new one, I'm caught in the inner works of some time framing!
The iconic logic of framing: schematization of representations and the categorization of schematizations. Framing is the subjective process by which classes and sets are made to organize the objects of mind.2 All of this is a package of autogenous movement and organization, and it sets forth a picture of categorial origination. We can visualize how a category originates, and, frame by frame and schema by schema, we can look at the circles and lines guiding and bounding its foldouts. Yet, we still have on our hands the problem Peirce seized and wrestled. Subjective space is comprehensible by the self, but only from its visualizable perspective. This is the problem of ‘I’ on the wing. Is there a way to face the mirror so deeply inward that we get a picture of the organization of the self, and we see the inner workings that determine the very visualizable point of perspective from which the categorial unfoldings ensue?
Since the organization of the self and its products can be unconsciously determined by structures, constraints, and patterns of movement and representation; there is intracommunication and hence intelligibility without consciousness. We can guess about the role of affect here and about the role of neurological transmissions, too. But my question remains one of a picture that you can have of your own intelligibility. I don't mean that if a surgeon knew which neurological transmissions were knotted, or were missing a node from which firings take place, that a repair job would not produce a change in unconscious determination of your choices of perspective. In theory, this is possible. Just as it's the case that, in theory, gene therapy could involve gene replacement. This, in turn, can change the quantity of affective arousal and its effect on those neurally determined patterns that wind up prevailing in your view, as the perspective on your thinking in a given situation. So, my queries here have to do with unconscious determinants, but not on the level of their observability by others. The questions I raise have to do with a subjective point of view. This is very hard indeed; because, how do you visualize what is unconscious, if you do not objectify it? Certainly, when you think about what might be the unconscious organization behind a choice that you make, you do not have subjective access to the neural pathway or the gene that a specialized observer can objectify.
So, the search I'm making for what we can visualize becomes one for a subjective portrayal, and when the organization I seek is that of unconscious thoughts, icons, categories, and schematics, it looks like a job that's a reconstruction. Some replication of what was automatic may give a set of clues as to what is ongoing, when we cannot see it directly and contemporaneously. But another irony, reflected as if in a hall of mirrors, is in front of us. If the picture of unconscious organization of time is one that we make retrospectively, but if, also, the determination of a perspective is at a present dynamic moment; then what does all that mean for the perspective on effective (adaptive) division of time and action schemata? How do we ever synchronize past and present; so that we can act immediately on the basis of what schemata are previously constructed or constructed retrospective to the immediate need? Is there necessarily an automatic partitioning of time in terms of the division of sentience into reception experiences and motor acts? Would that fill the bill; since the motor act may have to be detachable from the information you receive. This is so that, sometimes, you can ruminate about the past and a bevy of best possible solutions and actions; and, sometimes, you can cut away from any possible rumination or reconstruction of schematizations, and go directly to a motor act. I can picture myself having routines, which if not instinctual, are automatic, although they may have been learned. Like getting out of the way if I see a safe dropping toward my head.
Peirce assumed that for any two representations to be related, they require a medium—a third, which he calls an interpretant. What about revising a routine, where the timing requires interposing a period of thought? Suppose you think that your employees should have more frequent raises, because the time periods presently are too long for them to see their way clear to working harder to reach a goal. The goal is simply "not in sight." Well, if you don't have the money to accommodate more frequent raises; they're going have a problem "interposing thought." You tell them that a year is not so long to wait, and that they might think of the year in terms of holidays that succeed each other. But, this image of the year is "old hat," as are the nested metaphors of annual holidays. If the interpretant is like a term of a metaphor, it may be a dead one; and therefore it requires re-viewing for conscious life. You decide to change the metaphors. Instead of the "year" as a guiding icon, you introduce the idea of a physical check up to measure aging--in wrinkles, weight change, chemical changes, and so on. The importance of additional salary to assuage the losses of age becomes a motive that adds to the habit of having more money to pay bills at the year-end. The interpretant is thus inspired to another level—related to the self that can engage itself in the look at a metaphor. At that point, we’re back at the level of consciousness, from which we can gain leverage re-framing time.
As the awareness of self proceeds to the point of consciousness of mind and its products, comprehensibility permits the division of time and situations. Then, action patterns can be assessed relative to schematizations and the adequacy of their representations. Now, we're really at/in some level of consciousness that suggests a lot of conscious determination of perspective. When you’re conscious of mind and/or its subspaces, you can see all the objects pictured as projected into locations or places in mental space—itself an inner space in relation to self. The objects are representations. They’re pictured in schematic forms, such as routines with objects, actions, and time sequences. But these schematic forms can be framed, and therefore, re-framed, categorially. Let me show you a mini-sketch on how this might work.
Say I recognize I have a "restaurant script," such that I’m never satisfied with the items on a menu, and I always ask for a change in the item—a "special order." On reflection, I conclude this routine embarrasses my wife. I can now re-classify my "restaurant script," and with the category "routines of over-demandingness" aim at the whole subset or subspace from another direction of change, such as change of attitudes of over-demandingness. The time within my new frame is very different. That over-demandingness began way back when. I now surely have a lot of thinking to do and scenarios to review, before I order my French Fries cooked differently than served. Not an easy task for me to change a frame so charged with my attitudes. But I can group (and re-group) schematic groupings in categories.
Well now to the larger sketch, which is an outline of the general portrait of the self and its organization. I'll sketch general lines here, and then demonstrate by way of diagrams, in a few moments. If I make this analysis Peircean, I could sketch in the transformations of the representations as icons that I make and view. By using the idea of icons, I'd be showing that all groupings are pictures. With the icon as my unit to depict whatever I frame, I have a powerful way to make framings and their resultant groupings visualizable. I can show groupings as bounded units. And when I re-frame these groupings, they’d have boundaries too. Yet, each unit, no matter what form or transformation, is an icon. So, although re-framings may yield more abstract categories; these new categories, however abstract, are again visualizable objects, themselves.
Transfers of Mind and Self in the Portrait
The self’s awareness keeps moving up by reflective steps to an ‘I’ as category in an outside rung of inclusiveness. While your framing can also be from a next higher set, you can step out into an unconscious mode and settle into an automatic framing. When I forget myself and my "new" over-demandingness category and its reminders to be mature, I'm in tune with an old frame. So, I send back burnt toast. Still, for me and for you, conscious framing by the self continues in the direction of categorial hierarchies, in which the subsuming categories are advanced in abstraction and stability. Diagram 4 demonstrates this process as a construction of layers of objects, with the higher layers involving fewer details and particulars; hence being more invariant than the lower.
Diagram 4 represents a post-modern version of the self as an epigenetic/ecological construction, and it’s meant to be compatible with both the Lewinian and the post-modern models. These approaches are amply reviewed in the book. It is all part of the book's story of the constructionist emphasis on the mind and the reliance on physicalism to justify a phenomenological description of subjective determinism. Look at it as in the background of the portrait I make. But, as you know, there’s more to be seen in the foreground.
The viewpoint I depict in the Diagram is of categories leading to representations of the self. The lowest layer (O) shows a grouping of the organismic adjustments and movements of the individual in an ecological context. From this layer is extracted those operations representing the knowledge of patterns of these movements—a rudimentary mind (M). Built on top of the structure is a self (S)--merely a higher knowledge structure reflecting self-regulatory knowledge that governs the operations of the mind. However, the self projects objects and categories. As such, they are holarchical, as if a series of concentric circles, which in genus species relations to each other are reversible.3 Diagram 5 reverses the sequence of mind to self as a construction (Diagram 4). Diagram 5 is the view that the causal arrow goes from self-inward toward an embedded mind.
Aside from noticing the clear turnabout from AI and constructionist conceptions, Diagram 5 points up that self is closer in categorial contiguity with the nature of the organism; since mind is another level or layer away. The Diagram depicts circles of inclusion, with embodiment being all-inclusive for the organism, and with the idea that the category of mind is a subset of self. "Closest" to the categorial circle of the organism, is the self. The particulars of the self are less local to the organism’s present movements in its ecological situation than are those of the organism, and they are more local than those of mind. The self includes "peripheral" phenomena—the neural sensitivities of proprioception; the visceral systems governing emotions, etc. Mind is classically more "central;" therefore, as a category, it has less of a membership of particulars than does the self.
From this diagrammatic perspective, you and I can envision framing, when metaphor and analogy formats are assignments being made by—from the outer shell of—the self. From there, they're directed inward. As an odd use of the term "projection," I'll say here, that these assignments are the self's projections of objects into the inner shell, the mental space. (You might think about projection as something proceeding in an outbound direction. So, it may seem odd, when I use the term, not in the sense of being pushed from the organism to an external ecologically located object; but instead, as a term, indicating the push of the object out of the self's originating into its circle of cognitively useable objects.)
Next time you look at a Rembrandt self portrait, think of these depictions of concentric categorial organization and movement. Look at the visage of the portrait face as the organism. In Diagram 5, this is the outer rung or limit. Look at what’s immediately forcing itself to be seen when you look into the eyes of the person portrayed—as the self. And, ask what’s seen in the next penetration of your viewing into the portrait—when you "see" the person’s mind?
How do you see that person in the portrait? Framing is the act of making a structure. This is almost a contradiction-in-terms. But it isn’t. The construction of, and the phenomenon of, the "wholeness" are in opposition; but they are not contradictories. Rembrandt’s self portrait may be a phenomenon in a frame that Rembrandt made by painting the picture within a particular space. But when he, the artist, or you, the viewer, construct a frame, it may go beyond the limits of the canvas—receding behind it, as you look to the dynamics of origin in the person’s thoughts. (The "person" is the subject of the portrait, or it's the artist, or it's you.) Or you may see outside the rectangular bounds of the canvas to another room at another time, and imagine an image of the person in an action suggested by, but not depicted in, Rembrandt’s portrait.
If we are talking about your dynamically projected structure as the frame, consider what Piaget (1968/1970) writes,
. . . the transformations inherent in a structure never lead beyond the system but always engender elements that belong to it and preserve its laws. (p. 14).
The framing is embodied. If you are the one doing it; it's embodied within you. The framing is within the self, who's making the frame. The outer boundary is of the organism (double line of the outmost boundary in Diagram 5), and this is an ultimate limit. Within the constraints of the organism as a logical/biological form, knowledge can move within each shell’s orbit. To relate one shell with another is a metaphoric process.
Poetics of Visual Patterns, Hierarchies, and Causation
An ‘I’ functions as a first person proto-proposition within each shell. So, ‘I’ as self is one shell’s proto-agent, and ‘I’ as agent of thought (or other mind function) is proto-agent of another. But ‘I’ can oversee these proto-propositions and compare categories and statements of knowledge from one shell to another. In plain talk, the expression goes, My mind says "no," but my heart says "yes." Metaphors can straddle the different shells. "My stomach will decide" sets a causal order by comparing need to mind. The metaphoric interrelations of knowledge between the different shells of the structure can produce different genus-species organizations.
Two such major organizations by metaphoric relations are depicted as visual patterns in Diagrams 5a and 5b. You can immediately see that they can appear like a beehive (5a) or an upside down beehive—looking like a twister (5b). In the beehive structure, knowledge is organized as if moving upwards to abstractions—like a constructionist approach. The causal or target term (A) in a metaphoric comparison (A : B) would be sensorium-based. Thus, where a rose (A) is compared to beauty (B), the A and B slots can be reversed in the 5a and 5b structures. For the sensorium-based targeting (5a), "A rose is beauty." "Beauty is a rose" arises from the organization in 5b, in which the causal or target term of the metaphor is based on an ideal or abstraction.
In addition to the visual patterns of the beehive and the twister, which show the overall structure of the interrelating shells, there is also directional organization within each shell. Framing, once that projection of objects has taken place, results in closed systems of categories. These categories are formed within the shell, and they are organized hierarchically in a vertical direction, constructed by inclusion, subsumption, or ordering of classes and/or sets.
It may help to refer to the organization of interrelations of shells as metaphoric framing, and to the organization within a shell as categorial framing. This organization is depicted in Diagram 5c, which in the book as Figure 18, has the title Synchronicity of metaphoric framing. Metaphoric framing creates new holarchies of spaces. A holarchy is an organization, in which the inclusion relations are pictured as concentric circles. This makes for a salvaging of the specifics of sub-units; since they are merely nested within the more encompassing ones. In contrast, there's the subsuming of these units in a hierarchy of classification orders. In a holarchy, the ordering is proto-categorial; and not classificatory. In a hierarchy, a categorial ordering emerges, because the logical categories and their classificatory orders are merged. (Also, see note 3 of this section the Portrait Gallery.) Categorial framing constructs hierarchies of representation. Both are matters of visual patterns. The holarchies are organizational. The hierarchies can go in vertical and horizontal directions.
Causal Directions, Framing, and Bracketing
Professor of French literature Fernand Hallyn (1987/1993) approaches the subject of origins—whether of the universe or of thought—by way of analysis in terms of poetics. I'll take a moment to relate his explanation of poetics, despite the fact that Hallyn may emphasize cosmological origins; while my aims to develop a psychology of origins relate primarily to the self. Hallyn (p. 14) wants to use the term "poetics" to designate a collection of choices made at different levels (style, composition, thematics . . . ) by an author or group. On the one hand, these choices lead to operations that inform the concrete work. An example of an operation would be a brushstroke technique. On the other hand, the choices are loaded with meanings that more or less determine and are determined by the artistic endeavor, for which the work is the result and sign. What meanings were in Shakespeare's mind, when he portrayed the complex grief in Lear's deterioration?
For our purposes, origins by the self are related to portrayals and to the whole endeavor of making a portrait of the subjective self. So, analogies with the artist and with choices of meaning and the ways of organizing meaning are certainly apt. But more to the point here, if I am to share with you a picture of the self, and of its movement and dynamics in a visualizable space, issues of causality and temporal zones, in which the self is actor, arise. Moreover, these issues affect the central problems of establishing psychological and logical identity for the self. So, I'll keep Hallyn's very valuable frame of reference of poetics, but I'll focus his ideas about causality to integrate the portrait with his idea of "choices."
The next adventurous search for the Third Man takes a turn into another side gallery. There we look for the picture of a self with a unified identity. This self is framed in a world of causes, which move in different directions and through different time zones that cross each other, in ways suggesting the fragmentation and elusiveness of the identity of the self.
Hallyn distinguishes vertical and horizontal pictures of causation. As I see it, the self makes these causal pictures. In the vertical picture or representation are nested levels of meaning, organized hierarchically. From a point of origin within the vertical picture, different orders of meaning can be seen. You can note the order in the hierarchy. And you can also note how the meanings are played out or articulated. A horizontal picture of causation shows sequences of events.
The self can construct schematizations in which the self appears as an object, moving, or moved, in a sequence of events. Thus, the self is on different planes of causation. You see the self, causing (so to speak) the horizontal picture, itself; and you also see the self, depicted as a casual event within a schematic sequence. On the other hand, causation, which moves in what Hallyn might call the vertical direction, can be structured as a categorial organization. Superordinating categories denote the formal determination by causes, from an internal point of origin, which is on a different "causal" level than its effects as outcomes.
Even if you don't want to get too anthropomorphic, or rely too heavily on mythic images, you can get an idea of this active determination of vertical causation in a picture by portraying the self as an artist. There is the self, dropping superordinating categories, like a dancing Jackson Pollack, dishing out paint drops. Once on the canvas, their prepotency determines the category (design pattern) that dominates how you see movement and how you subordinate the themes of a sub-categorial nature--like those of less dominating colors, movement, and compositional variables.
These distinctions of organization and the different causal planes, from which it's possible to set forth categorial and schematic patterns, evoke anthropological linguist Roy Wagner’s (1986) time patterns. These time patterns are related to the individual's own experience, on one hand; and to objectifiable sequences of events, on the other. Therefore, we are in a position now to think about the dilemmas of time and the identity of the self, and wonder whether the sketches of causal patterns helps to justify a picture of the self as a unity; even though, time frames and schematics warp across each other. Wagner's concepts--explored in the book--include epochs—wherein time is in a series of relations within the organism’s experience and being—and intervals—wherein time is a transformation by sequences between points. Categorial and schematic structuring accommodates Wagner’s picture of the two time patterns; hence, the causal directions that relate to time impose vertical and horizontal structuring on epochs and intervals, respectively.
Given his emphasis on cosmology, one of Hallyn’s examples of the distinctions between vertical and horizontal causation patterns is in the astronomical conceptions of the origins and organization of the universe. We’ve seen a modest comparison of macro-world and micro-world, when I described the point, the spiral, the ellipse, and orbiting in search of circles. The point of relevance for our sketches in this gallery is that, whether of physical or cognitive objects and events, a picture you make from the point of view of origins is by way of poetics.
The alternative to this sort of picture, with its causal structuring penultimately in the vertical direction, is a reduction to a schematic and its horizontal sequence of actions. This is a picture of a chain of physical movements through a physical environment, where cause and effect are matters of positions in a mechanistic sequence, not internally inspired generativity resulting in some forms that give rise to their own objects. Characteristic of the vertical picture is a qualitative differential--call it a bottom-heaviness. The subsuming set is not equal to the sum of its parts; since details and features are subtracted out. You might say, they've decayed. Of course, causes, which are subsuming sets, like abstract ideal values, from which you deuce actions, are exchangeable from one application to another. If you are guided by an ideal of fairness, it transfers to many different arenas or domains of meaning. All this appears in contrast to the horizontal arrangement, in which, as in Fodor’s system of transportable linguistic units, events and objects are not only exchangeable, but they also presumably do add up to the total system.
So, the schematization of the self seems very useful; because, you, as a self, lose no detail, and no part of you decays or dies away in the entropy of a closed system. In addition, since time is always within the schema; it's always specifiable in causal direction and its mode can be reduced to steps or units from one point of action to another of outcome. However, there are misuses of diagrams of the self that are in the form of schematizations. While the time zone problem seems solved, when you have linear sequences of events; there is an explosion of selves; so that who you are becomes a matter of what situation you find yourself trapped within. Will the real O, J. please stand up!
For a first group of sketches, that I'd like you to look at, when arriving in the first room of this present gallery, I'll draw some simple directional lines. They'll show categories and causality pictured vertically; while bracketing, as a schema for propositional structures in sentence (syntactic) formats, is pictured horizontally. (Even though I've discussed framing, bracketing, and negation in earlier chapters of the book, and I've sketched them in earlier sections of this Portrait Gallery; please remember that these next sketches are still introductory. I have made the different depictions and sketch series, depending on the aspects I want to incorporate and develop. Here the aspect I will focus is the relation of categorial and schematic structure to causal direction. The payoff should be in the final chapters of the book, where the framing, bracketing, and negation processes are articulated with the portrait.)
Bracketing does also have a categorial structure; although it’s complex. When the ‘I,’ as the experiencer aware of his experience, is bracketed out of a proposition, we still have subcategories of the ‘I’ and its products within the brackets. The very act of bracketing is a psychological means of projecting meaning and scope within the brackets. Further, a "product-agency"4 is also projected into the brackets. To get perspective on his sketch, keep in mind that brackets set boundaries within a larger space; the internal boundaries of bracketing partition the space into things that happen within and things that happen outside the brackets. The perspective I'd like you to adopt now is one by which you can look at logical categorizing as flexible enough, so that the self can drop (like Pollock dropping the paint driplets) the logical categories inside the brackets or outside the brackets.
Logically, an "operator-agency" is assigned outside the brackets. The logical subcategory of the "products" is one of syntactic formats with role slots or nodes for agency, action, outcomes, and their relationships. These nodes are within bracketing as a schematic; although, within the encompassing space, the ‘I’ is an operator outside the brackets and a subagent within them. The relationships within the subcategory of syntactic formats are within the linear time flows of speech, social action, and the biological denouements of growth and death.
Now we come to a point somewhat in the patrimony of Wagner's teachings about time as epochs. The products of the self are a subcategory of the self. The ‘I"s of the subcategory move in an inevitable life-to-death direction of causality. They are, as is the direction of their movement, as if the complement to the category of the outside ‘I’ that fades back into a whirlpool of entropy. The self—as the collection of the ‘I"s—is a proto-category, if its parts or members add up to equal the whole subcategory. The whole category—or subsuming set—requires poetics to describe; since its logical structure, though limited and bound by natural embodiment, is based on dynamic transformations and powers of origin.
In sum, an elegant styled sketch in the corner of this room of the gallery shows the categorial organization of framing as one direction of the logical space of the subjective self. The organization by bracketing is a second—horizontal, in that the syntax of action and speech is linear, as is the time flow in which a living thing can act and effect outcomes.
Look at some more sketches, as the music of the Third Man takes us to the final room of this gallery. The third determinant of the visualizability of the logical space of the subjective self is negation, the indispensable boundary-maker for logical identity and contradiction. What I mean by "determinant" involves an act, which itself, may be depicted as both a form and a measure. So, framing is the act of making or setting a category in motion or in place; but the category is a form—a concentric circling, and the form has quantitative implications as a partitioning of subspaces within the self.
Negation, in the same sense, is an act—one perhaps more symbolic and abstract, as compared to framing. It’d be correct to call negation an operator; since it functions like a symbol, changing the categorial value of whatever is in its scope. Quantitatively, a logical negation would change the size of a category, reducing it to zero, but simultaneously changing the character of another subspace that would be its complement. However, simply calling negation a logical operator, does not deal with the ontological aspect of negation as an act. If I negate an agreement you and I have, I not only place a symbol on it that affects its logical status, I void out the agreement itself, with all the ramifications of what is included within the agreement. So, as a determinant, negation is an act, and it affects and creates forms and their quantitativeness.
We've come through the rooms that have pictures of the processes of framing and bracketing, but we have not found the Third Man. Yet, we have pictures and thoughts and harmonies. These can serve to outline in our portrait, the lines, spirals, circles, and ellipses, showing dynamic determination of structure. How do we now view something like negation? Well, if we can, negation should help keep the traffic between the self and the mind from dissolution due to the multifarious dynamic changes of spatial magnitudes and direction. Thus, I pointed out that bracketing divides a space in ways that make it nigh impossible to locate the self as something with logical identity. But the salvation is in the reciprocal of this point. If you focus the logic of the categories, as it moves to the logical identity of the self; then the time warps and causality direction traffic flows fade into subcategories.
The question, Who is the self, appears not only when it is divided into different actors in different causal sequences and time zones. The identity of the self is also caught in traffic tangles, when it's defined by the self and by others, too. You may define "Who you are" quite differently, yourself, in comparison to how you are defined by what others may think. How often, though, is it necessary for you to point out that the way another person sees you is not-you? Indeed, some may claim that sometimes they know you better than you know yourself. Well, let's not get involved here in a dispute about who may be right about you. However, I will say that, ultimately, whatever multiplicity of subcategories of the self you may wish to focus, the subjective self requires logical identity. The overall point is that negation operators can set off the different categories from each other. Self, as you define yourself, is one thing; self, not defined by you, is another. Self as a child is one thing; self that is no longer a child, is another. However, this is classification, which promotes a series of identities for discrete representations of the self. The specific point is that the subjective self, as a proto-category, has both uniqueness and logical identity. So, negation as a logical operator may help to set categories and their complements, as features and aspects, in perspective for the viewing of a portrait. However, in viewing a portrait of yourself, you'd, subjectively, interrelate what you'd see from the point of view of the self, portrayed, and from the point of view of the viewer of the portrait. Here the negation operator functions to open the doors of the portrait; yet close the doors into your subjective view of it.
Let's introduce, along with the Third Man Theme music, the negations--unseeable as schematic entities, except as symbols, of course. Yet clues in the mirrors that tell you about self as category and self as complementary category.
Last sketch. It's at a point in the gallery, where it's not clear that exit is possible. (If you haven't already, do see the Third Man film or video. Very important: the final sketch here is formalized. I'd like you to re-read, or at least, skim this Portrait Gallery section before reading this final sketch; then, take a break, and ruminate about it; then just read it as if it were musical themes relating to the Portrait Gallery section. )
The process of negation cuts across the other two (framing and bracketing), causing figure-ground shifts and resolutions in metaphoric framings. It brings about differentials in the degree of resolution on different levels of classification within the vertical dimension of orders and classes, which have been categorially framed. It results in various "oscillations" of expansion and contraction of meaning that shake out the boundaries of syntactic order in the horizontal dimension entailed in bracketing. Vicissitudes of negation in relation to framing account for variations in stability of genus-species order and for the irresolution of contraries marking the differences between metaphoric and categorial groupings.
Relative to bracketing, vicissitudes of negation directly impinge on primary syntactic categories, made up of role slots and nodes. The ‘I’ as subagent—and its various offshoots like self-concept, self worth, and so on—are primary syntactic categories. They are objects (products) of the self, which become the subjects, predicates, as well as the target of prepositional phrases in syntactic formats. Therefore, they lay out as various first person propositions; and therefore, impingement’s or constraints by negation affect the self’s basic beliefs, because these are related to meanings constrained by primary syntactic categories.
Sentience and Opposition: A Synaesthetic Sketch
Listening Room I.
Listen to the thoughts of C. K. Ogden. This is not an audio room in which I ask that you listen to his voice. It's an echo chamber. In it, I ask you to listen to yourself echo his words. Then, view the sketch, which you make and project onto a screen in the chamber. I intend that by hearing his thought—in the voice of your mind—you can synaesthetically see his metaphorizing. What I want you to do is to read the quote below to yourself—not aloud; instead, read each word as if speaking it. Ogden (1932/1967; pp. 58-59) wants you to visualize how meanings are partitioned into their opposites; so, he makes a metaphor, by which you can picture the partitions into oppositions of meaning. Ogden sees a meaning fundamentally as a unity that can be projected in terms of its oppositions into a space. Of course, he's describing this objectively and gives terms by which we can diagram a space that we can visualize. Nevertheless, the metaphor he provides is a comparison of the optics of your viewing with the spatial geometry of the meanings you project. With this in mind, look in the quote, where you'll see optical partitions that are of two types, scales and cuts. And you'll see that these ways of viewing a spatial field provide forms, by which meanings can be opposed. Read the quote now, as if you're speaking it. Then, along with the next quote, we'll try to find where the subjective self is in all this.
. . . a very fundamental distinction in any theory of opposites—that. . .between the Scale and the Cut. Opposites. . .may be either the two extremes of a scale or the two sides of a cut; the cut marking the point of neutrality, the absence of either of two opposed characters in the field of opposition. By a cut, moreover, we can dichotomize either a ‘linear projection’ or a ‘field of referents.’
Listening room II.
To find the subjective self, instead of dwelling on the way the meanings and the visualizations of the individual are projected, we'll have to look at issues of sentience and even at the individual's sense of being. Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1962/1963) reviews Rousseau’s view that persons begin their journey in the denouement of thought by identification with the Other, and the correlated view that a person ". . .originally felt himself identical to all those like him. . ."
Now listen to Levi-Strauss’ thoughts about a logic of oppositions. He too relates the individual to the oppositions of meaning. But his metaphor, comparing "viewing" to "meaning," is not merely an objective way of describing viewing angles and products. Indeed, he does describe what a logic of oppositions looks like. But, since he is dealing both with projections and the nature of the sentience and consciousness from which the individual constructs a field divided into oppositions; Levi-Strauss's view is a complex metaphor about viewing. It's as if viewing is compared to three things. Where viewing is V; the comparison is <; and the three things are A, B, and C,
A
V < B
C
So, the metaphor is of "viewing" to the third power—because it rises to (A) the level of consciousness of the oppositions and to (B) the field of oppositions as "logical properties" integral to consciousness, and C) the distinction between consciousness, itself, and its field of oppositions. A couple of paragraphs below, is the quote from Levi-Strauss to which I'd like you to listen. You might glance at it now, if you want; but I'd like to give you my thoughts about his metaphor of viewing rising to the third power. Try out my description, but if it doesn't easily make sense, go to the Levi-Strauss quote first; then come back to it.
The A, B, C comparisons metaphorize viewing as sentience, its product forms, and its relation to them. Levi-Strauss thus enters into a complex metaphor. He is describing, almost objectively, what the sentience (consciousness) looks like; what the properties of a logical field look like, and so on. These are pictured as the metaphoric transformations of viewing, itself. Therefore, the Levi-Strauss metaphor is a metaphor about metaphoric transformations. That's a metaphor upon a metaphoric base--and so, viewing goes to the second power.
The metaphor then triples, when it rises to the image of the individual. Now, the individual is metaphorized and viewed as himself, logically metaphorizing—like Levi-Strauss, making the metaphors about metaphoric transformations of sentience. The metaphorizing individual making metaphors about a metaphoric base. There it is to the third power. I see all this as a concentric set of forms. Well, I'm gratified that you heard me out on this. Now, if you haven't already done so, listen to the Levi-Strauss’ summary. It’s got this concentricity of forms and meanings. Read to yourself again—as if you can hear each word of this next passage. He describes (p. 101-102)
. . . the emergence of a logic operating by means of binary oppositions and coinciding with the first manifestations of symbolism. The total apprehension of men and animals as sentient beings, in which identification consists, both governs and precludes the consciousness of oppositions between, firstly, logical properties conceived as integral parts of the field, and then, within the field itself, between "human" and "non-human."
He takes the point home, reasoning (Also, p. 102) that
Metaphor. . . is not a later embellishment of language but is one of its fundamental modes.
Listen to the flow of Levi-Strauss's metaphoric transformations. Wend your way from their linguistic meanings and their semantics of opposition. Find the locus of the self, its consciousness, and its logical field of operations and transformations. This listening has you swinging between your own and Levi-Strauss's metaphoric transformations. It's a listening that has you bouncing from one resonance to another. You can see analogy patterns, which make it possible to hear the logical rhythms of the self. For, these rhythms are as if heartbeats, from which no one can quite extrapolate what they'd sound like, merely from the sights and sounds of the organism's life that they make possible. Thus, you enter into listening to metaphoric transformations in the way Edward Rothstein, in his book on the nature of metaphor, (1995) suggests you can plumb the relations of musical themes.1
Choice of Listening Rooms.
Have you gotten yourself into that mode of switching from analogy to analogy, compressing meanings into the equivalencies of the underlying relationships of thought? If so, then you may wish to make comparisons of the thoughts in this section with psycho-analyst Ignacio Matte Blanco’s (1975) view of the logical structures and the unconscious nature of analogy, relative to propositions. You might also want to make comparisons with psychologist Julian Jaynes’ views on the self as metaphier (1976) and of the mind, progressing over the course of its evolution, from surreal realities of its images to projected objects and divided subjective and objective worlds. Try these thinkers' thoughts in the voice of your mind, and see if your voicing illuminates the sound of the thinkers’ thoughts.
S5 Sketches to be seen Before Reading Chapters 13 and 14
An Exercise on Partitioning Wholes and the Continuities of Cognitive Action in Bracketing
Wholes, the Self, and Categorial versus Syntactic Partitioning.
Do wholes have their beginnings in smaller units; or do wholes come first and only then, are they divisible into smaller units? This question is so broad that it concerns almost any field of inquiry. Since we are focused on meanings, categories, and schematizations, I'll note that this very broad question applies not only to classical issues in linguistics, but also to contemporary cognitive linguistics. And, since, my main pursuit concerns issues of self and identity; I'll point out that these are affected logically and psychologically by how the question of whole-part relations is answered. So, yes, it’s a basic philosophical question; but it's front and center to the issues of my book and our explorations in this Portrait Gallery.
In fact, though, I think it would be very helpful to look at the whole-part relations issue in Piaget's (1968/1970) terms. In his pursuit of the understanding of the individual organism's internal cognitive organization vis-à-vis its relation to its environments, he focuses a more encompassing concern. He regards the idea of "wholes" as problematic in relation to the genesis of closed systems and their self-regulatory dynamics. Within the scope of my portrait of the subjective self, I picture the self as having various viewing points. And it's from these viewing points or positions of the self that the acts of making categories take place. So, with Piaget's proposition about the nature of self-regulation and the closed system, in mind, I ask these questions. Is the self a closed system? Is the self simply its own self-regulatory dynamics? Or, is the self the genesis of a closed system and its regulatory dynamics?
A whole ---> parts sequence is illustrated by categorial structuring; while a smaller units ---> whole pattern is illustrated by a linear syntactic direction from agency to outcome. The portrait in the book features both kinds of resolution to the question of the nature of the self. Yet, it's also the case that I present the portrait within the perspective of categorial primacy. Is this contradictory? I say, No.
Keep in mind the idea that a frame presents an opportunity for an outside or superordinating category to resolve the contraries within. In the book, this idea, made so visually accessible by Rudolph Arnheim's analysis of art, appears many times and is discussed more in full. Still, as a complement to the last two sections of the Portrait Gallery, let me add to the picture.
Although we are partitioning space categorially by closing circular and circular-type forms, so that they can represent groupings, what is included in the inner space(s) of the individual’s information is also organized by a linear syntactics—a different way of making "units" or "cuts," which I’ve called bracketing. Fundamentally, this partitioning by categorial organization sets in motion its consequent unit construction. This construction job emanates from the self and its bracketing capabilities and actions; but it seems to take on its own steam. It becomes a process by which syntactic rules direct the phenomenological representation of action, assigning agency, type or state of action, mode, et cetera.
Since you and I are coordinating the portrait of the subjective space, and we have to individually view what action we see in the self’s schematizations, let’s both make a generative sketch. We should make an icon, by which it'd be possible to picture bracketing. This picture should serve to reveal a launch pad for our actions and communications. If our icon for bracketing took on the form of a medium for expression, we could have a vehicle for language to speak to others and to represent things to others and to ourselves.
The apparatus we'd need for speech would unduly complicate our concerns; if we were to get into issues of morphology, and what body structures permit us to communicate. I simply want to develop a brief metaphor here, to show the generative power of a medium. In painting a picture, you'd need a medium by which to retain and display your message. If you're using paint, this medium could be a canvas or some sort of surface. At least, that's one sort of medium, which, if you had it available, would serve as a launch pad for all sorts of depicting that can take place within its confines.
Well, the purpose of my modest metaphor is targeted. From some generative icon, we should be able to depict the self-regulatory actions inside and outside brackets. Outside the brackets, the self's conscious decisions are made, and the icons are flowing forth--like live metaphors. Inside the brackets, schematization has taken over. Therefore, the bulls-eye of our target is now to show this automatic or inherent power of the field schematized to continue the job of setting its own partitions. So, the generative icon is our very construction of a surface--the canvas--that would fit into a frame. Therefore, although I do not want to dwell on it here, the icon, includes the active self, making categories; but also the schematized fields that continue "on their own steam."
The picture is of the self making a canvas that fits into a frame. But it’s only an illusion that the canvas is flat. It's something we can handle topologically to affect its texture and grooves. The traces of the texture and grooves are still present after we've constructed the icon. So, in any part of this after-period, the icon, itself, is dead, and we look at it as if it were in a museum gallery.
Picture bracketing as a series of folds in a sheet of this canvas that you fold in half lengthwise (one partition for subject; one for predicate), and that you keep folding in half, thus, increasing the number of spaces available for subject/predicate distributions. The illusion that the canvas is flat is emboldened by its status as a dead icon. So, once we've operated on this Frankenstein, the unfolded canvas, although newly partitioned, remains dead, and we merely look at it passively. Now, though, somewhere, although all the syntactic ordering and distributions into diagrams can occur in the traces of the canvas, we survive to bracket the self out. So, picture bracketing as a continuous cognitive action by which we generate the diagrams of the field within the frame.
In Piagetian terms, the self is a closed system. It’s a whole. It’s therefore categorial, intrinsically—and functionally too; since the self projects its objects. Syntactically, its agency is accommodated by bracketing out the ‘I’ to provide escape loops by which representations of the self can be made at various levels of pattern description and objectification—within the inner spaces of the individual’s information. Think of the accordioned canvas I pictured. Bracketing affords us the perspective from which to view the ancient tracks and traces of our schematizations. The diagram we can construct from this perspective, shows an organization that is primarily horizontal or linear; since it lays out representational procedures for action sequences expressed in linguistic sentential formats and in the sequential cause-effect logic inherent in propositions.
Space-making, Constraint of Color, and the Generativity of Framing.
Framing as Space-making: Enclosing and returning to Particulars. Framing experiences, impressions, and information is like positing categories—groupings, predicated in a variety of ways, by which to include unique and concrete details in the characteristics of and the criteria for membership. You'll see, in a moment, that classical views of categories and natural logic views are each robust in that they provide for a great deal of variation in categorial organization. However, self-regulation becomes an additional issue with a natural logic view. Further, when the self is posited as the source of the active aspect of framing, another problem arises. The self is in such a position that the issues of generating categories, along with the nested problem of "wholes," remain open and unresolved. So, I'll make some brief comments to help visualize logical structures in the processes of space-making. But my purpose is not to make any sort of historical survey.
Variety in the kinds of categories is made very clear in Aristotle’s analysis of categories, their contrarieties, and their status in relation to contradiction (1941a). While Aristotle based his logical laws and their application to inference making on only one type of category—the more abstract one—the same variety in categorial structure is described epigenetically and interpreted in terms of logical sequential growth toward more abstract groupings by Piaget (1974/1980).
All of this is not to say that Aristotle didn’t see a use for more proto-typical kinds of categories; but instead, it is to say, he didn’t formalize them as proto-logical symbolizations. Nor is this to say that Piaget was unaware of proto-logical thinking in mature persons; but instead, this is to say that he did not fully see the usefulness of these forms in relation to the genesis/entropy of the self and the related issues of intention and agency. On the other hand, Piaget was certainly aware of the dynamic value of uncompensated negations. It's as if a negated proposition would have its own life as a closed system, and, as if, within the system, there'd be a dynamic tendency toward some sort of compensation. For example, he concluded that, with enough disconfirmation of a structure of categories in a scientific theory, change might have to consist of re-accessing ways of thinking about particulars. Suppose you agreed with Einstein that you could not nilly willy use the concept of gravity to explain why it is that you do not merely float upwards. Yet, you did not have a ready way to explain why you can sit at your desk, without worrying that you are going to float off the chair. Certainly, if you were ready to question the category of gravity as one containing the explanation, you'd need a different category to explain why it is you should expect to stay bound to the chair, and in general, to the earth. You might turn to time-space curvatures; or you might decide to explore the possibility of putting some sort of gum at the bottom of your shoes, so that you'd walk, but not float.
The Odd Absence of Challenge in the Framing of an Icon There’s an odd point I have to make now. Chalmers (1995) is right in saying that which, in fact, Wilhelm Wundt proposed over a century ago, at the dawning of psychology as a discipline separate from philosophy. (This, of course, was before the ballyhoos of behaviorism drowned out Wundt’s message.) Experience is a different kettle of fish, compared to behavioral action and its analysis. Chalmers points out that when you look for explanations of what neurological patterns and structures seem to engage or govern the production of cognitive operations, the focus is pragmatic. You use categories and groupings of events and objects to demonstrate outcomes. When you look at behavior, either physical action or cognitive operation, and find categories and groupings that help to explain outcomes, the general perspective is pragmatistic. What you look for is, "Does it work; how does it work; and does it solve the problem being faced?" Challenges. But what about the realm of subjective experience?
The odd point I want to focus is that challenge is an objective criterion for evaluation; yet not necessarily meaningful in an account of a logic of origins. It's as if the initial genesis of a "whole" is not merely a survival strategy; but more fundamentally, a creative urge or force. Peirce noticed this absence of an objective criterion for evaluation in relation to abduction—a proto-logical process at a stage in hypothesizing, which he regarded as neither deductive nor inductive. With a deductive procedure, you reason from the general to the particular. With an inductive one, you evaluate particular quantities, and then move toward generalizing about them. For abduction, though, you do not have a "whole" pictured; nor do you count instances, so that you can add up to make a "whole." Your thinking is more proto-logical, in that you may see a set of particulars, related in a way that neither is fit to a general category nor is the product of repeated observation. The thinking resembles metaphor-making or possibly even the formation of a metonymy. You make a theory to fit the particulars or a relation you posit between them—so it’s proto-logical; not strictly logical.
For the act of abduction, challenge—as verification or disconfirmation does not relate or "compute." The question is, Does the "theory" or super-categorial-frame feel like it will accommodate and perhaps enrich a creative effort? If I want to draw a picture, I might take an 8 by 10 sheet of paper already cut and let it help me to generate the forms, which I’d like to project as objects. On the other hand, I might, like Christo, think that I want a much larger landscape and more dimension to the field onto which I want to project my object. So, the question is one of coherency and the want of generative constraints that fit intention, accommodate metaphorical relations and their object status, and serve to get things started.
The odd point I introduce here is a color. It's yours to glimpse, if you can get your viewing point past the receding point of origin in the portrait. (That would have to be at a point of your origin of perspective on the portrait.) Pragmatism is born out of the tendency, and carried along by the intention, to live, grow, succeed in achieving form. I do not mean this in some Platonic sense of ideal form. Form is therefore a dynamic not a structural part of the portrait. So, it’s not represented merely by the variety of orders of categorial grouping. While these orders are surely involved, it's better to articulate form more in the dynamic terms. Look at the form of a portrait as expressed by and as expressing logic in motion. So, yes, categorial orders are involved. But, from what point of origin are the categories set in motion?
These are not disparaging laments about the method of pragmatic organization, and the setting of a goal, the specification of outcomes, and the use of systematic checking to see if the categories actually work or are predictive. They are just to allot to Caesar what is due Caesar. What is the challenge for our representations, our views of ourselves, our theories of what we are about, and how we should be moving about? N. E. Wetherick (1995), whose views I cite in the book, might ask this question in terms of which abilities we employ in relation to what our purposes are. In his terms, there are these binaries: heuristic versus abstract abilities and inductive versus deductive purposes. That doesn't do it entirely, because there are purposes that are not beginnings, when they are primarily survival strategies. I suppose my point here is that there'd be no survival strategy, if there were no life to promote and to subject to survival issues. (While this is an enormous topic, I do not mean to say that the two, life and survival, are not syncretized at some primeval moment.)
So, for the purpose of portraying a subjective self with generative powers and a logical structure supporting originating of categories, I look at this point of origin in terms that value the forms and logical relations I've described. Still, I'd agree that a full portrait of the subjective self requires a look to see how an individual can make divergences and come up with sensible problem solving that, on occasion, may even appear to redefine him as a person. Looking deep into the portrait of the self, should also reveal the self's use of logical laws in relation to a mix of meanings, negation, and of the degree of logical reversibility characteristic of the order of inclusion under review.
In sum, the pragmatistic point I’m pursuing is not isolated. Instead it is connected to the themes and issues within an organization of processes and purposes. These issues, in relation to the self and the generation of wholes, call for you to imagine a source for the dynamics of growth and entropy. The icon you conjure and the image you chase is compressed within the diminishing point of origin of the portrait and promising to burst into energy beyond it.1
So, anyway you look at it, included in the range of criteria, by which events and/or phenomena are grouped as objects in categories, are markers and constraints of action, work, and the ways of navigating spaces, which require a syntax of operations. These markers, constraints, and algorithms (scripts and syntactical rules) include contiguous association of external events, internal events—and their interaction—sequence, observed antecedents and consequents, episodes, stories, deduced causes and effects, purposes, meanings, and interpretations.
Negation Boundaries, and Limits.
Negation, Opposition, and Contradiction When a system is closed, it's limited; yet profound powers and capacities seem to be a function of the very limitations that make the system unique in its degrees of non-correspondence to its environment. The cognitive capabilities we've been discussing have been in service of dynamic searches for meaning, by way of exploring the environment and by way of attempting to organize responses that would be creative and adaptive. Psychologist, Jerome Bruner (1983), while legitimizing his thinking pragmatically by contributions to cognitive psychology and the psychology of education, sees deeply into the search for meaning by episode, on one hand, and by categorization, on the other. Bruner regards psychologist, George Miller’s classic "magic number" paper on slots, limits, and chunking as extraordinarily pivotal in twentieth century cognitive psychology. Miller's empirical study shows how, when taking in information, a person’s very limitation of attention and memory paradoxically motivates a capacity. The proto-categorial capacity to frame can be employed as a compensatory strategy to group information by subtracting non-criterial features. So, picture a long telephone number, with country code, area code and local number. If it's read to you with no breaks, it's hard to recall. However, the flow of time when a string of such numbers is presented to you is not as important as is the pause that marks a boundary between smaller groupings of that larger set of numbers.
When your inability to take a large number of items of information into memory results in your using a cognitive organizational capability in concert with the strategy of breaking up the information into smaller groups, there is an ironic outcome. There's a development of cognitive organizing strategies that not only compensate for, but also, in fact, add to the person’s memorial capabilities. More generally, biologist Steven Jay Gould refers to the phenomenon of a failure in adaptation, which, in the course of evolution, has a reciprocal effect, giving rise to an unexpected and better adaptation.
In the same spirit—coping with limitation, on one hand, and utilizing the unexpected features of spatial organization, on the other—look at framing from the vantagepoint of logical space. We can neither see through objects nor see past the immediacy of the object’s presentation. Limitations in our capacities! You can figure out what would happen to an organism with these limitations and no compensatory strategy; if an omnivorous beast hid behind a big rock. Remember, the objects we encounter in our episodes and ecological situations are simply in present time. So, the beast is present. Even though, we can conceive and experience time abstractly as synchronic; we're limited in our system of knowing and its relation to information. It is a limit that we know about what's in front of us at the same time that the information is presented. (The nano-seconds of intracommunicative lag are not the point, here.) Our consciousness of time and the action possible seems locked into a perspective on time that might see the past and future, but in its dynamic present mode, would seem not to allow the individual to seize these non-present time zones and feel and act within them. The act of consciously knowing is always an immediate present, which is a synchronic presentation of the different time zones. This synchronic experience, which always is from the perspective of an enduring present, is a synthesis of time and the apprehension of the information about the objects and actions of the space we are in.
How is this limit turned to advantage? The answer is complex, and many arguments issue from it. In brief, the advantage is that the individual, epistemically (in relation to his system of knowing and information), is a closed system. (As I've pictured this, the system involves the self and its processes of originating categories and setting forth schemata.) A closed system provides both energy and the limitation of form. At its zenith the limitation of form is convertible to the beauty of a perfect form in tune with everything else. At its nadir, the limitation of form is what it cannot be and what it cannot do. The two sides of the limit are the form and its negation.
Well, we are still on the topic that began this section--the structuring of "wholes." And, apparently there are themes in common, when we consider the role of the auto-regulation of a closed system and the origination of forms. To be sure, cognitive psychologists have adopted a structural version of a space metaphor, applying it to issues of mental operations, analogues of logical computation, rules, and constraints for flexible parameters. Such a space metaphor of cognition seems ubiquitous and constitutive in psychology and in cognitive linguistics. Yet, the role of negation is not sufficiently analyzed. Perhaps this is because of the love affair of epigenetic explanation with social contextualism. After all, suppose that the transformation of logical operations is neatly explained as the developmentally inspired unfolding of new structures and capabilities. That's on one hand. On the other, assume that the very value of logical thinking is a function of social values and rules. Why, then focus on negation as either a process or as an operator that excludes one subspace from another? Yet, I'd hold that an account or a depiction of logic "in space" requires negation to define object boundaries and inclusion relations by which the objects can be related.
Nor is this requirement a simple affair. Not every object or category is logically contradicted by negation—some are in a form of opposition, which is contrary, while not mutually exclusive. So, how do you define inclusion relations in a space, when negation cannot be used to merely exclude objects in one subspace from those in another? I'll make a sketch here, but be prepared to spend some time studying it. It probably requires its own display room; so that we can make a hologram, which you could see from the vantage points of different planes. Visualize this state of affairs--categories as objects in logical space. Some are traditional style categories in organizational patterns, which are out-and-out contradictions. Some are arranged; so that they are in opposition to each other. We might label these as proto-categories. We remember that
oppositions of objects in mental space are marked by scales; while contradictions are marked by cuts.
(On this, please refer to Chapter 13, note 5, in the book).2
Well, if you've come this far; we'll turn on the laser lighting that spins and projects a multi-planed holograph in our display room.
Lights on! When you look at this hologram, keep in mind that scales, like intervals, can be pictured linearly; while cuts are made from point to point, by lines, which can bend into different geometric forms. Proto-categories are going to appear marked by scales that extend linearly. Categories are going to look like bounded shapes. But meanings mix. So, a proto-category of "green" may be on a scale; while a category of "apples" may be roped off from any other fruit. However, what about green apples? Making and marking categories and proto-categories in a space should involve images (icons) of common planes.
The Mobius band, you'll remember, can be pictured as such a plane. It accommodates within it, objects logically related by their opposition. However, the planes, too, are logical objects. They resolve oppositions, as in the form of a Mobius band, which can bend to converge at its two ends. And so, the two ends can be juxtaposed on the same plane. Yet, no matter how much the values of its objects seem to resolve, the band does not join at its ends. This object shaped in the form of a plane, which permits the mix of the different kinds of categorial structures, runs toward its own endings. In this way, the synthesizing forms and forces within the hologram reveal the distinct contradictions of categories and disjunction of various forms of opposition and contradiction. Piaget has a nice way of referring to the cognitive objects and operations in such a state as the subject of uncompensated negations. We can hypothesize that the state of categorizing, which we're depicting, is that of a closed system, which moves toward entropy; and that entropy as a limit of logical forms yields two bonus points. One, as Piaget points out about uncompensated negations, is the motivated search to resolve tension. Two, as I noted in an earlier work (1986), a closed logical system reaches a paradoxical point of super-logic. Where you can no longer synthesize, thinking becomes more defensive, and at times, paradoxically efficient. And, in a sense, the life has gone out of it.
Limits. Folds, cuts, and bends in planes partition; but they do not necessarily close, logical space. The Mobius band is a good icon. Partitions are a matter of boundaries, and these consist of lines that have topological capabilities, but tend toward circularity. The closing off of a category, like a closed system, resolves the contraries within; but closedness would be a limit to the form. In these terms, the capability engendered by framing is the origin of boundaries; not the determination of limits.
Boundaries separate and identify objects; they open the possibilities for definitions and logical operations, by which objects can be replicated and their constitution constructed and reversed. Boundaries allow spaces both for the construction of frames and for their effects within the framed spaces. Framing initiates a form. The creative act can provide shining ideals in logical tanscendences and creative flexibility in negotiability of signs and their classificatory status. These logical operations and these sign allocations, respectively, are matters of the boundaries of categories and of their definitions. Limits, then, are not in what's framed or in the framing, itself; but they are there in the self that does the framing. The ‘I’ and the self have a rock-bottom semantic base tied to the life of the individual; thus, limits.
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