Symbolic Capacity and Human Language: An In-Depth Analysis
Symbolic Capacity: Understanding Human Uniqueness
The symbolic capacity: The human being is a rational animal who has emotions, feelings, poetic imagination, and is able to express it symbolically.
- It is the only animal capable of building symbolic forms (language, art, myth, religion) that give sense and meaning to the world in which they live.
- The symbol is a perceptible element (object, image, gesture) that represents or replaces an idea, feeling, or reality.
Features of Symbols
- Symbols are artificially created by humans and can have an individual or conventionally recognized meaning. Example: light.
- They are transmitted through learning.
- They allow us to express ideas, emotions, desires, and atmospheric phenomena.
- Replacement elements are different from the symbolized element. Example: no relationship between love and the physical body that represents the heart.
Symbol and Humanization
- Symbols allow us to develop abstract thinking. (Let us think of possible things and future things and, above all, to create symbolic buildings such as the arts and sciences.)
- They allow us to share experiences and knowledge. (Because we are social beings who tend to be in a group, we develop as people.)
The Language: The Most Complex Communication System
Language is the largest and most complex communication system between individuals.
- Allows you to name and give meaning to all (natural things that we perceive through the senses, things that do not exist and never will be.)
- Allows to create and reproduce shared knowledge.
The Communication of Living Beings
The communication of living beings is imposed as an absolute necessity for the development of individual species and society.
- Animals communicate through sounds or interference.
- The ability to communicate is a common feature of all species. (Animals communicate with each other.)
- Communication has been important in language through animals because they were organized in groups and captured animals bigger than them, to their advantage but had to share food.
Human Language: A Double Articulated and Symbolic System
The man is the only animal that has speech and language that goes beyond the broadcast signal reception.
- Human language is double articulated. It consists of a limited number of basic units that combine to form messages. Moreover, morphemes and phonemes can be combined together to give an unlimited number of posts.
- It is symbolic, is built through signs. A sign is an object or physical event (a flag, a map), which refers to something different from it.
In the sign, we can distinguish the meaning, that is, the sign (which we express), and significant, which is what we use to express it (signal). For communication to occur, there must be an interpreter who knows and understands the relationship between the signifier and that to which it refers.
Animal Language: A Unique Joint with Limited Units
Animal language has a unique joint and is formed by a limited number of units (meow) that have a fixed meaning and cannot be combined to give rise to new meanings.
- They can communicate messages of danger but are genetically determined, are innate, and common to all species.
“Animal communication course.”
Symbolic Language: Conventional and Arbitrary Relation
In symbolic language, there is no natural relationship between the signifier and signified, or between the symbol and that to which it refers. There is a conventional and arbitrary relation to:
- Develop theoretical and abstract representations, thanks to the existence of signifiers that have no relation that we perceive through the senses (freedom).
- Represent the view of reality with its speakers. The way of organizing linguistic symbols and their meanings are consistent with the vision of reality that exists in every culture.
- Create new words and new meanings, as extending the field of human action (for example, technological advances, etc.).
- Inventing imaginary realities (the dragons).
Symbolic Logic: Addressing Ambiguity and Paradox
Symbolic logic: The natural language used to communicate and express our thoughts, desires, or situations, but has some problems:
- The ambiguous: We often make mistakes or cause misunderstandings due to polysemous words but also are useful for dialogue.
- The paradox: Sometimes, the apparently correct use of language leads to contradictions, but the sentences are syntactically correct.
The Formal Language: Accuracy and Structure
The formal language is built by human language, is accurate.
- Does not use words but symbols that are linked to each other by special signs.
- Has few rules used to use and operate properly with them.
- Reasoning correctly built. This avoids problems and makes the artificial language to become a model of all language (mathematics).
The Formal Truth: Validity and Coherence
The formal truth: In logic, the arguments are not true or false, but they are right or wrong. This is because:
- Logic, to be a formal science, ignores the meaning of the content and replaces the terms of natural language with symbolic terms.
- Its objective is to determine the validity or invalidity of the structure, order, and coherence of our ideas and thoughts.
- The concepts of truth and falsity apply only to those propositions or statements that relate to actual experience with the facts. It is called material truth.
- Logic, like mathematics, it moves only in the world of ideas. Why can not decide whether an argument is true or false about the world of facts, only if it is valid or correct itself. Is called formal truth.