gregory said:
But the sign itself is an image conveying the intended meaning - those that Helen Keller used were tactile images rather than visual - but still images. That is exactly my point.
Images may be signs, but signs are not confined to images, so I would say that Keller used tactile
signs that conveyed meaning - and in a way are we not all born into a cacophony of meaningless signs impressing themselves upon our senses - and in that sense say that signs come first, then meaning? Do we construct meaning via storing up a stock of how those signs respond or adapt to our responses to them?
RiccardoLS said:
What I wanted to say... is that we do not discover or learn the relationship between image and meaning: we *build* it.
Perhaps we may think of the relationship between sign and meaning as its 'language'. There is a piece by Carruthers on the learning of Latin in the middle ages which I am fond of quoting whenever given the opportunity, I hope the repetition is not too out of place here, for though it is about the language of latin we may apply it to other languages too, including the language of tarot
italics mine:
Quote:
"For whatever the changes in curriculum, in learning to read Latin
the elementary procedure was to build up from the shortest units
(letters and syllables) to longer and yet longer ones: words, and
phrases, and then sentences.
"This pedagogy had at least two consequences that are strange to
modern concepts of language learning. First, the tendency throughout
the middle ages is to see words in the first instance as single
letters variously combined in syllables, rather than to comprehend
them at once as semantic units.
Words are thus understood to be
constructions made up out of syllable, not simplexes of meaning.
"Meaningful signs result from a 'play' of non-semantic units, in a
way akin to graphic design or musical design made up of tone and
pitch and length. The elementary pedagogy of Latin pre-disposed
anyone who underwent it to first recognise letters in patterns of
syllables. A second consequence of this basic pedagogy is the tendency
to view knowledge less as a 'language' in our sense of that word,
whose rational units are semantically whole and only referential or
conceptual in function, and more as involving recombinant sets of
design elements,
whose units are sub-semantic 'signs' of all sorts
that make meanings (rather than necessarily 'having' them) in
constantly varying combinations with other 'signs'.
"The result must have been to give earliest education the aspect of a
calculational game, in which pattern recognition was a key to
success. Intricate chains of stories, woven together in the
activities of memory, are a characteristic medieval habit of mind
that is not accidental,
nor the manifestation of some time-spirit
or 'mentality'. It was learned in school from texts like the
Psychomachia. Like a tuning fork, the textual trope reverberates in
the culture made personal memories of those who read it.
So a
reader's memory, not confined to worries about 'the author's intended
meaning,' is freed to roam its memorial symphony, 'gathering up'
harmonies and antithesis in the compositional activity which Hugh of
St. Victor described as 'meditation,' the highest kind of study,
that "takes the soul away from the noise of earthly business" (such
as grammatical commentary) and "renders his life pleasant indeed" who
makes a practice of it. Intrepretation can then become a form of
prayer, a journey through memory like that Augustine took with his
mother Monica, by means of which, at moments, the soul seems to
recollect beyond itself, to find out God's own sweetness."
End quote from:
"The Craft of Thought: Meditation, rhetoric and the making of images,
400-1200" (Cambridge University Press 1998) by Mary Carruthers,p.146 -
148.
